Following is a lesson in comparative policy by the historian Mircea Platon. Romania's not being a major European power has made it into the object of a series of designs, which since the second half of the 19th century have been presented to Romanians as modernization projects. Defining and pursuing the national interest becomes, in countries like Romania, akin to a high wire act. Indeed, the difficulty of acting according to their own interests revisits the Romanians, citizens and elites alike, with the frequency of the major discontinuities reshaping the world (WWI, WWII, Cold War, and the compressed life-cycle of the uni-polar world).
Platon's study delivers a longitudinal analysis of sorts centered on the Romanian elites' positioning relative to the overbearing neighbor to the East, Czarist Russia, USSR, and now the Russian Federation. One additional comparative dimension of the study is the assessment of the balancing act of national interest West Germany performed between the two superpowers of the Cold War.
The student of Romanian history learns several aspects that add substance to the usual schemes in which history is being transmitted and received. The student and practitioner of policy is also well served by the bi-dimensional comparisons between then and now, respectively the Romanian and German pursuits of national interest. The skeptics of policy comparisons could argue, on epistemological grounds, that No man ever steps in the same river twice, but practitioners in pursuit of their country's national interest would be well advised to take notice.
Platon's study delivers a longitudinal analysis of sorts centered on the Romanian elites' positioning relative to the overbearing neighbor to the East, Czarist Russia, USSR, and now the Russian Federation. One additional comparative dimension of the study is the assessment of the balancing act of national interest West Germany performed between the two superpowers of the Cold War.
The student of Romanian history learns several aspects that add substance to the usual schemes in which history is being transmitted and received. The student and practitioner of policy is also well served by the bi-dimensional comparisons between then and now, respectively the Romanian and German pursuits of national interest. The skeptics of policy comparisons could argue, on epistemological grounds, that No man ever steps in the same river twice, but practitioners in pursuit of their country's national interest would be well advised to take notice.
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Mircea Platon, The Modernization of Romania and the “Russian Menace”, https://www.academia.edu/19979452/The_Modernization_of_Romania_and_the_Russian_Menace_
I. Introduction
Like many other states that gained independence and/or achieved national unity in the nineteenth or twentieth century, Romania had to simultaneously confront both nation-building and modernization issues. In fact, both the Old Hat (Whiggish) and the Old Guard (Marxist) historiographic orthodoxies have maintained that, in Romania, building a nation state was synonymous with modernization.[1] Both public orthodoxies cast the history of the Romanian national as a story of modernization, that is of “the integration or the reintegration” of the Romanian society “on the basis of new principles,” namely of either liberal or communist forms of “rationalism” setting in motion bureaucratic centralization, social standardization and industrialization processes that disintegrated the traditional society and forced the integration of the nation into a wider European or global order (capitalist or communist).[2] Even though the modernization of Romania has not always been called, for obvious political reasons, “Westernization,” it always had to do, at least on a discursive level, with the “mobilization” and “rationalization” of Romanian human and natural resources in order to achieve what C. E. Black identified as the “greater control, efficiency, and production” specific to modern societies.[3] Moreover, the “modernity” sought by Romanian elites has always been – for obvious reasons in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, far less clearer now, when we have already witnessed a multiplicity of modernities – a Western one. Hence, Romanian elites have often tried to “join the club” of civilized countries by presenting Romania as a guardian of civilization on the outskirts of the Roman Empire. As such, Russia represented the ideal “Tartar”/Oriental menace for, as a Euro-Asian empire, it cast a large shadow on both the Westernization and the national unity ideals cherished by the Romanian modernizing elites. With the Ottoman Empire ceasing to play any role in Romanian politics after 1878, and with the Habsburg monarchy perceived until its demise (1918) as a paragon of Mitteleuropean Kultur, only Russia/Soviet Union could be constantly denounced by certain Romanian elites as a foreign threat to Romania's modernization.
Although usually overlooked in favor of economic policies, domestic political dynamics and administrative development, foreign policy cannot avoid conforming to the modernization paradigm. Thus, whereas the foreign policy of Old Regime Europe was dominated by family connections, “tribal” hatreds, religious alliances, and the secrecy of the inner workings and diplomatic negotiations between the mostly monarchical governments (“le secret du Roy”), “modern” foreign policy is characterized by its relative transparency, by an “openness” most glaringly evident in the photo shoots of foreign dignitaries opening or concluding a round of negotiations. The public and parliamentary debates that often precede and follow any major foreign policy decision, as well as the publication of treaties (although not always in their entirety) contribute substantially to the widely held idea that peace, goodwill and the mutual benefits of all mankind are the normal ingredients of a “modern,” “rational,” “civilized” and above all interdependent foreign policy.[4]
In the following pages I will therefore take a brief look at the Russian/Soviet policy pursued by the Romanian liberal-democratic elites during WWI, in the interwar period, and finally after 1989. The Communist period (1948-1989), which Larry Watts has analyzed in the light of fresh archival research, will not make the object of this essay.[5] Fear of the Russian/Soviet invasion or malevolent meddling in Romania's internal affairs was a constant of Romania's history. For Little Romania (1859-1918), the danger came from the Russian empire that had annexed Bessarabia in 1812.[6] During the interwar period, Greater Romania (1918-1940) felt threatened by communist (Cominternist) subversion directed by the Kremlin and in 1940 by the new Soviet annexation of Bessarabia in complicity with Hitler’s Third Reich.
For Communist Romania (1948-1989), a decade of “fraternal,” comradely collaboration between the Soviet Union and the Romanian Communist Party (carried to power by the Red Army with Anglo-American complicity),[7] was accompanied by widespread fear of the Russians. Peasants, intellectuals, the small and the big bourgeoisie, certain ethnic minorities such as the Germans living in Transylvania, all had reasons to resent the Soviet military presence in Romania (1945-1958). This fear found an expression in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceauşescu’s so-called “national-communism,” which sought to make Romania independent of the Soviet Union and to open it, under the careful guidance of the Communist Party, to certain Western influences as well as to engage in economic cooperation with the West rather than with the Soviet Union and other CAER countries.
The Euro-Atlantic or Post-Communist Romania (after 1989) has witnessed the constant denunciation of the specter of Russian/Soviet (Romanian pundits and politicians use these terms indiscriminately) menace. Certain segments of the Romanian elites summoned the ghost of the Russian/Soviet empire in order to scare Romanians into accepting a Euro-Atlantic modernizing project whose high social, cultural and economic costs have fostered wide skepticism about Romania's Euro-Atlantic integration. This new brand of state-sponsored Russo-phobia has appealed to all the previous strains of Russo-phobia without explicitly acknowledging their sources. For example, while attacking the nineteenth century romantic versions of nationalism and socialism, neoliberal and neoconservative supporters of Romania's Euro-Atlantic integration have unabashedly recycled the anti-Russian strictures of romantic nationalists or socialists such as Jules Michelet, Nicolae Iorga or Constantin Stere. These Euro-Atlantic elites gloss over the modernizing, pragmatic foreign policy promoted by Romanian political figures such as Take Ionescu, founder and president of the Romanian Conservative-Democratic Party (1908-1922), or Nicolae Titulescu, both of whom have been widely celebrated as great Europhiles and internationalists even though both tried to impress upon their contemporaries that Romania needs to negotiate with Russia and the Soviet Union on a pragmatic, non-ideological basis.
