Hannah Riedler

This Habilitation project reinterprets the 1859 union of Moldavia and Wallachia as a contested process of state formation with deeply unequal regional consequences. While Romanian national historiography has largely celebrated this “Small Union” as an inevitable step toward the modern nation-state, the project shifts attention to Moldavia as a political and cultural space in its own right. For Moldavia, union entailed the loss of statehood, the downgrading of Iași from capital to provincial city, and long-term political, economic, and symbolic marginalization. The project closes a major research gap by offering the first systematic study of the anti-unionist and regionalist responses to the 1859 unification. Conceptually, it links state-building to processes of peripheralization and understands Moldavian regionalism as a flexible repertoire of political, cultural, and social practices rather than as a merely anti-national phenomenon. It thus highlights the ‚losers’ of unification and their political agency. At the same time, the project embeds Romanian state formation in the wider European age of competing unifications. Drawing on regional archives, Romanian and foreign press, memoirs, and diplomatic reports, it reconstructs how union was implemented, contested, and reinterpreted between 1859 and 1918.