We have three groups of minor nations in Central and Eastern Europe: those whose emancipation or extension of frontiers is at the expense of the Central Empires; those whose emancipation or extension of frontiers is at the expense of Russia; and the Balkan States, completing their emancipation from Turkey and establishing new frontiers at the expense of each other. Czechoslovakia belongs to the first category; Poland and Lithuania to the first and second categories; Finland and the Baltic States to the second category; the Ukraine also to the second category, although her claim to Eastern Galicia, denied by the Supreme Council, would put her in the first category as well; Jugoslavia to the first and third categories; Greece and Bulgaria and Albania to the third category. Rumania has the unique distinction of being in all three groups. And the factors and conditions in the creation of Greater Rumania are different from those that attend the resurrection or enlargement of the other minor states. Our small Allies (and Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria) face the general problems of the groups to which they belong. Rumania faces all the problems of all the groups.

Like Greece and Serbia, Rumania is confronted with a complete and radical remolding of the old political organism and a transformation of her social and economic life by the incorporation of “unredeemed” elements too large and too different culturally to assimilate; her agrarian and electoral problems are similar to those of Hungary; with Poland, she must face Bolshevism or make concessions to the irredentism of Russian subject races or find herself later forced to choose between Russia and Germany; she has frontier aspirations in common with Bulgaria and Italy against Serbia; she must resist the conspiracy of Great Britain and France to substitute themselves for Germany as her economic suzerain; and, as her only outlet is through the Dardanelles, she cannot remain indifferent to the disposition of Constantinople.

In common with all the races of southeastern Europe, the Rumanians had their independence and their political unity destroyed by the Turks centuries before the awakening of what we call “national consciousness.” When they tried to take advantage of the decay of the Ottoman Empire to reconstitute a state in the modern sense of that word, i.e., by bringing together into one political organism the regions where the majority of the people spoke the same language and felt the ties of blood and common interests, they faced implacable enemies in the empires of Austria and Russia. The policy of the Hapsburgs and Romanoffs was to extend their own frontiers at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. The resurrection of the Christian races subject to Turkey into political units was opposed by both empires, because each believed that the other would control the new state. Great Britain and France, and later Germany and Italy, adopted the same policy for the same reason. Up to 1880, the Occidental powers feared Russian control of the Balkans. They did not want the Slavs to have an outlet on the Mediterranean. During the generation preceding the World War, France—and later Great Britain—shifted their opposition from Russia to Austria. Where they had worried about the Romanoffs, they now feared the Hohenzollerns. Unified Germany was gaining control of the Hapsburg Empire to further her Drang nach Osten.

But the motives actuating Balkan policy did not change. All the Balkan States, and Rumania especially, were potential factors in upsetting the European balance of power. Hence they must be kept as small and powerless as possible, for fear of disturbing the peace of Europe. Irredentism, whether the agitation for extending frontiers was directed against Mohammedan Turkey or Christian Russia and Austria-Hungary was frowned upon. To prevent the Balkan States from forming an alliance to secure their national unity, the great powers arranged frontiers at Paris in 1856 and at Berlin in 1878 in such a way as to kindle the animosity of one Balkan race against the other. The Balkan races were not consulted in the drawing up of frontiers. They were not brought together and asked to settle their own differences by mutual compromises, with the great powers abstaining from interference. The same policy was followed at Paris in 1919. It bids fair to have the same results.

There is this difference, however, between the Congress of Berlin and the Conference of Paris. In 1919 the small nations protested more effectively against their exclusion from debates and their non-participation in decisions affecting their interests. They had taken advantage of the collapse of Austria-Hungary and Russia to occupy “unredeemed” territories. Rumania led the others in defying the Big Four. Refusing to abide by the decrees of a conference in which she had no voice, Rumania went ahead and formed her enlarged state as she wanted it. Only in a portion of the Banat of TemesvÁr and at the mouth of the Maros River are the Rumanians not under military control of Greater Rumania.

Most plausible have been the inspired articles from Paris condemning the intractability of Rumania. Rumania violated the terms of the armistice between the Allies and Hungary. Her forces occupying Budapest acted like highwaymen. The presence of a French army alone kept the Rumanians from overrunning a wholly Serbian portion of the Banat of TemesvÁr. Saved from the Austro-German yoke by Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, the Rumanians have shown their ingratitude, by refusing to abide by the wise just, and impartial decisions of the Supreme Council. They lay claim to purely Hungarian territory. They give evidence of bad faith and intolerance by not wanting to accept provisions in the Treaty of St.-Germain for the protection of racial and religious minorities. These are the charges. But before we pass judgment ought we not to hear the other side of the case and to examine the internal and external policy of Greater Rumania? What are the problems of Rumania as the Rumanians see them?