In the following section I will examine the ways and contexts in which Ionescu and Titulescu argued for Romania's alliance with Russia, respectively the Soviet Union. Ionescu sought to push Romania into World War One on the side of the Triple Entente in order to obtain the unification of Transylvania with Romania. Titulescu tried to secure the Soviet recognition of Bessarabia's post-WWI unification with Romania.
II. Little and Greater Romania (1915-1940): Take Ionescu and Nicolae Titulescu
Take Ionescu started from the premise that, despite being united by their religion (Eastern Orthodox), Russia and Romania were separated by geopolitics because Romania stood in the way of Russia’s expansion toward the Mediterranean Sea and the Bosphorus.[8] Despite these geopolitical premises, Take Ionescu did not hesitate, in 1915, when Romania was still neutral, to ask for Romania’s entry in the war on the side of the Triple Entente and to confront both the anti-tsarist voice of the liberal-socialist Constantin Stere, as well as the Germanophile Russo-phobia of Conservative leaders such as Petre P. Carp and Alexandru Marghiloman, who feared Russia.[9]
Although a staunch pro-Ententist, Nicolae Iorga's hostility toward tsarist Russia represented a third strain of Romanian enmity toward Russia. Iorga's attitude was not motivated by Germanophilia or by a liberal-socialist rejection of “reactionary Russia,” but by nationalism. Indeed Iorga wrote that, immediately after its 1812 annexation of Bessarabia, tsarist Russia sought to win over its Romanian population (87% in 1812) by appointing a Romanian noble as governor and the Romanian Garvril Bădulescu-Bodoni as the first Metropolitan of Chişinău. Iorga also pointed out that Romanian nobles who decided to remain under Russian administration enjoyed “the same rights as Russian nobles,” and that free peasants improved their lot by buying cheaply the huge properties of Romanian nobles that had chosen to remain in Romanian Moldavia. After such an idyllic depiction of life in Russian Bessarabia, Iorga concluded: “Happy would have been our people, with all its social classes, in the Christian Tzar’s Moldavia, if a people had, as socialists believe, only a physical body.” Iorga warned that any people has a “soul,” and that the suffering of the Romanians under Russian administration had to do less with their reasonable socio-economic status, than with the national “soul” tormented by a foreign administration.[10] Iorga's opposition to tsarist Russia was therefore motivated by ethnic nationalism, not by Western liberal or socialist criticisms of Russian “despotism.”
Facing a formidable array of anti-Russian voices (conservative, socialist, nationalist), Ionescu adopted a pragmatic line of reasoning, concentrating not on what Russia had – allegedly - “always” done to Romania, but on what Romania could gain by negotiating with Russia and the Entente in the particular context of World War One.
Thus, in his speech on “The Policy of National Instinct,” pronounced in the Romanian Chamber of Deputies on 16-17 December 1915, Ionescu declared that Romania should join the Triple Entente not for sentimental reasons, but for the sake of the national interest.[11] Talking about the “Russian danger,” Ionescu frontally attacked the idea that Romania should not act in its own best national interest, but as a bulwark of Western civilization against Russia's expansion toward the “open sea”.[12] Ionescu refused to subordinate Romania's foreign policy goals to serving the interests of other powers. Instead of narrowing Romania's diplomatic options to purely destructive goals (hindering any other country's access to something), Ionescu pointed out that Romania's development depended upon constructive political realism. Implicit in his demonstration was the principle that one of the first rules of constructive political realism required politicians to operate with a consistent and uniform set of criteria, one with universal applicability. Indeed, the history of political ideas indicates that the modernization of politics started in the eighteenth-century with the transition from the confessional state, concerned with the Christian salvation of its subjects, to the more technocratic state concerned with the secular well-being of its citizens.[13] The secularization of politics, not unlike the secularization of science, required the adoption of certain consistent and uniform principles and procedures. Similarly to modern scientists, modern rulers had to perform their operations openly and to give public opinion a peek behind the scenes. Ionescu therefore mocked publicly the logical inconsistencies of those who, while attacking Russia as a monster-state impossible to contain, asked tiny Romania to oppose its expansion.[14]
Ionescu acknowledged the pressure put on Romania by the vicinity of Russia, but treated it as a geopolitical fact that had to be dealt with rationally: “Evidently Russia constitutes a danger for us. To a small State the neighbourhood of a great one is always a danger. Would it not have been much better for Belgium not to be a neighbour of Germany's? Who will deny that? Nobody; not even the preachers of cowardice, the men who maintain that Belgium would have been better advised to bow before the invasion— and then send in her bill to be paid at the Imperial Bank !”[15] Ionescu pointed out that Romania had nothing to gain from playing the role of a “sentinel” policing the Russian borders in the name of the Western civilization. Taking aim at both Constantin Stere, who had spent eight years in Siberia for his socialist activity, and at those Conservative Germanophiles who manipulated the memory of the numerous Russian occupations of the Romanian countries,[16] Ionescu argued that the complex political context asked for something other than a knee-jerk reaction: “Gentlemen, in my opinion we ought to examine the question with complete freedom. Our relations with the Russians are more Complex than is conceived by those whose judgment is naturally biased, both by the fact that they are natives of Bessarabia, and by the fact that they have passed eight years of their youth in Siberia.”[17] The politics of resentment were counterproductive, springing from a distorted reading of history that shied away from recognizing the role played by Russia in the liberation of the Balkan and Eastern European nations from the Ottoman domination. Whereas Great Britain chose to support the Ottomans, Russia's wars against the Ottoman Empire created the political space for the emergence of the independent nation states of South Eastern Europe.[18]
