"Romanian - Serbian Diplomatic Relationships, 1880 - 1913"

Bogdan CATANA, "Romanian - Serbian Diplomatic Relationships, 1880 - 1913", Universitaria Publishing House, Craiova, 2009, 363 pages (in Romanian).

ISBN 978-606-510-358-0

The book was released in February 2009 by the University of Craiova Publishing House, "Universitaria" and it's about the first part of author's Ph.D. thesis, “Romanian-Serbian Relationships, 1880 - 1920”, for which he received the Ph.D. degree in history in 2008.

The study approaches the relationships between Romania and Serbia, focusing on the political and diplomatic relationships between 1880 and 1913. The landmarks of this work are two common and important moments in the modern history of the two countries, respectively the international recognition of their full independence, on one hand, and the end of the Balkan wars / 1913 Bucharest Peace Treaty, on the other hand.
The originality of this book is its focus, its critique of the few published secondary sources and its use and analysis of numerous original documents from Romanian and Serbian archives. ‘Local’ and international events are interwoven. A number of unique insights are presented, using the lens of previously neglected and unpublished materials. Nevertheless, most of the primary information was taken from the Archive of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Romanian National Historical Archives, the Archives of Serbia and Yugoslavia.
The Romanian, as well as the Serbian / Yugoslav historiography usually seemed to ignore the relationships between the two states within the studied period. The historians approached mainly the relationships of each country with the great powers of that time such as Austria-Hungary, France, Russia or Great Britain. The causes of the historians’ disinterest regarding this period could be the lack of some major international events that could have put together the two states. For the period before 1900 there was only one attempt to fulfill a complete scientific study of this matter, i.e. Miodrag Milin’s 1992: Romanian–Serbian political relationships in the modern era (the 19th century). This work extends the time period considered by Milin’s earlier work, and broadens and deepens an understanding of the interactions between the two countries and their wider impact.
Analysis of the early period includes coverage of the Romanian-Serbian affairs during the Oriental Crisis (1875– 1878), their separate wars with the Ottoman Empire, and the recognition of their independence within the Berlin Congress from 1878.
The introductory chapter also pays a great attention to the dynastic connections between Romania and Serbia in the second half of the 19th century. There we analyzed the marriages of some important members of the Obrenović dynasty with different private persons from Romania, or of Romanian origin, and the visits of the Serbian monarchs in Romania. We also pointed out the landed properties that the Serbian dynasties owned in Romania.
After the historiography and introductory chapters, the third one analyses the Romanian-Serbian relationships during 1880s, focusing on the second Bucharest peace treaty (1886), which was reestablishing the Balkan status quo preceding the Serbian-Bulgarian war from 1885.
The first part of this chapter presents a series of diplomatic and economic aspects of the Romanian- Serbian relationships from early 1880s, most of them being discovered in the Serbian and Romanian archives. We also made a short presentation of the 1883 peasant rebellion from the Timoc area of Serbia. We halted to this aspect because of the significant number of ethnic Romanians who live in the region. Nevertheless, this event is nothing but a matter of Serbia’s internal affairs, without any implication upon the Romanian-Serbian relationships, although some of the leaders of the Serbian Radical Party, including Nikola Pašić, fled to Romania, before being welcomed in Bulgaria, and receiving the help and encouragement of the Bulgarian authorities.
The author suggests that many regional events were neglected by earlier historiography because they did not produce any immediately apparent changes to the European or Balkan political scene, and uses the second Bucharest Peace Treaty of 1886, which re-established the Balkan status quo after the 1885 Serbian-Bulgarian war, as an example, making the case that for Romania this treaty has a symbolic importance, since the ‘Great Powers’ restated their endorsement of Romania as an independent state.
In the exploration of inter-state relations from 1890 to 1910 archival documents are used to illuminate a period of warming and cooling diplomacy. For example, diplomatic reports from Belgrade and Bucharest show how the Romanian and Serbian Ministers and diplomatic corps interpreted the changing situation. One fascinating example is the reaction to the Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909, with an analysis of the causes and consequences of open support for the Serbian cause by leading Romanian politicians and intellectuals such as Iorga, Xenopol, Carp, and Maiorescu. The author shows how recorded diplomatic post and telegrams, demonstrate the appreciation that Belgrade politicians felt for this support, and explain the improving relationship between the two countries for a time.
Further papers are used to show how a new tension developed between Romania and Serbia around 1900 over national minorities, with the Romanian government making appeals to Belgrade to ‘defend’ the interests of the 160 000 ethnic Romanians, or Vlachs to the Serbs, resident in eastern Serbia’s Timoc River Valley region.
Again highlighting the way that ‘local’ issues reveal wider sub-texts, the last section of this chapter is dedicated to a new topic for the Romanian historiography, that of the Romanian-Serbian negotiations regarding the construction of a railway bridge across the Danube. Except the technical work written during the interwar period by the railway engineer, M. Tudor, the Romanian historiography didn’t record approaches of this topic. On the other hand, the Serbian / Yugoslav historiography collaterally approached this subject because it was in a close connection with an important topic of the Serbian history from the beginning of the 20th century, the Adriatic railway, that was to start from the Romanian border on the Danube. The construction of such a bridge, directly connected with the Adriatic railway, could provide measureless possibilities both for the Serbian and Romanian foreign trade. Most of the materials used for writing this chapter come from the Romanian and Serbian archives, and also from the above-mentioned collection of documents of the Serbian Academy.
A period of maximum intensity for the relationships between Romania and Serbia was that of the Balkan wars and the Bucharest Peace Treaty from 1913. Most of the historians who treated this topic presented it mainly from the point of view of Romania’s or Serbia’s position during the war or of the peace negotiations from Bucharest and much less from the point of view of the Romanian–Serbian diplomatic relationships. Besides the above mentioned topics, this chapter also presents a few echoes of the foreign press about what was happening in Bucharest in the summer of 1913, only one year before the ‘Great War’.

Although the book contains plenty of archival materials, there are also other archival records to which either we didn’t have access or we didn’t reach. These can be used in the future by those who wish to complete the image that this work managed to create for the political and diplomatic relationships between Romania and Serbia.

The book contains also a concise set of appendices, a vast and detailed bibliography, a general index, maps, illustrations of the key monarchs, politicians and diplomatists, and an English summary.