For most of their history, the people of Romania lacked a nation-state.
An Eastern-Romance-speaking group, they’ve been isolated since the fall of the Roman
Empire, and over the centuries have been dominated by their more powerful neighbours.
Romania’s earlier history is a story of a struggle for survival—the ferocity of
one Wallachian prince, Vlad the Impaler, is even the inspiration for Dracula—but with
the rise of nationalism across Europe in the mid-19th century, the Romanians seized their
chance to come together.
Exactly how then, did they actually do it?
What stood in Romania’s way?
And why did the country eventually have not one, but two, unifications?
Well for centuries Romania (centred around the principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia,
and Transylvania) served as a borderland and a battlefield for the often-at-war Russian
and Ottoman Empires.
At their height, the Ottomans controlled all three, but by the 1830s, when Romanian political
unification, or at least its first stage, began, the Romanian lands were split between
empires: Wallachia and parts of Moldavia were nominally subordinate to the Sublime Porte
(the Ottoman central government), but were in practice made Russian protectorates by
the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829.
The rest of Moldavia, the regions of Bessarabia and Bukovina had already been conquered by
Russia and Habsburg Austria.
Transylvania by then formed a part of the Habsburg’s Kingdom of Hungary.
The process of unification would begin when Russia created parallel, but still separate,
institutions in Wallachia and Moldavia.
Collectively they’re called the Organic Statute governments.
The Organic Statutes empowered a small number of Boyar families, the Romanian aristocracy,
and a prince, but most Romanians were left entirely out of politics.
Something that annoyed everyone, but particularly
the educated, professional, and growing, middle-class
who openly embraced new liberal and nationalistic ideas, and would lead efforts for Romanian unity.
Not that they wanted majority rule mind you, the unsophisticated peasantry could of course
never be allowed near the levers of power, but certainly they dreamed of a more meritocratic
style of government than rule by hereditary nobility.
The year 1848 saw Liberals rise up to fight for their ideas across Europe,
and each of
Romania’s principalities participated in the revolutions, with limited success.
Moldavia is hardly worth mentioning: the conservative
aristocracy aided by Russia put down the rebels
in no time at all, however, they were partially led by a man named Alexandru Ioan Cuza.
In Transylvania, ethnic Romanians were distracted
fighting against Hungarian revolutionary nationalists,
but in Wallachia rebels managed to take over the capital, Bucharest.
Their provisional government lasted for three
months, and was both anti-Russian and anti-Ottoman;
it wanted to unite Wallachia and Moldavia, and choose a foreign noble as their prince,
to gain an alliance along with him.
They were stymied as Wallachians could count on no help from ethnic Romanians elsewhere,
and even among the revolutionaries there were deep divisions.
Critically, they failed to win support from the peasantry, to whom the Liberals seemed
to be just another elite class vying for power, if a slightly bigger one.
The revolutionaries’ failure also made it crystal clear that Romanian unification simply
couldn’t be achieved by standing alone against their imperial neighbours.
Conveniently then, those neighbours continued their long tradition
of not getting along, and in 1853 the Ottomans
and the Russian Empire, again, went to war.
The Romanian Principalities were quickly occupied,
but this time, the Turks were backed by Britain and France.
The Crimean War went in the allies' favour and the 1856 Treaty of Paris decreed that
the Organic Statute governments would go.
With their being subject to the Ottomans only a legal fiction, Wallachia and Moldavia were
now functionally independent.
They also got access to the sea.
Whether they could unite was another matter.
The Powers were split over the issue and with gridlock in Paris, so-called Divans ad Hoc
gathered in both Moldavia and Wallachia.
Under Ottoman pressure, they voted for the status quo.
Then under French pressure, they voted for union, but ultimately both were ignored and
in 1858 the powers met again in Paris, and eventually agreed on the August Convention.
Like under the Organic Statutes, the August Convention sought to maintain two separate
governments in Moldavia and Wallachia.
They would keep two assemblies, have two cabinets of ministers, and each was to choose a different
prince, but unlike before they would also have a limited central commission, a sort-of
executive, and a court system.
That didn’t really satisfy Forty-Eighters though, the Liberal revolutionaries, but they
managed to get around the spirit, if not the letter of the Convention.
Rather than a foreigner, they chose one of them, Alexandru Cuza, as prince in Wallachia
in late 1858… and then to some Powers’ chagrin, also for Moldavia in January 1859.
As the United Principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia were under one ruler, and after Cuza
officially abolished his two separate governments and centralised the state in 1862, Romania’s
first unification was complete.
Getting to the second still would take some work.
Both Cuza’s fellow Liberal, nationalistic, Forty-Eighters, and the Conservative landed
classes, in spite of their original opposition, backed political unification.
Frankly, it just made things simpler, but it was also one of the last times that they would
agree on anything.
Two problems plagued Cuza’s reign: the extent of the franchise, and agrarian reform.
At that point almost all Romanians were poor peasants, working on estates.
For the Liberals, reform was a matter of efficiency
and social progress; parts of Romania still
looked feudal in a quickly industrialising Europe.
For the Conservatives, it was about balancing maintenance of their status, while also avoiding
all-out peasant revolution.
