Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

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.