At the Peace Conference Premier Bratianu claimed as the component parts of Greater Rumania (1) the kingdom of Rumania as it was in 1914, (2) the province of Bessarabia, formerly belonging to Russia, (3) the Austrian province of Bukowina, and (4) the portion of Hungary known as Transylvania, the Maramouresh and Crishana regions, and the Banat of TemesvÁr. The greater part of the new frontiers claimed is clearly marked by great waterways, the Dniester, the Danube, and the Theiss. The Rumanians admit that these frontiers give them 250,000 Serbians in the angle between the Theiss and the Danube, a partly Hungarian population in the lower valley of the Maros, and many Bulgarians and Turks in the Dobrudja region taken from Bulgaria in 1913. But they argue that 100,000 Rumanians in Bulgarian territory and 300,000 Rumanians in Serbian territory on the right bank of the Danube offset Bulgarians and Serbians incorporated into Rumania. They point out, also, that more than 100,000 Rumanians will remain to Russia between the Dniester and the Bug. As for the Hungarians, if the frontier is drawn on strictly ethnographical lines, an impossible economic situation would be created, because of the loss of the means of exit by natural waterways and of the control of canals and railways.

Taken as a whole, the Rumanian claims were as legitimate as those put forth by any other country at the Paris Conference. The National Council of Bessarabia declared its reunion with Rumania on April 9, 1918; a General Congress of Bukowina (including the Poles and Germans) adopted a similar resolution on November 28, 1918; and on December 1, 1918, a General Assembly of elected representatives at Alba-Julia declared the union of Transylvania and the Banat of TemesvÁr “and the Rumanian territories of Hungary” with the kingdom of Rumania. This act of union was ratified on January 8, 1919, by a General Assembly of the “Saxons of Transylvania.” By two royal decrees King Ferdinand accepted the administrative control of these territories and admitted to the Rumanian cabinet ministers without portfolio to represent them. The Peace Conference was confronted with a fait accompli.

The Big Four and the Supreme Council that followed them did not contest Rumania’s right to Transylvania and to the larger portions of Bukowina and the Banat of TemesvÁr. These had been promised by the secret treaty of 1916. Since the principle of the conference was strictly vae victis, the question of a revision of the Bulgarian boundary of 1913 did not come up. But the powers were afraid to say anything about Bessarabia. That its inclusion in Rumania was in accordance with the principles for which they had fought did not bother them. For a whole year our peacemakers played a disgusting game of duplicity with Rumania in the Bessarabian question, the proofs of which were in the hands of Premier Bratianu as early as April. It is distasteful to have to say so, but since we have not minced words with Rumania why should she mince words with us?

The President of the United States and the Premiers of France, Great Britain, and Italy did not discourage Rumania’s aspirations because they wanted to use the Rumanians to fight the Bolsheviki. And while they were “stringing” Premier Bratianu they secretly promised Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin that the future of Bessarabia should be decided by the Russians themselves. This was on a par with the promise made by the French representatives at Kiev to Ukrainia in 1918. On November 1, 1919, Rumania finally lost the last vestige of confidence in the good faith of her big allies; and she formally notified the Supreme Council of the annexation of Bessarabia. God helps those who help themselves. Since Cavour, statesmen of all small countries have learned in their dealings with the great powers that so long as one looks upon them as Dives crumbs and crumbs alone fall from the table. The union of Bessarabia with Rumania was approved by the Supreme Council in March, 1920, after the collapse of the Russian counter-revolutionary movements.

The Entente Powers acted as a moderating influence in dealing with the territorial claims of Rumania against Hungary and Serbia. As regards Hungary, the Rumanians admitted themselves that a fair frontier was exceedingly difficult to establish. The Hungarian islands in the eastern part of Transylvania gave them a larger Magyar population than they wanted; and, unlike the Poles, the Rumanians realized the danger of annexing alien border districts. Between Rumanians and Hungarians the bitterness is not so great as between Poles and Germans or between Poles and Russians. The boundary finally agreed upon by the Entente commission gave Rumania a far more advantageous frontier than she had either ethnographic or economic right to. But Hungary is so self-supporting a country agriculturally that the loss of provinces does not cause the hardships and force the lower standard of living that Germany and Austria are suffering.

