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One century of history
We have recently celebrated one century of existence as United Romania guided by pride and gratitude for the achievements of our forebears of 1918 and by the duty to build up the future of our country, in the temporal horizon of the next Centennial.
It is an ambitious goal - many would venture so far as calling it perhaps too ambitious, seeing that we live in a fast changing world, whit our capacities for prediction, anticipation and planning being put to the test as much by technological progress, as by the economic, cultural, social, political and strategic evolutions. Foreign policy, as conducted at state, regional and global levels, makes no exception to the above. Quite on the contrary, this is a field where accelerated change is perhaps the most manifest and consequential.
The European geopolitical landscape prior
to the First World War was quite clearly dominated by Great Powers, some of which were democratic – at least by the standards of those times (let us not forget that universal suffrage and the right of women to vote
were the exception and not the rule, even for the most advanced states), while other were absolutist polities. For smaller states, as Romania was at the beginning of the last
century, and middle-sized ones, like Romania during the interwar and contemporary era, making one’s voice heard was not as easy.
Contra some idealists’ optimism at the time who had quite paradoxically hoped that the huge advances in weaponry and military means would make war impossible, the outburst of the first European civil war, which very quickly turned into the First World War, was not so much of a surprise. In fact, all the great powers had been gearing up, to one extent or another, for the great turmoil. What however only few were able to predict in 1914 was the magnitude of the human and material catastrophes of the war and the amplitude
of change following the peace of 1918 and therewith.
The fall of the Great Empires, such as the Ottoman, Russian, German and Austro- Hungarian and the birth or rebirth of former or new states, the ample redrawal of borders, the radical changes in political regimes, all led to the First World War being called the Great War.
The creation of the Society (League) of Nations was one of the most important outcomes of the First World War, as the first attempt at
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