The
Romanian people has existed on the territory bordered by the Danube,
the Carpathians and the Black Sea ever since its formation. As a
modern European people it is as old as the French, Spanish, Italian
and Portuguese peoples and older than the Latin peoples that surround
it. Yet, unlike other Latin people, because of specific reasons, the
Romanian people could not organize itself into a state in the first
centuries of its existence, following the retreat of the Roman Empire
from Dacia (271 AD). Once organized into a powerful kingdom, that of
the Dacians, the Carpatho-Danubian-Pontic territory came out of the
Roman era without kings or emperors, without a proper administrative
and territorial organization, without state institutions and an army,
as the old Dacian state had been destroyed by Traian and replaced
with the state structures of the Roman Empire, and after the retreat
of the Roman administration and army to the south of the Danube there
was a generalized collapse. The Dacian state could not be rebuilt,
because, more than 160 years after the disappearance of the Dacian
kingdom, the traditions of the indigenous state were lost, and the
people (a mixture of Dacians and Roman settlers) no longer identified
with the age of Burebista (as the Galo-Romans could no longer
identify with the age of Vercingetorix), while an alternative model
of state organization did not exist and could not be borrowed from
our geographical neighbors, which were themselves in a state of
anarchy or primitivism. During one generation, all the civilization
of Roman Dacia collapsed, the cities were abandoned and the
Dacian-Roman population was forced to go back, in just a few years,
to the primitive age. Emperor Aurelian should have left in Dacia an
indigenous political leader supported by a local army, which should
have ensured the organization of the abandoned territory and should
have defended it. Thus, lacking the force and cohesion to form their
own state, the proto-Romanians and then the Romanians were forced to
accept, starting with the invasions of the Carps and the Goths, their
rule and had to experience, throughout the centuries, all kinds of
pre-statal organizations and put up with all kinds of Asian tribe
leaders pretending to be military and political leaders over their
national territory.
A
phenomenon that was to leave a profound mark on the Romanian
psychology started to take shape. The invasions of the migratory
tribes continued, their rule succeeded one another, yet the Romanian
people managed to preserve their identity. One way or another they
assimilated the migratory people left in the Carpatho-Danubian space.
They became neither Avars, Visigoths, Pechenegs and Cumans, nor
Slavs, Turks or Fanar Greeks, to the disappointment of the great
neighboring powers which, like fault lines, were colliding on the
Romanian territory.
The
Ottoman Empire suffered defeats as a result of these collisions
between geopolitical plates and had to gradually limit its area of
influence, while the Habsburg empire took over Bukovina and the
Russians managed to get Bessarabia, extending their sphere of
influence over these parts of our national territory. This wouldn't
have probably happened if the Romanian principalities had not been
ruled, back then, by princes appointed by the Ottomans. This was a
situation which repeated itself, which Romanians had already gone
through before, during the early Middle Ages, when they had not
appeared on the Byzantine maps as a separate state, because they
found themselves under the rule of strong migratory tribes. In
Wallachia and Moldavia there were the Cumans and in Transilvania the
Magyars that had come from Altelcuz. Being originally migratory and
warfare peoples, the Cumans and the Magyars had a better political
and military organization than the sedentary indigenous Romanians,
who were an agrarian-pastoral people dissipated across the land and
lacking a political and administrative centralization as well as an
army that should have protected them.
With
the endless waves of Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Gepids, Avars,
Pechenegs, Bulgars and others that roamed from the east to the west
over the Romanian territory, it would have been impossible to lay the
foundations of a Romanian state, without it being destroyed
overnight, like in the legend of the Master Manole. Helped by
favorable circumstances in the early Middle Ages, the Magyars settled
not just in Pannonia, but also on a vast part of the Transylvanian
territory, which after a few generations they came to consider as
part of their national territory. Their bad luck was that, unlike the
Romanized population they found in Pannonia, the Romanian population
in Transylvania could not be magyarized in a significant percentage.
Less lucky, the Cumans, who were in brotherly relations with the
Magyars, were violently dislocated by the Great Tatar-Mongolian
invasion in 1241, and on the Byzantine maps there was no longer
Cumania instead of Wallachia. On the other hand, the Magyars,
although they were also dislocated by the new Asian invaders, and
their kingdom was almost totally destroyed, as it is attested, among
other sources, in Monk Rogerius's “Carmen miserabile”, still
managed to re-establish their kingdom, which was to last for a couple
of centuries, until 1521, when it fell prey to the Ottoman Empire
during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, a sultan whose
particular ambition was to turn all Magyars into Turks, in order to
extend Islam into the heart of Europe. Yet the Turks encountered, as
the Magyars had done in Transylvania, a stubborn nation, which they
could not convert or ethnically assimilate, thus being forced to
abandon their Central-European pashalik, which could not overlap with
Saint Steven's crown.
