The Nation’s Gratitude: World War I and Citizenship Rights in Interwar Romania by Maria Bucur

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Nation’s Gratitude: World War I and Citizenship Rights in Interwar Romania by Maria Bucur Ștefan Cristian Ionescu Bucur, Maria. The Nation’s Gratitude: World War I and Citizenship Rights in Interwar Romania. Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2022. viii + 237 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £120.00; £33.29 (e-book). The whereabouts of veterans in post-World War One (hereafter, WWI) Europe has triggered numerous academic inquiries, exploring their physical and psychological injuries, their participation in radical politics, their economic-social problems and the welfare programmes aimed at soothing their sufferings. Until now, Romania lacked a comprehensive study with just a few scholars addressing only some aspects of the topic in passing. The country deserves more attention, however, as it suffered one of the highest ratios of casualties amongst all combatants. Relying on a wealth of archival and published sources — official documents, citizens’ and organizations’ petitions and reports, minutes of parliament and government meetings, legislation and the press — Maria Bucur’s book examines the story of Romania’s national office of veterans, widows and orphans (known by its acronym, IOVR), private NGOs and individual beneficiaries as a lens to elucidate how citizenship functioned for different categories of inhabitants and how a form of welfare state gradually emerged during the interwar years. This story is crucially important for understanding Romania’s recent history and its fragile liberal democratic traditions. War veterans, widows and orphans represented a significant section of local society — estimated at over 2 million people out of a population of 16 million (12 per cent) after WWI — and the status of this category of citizens was at the core of numerous public debates on national identity and democracy, welfare policies and citizens’ activism that took place during the interwar decades. As Bucur shows, Romania’s veterans, widows and orphans, who were grouped in more than 250 organizations, were not able to establish a coherent community and remained divided based on class, gender, geographical location, religious and political affiliation. The finding about the veterans’ different political choices contributes to a broader historiography on WWI veterans and the emergence of right-wing radicalism: based on the available evidence, Bucur suggests that the majority of veterans did not join the fascist movements/parties of Romania, unlike most previous assumptions. Bucur convincingly argues that the IOVR legislation and its implementation represented the state’s systematic endeavour to build, centralize and control a welfare policy aiming to help veterans, widows and orphans after WWI. One of the most generous policies in interwar Europe, at least on paper, it eventually become much more restrictive under the influence of ethno-nationalism and antisemitism in 1938. Bucur reveals how the Romanian authorities proved quite ineffective in their centralizing attempts to implement the welfare policy and how they kept the programme underfunded. This problem was partially [End Page 580] resolved by the activity of some private NGOs, which proved more efficient in helping those impacted by the war, even though these organizations struggled with insufficient funding. A major contribution of the book is the thorough intersectional examination of how the categories of gender and disability were framed into IOVR laws and bureaucratic practices, and how they contributed to a change in traditional gender norms and assumptions about able-bodiedness in local society. Chapter one is crucial for understanding the complicated legal framework that regulated the veterans’ rights, as well as the law makers’ debates on and justifications of that legislation. Bucur provides a sophisticated analysis of the numerous laws — over fifty in two decades — looking at how the concepts of class, gender, ethnicity, religion and able-bodiedness intersected, and what they revealed about the local political elites’ perspective on the local community, the citizens and their merits. The initial, almost complete political consensus on improving the lives of war veterans, widows and orphans translated into adopting what seemed to be a very inclusive law for that time, encompassing broad definitions about who was a war victim and who deserved the nation’s gratitude. The law did not discriminate against people of different ethnicities, religions, or wartime army affiliation. Subsequent political instability and beneficiaries’ protests and...