Ionescu argued that Romanian Russo-phobia was an ideological byproduct of the nineteenth-century Westernization of Romania. Whereas Romanian elites had embraced Western, particularly French, national-Liberal ideas, Russia seemed frozen in a reactionary posture.[19] Ionescu pointed out that “those times,” when Russia was the “policeman of European reaction,” were over. Romanian national progress required a level-headed, pragmatic, prejudice-free assessment of the country's foreign policy options. The existence of Romania as a modern, unitary state depended upon the elaboration of a sophisticated foreign policy: “Our renaissance is an accomplished fact; others [the Austro-Hungarian empire, n. M.P.] have transformed themselves into the police of reaction; we are therefore in a position to examine the relations between Russia and ourselves with the same liberty, the same absence of prejudice, with which we examine our relations with other Powers.”[20]
Ionescu warned that a Russo-phobic, irrational foreign policy would have tragic consequences for Romania. Ionescu illustrated his point by recalling the example of the Conservative leader Petre P. Carp, one of the leaders of the Germanophile faction. In 1878, dissatisfied with the results of the Berlin Congress - where Romania saw its independence recognized in exchange for turning over the Southern part of Bessarabia to Russia -, Carp wanted to reject the incorporation of Dobrogea by Romania, granted by the Congress. Ionescu pointed out that accepting Carp's suggestion would have put Romania in a very difficult situation: “I will call your attention to what M. Carp said in 1878. A crime was committed in 1878 by Russia, and a mistake, I believe, by ourselves. I will not concern myself now with our mistake, for I do not want to turn the discussion at present upon our political past, a discussion which would inevitably involve estimates of parties and of personalities. But do you know how far M. Carp went when we took over the Dobrudja ? He said: " Since Bessarabia has been taken from us"—which, by the way, M. Carp did not suggest that we should defend by force of arms—"let us refuse the Dobrudja, so that we may never forget our hatred of Russia !" Suppose, gentlemen, that the Roumanian Parliament had followed his advice, that Roumania had not accepted the Dobrudja, that the Bulgarian Government had established itself at the mouth of the Danube, and that we had been cut off from all access to the sea—what would the position of Roumania have been in such a case ?”[21]
Addressing the question of Pan-Slavism, Ionescu argued that Romania was in no danger of being surrounded and overwhelmed by the neighboring Slavic countries. The “thirst for independence” of the Serbians and Bulgarians was, he claimed, too strong to allow them to become simple dependencies of the Russian empire. Supporting Ionescu's judgment, Iorga declared that Serbians fought for their own national interest and that, however grateful they might have been for Russia's help, “amongst the Serbs the idea of Pan-Slavism has not entered the head of anybody.”[22]
Far from being attacked as a promoter of “Russian despotism,” Ionescu was saluted as one of Romania's foremost internationalist and Euro-federalist politicians. During the war, his pro-Russian political stance was subsidized by the Russian legation in Bucharest.[23] Unlike Mussolini, who founded his pro-Ententist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia in 1914 with the financial support of the French embassy, Ionescu would not radicalize his pro-war nationalism into interwar fascism. His discourse in support of the Romanian entry in the war on the side of the Triple Entente and implicitly for a Romanian alliance with Russia was translated into English and French and greeted as a masterpiece of parliamentary oratory reflecting not mercenary preoccupations, but a thoughtful analysis of the war and a careful assessment of Romania's interests and objectives.[24]
After the war,[25] Ionescu became involved in various Euro-federalist schemes and became one of the founding fathers of the Petite Entente, the alliance between Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania that sought to preserve the Central and Eastern European order established by the Versailles Peace Conference and the Trianon Treaty. Even during the Versailles Peace Conference, Ionescu proposed the creation of an Eastern European bloc, grouping Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland and Greece. In Ionescu's vision, the bloc would have counterbalanced the German-Hungarian revisionism in Central Europe and would have kept the Bolshevik revolution out of Europe. In 1921, as minister of foreign affairs in general Alexandru Averescu's cabinet, Ionescu signed the defensive treaty between Romania and Czechoslovakia (23 April 1921), and between Romania and Yugoslavia (7 June 1921). The Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs Edvard Beneš and the Yugoslav minister of foreign affairs M. Nincic had signed a Czechoslovak-Yugoslavian defensive convention on 14 August 1920. Ionescu and Beneš were the most active promoters of the Petite Entente. Invited to join the Petite Entente, Poland participated at the Bucharest conference (20-24 February 1922), but did not join the alliance. Whereas Romania, Czechoslovaki and Yugoslavia feared Hungarian revisionism and Czechoslovakia and Iugoslavia were Rusophile, Poland feared Russia and entertained good relations with Hungary.[26] In 1921, Romania and Poland signed a treaty for of mutual assistance against Soviet aggression. Romania had both a common border and territorial disputes with a Soviet Union that denounced the unification of Bessarabia with Romania as an act of bourgeois imperialism and capitalist reaction. Romania also feared the Soviet influence among certain Bessarabian Russophone minorities. However, in the context of the Great Depression, the three countries that formed the Petite Entente would strengthen their ties by signing in 1929 and 1930 two sets of accords regarding questions of judiciary settlement and arbitrage and a supplementary accord guaranteeing that their ministers of foreign affairs would meet at least once a year. On 16 February 1933, a new pact for the organization of the Petite Entente was signed at Geneva, between Nicolae Titulescu (for Romania), Beneš (for Czechoslovakia) and Jeftic (for Yugoslavia).[27]
Titulescu had entered politics, and the Parliament, in 1912, as a member of Take Ionescu’s Conservative-Democratic Party. As pragmatic and internationalist as his mentor, Titulescu supported the idea of stronger diplomatic and economic ties between the Petite Entente and the Soviet Union. Part of Titulescu's strategy for securing the Versailles order and the borders of Greater Romania rested upon the conclusion of a mutual assistance pact between Romania and the Soviet Union. In January 1934, at the 22-23 January conference of the Petite Entente taking place in Zagreb, the ministers of foreign affairs of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia decided to renew their countries' diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union. After a June 1934 epistolary exchange with Litvinov, the Soviet minister (Commissar of the People) for foreign affairs, Titulescu opened diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union and started negotiating a treaty between Romania and the Soviet Union. The treaty would have included the Soviet recognition of Romania’s eastern borders on the Dniester.
