Ethnic Fragmentation As Unintended Consequence of EU External Governance - the Case of Moldova

Russia’s and the EU’s increasingly conflicting integration endeavours and the ‘Ukraine crisis’ of 2014 have led to a shift of how scholars and policy makers understand the effects of external governance in the Eastern neighbourhood. This shift stems from the conviction that the domestic political instability in the neighbourhood countries cannot be untangled from the growing interregional competition between Moscow’s and Brussels’ integration policies. In this vein, the paper utilizes regional security complex theory and securitization theory to examine the interplay of the (inter-)regional (EU-Russia) and domestic political discourse in the Republic of Moldova. It examines the way in which representatives and elites of the Gagauz minority and the Transnistrian separatists draw upon symbolic resources provided by an increasingly conflictive external discourse in their domestic struggle. The paper contends that external representations feed into historically antagonistic narratives of stakeholders, fostering durable patterns of amity and enmity within Moldova’s political landscape. As a result of such dynamics, ethnic and political fragmentation and polarization are identified as unintended consequence of EU external action in the geopolitical setting as it is currently present in the Eastern neighbourhood.