Why didn't Moldova unite with Romania?

Question

Towards the collapse of the USSR, nationalism rose in Moldova. Nationalists proclaimed the linguistic and ethnic identity between Moldovans and Romanians. It seems that they strove toward unification of their country and Romania. Besides, Moldova (except for Transnistria) had already been part of Romania before Soviet annexation.

So why didn't the two countries unite?

Answer 1

I think there are three main reasons.

• First, the elites usually do not want to resign their powers. For example, East Germany leadership opposed the reunification to the end. Historically the elites are much more likely to support secessionism than unification.

• Second, as Wladimir Palant pointed out, unification with Romania requires abandoning any hope to restore Transnistria as a part of the country. Transnistria in theory only agrees to reunify under condition of no future NATO membership of Moldova. This rules out the possibility of incorporation into Romania.

• Most people in Moldova know Russian and do not know English. Conversely in Romania nobody knows Russian and many know English. And, more importantly, knowledge of English is required for official documents because Romania is part of the EU.

Answer 2

There is a long documentation of the process on Wikipedia which doesn't really answer your question however. It does make it obvious that there are large population groups both in Romania and Moldova opposing a reunification (this group seems larger in Moldova). I think that there is a number of reasons:

• Despite being closely related, the two countries developed a distinctly different mentality. One has to consider that Moldova was part of the Russian Empire since 1812. It fell back to Romania in 1918 only to be occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. In other words, in the past 200 years Moldova has been a part of Romania for only 22 years.
• The nationalist movement that was very strong in 1992 lost ground when the economical problems of the country grew larger. One symptom is that the country had a communist as a president between 1997 and 2009 (first Petru Chiril Lucinschi, then Vladimir Voronin). The communist government had more interest in establishing a good relation to Russia than to Romania.
• There is the unresolved conflict with Transnistria, a region where only one third of the population is Moldovan. Transnistria strictly opposes a reunification and actually used this question as a reason to break away. A reunification between Romania and Moldova would require releasing Transnistria, yet Moldova doesn't seem to be ready to accept Transnistria's independence.
• Moldova's economy is very weak ("poorest country in Europe"). A reunification would cost the Romanian economy a lot. Even the (relatively stable) German economy suffered as a result of reunification with the GDR, even though GDR was one of the wealthiest countries of the Warsaw Pact - and Romanians have all the reason to worry about the stability of their economy.
• This isn't something that I can back up, based merely on what I heard from my grandfather: it seems that Moldovans were second-class citizens in Romania before 1940, Moldova being a mostly agrarian province. There is obviously a high probability that the history will repeat itself which might also be a reason why some Moldovans aren't very keen on a reunification.