Moldova’s president has been musing about her country uniting with Romania. A diplomatic breakthrough by Enda Kenny almost a decade ago made it a more attractive option.
Moldova, Romania and Enda Kenny
Moldova said last week that it was severing its remaining ties with the Commonwealth of Independent States, a group of former Soviet republics Boris Yeltsin set up after the collapse of the USSR. It was the latest step along the path Europe’s poorest country has taken in recent years away from Russia and towards the European Union.
Moldova voted by a tiny margin in 2024 to include in its constitution an aspiration to join the EU, and the pro-EU Party of Action and Solidarity retained its majority in last year’s general election. Accession negotiations are making progress and president Maia Sandu said last year that EU membership was the best guarantee for her country of 2.4 million people to maintain its independence.
This month, however, Sandu said that she would prefer Moldova to give up its independence to become part of Romania, its much larger neighbour to the west which is already in the EU.
“If we have a referendum, I would vote for the unification with Romania,” she told the podcast The Rest is Politics.
“Look at what is happening in the world. It is getting more and more difficult for a small country like Moldova to survive as a democracy, as a sovereign country, and of course to resist Russia.”
About half the size of Ireland, Moldova lies between Romania and Ukraine on territory that was from the early 19th century until 1917 a province of the Russian Empire called Bessarabia. It declared independence after the Russian revolution but voted to unite with Romania in 1918.
The Soviet Union annexed the territory in 1940 but Moldova declared independence in August 1991, after which the Romanian-speaking majority reasserted its cultural and political dominance. The Slavic minority in Transnistria, a narrow strip of territory that runs along Moldova’s eastern border with Ukraine, launched an armed uprising with Russian support.
Following a ceasefire in 1992, Transnistria became effectively autonomous from Moldova, although no United Nations member state has recognised it as an independent state. Russia maintains a garrison there of about 1,500 soldiers, of whom around 100 are Russian officers and the rest are locally recruited.
Transnistria’s unresolved status is one of the factors that could complicate Moldova’s EU accession, alongside such issues as the independence of the judiciary and the fight against corruption. Although only a third of Moldovans currently support unification with Romania, it could offer a faster and more straightforward route into the EU.
When East Germany united with West Germany in 1990, the east was not required to apply separately to join the EU. The territory of West Germany was instead deemed to have expanded and the EU treaties applied to the whole country after unification.
After Britain left the EU in 2016, Enda Kenny secured from other EU leaders a formal commitment that in the event of Irish reunification, Northern Ireland would become part of the EU.
“The European Council acknowledges that the Good Friday Agreement expressly provides for an agreed mechanism whereby a united Ireland may be brought about through peaceful and democratic means. In this regard, the European Council acknowledges that, in accordance with international law, the entire territory of such a united Ireland would thus be part of the European Union,” the leaders said in a declaration in April 2017.
If the German precedent applies to Ireland, it will be hard for EU leaders to argue that the same principle should not extend to Romania should Sandu persuade her fellow Moldovans to change their minds on unification.
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