Cuza handled both problems poorly.
He started off well enough, appointing a Liberal Prime Minister who secularised lands held
tax-free by the Orthodox Church,
and expanded voting rights for smaller landowners and middle-class professionals.
But the 1864 Agrarian Law, while radical on paper, was effectively unenforceable outside
of the capital.
Boyars were formally stripped of their noble rights, but stayed incredibly powerful.
Land redistribution favoured them heavily, and Romania functionally remained a country
of landed estates.
Cuza’s situation went further downhill when his own allies, the Liberals, began to turn
against the prince as his reign progressed.
He was only ever a compromise candidate in the first place and the obvious failure of
land reform seemed to prove his inadequacy.
He fell out with his government over its implementation,
and of course, the Conservatives had never
liked him at all.
That culminated in both them and the Liberals coming together, along with the army, in 1866
to depose Alexandru Cuza.
In his place, the 48ers finally got what they wanted: to secure relations with a western
power, Romania chose Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen
to be its new Prince.
He came with the benefit of associating Romania with Germany, being distantly related to the
soon-to-be Kaiser, and he also had the stamp of approval of France’s Napoleon III.
Not that mattered much after his own deposition.
The other Great Powers accepted the installation of Karl, who took the Romanian regnal name
Carol I, as a fait accompli, while the Austro-Prussian War distracted their attention.
Carol’s reign was much more successful than that of Cuza.
As a condition of his election,
he agreed to a constitution that vested most power in the Romanian assembly.
He also embraced Romanian culture, quickly learning the language, and promising to raise
his family in the Romanian Orthodox Church.
All of which won him genuine popularity.
It did not unite the political classes, and with land reform seemingly too difficult to
approach, Romanian governments under Carol I focused on foreign policy.
He personally despised being a subject of the Ottoman Sultan, even if only nominally,
and began to guide Romania towards total independence.
His government won recognition from Russia and Austria-Hungary in the 1870s and entered
into commercial agreements with both, but as with so many things in Romania, it would
take yet another Russo-Turkish War to finally break its bond to the Sublime Porte.
That came about in early 1877 and Romania joined the Russian army in attacking the Ottoman
Balkans; shortly afterwards it declared independence.
Russia crushed the Ottomans, and it was only with the diplomatic intervention of the other
Great Powers that they were spared from being pushed out of Europe.
The Treaty of Berlin recognised Romania as a fully independent state, and three years
later Carol I was crowned King of Romania in line with that new status, but the end
of the war left Romanians disgruntled.
Russia had permitted them less land than they sought, and in fact the Bessarabian territory
ceded by Russia to Moldavia in 1856 was taken back.
The country was independent, but millions of ethnic Romanians still remained outside
of Romania, and given that they were ruled by the new Kingdom’s only real allies, there
wasn’t much that could be done about that.
For the next thirty years, the cause of Romanian
unification was relegated to sword-rattling with Bulgaria,
which had received southern Dobrudja after the 1878 war over Romania’s objections.
Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania were simply beyond their reach.
That was until the Balkan Crises and the shattering
of Europe’s balance of power in 1914.
Romania had mixed success in WW1.
Despite having secretly agreed to align with the Triple Alliance of Italy, Germany and
Austria-Hungary before it broke out, it remained neutral at the war’s start.
When it did eventually join both the elected government and the new king, Carol’s nephew
Ferdinand I, aligned with the Entente.
Hoping to acquire Transylvania, Romanian forces invaded Austria-Hungary in August 1916, only
to find two-thirds of their own country occupied by the end of the year.
Then when the Russian Revolution toppled the Tsar in 1917, Romania found itself ally-less
and in a dire situation.
That did at long last see the return of Bessarabia though, when, with the Romanian military present,
revolutionaries there proclaimed the creation of the Moldavian Democratic Republic, which
promptly voted to unite with Romania proper.
Still, without the Russians, Romania stood
no chance against the combined forces of Austria-Hungary,
Germany, and Bulgaria so they agreed to peace in 1918.
The effects of that would not last long.
As the Germans faltered on the Western Front and Austria-Hungary began to disintegrate
under the weight of its many disparate ethnicities,
Romania rejoined the war against them on November
10th 1918, a day before it ended.
At the Versailles peace conference, Romania’s losses were reversed, and they set their sights
on the long-lost third principality of Transylvania.
So when Hungary officially terminated its union with Austria, and fell into a period
of near-total chaos, Romania invaded and pushed all the way to Budapest.
That victory, and the support of the Entente, particularly France, resulted in the post-war
Treaties of Trianon and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Those saw millions of ethnic Romanians united with their mother country.
Of course, Romania would only keep those precise borders for another 20 years until WW2 again
redrew the map of Europe.
The Romanian-speaking world is now divided between Romania
and the former Soviet Republic, Moldova.
It also wasn’t the case that everyone in the new lands was happy to be Romanian.
Large minorities of Hungarians and Germans inhabited Transylvania in particular.
You can find out more about them in the video on the Treaty of Trianon to the left, or find
out how another Romance nation, Italy, united a generation earlier.
As always, I’ve been James and I’ll see you there.