The
union of the Romanian principalities (24th January 1859) was the
result of a normal historical development in an international
politically favorable context (the Anglo-French-Turkish policy of
blocking the Russian expansion towards the Balkans, which led to the
defeat of the Czarist Empire in the Crimean wars 1853-1856). Thus,
Romanians managed to lay the foundations of their national state,
which, starting with 1866, came to be called Romania and was
recognized as such internationally. At that time roughly in the West
other national states were formed, Germany and Italy, though a
similar process of unification. No one can claim that Germany and
Italy are recent phenomena on the map of Europe. Italians and
Germans, as well as Romanians, have always existed on their national
territories, where they have gone through various forms of state
organization, from provinces and principalities to unitary national
states in the modern period.
The
first World War, dubbed by the pre-communist historiography The War
for the Reunification of the Country, led, by a historical
determinism, to the formation of Great Romania, by the successive
union of Bessarabia (March 1918), Bukovina (November 1918),
Transylvania and Banat (1 December 1918) with the Old Kingdom, which
also comprised Southern Dobruja (the Cadrilater). Outside the country
were left a few small territories inhabited by Romanians, such as the
Serbian Banat and the northern part of Maramures. And besides its
current neighbors, Great Romania had a border, in the north, with
Czechoslovakia and Poland, two states that reappeared on the world
map, after a long period when their national territories had been
divided among neighboring empires.
Romania's
entrance in the war on the side of the Entente in August 1916 proved
to be a correct and responsible choice, because, although the kings
of the country belonged to a German dynasty (The Hohenzollerns),
everything pleaded in favor of our country's alliance with France.
The whole forty-eight generation had been educated in Paris, and the
Union of 1859 was accomplished with the aid of Napoleon the 3rd. The
ascension of Prince Carol on the Romanian throne in 1866 had been
also due to the advice of the French emperor, who wanted a powerful
kingdom at the mouth of the Danube, a kingdom which would strengthen
the French influence in Europe. Unfortunately, the insufficient
military training with which Romania came into the war on the side of
the Entente and the strategical errors that some of our military
leaders had made ended the campaigns on the Danube and the
Transylvanian fronts and allowed the enemy troops, led by general
Mackensen to occupy, in a short time, the southern part of the
country, with the capital, up until the Siret. It is true that this
defeat occured as the Czarist army contributed only slightly to the
war in which it had engaged, and after the Kerensky government came
to power started to disband, thus turning into a real danger for the
Romanian soldiers behind the front-line. Taking refuge in Jassy
together with the Romanian army and government, King Ferdinand ruled
for two years over only one third of the initial kingdom, as it had
been when Romania had entered the war with the high hopes of seeing
its territory reunited with Transilvania following a rapid and
successful offensive.
It
was a miracle that the King and the government managed to learn their
lessons from the disaster of the year 1916 and managed to keep the
Central Powers along the line of the Siret, while bringing the army
to an efficient state, with the help of valuable militaries such as
Alexandru Averescu, Eremia Grigorescu, Constantin Prezan and others.
In the 30s, when he came back to visit Romania, Marshall Mackensen
remembered the spectacular resurrection of the Romanian army, which “
seemed to have disappeared” before (during the fights in Oltenia
and Wallachia). An important role in this reorganization was played
by the French military mission, led by general Henri Mathias
Berthelot and the combat force of the Romanian soldiers, who, in the
battles at Mărăşeşti, Mărăşti and Oituz, literally put into
practice the order “One should not pass this point”.
Even
if these victories on the battlefield could not lead to the immediate
liberation of Romania from under foreign occupation, because of the
Treatise of Brest-Litovsk, where the Central Powers and Lenin's
government agreed to come to a separate peace, they prevented the
enemy from occupying the rest of the country and allowed the army to
re-enter the war at the end of 1918, when the German and
Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, due both to the failures on the
Western front, and to the resistance that the two great powers met
with in Romania, which forced them to make more military and
financial efforts than they had imagined they could put up with.
Far
from being a miracle or an accident, the forging of the national
state on the 1st December 1918 was the reward that the Romanian
people deserved naturally and logically for its continuous existence
and persistence on the national territory, in spite of the hardships
of history.
Translated
by Roxana Doncu
Editorial
modification: Raymond Walden
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