The frontier dispute with Serbia has been adjusted, but to the satisfaction of neither state. The Banat of TemesvÁr is a little country lying north of the Danube from a point above Belgrade east to the Iron Gates. The Theiss River, running due south into the Danube, separates it from the former Bacs-Bodro province of Hungary. In the angle between the Theiss and the Danube, the Serbian-speaking population overflows both rivers and penetrates for many miles into the Banat. Farther east, the Rumanian population has overflowed south of the Danube for fifty miles in the Timok Valley and in the extreme northwestern corner of Bulgaria. When the Serbians advanced their claim to a portion of the Banat, disregarding the natural river boundaries, the Rumanians countered with the statement that there would still be more Rumanians in Serbia, in territory contiguous to Rumania, than Serbians in Rumania, if the entire Banat should be awarded to Rumania.

The Theiss and the Danube are natural frontiers. Either the Danube is a boundary or it is not. If it is not, the ethnographical argument cuts both ways. But the Supreme Council, in order to appease the Jugoslavs, took their side against Rumania and divided the Banat. The river from which the Banat takes its name, the canals, and the railway reach the Danube and Theiss through territory awarded to Serbia. In the hinterland are the richest coal and iron regions of the old Kingdom of Hungary. The short-sighted, self-centered diplomacy of the Big Four did not behave with real friendship for Serbia nor with regard for permanent peace in the Balkans. The principle applied was the exact opposite of the one used in deciding frontier questions between Italy and Serbia. One cannot escape from the conclusion that the underlying motive was what had always guided the great powers in their Balkan diplomacy, to limit one another’s influence and to prevent the Balkan States from arriving at a direct compromise, thus keeping troubled waters in which to fish.

The most serious quarrel between Rumania and the Entente Powers was over the method of drawing up the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon, and over certain of their stipulations regarding protection of minorities and economic privileges. Writers who took their cue from the statesmen of the great powers, including those of our own country, gave the public a persistently unfair and denatured explanation of Rumania’s attitude on these questions. There was a bitter background of experience behind the Rumanians when they refused to accept the renewal of the Berlin clauses concerning the protection of minorities. At Berlin they had offered to grant full citizenship to Jews if Russia would assume a similar obligation. It was dangerous to give citizenship to immigrants and children of immigrants automatically so long as Russia continued to oppress the Jews. In a few years Rumania would have been swamped. In 1917, when the old rÉgime disappeared in Russia, citizenship was voted to native Jews of Rumania. They were enfranchised; a renewal of the Berlin stipulations and the making of a new contract with the powers were unnecessary. The minorities in the new territories were protected by the provisions in the Acts of Union, which had been presented to the Peace Conference. Why should Rumania put her head into the noose by signing an annex with the big powers which would enable them to find a pretext at any time to blackmail Rumania for economic concessions by stirring up trouble?

To call the Anglo-French bluff and to prove that there was an ulterior motive not connected with anxiety for the fate of minorities in the objectionable clauses of the Treaty of St.-Germain and its annex, Rumania offered to accept pledges in regard to both Jewish and Christian minorities, if the contract was to be between Rumania and the League of Nations and if all the members of the League of Nations, including the great powers, were willing to make similar contracts. This proposal was putting into concrete form, to test it, the war aim of Great Britain, as phrased by Sir Edward Grey, that all nations should be given identical opportunities, irrespective of size, to work out their own salvation in their own way.

When the Supreme Council received from its agents the analysis of the Pan-Rumanian General Election, they saw that the people of Greater Rumania were determined not to agree to any infringement of national sovereignty. Unwilling to have Rumania stay out of the League of Nations, the Supreme Council gave in. The lines and the preamble referring to the engagements imposed upon Rumania by the Treaty of Berlin were struck out of the Treaty of Neuilly. Article LX of the Treaty of St.-Germain was emasculated. The annex concerning minorities was modified, and now became a free-will undertaking, in accordance with the Acts of Union of the new provinces, and entailed an obligation from the Rumanian Government only to her own peoples and not to the principal Allied and Associated Powers. As for the Jews, the annex recognized that the amendments of 1917 to the Rumanian constitution covered their protection.

General Coanda signed the amended treaties in Paris on December 10, 1919. Thus ended in a notable victory the rebellion of Rumania begun, in common with the other minor states, at the second plenary session of the Peace Conference. Rumania avoided remaining a satellite. She would henceforth have to dance to no great power’s piping. It was a victory for all the smaller states in resisting the hope of the World War victors to use the small Allies for their own political ends and commercial profits.

