In July 2014, IPN News Agency carried out an awareness raising campaign entitled “Myths and truths about the Association Agreement”, which tackled the main fears related to the process of signing and ratifying this accord. In almost three years, we decided to return to the same sources and the same subjects in order to see how things changed in evolution and if the expectations that existed before the signing of the Association Agreement with the EU were met.
---
“Signing the Association Agreement poses a threat to Moldovan culture and traditional values”
Doctor Habilitate Varvara Buzila, university lecturer and scientific secretary of the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History, said it has been almost three years of the signing, but the Association Agreement with the EU has posed no threat to the culture and traditional values, as it was rumored. The benefits it brings cannot be measured now, but will be felt in time.
“Our society makes progress when it has high ideals. We, as a society, got an ideal. We have the possibility of making common cause and finding internal resources to achieve it,” stated Varvara Buzila. She expressed her confidence that we are able to come closer to the proposed model of ideal – for civil society, as a society organized into traditional or modern institutions. On the other hand, at the level of political class, there is no maturity to match civil society’s maturity.
As regards those who said that the Association Agreement is a threat to the culture and traditional values and continue to say so, Varvara Buzila said a broad framework for developing different opinions on one and the same issue is a good start towards the assertion of the democratic values. The higher is the number of supported different, clearly stated and democratic opinions, the clearer will be the benchmarks for dialogue for society.
“If we do not manage to go on and continue to move back, as someone tries to provoke us by attacking what is called proper path of society, we will probably continue to stagnate. We will definitely return to the same ideals in a period, but will regret the stagnation,” concluded Varvara Buzila.
Alina Marin, IPN
The article on the same issue published in July 2014 is available here