Formation of Greater Romania
Romania doubled in size and population in 1918, acquiring Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina in a single year. It had entered the war in 1916 on Allied promises of exactly that territory, been invaded within months, lost Bucharest, and made a punitive separate peace in May 1918 — then re-entered the war on the day before the armistice. The acquisitions came from the collapse of three empires rather than from the battlefield. Bessarabia's assembly voted for union in March 1918 as Russia disintegrated; Bukovina's followed in November; and a Romanian national assembly of some 1,228 delegates at Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918 declared the union of Transylvania, which had been Hungarian for centuries and had a Romanian majority. Hungary contested it, and a Romanian army occupied Budapest in August 1919 to end Béla Kun's soviet republic. The settlement was confirmed at Trianon in 1920 on terms Hungary has never accepted emotionally, losing two-thirds of its territory and a third of its Hungarian speakers, some 1.6 million of whom found themselves in Romania. Greater Romania then had to govern a state in which nearly thirty per cent of the population was a minority, with four legal systems, three railway gauges and a land reform to carry out. Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were taken by the Soviet Union in 1940 and are now largely Moldova and Ukraine, and northern Transylvania was returned by Hitler's arbitration and taken back in 1945. 1 December is Romania's national day. The interwar state was culturally confident and politically fragile, producing a constitution, a land reform and eventually a royal dictatorship and the Iron Guard. Its borders are substantially those of Romania today, minus what was taken in 1940.
- Year: 1918 CE
- Category: Political
