THE IMPORTANCE OF RUMANIA
Commonwealth and Foreign
By DR. GERHARD SCHACHER
THE presence of King Carol of Rumania in London this week will no doubt be made the occasion of important political conversations with British Ministers. These will follow the conversations the King has just had with Prince Regent Paul of Jugoslavia, who paid a week or so's visit to Rumania in order to discuss with the King the problems " which might result from possible German and Hungarian claims."
As Rumania, even more than Jugoslavia, now comes more and more into the German orbit, she is seeking foreign support. In London such support will probably be mainly a matter of economic and financial help. For the Western countries Rumania, after the Czech crisis, has now become the most important problem in Central and South-East Europe.
The surrender of the mountain fortifications of the Bohemian frontier virtually sealed the ultimate fate of Central and South- Eastern Europe. The second, and probably the last attempt, to prevent Germany's total domination of the way to the Black Sea, is based on the idea of making Rumania, backed by alliance with the West, the new bulwark of democracy.
To erect a substitute for the recently surrendered barrier in the fertile but strategically indefensible plain of Rumania, is an almost impossibly difficult task. The principal argument in favour of this attempt is that, by reason of her common frontier with Russia, Rumania is the only State in South-East Europe in a position to stem the German advance, by relying on the support of its powerful Russian neighbour. This theory may have had a certain justification while Czechoslovakia still existed in its original form, and before Rumania was so thoroughly undermined by Nazi propaganda as it is at present— this despite the recent sentences passed on Codreanu and other leaders of the Iron Guard and the ban on parties financed from abroad.
In spite of the land reform, which only affected a very small proportion of the great estates, the ownership of these estates has remained in the hands of a caste of mainly Greek origin, whose interest it is to sell corn, maize and soya beans to Germany. The great German chemical concern, I.-G. Farben, has succeeded in concluding an agreement by which a considerable part of Rumanian land has been put under cultivation of soya beans, of which it holds a monopoly of purchase. Rumania is forced in exchange to take corre- sponding quantities of German industrial products by means of clearing arrangements. The balance of trade between Germany and Rumania is thus officially preserved, although in reality reliable sources estimate that a credit of some I,000,000,000 lei (£1,5oo,000) has accrued in the last five years to Rumania. This credit, which is in blocked marks, which are almost impossible to realise, naturally enables Germany to exercise powerful economic influence on Rumania.
The Rumanian Minister of Economics, Constantinescu, it is true, is attempting to rid himself of the bonds of this clearing agreement, which makes Rumania daily more dependent on Germany. His plan is to secure an English loan of some fifteen or twenty million pounds on the model of the recent Turkish loan. The loan would then serve as a basis for a general extension of Anglo-Rumanian trade relations. Only recently, in fact, Rumania refused a German tender for a big consignment of wheat and delivered the wheat to England, although the price offered by Germany was well above the general world market level. The fact, too, that on his Balkan mission Herr Funk did not visit Bucharest seems to imply that the resistance to the " bloodless invasion " is stronger in Rumania than in the other Balkan States.
The main purpose of King Carol's visit is likely to be to provide for the possibility of his country's declining the many German offers. According to latest information the latter are very comprehensive, for Berlin demands of Bucharest the concession of a ten years' monopoly to exploit the Rumanian mineral wealth and also the sole right to buy the next two years' wheat harvest on the barter system. If Germany succeeds in settling an agreement of this kind, it means a quick stiffening of economic and political pressure on Bucharest, in such a way that further resistance by Rumania will hardly be possible. Britain has repeatedly shown her own interest in these two points, and much depends for Rumania's future on whether King Carol and his government can find a better basis of negotiation in London than the German offer of barter.
From a racial point of view, Rumania not only possesses a German minority of 750,000 in Transylvania, which acknow- ledges almost to a man the leadership of Nazi commissars, but also a very numerous Magyar minority in the West. As a result of the satisfaction of Hungary's demands for frontier revision by the partition of Czechoslovakia, this minority may well become the subject of further demands on the part of Budapest. The Russian minority, which forms almost the entire population of Bessarabia, is also of considerable importance. It is bound by close ties to the Ruthenian minority, which lives on the Polish and Czech frontiers of Rumania, and which may one day play a not insignificant role in the project of a Greater Ukraine which is being nursed in Berlin.
There is, moreover, a large Jewish minority, besides numbers of Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians and Jugoslays, so that altogether the Rumanian minority problem, when and if it becomes acute, is perhaps potentially the most intricate in Europe. It is extremely questionable whether the relatively small majority of so-called " Ethnical Rumanians," which amounts to sixty per ceht. at most, would be able to remain master of this problem if it is ever seriously raised. Nor must one forget that Rumania's neighbours almost without exception have terri- torial claims to advance which they are always ready to press as soon as the occasion arises. The U.S.S.R. has only admitted the cession of Bessarabia de facto and not de jure—a very strong card in any Rumanian gamble. At the -end of the Great War Hungary's most considerable territorial loss was to Rumania, and she conducts intensive revisionist propaganda on this score. Bulgaria lost the Dobrudscha in the Balkan War, and only her present difficulties have hitherto prevented Sofia from voicing her claims, particularly since the conclusion of the Balkan Pact.
If in addition one takes into account the Ukrainian problem, which admittedly affects Rumania less directly than her Polish ally, one gets some idea of the complications of a situation which can be aggravated at a moment's notice if either Russia or Germany (or at Germany's instigation Hungary, Bulgaria or Ruthenia, which is dependent on Prague only in name) were to advance territorial claims on the ground of the so-called " right of self determination." Rumania, in fact, provides a text-book example of how this right of self determination of national minorities must inevitably lead to the disintegration of existing States, when once it has been admitted as a weapon in the hands of a great and aggressive Power.
In order to eliminate from every coalition formed against Berlin one of Europe's finest armies and one of Europe's most efficient industries, Germany created the Sudeten German problem. The impression that Rumanian problems of all sorts could be created without much difficulty becomes daily more unavoidable, especially if their creation was dictated by the desire to secure the all-important war-time reserves which Rumania contains. It remains to be seen if British support can be found at the eleventh hour and if such merely economic help will be sufficient to strengthen the power of resistance in Rumania to the necessary degree.
Since 1933 Berlin has not failed to make the, preparations necessary for bringing the Rumanian problem to a head. In this connexion it is interesting to recall Field-Marshal Goering's address to the Germans from Rumania at the Breslau Turnfest, in which he said : " As soon as we have settled the Czechs, it will be your turn."
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