Even Nae Ionescu, soon to be regarded as a fascist intellectual and one of the most influential German agents of influence in Romania, saluted in a January 1932 column the eventual signing of a treaty between Romania and the Soviet Union. Nae Ionescu pointed out the absurdity of those politicians who recycled the usual anti-Russian and the new anti-Soviet clichés in order to ask for the interruption of the negotiations between Romania and the Soviet Union. A keen and sophisticated reader of theology, Nae Ionescu argued in the manner of the early modern neo-Augustinians holding that, since society cannot be built on human virtues, it has to rest on the foundations of enlightened self-interest. Indeed, Nae Ionescu pointed out that, since there was no Russian regime – tsarist, liberal-democrat (Kerensky's), Bolshevik (Stalin's) – that Romanians would have grounds to consider friendly, they would have to settle for negotiating with whatever government Romania's big Russian/Soviet neighbour chose to have. Moreover, Nae Ionescu pointed out that a “Westernized,” “civilized” Petrine Russia would be less inclined to listen to Romania's arguments regarding Bessarabia than a Stalinist regime dedicated, according to Nae Ionescu, to the proposition that the Soviet Union was a “Eurasian country.” Nae Ionescu considered that, at that moment, in 1932, in the context of the Great Depression, when so many Western countries tried to find “third way” solutions to the huge socio-economic crisis of capitalism, Soviet Union was not so much a “Bolshevik” country, than one that was “honestly, pathetically honest, seeking, and by means that are often very impressive, a new organization of life.”[28]
Despite his good intentions, Titulescu's negotiations with the Soviets were seriously hindered by the Soviet appointment as negotiators with Romania of two confirmed Româno-phobes: the self-proclaimed anti-Romanian diplomat Yakov Zacharovich Surits, and the Bulgarian Boris Spiridonovich Stomonyakov, Litvinov's assistant.[29] Despite these setbacks, on 21 July 1936, in Montreux, Titulescu and Litvinov signed a protocol regarding the future mutual assistance treaty between Romania and the Soviet Union. However, Titulescu's Soviet policy was attacked by the pro-Nazi Romanian fascist organization the Iron Guard and by Liberal politicians such as Gh. I. Brătianu. Under pressure from both the Third Reich and Fascist Italy, in August 1936 King Carol II removed Titulescu from all official positions. Ironically, while Nazi Germany forced Carol II to literally exile Titulescu and put an end to any diplomatic openings to the Soviet Union, the Third Reich continued the supple diplomatic policy toward the Soviet Union inaugurated by the Weimar Republic with the Treaty of Rapallo (1922) and crowned by the Ribbentrop-Molotov “Non-Aggression Pact” (1939).[30]
Both the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that allowed the Soviet Union to occupy Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in June 1940 and the Vienna Diktat that awarded Northern Transylvania to Hungary in August 1940 found Romania unprepared. Carol II's anti-Nazism, however well-intended, was supported only by weak Franco-British guarantees and was hampered by Romanian elite anti-Sovietism. Carol II’s fear of Bolshevism was tempered by the pressure of geopolitical realities and alleviated by French soft power. Trying to walk on a diplomatic tightrope, Carol II kept the Nazi Germany happy by dismissing Titulescu in 1936, but gave a discreet helping hand to the Franco-Czechoslovak and the Soviet-Czechoslovak system of alliances that required the Soviet army to assist Czechoslovakia in case of Nazi aggression. While Poland refused to allow Soviet troops to pass through her territory on their road to Czechoslovakia, Carol II focused, even after the dismissal of Titulescu in 1936, on the construction of a Bukovina-Transylvania railway that would have allowed Soviet troops to transit northern Romania on their way to Czechoslovakia.
Looking back on the interwar decades, Hugh Seton-Watson pointed out that the Soviet refusal to recognize Bessarabia as part of the Greater Romania complicated the already fraught relationship between the two countries, separated by a difference in political regimes that made Romanians fear the spread of “Bolshevism,” and prompted the Soviets to constantly denounce Romanian “bourgeois imperialism.” Romania’s recognition of the Soviet Government in 1934 came in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's entrance in the League of Nations in 1933, and was the result of improved diplomatic ties between the Soviet Union and France, Romania's closest Western ally. Seton-Watson noted that, until Titulescu, only “the reactionary [Alexandru] Vaida-Voevod” made two serious attempts, in 1919-20 and 1932, to clear the diplomatic air between Romania and the Soviet Union. In 1920, Vaida-Voevod refused to support the Polish-Soviet war, engaging instead in negotiations with the Soviet Union. These talks were supported by Britain but inopportune for France, which needed Polish support against Germany. As a result, Vaida-Voevod lost his post as Prime Minister, but Take Ionescu, the new minister of foreign affairs, chose to continue Vaida-Voevod's Soviet policy and Romania did not intervene in the Polish-Soviet War.[31] Seton-Watson pointed out the unrealistic way in which Romanian political elites, encouraged by their Western allies, dealt with the Soviet Union: “Until Titulescu became Foreign Minister Romania adopted an arrogant attitude towards the Soviet Union, being encouraged to believe that in any dispute she could always count on the support of the Western Powers.”[32]
In the absence of any solid guarantees of security from either the Western democracies or the Soviet Union, Romania was left alone in 1940. With no coherent Soviet policy, literally cracking up under the pressure of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Romania could not cope with the consequences of the German-Soviet mutually ensured destruction of the European order.[33] According to George Ciorănescu, a Romanian pioneer of European federalism, Titulescu's diplomatic negotiations with the Soviet Union would have guaranteed Soviet support against the Vienna Diktat. Answering to Titulescu's Iron Guardist critics such as Mihail Sturdza, minister of foreign affairs during the brief and disastrous Iron Guardist spell in power (September 1940 - January 1941), Ciorănescu wrote: “If Titulescu's “disastrous” policies would have been fully implemented, the sufferings and humiliations of Romania would have been much smaller. Because Titulescu's European policy fully covered Romania's national interests. By signing direct treaties with its neighbours, three of Romania’s national frontiers would have been secure (the Yugoslavian, Czechoslovakian and Polish guarantees) and the negotiations with the Soviet Union were on the verge of winning for us the friendship of the Soviets.” [34] Commenting upon Romania’s international stature in the interwar years, Hans J. Morgenthau wrote that: “Rumania owed its ability to play a role in international affairs much superior to its actual resources chiefly to the personality of one man, its Foreign Minister Titulescu.”[35]
III. The Soviet Policy of West Germany
Romania experienced periods of economic prosperity and enhanced international prestige every time Romanian elites were bold and skilful enough to pursue an independent foreign policy, such as the recognition of the Federal Republic of Germany by Communist Romania and the re-establishing of diplomatic relations between Romania and the Bundesrepublik in January 1967.[36] In short, Romania’s most successful modernizing spells coincided with those periods in which her foreign policy was non-subservient to bloc policies (either Western or Eastern) and consisted in deftly negotiating with the great powers in order to open new diplomatic and economic space for Romania. In this, Romania's most inspired foreign policy resembled that of German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who “proved adept at manipulating the United States – its fear of nationalism, communism, and neutralism – in order to speed the way to German self-government” after the Second World War. Whereas U.S. leaders “employed the discourse of cooperation to ensure American supremacy, Adenauer used it to erode West Germany's subordinate status.”[37] It is true that Adenauer used the “Communist threat” in order to gain American support for his Christian Democratic Party against the German Social Democrats. But in dealing with the United States, Adenauer used the “Communist threat” discourse not in order to yoke West Germany to the juggernaut of American Cold War foreign policy, but seeking to secure increasingly more room for West Germany's economic and political maneuvers. In his dealings with the US elites, Adenauer argued that unless Germany was allowed to regain its rightful place in Europe, the Soviets would penetrate Central Europe. Unlike Third World authoritarian rulers propped up by the West, Adenauer did not use the Communist threat against German citizens, but for their benefit, constantly nibbling away at the US control over West Germany.[38] Adenauer played the Soviet card with a lucidity that can only recommend it as a classical example of a truly modern diplomacy serving the national interests of a modern nation state.