Rumania, of course, like other countries, is far from blameless in her dealings with minorities. Less than half of the several millions taken from Hungary and given to Rumania by the Treaty of Trianon are of Rumanian origin. The Magyar and Saxon minorities of Transylvania live largely in the cities. Their culture is a thousand years old. Most of the commerce and industry is in their hands, and their holdings in land are out of proportion to their numbers. Most of the Rumanians, on the other hand, are farmers and herdsmen. The Rumanian Government has simply turned the tables and is doing what the Hungarian Government used to do and what the Germans did in Alsace-Lorraine, striking at the minorities through their educational institutions by trying to force the exclusive use of the Rumanian language in the schools. This is causing hardships and unrest of a serious character, and it remains to be seen whether it will be successful. The difficulty is the same as in all the Succession States of the Hapsburg Empire. The new masters are culturally inferior and politically less experienced than the former masters who are now at their mercy.

Before the World War the Kingdom of Rumania was the most populous and the wealthiest of the minor states of eastern Europe. But it was the most backward in democratic evolution. Political and economic conditions were more like those in Russia than in any other European country. Sixty per cent of the population over seven years could neither read nor write—about the same percentage as in Poland. Suffrage was exercised through an elaborate system of three electoral colleges, which kept the power in the hands of the large landowners and the small educated element. The common people had no voice in the government. Conservatives and Liberals, with scarcely any distinction in their policies, controlled Parliament in the interest of a very small class. About half of the cultivable land was in the hands of less than forty-five hundred proprietors. Forests and pasturage were even more monopolized.

The crushing defeat of Rumania by the Central Powers and the Russian revolution, calamities as they seemed to be at the time, were really blessings in disguise. There was no hope for the Kingdom of Rumania, much less of realizing the dream of Greater Rumania, unless radical changes were made in the political and economic organization of the Kingdom. The people of the Kingdom had to be given a big inducement to stand by the dynasty and the Government. The Rumanians of Hungary would never cast in their lot with the “mother-country” that had failed to free them unless the land and suffrage questions were settled. Bessarabia was called by Petrograd to share in the land redistribution of New Russia. The Rumanian Parliament at Jassy voted the three reforms essential to the rehabilitation of Rumania. To keep the support of their own people and of the “unredeemed” Rumanians, constitutional changes were made in establishing universal and equal suffrage and breaking up estates of over five hundred hectares. To conciliate public opinion outside of Rumania, citizenship was extended to native-born Jews.

In the Acts of Union, Transylvania, the Banat of TemesvÁr, Bukowina, and Bessarabia entered Greater Rumania on the basis of universal suffrage, land distribution, and citizenship to Jews and racial minorities. But they put the limit of estates at one hundred hectares, and stipulated that they should keep their local autonomy.

The population of the new state is nearly doubled. From about 9,000,000 Rumania finds herself with more than 16,000,000. The addition of Bessarabia has brought 2,000,000 new citizens whose preponderant Rumanian element had never enjoyed political and economic conditions very different from those that prevailed in the old Kingdom. But the Rumanians of Hungary have had a radically different background. Taken as a whole, they are far more advanced than the Rumanians of the Kingdom. Having had to struggle for centuries against Magyarization, they fought for a hold on the land and for control of industries. They have been widely trained in the importance of exercising suffrage as a means of combating the Magyars. Their language and primary education and their church have been weapons essential to their separate existence and the growth of national feeling. Hence it is that with universal suffrage, which they alone know how to use, the Rumanians of Hungary threatened to become the dominant element in Greater Rumania. Their leaders do not belong to the aristocracy but come directly from the soil. From the moment of their entry into the Parliament of Bucharest, they dispossessed the old politicians, who were servants of the landed aristocracy. They demanded the removal of the capital from the Kingdom to Transylvania, suggesting Kronstadt (Brasso).

