Romania

Romania A part of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth century, the independence of Moldavia and Wallachia as Romania was recognized at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The new state was relatively weak, its administration corrupt and inefficient, and the power of the landlords remained intact. This led to a number of peasants' revolts (1888, 1907), which were brutally suppressed. Despite its domestic weaknesses, it was able to mobilize sufficient resources to wrest control of southern Dobrudja from Bulgaria in 1913. An ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary since 1883, it remained neutral at the outbreak of World War I. However, its Prime Minister, Bratianu, recognized that it was more likely to gain control of Transylvania by joining the war against Hungary than by joining it on its side. Bratianu declared war on 27 August 1916. His forces were overrun by the German and Bulgarian armies, and on 7 May he was forced to sue for peace.

Romania re-entered the war on 9 November 1918, so that it gained the status of a victorious ally. In the Paris Peace Conference it received unusually generous treatment in an effort to strengthen the state against Bolshevist Russia, mainly at the expense of the defeated Hungary. It gained control over Transylvania, Banat, northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia, more than doubling the size of its territory. Despite the original intentions, this weakened rather than strengthened the state. Romania's new minorities included substantial communities of Ukrainians, Bulgarians, gypsies, Germans, Hungarians, Tartars, Turks, and Jews. The permanent and peaceful integration of these groups was beyond the means of a weak and bankrupt state, even if this had been the intention of the ruling elites. Instead, they had little time for these minorities, most of whom had been enemies in World War I. Strikingly, the Romanians of the new territories also more often than not remained distinct, feeling alienated in a state with different political and administrative customs. These tensions were exacerbated by the 1923 constitution, which created a central state where a decentralized one would have been much more appropriate. The state's credibility further declined as a result of poor economic management. In a series of contradictory policies, foreign investment was severely restricted, but industrialization encouraged. Agriculture was promoted, but tariffs on food exports levied.

By 1928 the Liberals, who had been in government for eight years, were swept from power by a right-wing nationalist government under Maniu. He wasted his unique popularity, and thus a genuine opportunity to carry out reforms, through his own hesitations, and inter-party squabbles. The inability of the political establishment to find a coherent response to the economic slump of the Great Depression furthered the growth of the right wing. Ultimately, the Iron Guard was contained, but only through the application of increasingly dictatorial methods, first by King Carol II and then also by Antonescu.

The country's real weakness was displayed in 1940, when in the space of weeks it lost Bessarabia, northern Transylvania, and southern Dobrudja in response to the Hitler–Stalin Pact and the second Vienna Accord, despite its close relations with Nazi Germany. In World War II it still gave vital support to Germany as its major supplier of oil, and as a co-belligerent from 22 June 1941, following Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. It lost many of its troops in the Battle of Stalingrad. In the face of imminent defeat, on 23 August 1944 Antonescu was deposed, and war was declared on Germany the following day, in an effort to mollify the advancing Red Army.

The Soviets installed a Communist regime under Gheorghiu-Dej, which eliminated all opposition, forced King Michael I to abdicate on 30 December 1947, and proclaimed a Communist People's Republic. Private ownership was abolished, so that by 1960, 98 per cent of all firms and 80 per cent of farms had been nationalized. Gheorghiu-Dej established a ruthless regime with the help of the Soviet NKVD-KGB and, increasingly, his own security forces. Opposition leaders were harassed, imprisoned, or killed, and press censorship was established. Since the country had a long border with the Soviet Union, Gheorghiu-Dej ensured Stalin's satisfaction with the regime, especially since Romania was still full of Red Army troops.

The Soviet armed forces were withdrawn in 1958, however, as a grateful gesture for Romanian support in the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. This enabled the Communist leadership, headed by Ceaucescu after 1965, to gain a certain degree of independence from the Soviet Union. It was thus the first East European country outside the USSR to take up diplomatic relations with West Germany, and was the only Warsaw Pact country not to break off relations with Israel after the Six Day War in 1967. Romania's popularity in the West was further increased by the fact that it financed more and more of its misguided investment in heavy industry with help from the West, and became eastern Europe's first member of the IMF.

The dire condition of its economy was for a long time overshadowed by its wealth in oil. However, its reserves had largely dried up by the 1980s, which made it difficult to keep up repayments on loans. It was also hit by the oil price shock of 1979, which affected Comecon countries with some time-lag and caused a near-collapse of industry, while food rationing was introduced in 1982. To cope with the growing popular resentment that was inevitable in this state of affairs, harsh measures were introduced by the security forces, which were exacerbated by Ceaucescu's increasing megalomania. For instance, in 1981, all private typewriters were ordered to be confiscated to prevent the writing of letters of complaint to foreign embassies.

However, even these measures could not prevent the collapse of the regime in December 1989, following the collapse of Communism in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Ceaucescu was arrested and executed on Christmas Day 1989. Important parts of the old political establishment retained control of the state, so that Romania's anti-Communist revolution was relatively ineffective compared to Czechoslovakia (Velvet Revolution), East Germany, or Poland.

Iliescu stabilized the ‘new’ regime, which was confirmed in the 1990 elections with an overwhelming majority, by minimizing the break with the Ceaucescu regime. The bureaucracy and administration were largely unchanged, and discrimination against national minorities continued. The dreaded secret police continued in operation as the state security forces. In 1990 the government called the radical miners into Bucharest three times to brutally suppress student demonstrations. After 1992 some economic indicators improved, such as inflation, which came down from 2,600 per cent to less than 50 per cent in 2001. In 1996 Iliescu lost power to the centre-right led by Emil Constantinescu. His Democratic Convention (DC) obtained the largest number of seats in parliament, but this amounted only to one third of the seats. Politics were thus marked by fundamental instability, as the DC, itself a movement consisting of seventeen political groups, was forced to enter a number of coalition alliances in a very fragmented political system. Constantinescu's goal of Romania's EU membership proved elusive, as Romania's economy actually declined overall in the post-Communist era. However, at the Prague summit in 2002 Romania was set to join NATO because of its geopolitical significance.