In September 1961, after spending a quarter as instructor at the University of Heidelberg, Robert Strausz-Hupé, the founder of the staunchly neoconservative Foreign Policy Research Institute, informed the American military authorities on what he perceived to be the demoralization of the West German political elites, on the “rapid deterioration of the morale of our friends in high places in Germany.” Strausz-Hupé warned US authorities that West German public opinion was dominated by the impression that American inappropriate action or inaction in response to the Berlin crisis had forced Chancellor Adenauer into “embracing negotiations” with the Soviet Union. The “crisis of confidence” in Bonn pushed the German elites to “rush in the direction of De Gaulle,” who was perceived by the Germans as a “strong figure” with a “willingness to stand up to Russian pressures.”[39] De Gaulle’s “nationalism” therefore threatened not so much the Western anti-communist alliance as the American monopoly on the anti-communist-themed domestic and foreign discourses and policies that justified the creation of an American empire. Militarily, De Gaulle’s nationalism asked the United States to share their “atomic secrets” with the European partners. As such, French nationalism did not pose a significant threat to the military integration of the Atlantic Community. According to the Foreign Policy Research Institute analysts, the danger was political and French nationalism had a “debilitating effect upon the Atlantic Alliance as a whole” because De Gaulle's France demanded that European unity result in a Europe des patries, in an European Union of nation-states rather than in a federal structure complete with supranational institutions.[40] What is more significant is that the German public admired De Gaulle's stance toward the Soviet Union, even while De Gaulle's Soviet policy was very supple and pragmatic. Less strident in his anti-Communism than the US authorities, De Gaulle's Soviet policy resembled that of Adenauer.[41]
Indeed, commenting upon the German Soviet policy, Hans Morgenthau noted peevishly that Bonn played the Soviet Union card against the best interests of the United States: “The limits of American policy toward the Soviet Union are determined by what is acceptable to the government in Bonn. American policy in not being made in Bonn, but Bonn decides how far Washington can go.”[42] In the aftermath of the second crisis of Berlin, the same that prompted Strausz-Hupe’s warnings quoted above, Morgenthau deplored the way in which the United States reacted to the Adenauer-De Gaulle meeting in January 1963 that resulted in a Franco-German treaty. According to Morgenthau, that treaty prompted John F. Kennedy’s hurried visit to Germany and his “transformation” into “a German” (a reference to the famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” catchphrase). The partial test-ban treaty between Washington and Moscow was similarly received by Bonn with deft diplomatic maneuvering aiming to ensure German national interests in the sense of preventing the United States from officially recognizing the East German regime. Morgenthau feared that West Germany exercised undue influence on the American Soviet policy: “Although the carefully worded text of the partial test-ban treaty precludes the possibility of even approaching something like recognition of the East German regime, the publication of the treaty created near-hysteria in Bonn. The President of the United States had to write a personal letter to Chancellor Adenauer. The Secretary of State of the United States had to go to Bonn. So did an Assistant Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. After the latter had gone to attend the opera in Salzburg, he was summoned back to Bonn by Mr Adenauer, who lectured him for almost an hour on the dangers of the test-ban treaty without allowing him to put in a word of his own. A hundred years ago, Bismarck wouldn’t have dared treat, say, the British Secretary of War like that; nor would the British Secretary of War, for that matter, have allowed himself to be so treated.”[43]
Analyzing the diplomatic maneuvers of the Bonn government, Morgenthau found that, although West Germany had joined NATO in 1954, it did so in order to obtain the reunification of Germany. And the only country able to solve this national desideratum was not the Unites States, but the Soviet Union, which controlled East Germany. Morgenthau argued that West German foreign policy had “an eastern orientation” which would survive German unification. The West German and Soviet elites had opened channels of communication that had little to do with American Cold War interests and policies. Morgenthau warned the US government to take seriously into consideration Nikita Khrushchev’s conviction - stated in a December 1961 memorandum submitted by Khrushchev to the West German government, and often repeated in his private conversations with foreign dignitaries - that: “One day, the Germans will want another Rapallo. It won’t happen under Adenauer’s successor, nor probably under his successor’s successor. Later, perhaps. But the day will come, and we can wait” (Khrushchev speaking in July 1963, cited by Paul-Henri Spaak). Morgenthau commented that: “What is a pleasant dream in Moscow is a nightmare in Washington and a source of great political strength for Bonn.”[44]
Morgenthau argued that since NATO was in fact “the cornerstone” of Washington’s policy in Europe, the US government could do nothing that would have endangered this alliance. In Morgenthau’s opinion, the West Germans got the upper hand on the United States and forced them to be more radical toward Russia than Germany itself. Fearing to upset a West German government ready to raise its voice against any American “weakness” in dealing with the Soviet Union, the US could not arrive at an understanding with the Soviets based on the post-WWII status-quo. For the sake of preventing “a drastic change in the world balance of power through an Eastern orientation of a united Germany,” the US struggled to preserve the “illusion” that the Western orientation of West Germany would help her achieve the national aim of reunification. But this “illusion” was maintained only with the price of the American “commitment to the German nonrecognition of the European status quo,” a commitment that was “incompatible” with the US “search for an accommodation with the Soviet Union.”[45] On the other hand, American intransigence in their dealings with the Soviet Union freed West Germany to come to their own agreement with the Soviet Union: “Paradoxically enough, if the United States should continue to be, in its verbal commitments at least, as intransigent as the most intransigent Germans, it is likely to find itself left behind by a new generation of German leaders who will, in one fashion or other, try to change circumstances rather than declaim against them.”[46]
As recent historiography based on fresh archival research has shown, the Soviet leadership made the same point to the East German leaders. On 28 July 1970, Leonid Brezhnev told Erich Honecker that the very civic nationalist identity of the GDR could not exist without the Soviet military presence. Unlike the other countries in the Western bloc, the GDR existed only as a function of the Soviet presence in Central Europe. As Brezhnev put it: “After all, we have troops in your country... the GDR cannot exist without us, without the Soviet Union, its power and strength.”[47] Indeed, the reunification of Germany would happen, in 1990, after Helmuth Kohl negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989-1990. In October 1990, East Germany joined West Germany as a member of the European Community. Gorbachev also accepted to repatriate by 1994 all Soviet military forces (350,000 troops) stationed in East Germany. After that, NATO would establish its authority on the former territory of the German Democratic Republic. Federal Germany promised to offer fifteen billion DM “in loans and grants to enable the Soviet Army to leave eastern Germany by 1994.”[48]
IV. Conclusion: Post-Communist Romania
Gerhard Schroeder and Angela Merkel, under whose chancellorship Germany has emerged as EU's leading economic power, continued the wise and fruitful Eastern policy initiated by Adenauer. The supple and nuanced position adopted by Berlin since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis has confirmed Germany as a pragmatic, cautious and level-headed partner of both the US and Russia. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about Chancellor Merkel's favorite Romanian political partner, President Traian Băsescu.
