C.L. Topor From this peace one can hope (original) (raw)
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European Scientific Journal (ESJ), 2020
This article analyses Romania’s situation after the armistice of Focsani (signed on December 9, 1917) and at the beginning of the year 1918. It valorises mainly documentary evidence from both French and Romanian diplomatic and military archives. The necessary documentation for the elaboration of the article consisted mainly of telegrams and military reports. The most significant and important documents were selected. So the paper makes a critical analysis of the sources, resorting to a comparison between documents. The study also used a few concepts belonging to the theory of international relations. For a better understanding, the paper highlighted and analysed briefly the premise, namely the period of Romanian neutrality. The research paper explained as well why the Romanian Kingdom could not remain neutral in the First World War, why its situation in the international system was completely different from that of Switzerland. At the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, Romania’s situation worsened very quickly due to the unfavourable external circumstances. Under the influence of Bolshevik ideology, Russian soldiers had refused to fight since the fall of 1917. The armistice of Brest Litovsk, signed by Soviet Russia in early December 1917 placed Romania in a critical situation. On January 13/26th, 1918, Russia broke all diplomatic relations with the Romanian government from Iaşi. The Romanian Kingdom would be surrounded only by hostile forces. Ukraine, which had served as a buffer zone for the Romanian state, concluded, in turn, a separate peace with the Central Empires, on February 9, 1918. Although the Romanian army needed military aid, war material, and ammunition, and faced pressures of the Central Powers, the Allies asked for resistance. Among the four powers of the Entente, France was the most intransigent. In fact, all these states strongly rejected the separate peace but the French attitude was more clearly defined than the English attitude forinstance.
Journal of Romanian Studies, vol. 1/2, 2019
is an international interdisciplinary academic organization, founded in 1973, that is dedicated to promoting the professional study, criticism, and research of all aspects of Romanian culture and society, particularly concerning the countries of Romania and Moldova. The SRS is generally recognized as the major professional organization for North American scholars concerned with Romania, Moldova, and their diasporas.
Skhid
The article covers the course of negotiations between the plenipotentiaries of Romania and the leading states of the Entente and the Quadruple Alliance during the First World War. Facing the dilemma of determining its own foreign policy orientation – by joining one of the mentioned military-political blocs, the Romanian government was hesitating for a long time to come to a final decision. At the same time, largely due to this balancing process, official Bucharest managed to preserve its sovereign right to work out and make the most important decisions, while consistently defending Romania's national interests. By taking the side of the Entente and receiving comprehensive military assistance from Russia, Romania at the same time faced enormous military and political problems due to military superiority of the allied Austrian and German forces at the Balkan theater of hostilities. Their occupation of much of Romania forced official Bucharest to seek an alternative, making it sign...
ANALELE ŞTIINŢIFICE ALE UNIVERSITĂŢII „ALEXANDRU IOAN CUZA” DIN IAŞI (SERIE NOUĂ), ISTORIE, 2021
The aim of the article is to make some new contributions on the attempt of February-March 1920 to change the Romanian-Hungarian border, the one made at a time when the peace meeting had briefly moved to London and the British and Italian leaders proposed to renegotiate the border line, a position that seemed capable of prevailing despite French opposition. The present article is an endeavour to provide evidence, from unknown or relatively little-known sources, about the man who, in early March 1920, succeeded in blocking the attempt to change the borders established in 1919 in favour of Hungary. Allen Leeper is the name of the Australian-born British diplomat who managed to convince his superiors – Eyre Crowe, Lord Curzon and David Lloyd George – that it was neither fair, just nor practical to alter the border lines already established and announced to all parties concerned. In the end, nothing changed, and the line proposed by the experts in 1919 was to find its place in the peace treaty Hungary signed with the Allied and Associated Powers on 4 June 1920 at Trianon.
Romania's peace feelers (March 1943 -April 1944): views from Helsinki
Valahian Journal of Historical Studies, 2009
This paper analyzes the Finnish diplomacy and media have perceived Romania's attempts to extricate herself from the war on Nazi Germany's side. The significance of such a research rests with the fact that, as Romania, Finland also envisaged a way to withdraw from war and any Romanian step taken to that effect, as the paper demonstrates, was attentively monitored by Finnish decision-makers. Moreover, according to an agreement the two countries had concluded back in July 1941, they exchanged information about sensitive issues regarding their foreign and security policies and therefore the quality of knowledge of each other's intentions was valuable. Sometimes, information affecting the most important interests of the other country could be exchanged, as this paper describes.
ROMANIA AT THE PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE
Following archive documents which are now more accessible, this study proposes to discuss a turning point in contemporary history of Romania, which had an overwhelming influence on the subsequent evolution of the Romanian state in an irreversible course of events. Thus, the paper focused on the work of the Conference of Foreign Ministers of Great Powers in Paris, which served to prepare peace treaties with former enemy states, aiming at, in particular, highlighting decisions relating to establishing borders of Romania, and discussions on the economic clauses of the Treaty of Peace with Romania. Also, the progress of work at the Paris Peace Conference is discussed at length, with a special emphasis on the Romanian delegation's efforts to improve economic and military terms contained in the Draft Treaty of Peace. There was no activity overlooked by a group of former diplomats and politicians set in the West, who acted alongside Romanian official delegation activity, having a series of meetings with some foreign delegates and experts attending the conference and advancing " peace forum " several memorials, statements, notes and letters. In conclusion, we believe that, in the spirit of the present time, a foray into this preliminary period of the Communist era is a necessary undertaking for understanding Romania's place in the context of European and world history.
In the Middle of the Whirlwind: Romania and Poland in the Tripartite Negotiations
Studia Środkowoeuropejskie i Bałkanistyczne, 2024
even if the works dedicated to european diplomacy from the period 1939-1940 are extremely numerous, the research we propose allows us to identify a less common approach, but which can provide more clarity on the diplomatic resources that generated the well-known events in 1939. We opted for an analysis focused on a somewhat novel angle, that of the foreign policy scenarios that ultimately guided the policy of great Britain, France and the Soviet union in the period we are referring to-the spring and summer of 1939-and the place that poland and romania occupied within these variants of projects. These possible scenarios generated intense diplomatic agitation in most european capitals in 1939, and Warsaw and Bucharest were no exception. The multitude of variants analyzed in the three european chancelleries ultimately generated actions with deep consequences and dictated by cynical reasons of state but were considered necessary at the time. Therefore, we hereby analyze the motivations that led the great Western powers to opt for negotiations with the Soviet union, in order to give more consistency to the guarantees granted in the spring of 1939 to poland, romania and greece, but our study also follows the actual evolution of the negotiations, with their endless series of proposals and counterproposals. in this way, we believe, the importance that the British, above all, gave to eastern european states-we have in mind here, first of all, poland and romania-because precisely these countries and, obviously, their destiny, were at stake during these negotiations, failed due to the reluctance of the British to "capitulate" to the growing demands of Moscow, the Soviet-german rapprochement and the conclusion of the ribbentrop-Molotov pact.
2010
The years 1943-1944 were the turning point in the carrying of the Second World War, the United Nations’ troops managing to take the strategic initiative on the front due to significant human and material resources at stake. The services brought to the Allied cause cost Romanian state significant material reserves, not to mention the number of lost lives among the Romanian Army. The calculations showed that Romanian’s economic effort after August 1944 amounted to $ 1.5 billion (1938) allocated only for the implementation of the Convention’s provisions and 1.2 billion dollars for the war effort. The real costs of Romania's participation in the anti Hitlerite war placed Romania on a respectable fourth place in the hierarchy of states participating in the war against Germany, before France, Yugoslavia and Australia.