When the first Parliament of Greater Rumania assembled, the old politicians of the Kingdom tried to get King Ferdinand to appoint a premier and approve the formation of a cabinet without regard to the parliamentary majority. Jonescu and Averescu signified their willingness to “save Rumania.” Their plea was that the actual constitutional union had not yet taken place, and that Rumania was in a transitional stage, without definite frontiers and without international recognition. Until the treaties with the defeated coalition were ratified by the Allies, and until some general policy was adopted by the victorious coalition in regard to Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and common financial questions, they argued that the new Parliament was not in a position to function constitutionally as the law-making body of the new Rumanian political organism. In the Acts of Union, did not the Rumanians of Hungary and Austria and Russia expressly stipulate their local autonomy? The bases of the new Rumanian state and the authority of its united Parliament had yet to be worked out. The thesis was plausible and would have won the day for the time being, had it not been for differences of opinion among the political leaders of the old Kingdom. There was also the fear shared by all that the Rumanians could not hold out against the Supreme Council in the matter of the treaties unless the new Parliament was regarded as constitutional and authoritative, not transitional.

Considerations of foreign policy prevailed. Premier Bratianu resigned. He was succeeded by M. VaÏda, a Transylvanian Nationalist, who could claim the support of the parliamentary majority. Premier VaÏda was a deputy in the Hungarian Parliament at the beginning of the war. His whole life had been spent in fighting against government by a small clique. To emancipate his fellow-Transylvanians from exploitation at the hands of the Magyar aristocracy, he made himself the advocate of universal suffrage, equal and secret; ownership of land by those who work it; exclusion of foreign capital and foreign management in the industrial and mining enterprises and in transportation; communal ownership of forests and mines; local autonomy; and universal compulsory education. One readily sees how leaders of subject races, in the fight against a dominant nation, must be radicals and appeal to the common people against vested interests. Where there is a racial question, the nationalism of the oppressed race is inevitably radicalism. Alas for the hopes of the politicians who espoused irredentism and believed that they would be simply extending their field of action! Alas for the hopes of the statesmen of the great powers, who saw in irredentism the means of destroying enemies and creating new fields for commercial and industrial exploitation in small states dependent upon them! The easily controlled Parliament of the former Kingdom of Rumania was gone forever, now that millions of new voters were added to the electorate—voters whose background had been different for centuries, and who had united with the state whose citizenship they had assumed by agreements containing definite stipulations.

Every nationalist movement has as its corollary the effort to oust foreigners from concessions and economic privileges secured in the days of absolutism and weakness. The Rumanians did not wait to begin the fight to rid their country of economic servitude to the great powers. Germany had lost all her treaty privileges of ante-bellum days, and the new treaties provided for the cancellation of concessions and contracts of German and Austro-Hungarian subjects. Of course it was the intention of the victors to substitute themselves for the enemies and rivals they had ousted, and secret agreements to that effect were concluded. But New Rumania is determined to put a stop to the old practice of foreign enterprises protected by diplomatic treaties.

In 1923 the struggle is still going on against the old-fashioned aims of foreign capital, with governmental backing, to bind smaller nations hand and foot. Premier VaÏda did not last long, because of the inevitable disruptive influences at work in coalitions. But the old oligarchy was equally unable to remain in power. When the Constituent Assembly was elected in 1920 there was so much intimidation and corruption that the minority parties began to cry out against its right to frame and adopt a constitution. The Constituent Assembly finally voted the new constitution, under the skilful majority leadership of the veteran Bratiano, who had once more become premier. The final vote was 225 for and 122 against; but the Opposition, denying the legality of the Assembly, declared the constitution unacceptable unless revised. Disorders broke out in Bucharest and the provinces. Premier Bratiano at once declared martial law, and the King signed the new constitution. On April 4, 1923, occurred the first serious rioting in Bucharest in which the troops fired upon the people. The minority parties, who gained much strength from the new parts of Rumania, complained that the constitution deprives minorities of political rights and centralizes the powers of the Government in an oppressive manner.15

Rumania is the prey of internal political instability, in which agrarian reform, adjustment to the different conditions heretofore existing in the new provinces, the constant menace from Russia, the revival of Hungary, and the new crisis in the question of the Straits have all played their part. The problems and tendencies of Greater Rumania, so clearly posed and defined at the moment of her birth, have become obscured for the moment in the effort of the country to find internal political stability and to guard against dangers menacing it from the east and the west. The Russian danger has been a beneficial thing in one way: it has acted as a deterrent in the internal political strife.

But insecurity has played havoc with Rumanian finances. Her money has depreciated more than that of defeated Bulgaria. And yet Rumania hesitates to contract a large foreign loan, fearing that conditions will be imposed of the kind she successfully resisted at Paris in 1919. So her wealth and mineral oil and cereals are not saving her from following the path of other European states large and small, a path that is leading to bankruptcy.