Although Merkel publicly praised Băsescu's neoliberal, austerity-driven handling of the Romanian economic crisis,[49] Berlin chided Bucharest for maintaining absolute silence on the illegal NSA hacking of the computer and telephone communications of UE countries.[50] But Bucharest's silence about proven (the NSA spying) or alleged (the “secret CIA prisons” in Romania) American abuses against human rights is a key element of the so called „modernization project” adopted by the Băsescu administration. Indeed, this “modernization” project is defined in essentialist terms and as such it aims less at building strong democratic institutions in Romania than at developing mechanisms of ideological, economic and institutional coercion to enforce the pro-Western allegiance of Romania. Unfortunately, in many cases, the authoritarian medium sounds like a very anti-democratic, and therefore anti-Western, message. Whereas Adenauer used the Communist threat to convince the US government to give Bonn more elbow room, the Băsescu regime and many pro-Băsescu pundits have used the same discourse in order to attack political (Liberal or Socialist) adversaries, to discredit any environmentalist opposition to the exploitation of Romanian natural resources by North American companies, and to put Romania at odds with Russia.[51]
Băsescu's “modernization project” is perceived by many Romanian analysts to be less about Romania's inner development than about Romania's outer allegiances. As such, open, democratic debate of Romania's foreign or domestic policy agenda is usually attacked by the supporters of the “Băsescian modernization” in McCarthyist tones, as counterproductive and subversive, usually as seeking to push Romania in the much maligned direction of a “Communist,” “backward,” “totalitarian” East. Both the Chinese and the Russian real or alleged political and economic involvement in Romania have attracted such denunciations.[52] Citing sources ranging from the NATO Secretary General Andres Fogh Rasmussen[53] to American think-tank analysts such as Strafor founder George Friedman, the supporters of the Băsescian modernization have insistently advanced the idea that any enemy of their “modernization agenda” is an enemy of the West supported by Russia: a “Putinist,” a “Dughinist,” or a “Red Fascist.”[54] The conviction underpinning the intelligentsia's celebration of the Băsescian modernization is that Romania is a „vanguard” of Western civilization, and as such has to aggressively monitor the Eastern flank of the Euro-Atlantic system of alliances. Unfortunately, the sense of a mission to „defend the Western civilization” has enabled Romanian neoliberal elites to recycle and transfer interwar and WWII-era Orientalizing anti-Russian clichés in new contexts.
The history of Romania's long and often fraught relationship with Russia cannot be disregarded. But the line between adopting a prudent approach to Russia and engaging in anti-Russian propaganda couched in essentialist terms redolent of WWII and the early phases of the Cold War[55] is surely thick enough to be noticed by even the most myopic politician. History and the huge geopolitical disparity between Romania and Russia warrant Romania's caution in dealing with Russia. But no lucid, sure-footed Romanian foreign policy can be built on the basis of wholesale denunciations of Russian history, people and culture, or by generating and exacerbating Romanian Russophobia in order to transform Romanians into cannon fodder for imperial proxy wars. Western, and especially US, soft power played a key role in Romania's post-Communist „demythologization” of its historiography. That the essentialist Weltanschauung purged from the history schoolbooks after 1989 has found a refuge in Romania's foreign policy towards Russia or China is, surely, a development that ought to raise some eyebrows in Western chancelleries.
[1] If the Whig (national-liberal) paradigm dominated the Romanian public discourse between 1848-1948 and then again after 1989, the more or less crudely Marxist interpretation of history was enforced by the state between 1948 and 1989.
[2] My definition of modernization draws upon C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization. A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 1-33, and Hans Blokland, Modernization and Its Political Consequences: Weber, Mannheim, and Schumpeter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), transl. Nancy Smyth Van Weesep, 1-8.
[4] Edward L. Morse, “The Transformation of Foreign Policies: Modernization, Interdependence, and Externalization,” World Politics, 22: 3 (Apr., 1970), 371-392.
[5] See Larry Watts, With Friends Like These: The Soviet Bloc’s Clandestine War against Romania (Bucharest: Editura Militara, 2010), and Extorting Peace: Romania and the End of the Cold War (Bucharest: RAO, 2013), as well as his e-Dossier, “Divided Loyalties Within the Bloc: Romanian Objection to Soviet Informal Controls, 1963-1964” CWIHP e-Dossier No. 42 (2012) (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/divided-loyalties-within-the-bloc-romanian-objection-to-soviet-informal-controls-1963).
[6] See Keith Hitchins, A Concise History of Romania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 147-48.
[7] See Hugh De Santis, The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933-1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
[8] The best expression of this idea is to be found in Take Ionescu's La politique étrangère de la Roumanie (Bucharest: F. Gobl, 1891).
[9] See Alexandru Marghiloman, Note politice: 1916-1917 (Bucharest: Instituttul de Arte Grafice “Eminescu”, 1927), 2: 268.
[10] “Când Rusia a luat Basarabia, ea a avut grijă să păstreze un timp înfăţişarea românească a ţerii, să câştige prin recunoaşteri şi adăugiri de drepturi toate clasele, – mai toate măcar. Guvernator a fost numit un Sturdza aşezat în Rusia şi ai cărui urmaşi erau să fie cu totul înstrăinaţi, în sens franţuzesc şi rusesc. Exarh al Sinodului rusesc, vlădică în Chişinău a fost aşezat un răzeş bucovinean, Gavriil Bănulescu, care a tipărit cărţi româneşti. Boierilor li s-a cerut să se aşeze cu totul peste Prut ori să-şi vândă în termin scurt moşiile. Cei mai mulţi au rămas în Iaşi şi au pierdut moşiile, cu totul ori aproape. Şi la noi în casă era un sipet mare de fier în care se cuprindeau multe petiţii ruseşti timbrate pentru o lungă cheltuială şi o mare pagubă, din care am rămas oameni săraci. Celor ce găsiră însă că e mai bine să primească oblăduirea împărătească, ce nu li s-a dat? Drepturi ca ale nobililor ruşi, cinuri de funcţionari, cordoane de cavaler, – juveţe prinse de gâturi plecate. Clerul, în ţara unde pretutindeni arde lumina la icoane, în ţara unde statul sprijine Biserica sprijinindu-se pe dânsa, în care toţi se pleacă înaintea clericului, n-avea de ce să fie nemulţămit. Şi, în sfârşit, ţeranii neliberi, cari aveau înaintea lor exemplul eroicilor răzeşi ai Orheiului şi Sorocăi, au prins ceasul prielnic al vânzării moşiilor pe nimic şi s-au împroprietărit pe brazda lor. Fericit ar fi fost neamul nostru, cu toate clasele lui, în Moldova împăratului creştin, dacă un popor ar trăi, cum cred socialiştii, numai din viaţa trupului, dacă el s-ar simţi bine numai în oasele şi carnea lui. Dar un suflet dumnezeiesc se zbate în acest trecător înveliş al nostru, un suflet pe care altă voinţă decât a noastră îl duce pe căi ce cuprind răbdare şi suferinţă, dar de pe care toate chemările cărnii ce tinde spre mulţămire nu-l pot îndepărta. Şi sufletul acesta nu putea trăi, adecă nu se putea dezvolta şi nu putea stăpâni în Basarabia” (Nicolae Iorga, “Sufletul românesc în Basarabia după anexarea din 1812” Neamul românesc, anul al IV-lea (1909), nr. 138). See also Iorga's Basarabia noastră. Scrisă după 100 de ani de la răpirea ei de către ruşi (Vălenii de Munte: Editura şi Tipografia Societăţii „Neamul Românesc”, 1912) and Continuitatea spiritului românesc în Basarabia (Iaşi; Tipografia “Neamul Românesc”, 1918). Iorga was more critical of the Bessarabian pesants' fate under the Russian administration in his Adevărul asupra trecutului și prezentului Basarabiei (Bucharest: Tipografia ziarului „Universul", 1940). For statistics on the economic life and land distribution in Bessarabia immediately after 1918, see C. Filipescu, Eugeniu N. Giurgea, Basarabia. Consideraţiuni generale, agricole, economice şi statistice (Chişinău: Institutul de Arte Grafice „România nouă”, 1919). Filipescu and Giurgea argued for a new land reform that would distribute the land concentrated in the hands of big landowners among free peasants, encouraging them to organize in cooperatives.
