REVIEWS 987 appositely uses but which extend rather beyond the range of commonly encountered expressions. School ofLaw JANE HENDERSON King'sCollege London Lewis, Ann (ed.). TheEU andMoldova:On a Fault-Line of Europe.Europe's EasternBorders,5. The FederalTrust,London, 2004. 240 pp. f29.50. ANN LEWIS'Ssymposium of twenty-seven writersfrom Moldova, the EU, the US and Romania gives scant hope that Moldova will rapidlyheal its internal division or escape its rankingas the poorest and most pervasivelycorruptin Europe.Eventssincethebook'scompletion have not improvedtheprospect the OSCE's proposals for a federal state were abruptlyrejected in February 2004 and underscore the Editor's conclusion that vested interests entrenched in Chi?inau,Tiraspol, Kiev and Moscow will continue to frustrate federal unification which, given the variegated ethnic mixing in both Transdniestriaand the main partof Moldova, sheposits as the only long-term solution. For the main region, divisions within the governing party, nontransparencyin business and in administrationplus the lack of investment to improve the economic fundamentals allow few grounds for shorter-term optimism. BorderingRomania, which can expect membershipof the EU in 2007, and with almosttwo-thirdsof the population ethnicallyRomanian, Moldova could by now be on a similartrack:the contributorsto thisvolume explain why it is not. In a Foreword,Chris Patten, the EU Commissionerfor ExternalAffairs, offers no concrete expectation of membership for a country with the 'longstanding and stillunresolvedproblem of Transdniestria',and goes no further than hoping that the 2003 European Neighbourhood Programme 'opens up new avenues' (p. 5). Marius Vahl (Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels)writes of the EU's 'marginalization' of Moldova since it signed a Partnershipand Cooperation Agreement in November I 994. The Agreement did not enter into force untilJuly I998 and failedto lead, asformost otherexCommunist states, to an Association Agreement, nor even to easier financial assistanceundera lower-gradeNeighbourhood Agreement.AsAndreiNegula and Alexandru Simionov (respectivelychairand advisorof the ForeignAffairs Committee of the Moldovan Parliament)admit, 'the EU has not categorically refused Moldova's request for accession to the EU, but nor did the country receive any clear signalsin this respect'(p. I9 I). Moldova is off the EU agenda for two major reasons -the separatismof Transdniestriaand bad governance both there and in the larger part of the territory.Chapters by Elizabeth Teague (researchanalyst at the Ministry of Defence in London with long previous work at Radio Free Europe) and by Gottfried Hanne (three years a member of the OSCE mission in Moldova) furnish the clues to the Transdniestriaproblem. Teague describes the Soviet creationin I 924 of a sliverof land on the eastbankof the Dniester (thefrontier with Romania's then newly-absorbed Bessarabia) to become a Moldavian Autonomous Socialist Republic (ASSR) within Ukraine. This might have 988 SEER, 82, 4, 2004 been put into the context of the almost simultaneousinvention of a Karelian ASSR, upgradedin I940 to the Karelo-FinnishSSR, and even to some extent of the establishment of the ByelorussianSSR in 1922 and its enlargement in I924-26. All three cases were a statement of early Soviet intentions to regain tsaristterritory respectivelyfrom Romania, Finland and Poland.When, as Teague states,Romania benefitedfrom the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 to regain Bessarabia in I940, it took advantage of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 to take over a large swathe of Ukraine, designating it Transnistra.This occupation was carriedout with such brutality(Romania itselfbeing under a fascist dictatorship) that Transdniestriansremain hostile to any merger of Moldova with Romania. But, as Hanne shows, they have little say on their destiny today, having fallen under the repressiveauthoritarianregime led by so-called president Igor Smirnov, who came to Moldova only in i987 and retainshis Russian citizenship. The Editorlinksseparatismwith domestic misrulein her Introduction.She is an appropriately-experienced retired diplomat her service included postings to the GDR and Soviet Union and in the FCO overseeing cultural relations with the then Communist states and has already edited earlier volumes on Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in the Federal Union's Eastern Borders Series. She shows how, under Gorbachev's glasnost' and in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet break-up, moves among the Romanianspeakingmajoritytowardsunificationwith Romania stirredthe Russian and Ukrainian minorities into civil war and to establishing their own rebel administrationin Tiraspol. Deputy ForeignMinisterIon Stavil'adescribesthe early...