For issues related to the Romanian language to stop causing division within Moldovan society, the authorities must do exactly what the law says, declared the political pundit Igor Boțan during an IPN debate on the subject.
The expert believes that politics played a big role in building controversy around the issue. As an example of a speculative approach, he recalled an editorial published in the Moldovan Communist Party’s newspaper in 2001, which admitted that Moldovan and Romanian were different names for the same language, but insisted that the communists called it Moldovan for geopolitical and ethnopolitical reasons.
So it becomes clear, in the expert’s view, that politicians have always had the language policy caught up in party interests. This approach left a mark. “As for the name of the language, academia has had its say. The 1989 law established that whether you call it Romanian or Moldovan, the language is the same. The (2003) Concept of State Policy Law also proclaims that that it is one and the same language. And if we are talking about preferences, some political parties insist on the Moldovan language to this day. And this insistence is related to interests”.
In such conditions, the public and decision-makers should ignore these interests and direct all their efforts to the harmonization of linguistic relations in our country, neglecting the parties that exploit fakes and ignore the opinion of scholars.
"We the people of Moldova are divided regarding the past and the future. What unites us is the present - regardless of ethnic origin and spoken language - we live in the same conditions, which we want to improve. We interpret the past differently – what was good and what was bad. Our expectations for the future are just as different: are we integrating into Europe or the Eurasian space? These are the things that divide us. Otherwise, I don’t see any pressing problems”, concluded the expert.
The debate was the 261st installment of the Political Culture Series, run by IPN with the support of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
