Greater Romania
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- See "România Mare" for other meanings
Greater Romania (Romanian: România Mare) generally refers to the territory of Romania in the years between the First and Second World Wars, the largest geographical extent of Romania up to that time and its largest peacetime extent ever (295,649km²).
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[edit] The name and its meanings
The original Romanian term, România Mare, did not carry the expansionist or irredentist sense of its English translation.[dubious ] The name was coined right after World War I,[dubious ] when the Kingdom of Romania came to include all provinces with an ethnic Romanian majority, by comparison with the previous Romanian Old Kingdom, which did not include the provinces of Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. An alternative name for România Mare, coined at the same time, was România Întregită (roughly, "Reintegrated Romania"). România Mare was seen (and is still seen by some) as the natural national Romanian state,[citation needed] or, as Tom Gallagher says, the "holy grail of Romanian nationalism".[1]
The term România Mare acquired an irredentist meaning after the Second Vienna Award and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,[dubious ] which led to the annexation of Northern Transylvania by Hungary and of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina by the Soviet Union in 1940.
Nowadays, the term is most often used in English to convey a nationalistic meaning, though it does not necessarily have an expansionist meaning in Romanian.[dubious ] When used in a political context, especially with reference to the Greater Romania Party, it usually conveys an irredentist connotation, mainly concerning the territories taken after World War II by the Soviet Union, and now part of the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.
 The three Principalities and the territories united under Michael the Brave's authority in 1600 |
 A hypotetical map of Rumania from 1855, by Cezar Bolliac |
 Territories inhabited by Romanians before the territorial acquisitions from 1918 |
.JPG/120px-Romania_Mare_(judete_si_regiuni_istorice).JPG) Counties (before 1926) and historical regions of Greater Romania |
[edit] History
In 1918, at the end of World War I, Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia united with the Romanian Old Kingdom.
[edit] Bessarabia and Bukovina union
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[edit] Transylvanya and Banat union
Transylvania (the last of the three to do so) joined Romania by a Proclamation of Union of Alba Iulia adopted by the Deputies of the Romanians from Transylvania, and supported one month later by the vote of the Deputies of the Saxons from Transylavania. The Hungarian-speakers from Transylavania, about 32% at the time (including a large Hungarian-speaking Jewish community), and the Germans in Banat did not elect Deputies at the official dissolution of Austro-Hungary, since they were considered represented by the Budapest government of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungary. In Bukovina, after occupation by the Romanian Army,[2][3] a National Council voted for union with Romania. While the Romanian, German, Polish and Jewish deputies voted for,[citation needed] the Ukrainian deputies (representing 38% of the population at the time)[4] voted against. Bessarabia, having declared its sovereignty in 1917 by the newly formed Council of the Country (Sfatul Ţării), was faced with the disorderly retreat of disbanded Russian troops through its territory in January 1918. Romanian troops occupied the province[5][6][7] allegedly to protect it from the Bolsheviks who were spreading the Russian Revolution. After declaring independence from Russia on 24 January 1918, the Romanian dominated Sfatul Ţării voted for union with Romania on 9 April 1918: of the 148 deputies, 86 voted for union, 3 against, 36 abstained (mostly the deputies representing the minorities, 50% at the time)[8] and 13 were not present.
[edit] Interwar period
The union of the regions of Transylvania, Maramureş, Crişana and Banat with the Old Kingdom of Romania was ratified in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon which recognised Romanian sovereignty over these regions and settled the border between the independent Republic of Hungary and the Kingdom of Romania. The union of Bukovina and Bessarabia with Romania was ratified in 1920 by the Treaty of Versailles. Romania had also recently acquired the Southern Dobruja territory called the Cadrilater ("Quadrilateral") from Bulgaria as a result of its victory in the Second Balkan War in 1913.
 History of Romania |
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| Timeline | |
| Military history | |
| Prehistory | |
| Dacia | |
| - Dacian wars | |
| - Roman Dacia | |
| Early Middle Ages | |
| - Origin of the Romanians | |
| - Daco-Roman | |
| Middle Ages | |
| Early Modern Times | |
| - Phanariotes | |
| National awakening | |
| - Organic Statute | |
| - 1848 Wallachian Revolution | |
| - War of Independence | |
| Kingdom of Romania | |
| - World War I | |
| - Greater Romania | |
| - World War II | |
| Communist Romania | |
| - Soviet occupation | |
| - 1989 Revolution | |
| Romania since 1989
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Romania retained these borders from 1918 to 1940. In that year, it lost Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, lost the considerable territory of Northern Transylvania to Hungary in the Second Vienna Arbitration, and lost the Cadrilater to Bulgaria in the Treaty of Craiova. In the course of World War II, Romania (in alliance with the Axis Powers) took back Bessarabia and was awarded further territorial gains at the expense of the Soviet Union (Transnistria or western Yedisan or western New Russia; these were lost again as the tide of war turned) as compensation for Northern Transylvania.[dubious ]
After the war, Romania regained the territories lost to Hungary, but not those lost to Bulgaria or the Soviet Union, and in 1948 the Treaty between the Soviet Union and Soviet-occupied Communist Romania also provided for the transfer of four uninhabited islands to the USSR, three in the Danube Delta, and one in the Black Sea (Snake Island).
[edit] See also
- Movement for unification of Romania and Moldova
- List of famous Romanians who were born outside present-day Romania
- Tatarbunary Uprising
- Little Entente
[edit] Further reading
- Leustean, Lucian N. (September 2007). ""For the Glory of Romanians": Orthodoxy and Nationalism in Greater Romania, 1918-1945". Nationalities Papers 35 (4): 717-742.
[edit] References
- ^ Gallagher, Tom (2005). Modern Romania: the end of communism, the failure of democratic reform, and the theft of a nation. New York: New York University Press, p. 28. ISBN 0-8147-3172-4.
- ^ Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Arkadii Zhukovsky, Bukovyna, in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2001
- ^ Sherman David Spector, Rumania at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study of the Diplomacy of Ioan I. C. Brătianu, Bookman Associates, 1962, p. 70
- ^ Donald Peckham, Christina Bratt Paulston, Linguistic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, Multilingual Matters, 1998, p. 190
- ^ Ray Egerton Henderson Mellor, Eastern Europe: A Geography of the Comecon Countries, Macmillan, 1975, p. 79
- ^ William Aylott Orton, Twenty Years' Armistice, 1918-1938,Farrar & Rinehart, 1939, p. 41
- ^ Volodymyr Kubiĭovych, Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, University of Toronto Press, 1963, p.756
- ^ Results of the 1897 Russian Census at demoscope.ru
