Rumania and the Belligerents 1914-1916

Abstract

As the intention of Austria-Hungary to utilize the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for a reckoning with Serbia became increasingly evident during July I9I4, the Rumanian government manifested corresponding concern. It was widely believed in Bucarest, and not without reason, that an Austro-Serbian conflict would lead to the aggrandizement of Bulgaria, thereby threatening Rumania's aspirations in the Balkans and her security as well. Even more disquieting was the possibility that the Austrian action would touch off a general European war in which Rumania might become merely a battleground for the great powers. But for King Carol I, a prince of the South German branch of the Hohenzollern family, an Austro-Russian conflict was especially unwelcome. His personal inclinations and a secret alliance of more than thirty years standing linked him to the Central Powers. Until recent years at least, Rumania's isolation and traditional Russophobia gave reasonable justification to Carol's association with the Triple Alliance. But in the decade before I914 the memory of Russia's past iniquities and even the indignation over the treatment accorded the Rumanian minority in Bessarabia had been eclipsed in Bucarest by resentment over Austria's support of Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars, and especially by anger over the plight of the larger Rumanian minority 'languishing under the Magyar yoke' in Transylvania. The latter, together with the Austrian province of Bukovina, now became the prime object of Rumanian irredentism. The role of Vienna in championing Bulgaria's cause at the Peace of Bucarest (1913) unleashed an outburst of Austrophobia which was still re-echoing in the Rumanian press the following summer and which prompted the first steps towards a rapprochement with Russia. Carol became acutely conscious of this contradiction between his personal inclinations and the interests of his adopted land when