L'Espace Politique (Apr 2007)
La périphérie négociée. Pratiques quotidiennes et jeux d’acteurs autour des mobilités transfrontalières entre la Roumanie et la Moldavie
Abstract
The Republic of Moldova is one of the States both located beyond the new Eastern border of European Union and concerned by the European Neighbourhood Policy. The European policy about them is ambivalent, particularly regarding the borders they share with the EU. This raises the question if Moldova is a periphery of the European Union, and how this asymmetric relationship has been built in the course of time. Since EU is a more and more important actor on the former communist geopolitical area, one could easily believe that the European community is the leading force there. This article seeks to identify other actors, involved in the territorial building of Europe and its neighbourhoods, and this by analysing trade mobility that have been existing for about fifteen years between Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Our aim is therefore to understand how the peripheral position can be built “from bellow”, as well as how the centre/periphery relationship is organised. We argue that the EU “neighbours” peripheral situation – here considered from the Moldovan case – is both a consequence of social dynamics “from bellow”, from local daily practices and ways of life, as of policies initiated from Brussels. The transborder trade mobility analysed here is mainly oriented from Moldova toward Romania. It acts as a spatial structuring agent : it generates social, economical and political (as well as identity processes) relations between the two sides of the border; by doing this, it strengthens a transborder territory. This evolution is bounded to the recent revaluation of State border that could be observed in the political debates about the enlargement to Central and Eastern European countries. All of this causes tensions, shaped in the level of integration or marginalization of the direct peripheries of EU. Therefore an immediate consequence of the enlargement is the growing gap between the core of the EU and some of it neighbours.
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