[11] “I am dealing, gentlemen, with interests. I accept that. We are living in the days of interests. Let us take our stand on the ground of interests,” in Take Ionescu, The Policy of National Instinct (London: Sir Joseph Causton, 1916), 28.
[12] “We have just been told that the principal mission of the Roumanian State is not to concern itself with the unification of the race nor to develop strength enough to resist the dangers of the future, but that our mission is to prevent, at all costs, Russia from obtaining access to the open sea […] And is it eternally necessary to prevent the Russian people from having access to the sea? And is the essential role which we have to play to be that of a policeman, of a sentinel, preventing Russia from securing access to the open sea? But what does that mean? Since Russia will always struggle to reach the sea, our part would be to be eternally on guard to prevent Russia from realising her age-long dream,” (Ionescu, The Policy of National Instinct, 35, 37).
[13] Mircea Platon, “Newtonian Science, Commercial Republicanism, and the Cult of Great Men in La Beaumelle's Pensées (1752),” History of Political Economy, 43:3 (2011), 553-589.
[14] “First of all, gentlemen, allow me to note an extraordinary contradiction involved in this way of speaking, according to which Russia figures, at one and the same time, both as so powerful that none of her neighbours could continue to live in freedom, and as so weak that, even "when allied with England, France, Italy,and Japan, she could be not merely defeated, but driven right back to Moscow” (Ionescu, The Policy of National Instinct , 35).
[16] For an exemple of WWI anti-Russian Germanophile propaganda, see Dumitru Karnabatt, Rusia in fața cugetărei românești (Bucharest: Minerva, 1915).See also Lucian Boia, "Germanofilii". Elita intelectuală românească în anii Primului Război Mondial (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2010).
[18] “When the Western Powers had abandoned the crusade against the Turks, the Russians took this crusade upon themselves. No doubt they have found their profit in it—that is very certain—but others have found their profit in it also. It is from these wars that the independence of Greece has resulted; it is from these wars that the independence of Serbia has resulted, though the Greeks and Serbians have, naturally, made sacrifices of their own besides. The independence of Bulgaria was equally the result of these wars— but without any sacrifice on the part of the Bulgarians. That is probably another reason why their gratitude is the more remarkable! These wars have been of service to us, too, in rescuing us from the cruelties of the Turks, from those cruelties of which we of our generation have no recollection, but which the old men whom we knew in our childhood could well recall, and spoke of in tones of horror” (Ionescu, The Policy of National Instinct , 40). Mocking certain Western double-standards, Ionescu continued: “When I say Bessarabia, I mean all the country included between the Pruth and the Dniester, that is, the half of Moldavia that we have lost. Only the Russians took away the half of Moldavia by fighting, whilst Austria wrested the Bukovina from us without stirring a finger. (Prolonged applause.) And when one compares the two acts of injustice, it is impossible to prefer those who have done nothing but swallow. It is like the case of the partition of Poland; Frederick proposed it, Russia accepted it, and Maria Theresa alone declared that she only accepted it with tears, as if it might be some consolation to Poland to know that Maria Theresa hadsoaked two or three handkerchiefs on the occasion of this outrage” (Ionescu, The Policy of National Instinct , 41). Surveying the history of the wars between Russia dn the Ottoman Empire, Alexandru D. Xenopol noted that Russia's sole interest was “to wipe Romanians' name off the face of the earth” (Alexandru D. Xenopol, Războaielor dintre ruşi şi turci şi înrâurirea lor asupra ţărilor române [Iasi: H. Goldner, 1880], 2 vols, 1: 377-78). For a good account of Romania's deft handling of both Western and Russian interests (and threats) in the context of the “Oriental crisis,” see Sorin Liviu Damean, Romania si Congresul de Pace de la Berlin (1878) (Bucharest: Mica Valahie, 2011).
[19] “Do you know when there began to be a disturbance in the friendly relations between ourselves and Russia ? Do you know when a feeling of great hostility to Russia grew up in our country ? At the beginning of the nineteenth century, and for a very legitimate reason. Our renaissance was based upon Liberal ideas which we had got from our sister France, at the time when Russia was the policeman of European reaction” (Ionescu, The Policy of National Instinct , 42)
[24] Ion George Duca, Memorii. Neutralitatea, partea a doua, 1915-1916 (Bucharest: Helicon, 1993), 72.
[25] For Take Ionescu's “oil diplomacy” and shady business partnerships (with pre-WWI German companies, or with pre-WWI and interwar British-American oil companies), see Iordache, Take Ionescu, 135, 264; Gheorghe Buzatu, A History of Romanian Oil (Bucharest: Mica Valahie, 2002-2004), 2 vols, 2: 184-185.
[26] George Cioranescu, Românii și ideea federalistă (Bucharest: Editura Encicplopedică, 1996), 109.
[27] For an astringent consideration of the origins and aims of the Petite Entente, see Piotr Wandycz, “The Little Entente: Sixty Years Later,” The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Oct., 1981), pp. 548-564. See also J. B. Duroselle, “The Spirit of Locarno: Illusions of Pactomania,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Jul., 1972), pp. 752-764.
[28] „Regimul rus care să ne convină nouă, nu-l prea vedem. Nu ne-a convenit Rusia ţaristă; nu ne-a convenit Rusia lui Miliukov şi a lui Kerenski; nu ne convine republica lui Stalin. Putem noi aştepta ceva mai bun? Şi, în definitiv, ce ne repugnă în actualul regim? Ar fi, să spunem, un împiediment pragmatic-politic. Sovietele nu vor să ne recunoască drepturile noastre asupra Basarabiei. Asta nu e serios. Drepturile noastre asupra Basarabiei nu pot forma un obiect de discuţie. Pentru că sau Rusia vrea să meargă la Constantinopol pe la gurile Dunării, şi atunci nici un regim – oricare ar fi el – nu ne va respecta drepturile asupra Basarabiei, chiar dacă ele ar fi recunoscute prin douăzeci de tratate; sau Rusia renunţă la planurile Împărătesei Caterina, şi atunci Basarabia nu mai are nici o însemnătate pentru ea. Recunoaşterea protocolului Basarabiei este încă, precum se vede, o chestiune de politică externă rusească şi nu una de regim intern. Iar dacă e vorba de politică externă, mai uşor ne putem înţelege cu un regim actual care socoteşte Rusia drept o ţară eurasiană, decât cu un regim „civilizat” „occidental”, care ar urma tradiţia concepţiunii petrinice” (Nae Ionescu, “Suntem naivi, - sau ce suntem?” Cuvîntul 6 ianuarie 1932).
