Authors

Discussion

This article coins the concept of ‘ideational diplomacy’ to illustrate Romania’s coaching and sponsorship of the Republic of Moldova’s European integration. This research project starts from the premise that the shared goal of the democratic political elites of Moldova and Romania, as well as of significant segments of the Romanian and Moldovan societies, is to ‘reunite in the grand European family’, a symbolic aim which requires a new framework of interpretation. Ideational diplomacy reflects a form of public diplomacy which performs a symbiosis of relational capital, norms and soft power designed to mobilise societal actors around a shared ideal. The article starts by investigating the Romanian-Moldovan relation in the key of three forms of unionism innovatively introduced by this thesis: soft, sharp and symbolic unionism. Moreover, this research conceptualises ideational diplomacy as the intersection of relational diplomacy, soft power and norm diffusion. Using a qualitative methodology of discourse analysis, content analysis and process tracing, the article’s case study empirically investigates policy strategies, public communication patterns, political, cultural, societal and economic landmarks to prove the employment of ideational diplomacy in Romania’s strategy in the Republic of Moldova and Moldova’s agency of this endeavour, by the development of a particular form of soft power. This article concludes with a policy reflection exercise which delivers new perspectives for the development of the Romanian- Moldovan relationship, as well as its potential to influence European Union developments in the spectrum of the Enlargement and Neighbourhood policies.