Sherman David Spector - Romania at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study of the Diplomacy of Ioan I.C. Bratianu

at the Paris Peace Conference

Sherman David Spector

at the

Paris Peace Conference:

A Study of the Diplomacy of
Ioan I.C. Brtianu

The Center for Romanian Studies

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In his recently published one-volume The First World War, which the prolific British scholar Martin Gilbert subtitled The Complete History, nowhere in his index is Romania cited! Is this the dust bin into which Rumanias pivotal role in that fateful conflict is to be consigned?

Forty years ago I undertook research into Romanias role in that war and its aftermath at the peace negotiations, intending to dramatize the critical part played by Ionel Brtianu (1864-1927), the National Liberal Party leader and dominating force in Romanian politics for the first quarter of this century. His familys influence on Romania began with his father Ion, who was instrumental in the anti-Turk 1848 revolution, unification of the two Danubian Principalities, establishment of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen monarchy after overthrowing the Alexandru Ioan Cuza regime, and the new nations emergence as a small power in Eastern Europe. The eldest of his three sons, all destined to perpetuate the founding fathers predominance in politics, doubled the size and population of the Romania the father originally created. In fact, the younger Ionel dominated Romania until the year of his death and my birth. Perhaps no non-dynastic family in Europe has ever exerted such influence over a nations destiny as the Brtianu family did until Constantin (Dinu) was tried and condemned by the communist regime in 1947 one century after his father ignited Romanian nationalism and after his brother had campaigned against the advance of Bolshevism into Central Europe in 1918-1919.

My 1962 study of Romanias moves during the First World War and at the subsequent Paris Peace Conference resulted from several years of research while I was a graduate student at Columbia University in the City of New York under the guidance of a fellow-tiller in the Romanian vineyard, Henry L. Roberts (1916-72), whose classic study Rumania: Politics of an Agrarian State (1951) inspired in me an urge to seek him out as a Ph.D. sponsor. My research efforts in the 1950s were frustrated by the silence experienced to the inquiries made to the community of historians and specialists in Bucharest. Not until my book was published in 1962 did I experience reactions from Romania. Those reactions were not laudatory because my appraisal of Brtianu did not coincide with the then official line. I hope the atmosphere has sufficiently changed so todays historians in Romania can accord to Brtianu the recognition I continue to maintain he earned. Trained as an engineer in cole Polytechique in Paris, Brtianu engineered the creation of Greater Romania; without his policies and tactics such would not have materialized. I furthermore hope his contemporary colleagues in the other nations of the former socialist bloc who have been denied proper recognition by communist historians, e.g., Bene in Czechoslovakia, Dmowski and Paderewski in Poland, Pai and Trumbi in Yugoslavia, etc., will be accorded the honor and recognition they likewise earned during and after the First World War.

This book is about to appear in a Romanian translation and thus should be available to those in Romania denied access to it for more than thirty years. My profound thanks for the translation go to Professor Constantin Sorin Prvu of the University in Iai, and to my dear friend for thirty years, Professor Ioan Aurel Preda of the University in Bucharest. I also thank Dr. Kurt W. Treptow of the University of Illinois and the Center for Romanian Studies of the Romanian Cultural Foundation in Iai for facilitating the publication of this English-language edition. Nothing in my 1962 book has been changed. Readers can thus acquire an awareness of what a young American concluded from his researches and analyses far from the time and place about which he was investigating. Whether his conclusions would have been different then or would be different now, if he were to conduct new researches and consequently reach new conclusions, is a daunting task an emeritus educator could not undertake. I ask readers to judge this 1962 book on its merit as the product of a non-Marxist bourgeois American graduate student fulfilling Ph.D. requirements at Columbia University in the City of New York, USA.

Sherman David Spector

Orange, Connecticut USA

March 1995

Twenty-eight years ago Harold Nicolson wrote that a history of the Paris Peace Conference has yet to be written. He predicted it would be many years before complete materials could be made available or digested, and that this documentary evidence (let us say in the year 1953) will be abundant and authentic.1 Nicolsons optimism was not shared by Henry Wickham Steed who prophesied that a full history of the Paris Peace Conference can never be written, and even when all documents and diaries have been published, and all contemporary records collated, there will remain gaps that nobody can fill.2

I have found Steed, not Nicolson, correct in his prognostication. In this study concerned with negotiations between Romania and the Allied Powers, a paucity of documents and other materials from the Romanian side, scarcity of French and Italian sources, and a limited amount of American and British materials have restricted the scope and details of an analysis. The reader will become aware that in limiting the range of this study I have omitted certain important items. It has not been my purpose to provide an exhaustive analysis of the creation of Greater Romania, but rather, after offering a survey of World War I developments, to select those events which either affected or were affected by Romanias policy.

I have tried to present the record for its own sake in an impartial manner without attempting to offer a particular thesis or point up a moral. Although the title of this study concerns events in 1919, it is important to go back to the origins of Romanias actions prior to her entry into the war in 1916. This procedure was adopted to provide a lucid account of Romanias wartime diplomacy; it is limited to those questions that became issues at the Peace Conference.