[29] See Behind Closed Doors: Secret Papers on the Failure of Romanian-Soviet Negotiations, 1931-1932, translated with an introductory essay by Walter M. Bacon, Jr. (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979). For the “nervous attention” with which Nazi Germany followed Titulescu's Soviet policy, see Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945. Series C. Vol. V. The Third Reich: First Phase. March 5, 1936-October 31, 1936 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office. 1966), 172, 629, 636, 668, 670. See also Emilian Bold, Ilie Seftiuc, România sub lupa diplomatiei sovietice (1917-1938), (Iasi: Editura Junimea, 1998).
[30] See Zygmunt J. Gasiorowski, “The Russian Overture to Germany of December 1924,” The Journal of Modern History Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 1958), pp. 99-117; R. P. Morgan, "The Political Significance of German-Soviet Trade Negotiations, 1922–5," The Historical Journal 6.02 (1963): 253-271; Robert Grathwol, "Gustav Stresemann: Reflections on His Foreign Policy," The Journal of Modern History (1973): 52-70.
[31] See Marcel Mitrasca, Moldova: A Romanian Province Under Russian Rule : Diplomatic History from the Archives of the Great Powers (n.p.: Algora Publishing House, 2002) 212-13.
[32] Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918-1941 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967 [1945]), 363.
[33] For a contemporary take on the subject, see Pavel Pavel, Why Romania Failed, (London: Alliance Press, 1944). Pavel's works were recommended by R. W. Seton-Watson and Wickham Steed.
[35] Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967 [1948]), 137.
[36] For this and other instances of deft Romanian diplomatic maneuvering (regarding the Arab-Israelian or the Chino-Soviet conflicts), see Natalia Vassilieva, “L’URSS et le développement des relations de la France avec les pays d’Europe de l’Est (Pologne et Roumanie),” in Maurice Vaisse, ed., De Gaulle et la Russie (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2012 [2006]), 327-38.
[37] Deborah Kisatsky, The United States and the European Right, 1945-1955 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005), 18, 27.
[38] See also Hans W. Gatzke, Germany and the United States: A 'Special Relationship?' (Cambridge, Mass.: Harbard University Press, 1980), 279.
[39] Colonel Julian E. Ewell, “Memorandum for Mr. Bundy. Subject: Expert Observations on the Berlin Situation,” 6 September 1961 (NLK-78-295).
[40] Robert Strausz-Hupé, James E. Dougherty, William F. Kintner, Building the Atlantic World (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 258-59.
[41] See the studies collected in Maurice Vaïsse, ed., De Gaulle et la Russie (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2006).
[42] Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Problem of Germany,” in his Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960-70 (New York: Praeger, 1970), 340-46, 341.
[43] Morgenthau, “The Problem of Germany,” 341.
[44] Morgenthau, “The Problem of Germany,” 342.
[45] Morgenthau, “The Problem of Germany,” 345.
[46] Morgenthau, “The Problem of Germany,” 346.
[47] Peter Griedler, “’When your neighbour changes his wallpaper’: The ‘Gorbatchev factor’ and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic,” in Kevin McDermott and Matthew Stibbe, eds., The 1989 Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe: From Communism to Pluralism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 73-92, 73.
[48] Peter Griedler, “’When your neighbour changes his wallpaper,’” 86. See also Szabo, The Diplomacy of German Reunification; D. H. Shumaker, Gorbachev and the German Question: Soviet-West German Relations, 1985-1990 (Westport, 1995).
[49] Teodora Bodeanu, „Merkel il lauda pe Basescu, la Congresul PPE: Nu-i este teama sa se gandeasca la viitor” 17 October 2012, ziare.com (http://www.ziare.com/basescu/presedinte/merkel-il-lauda-pe-basescu-la-congresul-ppe-nu-i-este-teama-sa-se-gandeasca-la-viitor-1196422).
[50] Horaţiu Pepine (DW-Bucharest), „Liderii de la Bucureşti nu par scandalizaţi de spionajul NSA,” Deutsche Welle, 24 October 2013 (http://www.dw.de/liderii-de-la-bucure%C5%9Fti-nu-par-scandaliza%C5%A3i-de-spionajul-nsa/a-17180557).
[51] Băsescu is one of the most vocal attackers of President Vladimir Putin. See “MAE rus: Băsescu şi-a permis declaraţii neprieteneşti la adresa Rusiei” Mediafax, 10 December 2009; F. M. “Traian Basescu despre explotarea gazelor de sist: Gazprom ARE TOT INTERESUL ca Romania sa nu poata incepe exploatarea ide gaze de sist. Nimic rusesc nu e atins, la tot ce e american apar proteste,” Revista 22, 18 October, 2013; “Traian Basescu: Rusia e partenerul teroristilor” HotNews.ro, 21 July 2014.
[52] See for example the Radio Free Europe headline quoting a Romanian journalist according to whom: “„Iubirea” lui Victor Ponta pentru China și Rusia, un mesaj îndreptat clar împotriva Occidentului” (RFE, 14 January 2014) (http://www.europalibera.org/content/article/25229682.html).
[53] V. M. “Seful NATO: Rusia lucreaza in secret cu ecologistii pentru a se opune gazelor de sist,” HotNews 19 June 2014; Ionuţ Iordăchescu, „Friedman (Stratfor), după discuțiile cu Băsescu: Serviciile Rusiei manipulează procesul politic în România,” DeCe News, 27 May 2014.
[54] In 2014, Băsescu's supporters have started to circulate on Romanian blogs and on socialization networks blacklists containing names of alleged “Russian” agents of influence in Romania. For more about these lists, see Mircea Platon, “Agenţii Moscovei şi politica psihotică ,”Cotidianul.ro, 1 April 2014. As the left wing essayist Vasile Ernu wrote, many of these radical right-wing blogs are supported by members of the Romanian cultural establishment such as Vladimir Tismăneanu and Dragoş Paul Aligică. See Vasile Ernu, „„Listele negre pentru zile albe” au revenit. Cu binecuvîntarea establishmentului cultural,” CriticAtac.ro, 28 March 2014.
[55] The anti-Russian discourse of the Romanian neoliberal and neoconservative elites that, under Băsescu, have governed Romania in the name of anti-communist modernization reads in fact like the worst passages from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' anti-Tsarist journalism collected, at the height of the Cold War, in anthologies such as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, edited by Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953).
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