United Principalities of Romania

The United Principalities of Romania are a federation of two kingdoms on the lower Danube, holding the plain of Wallachia, the hills of Moldova and the Black Sea coast of Dobruja, with about 15 million people. The country is built on the best black soil in Europe, drains into the greatest river in Europe, sells through a strait it does not own, and has at its back a mountain wall that belongs to somebody else.

Its constitution is the oddity that everything else follows from. One sovereign wears two crowns: Ferdinand III is King of Wallachia and King of Moldova, and Prince of the United Principalities in that order, because the two royal titles came later than the federal one and nobody has ever tidied it. Each kingdom keeps its own parliament, government, courts, police, schools and church province. Above them sits an elected federal Diet which holds foreign affairs, defence, the customs and currency, the railways and the river, and which confirms a Common Minister-President who is, by design, a broker rather than a leader.

The union was made by a loophole. In 1859 the powers refused the two principalities permission to unite, and the two assemblies got round the refusal by electing the same man prince of each. When that man tried to fuse the states outright seven years later he was deposed, and what was built in place of the fusion is the federation that still stands.

Its twentieth century was unlike its neighbours’. It stayed neutral in the first great war, which cost it the standing to demand anything at the peace and spared it the defeat, the occupation and the veterans’ politics that broke governments elsewhere. It fought on the Allied side in the second, where its oil mattered more than its army and its refineries were bombed for four years. It had no communist period at all, and so no collectivisation, no secret police of the eastern kind, no dictator’s palace and no revolution: the old centre of Bucharest is still standing, which is the plainest visible measure of what the country was spared.

Two provinces it does not hold define it. Transylvania is Austro-Hungarian, its Romanians hold their schools, courts, church and national council under imperial statute, and the claim to it faded across three generations until it became a marginal politics. Bessarabia is Russian, and the claim to it is renewed by a resolution of the Diet every single session, which is weaker and more embarrassing than a claim nobody has to vote on.

And the country’s oldest failing is older than either. Roma were held in chattel slavery in both principalities for about five centuries, until the 1850s. No restitution has ever been made.

Name

The state is the United Principalities of Romania, and both halves of the phrase are contested by somebody.

United Principalities is what the two states called themselves in 1859 when they were still principalities under Ottoman suzerainty, and the name survived the independence of 1878 and the royal titles of 1881 for the simplest of reasons: changing it would have required deciding whether the new state was a kingdom, and deciding that would have required deciding which royal title came first. The federal name is therefore older than either crown, and describes a constitutional arrangement that no longer exists in the terms it uses. Romanians find this unremarkable. Foreign ministries find it a nuisance, and the Concert’s own protocol office spent three months in 2027 on the question of where the country sits in an alphabetical order.

Romania was the nineteenth century’s addition and is the national half of the title: the country of the Romanians, a Romance-speaking people among Slavs and Magyars, whose national theory is built on descent from Rome and whose alphabet was changed from Cyrillic to Latin in the same century as a political act.

In ordinary speech the country is Romania and its people are Romanians. The federal style is used on instruments, on the currency and in the Diet, and in the two kingdoms people say Wallachian and Moldovan as readily as they say Romanian, without meaning anything separatist by it.

Geography

The Principalities occupy the lower Danube basin: a great plain in the south, a hill country in the north-east, a delta at the mouth and a short sea coast.

The plain, the hills and the delta

Wallachia is the plain between the Carpathian foothills and the Danube, the most fertile large body of farmland in Europe, black soil to a depth that farmers elsewhere do not believe. It is flat, hot in summer, cold in winter, and grows grain, maize and sunflower in quantities that have fed other countries’ cities since the eighteenth century.

Moldova is hill country: vineyards, orchards, oak woods and river valleys running south-east, poorer soil than Wallachia’s and prettier country, with the Prut as its eastern frontier and the closed Russian border beyond it.

Dobruja, between the lower Danube and the sea, is dry steppe and limestone, with the country’s only coast, its port at Constanta and its Turkish and Tatar villages.

The delta is the largest wetland in Europe: three main channels, a labyrinth of reed and water, a protected reserve, and several thousand people who still live by fishing in it. Its administration has more authority on paper than it can enforce on the water, and the argument between fishing, tourism and dredging never ends.

The Carpathians

The Carpathians are the frontier. The arc of the mountains is the boundary with Austria-Hungary, so the country is a plain and a hill country facing south and east, with a mountain wall at its back that it does not own.

Three consequences follow. The passes are among the busiest crossings in eastern Europe, and the towns on both sides live on the traffic. The timber, the ski country and the high pastures are Austrian, which is why transhumant shepherds cross a frontier under agreements older than the frontier itself. And the castles, the forests and the whole Dracula trade are on the Austrian side, which Romanians find intensely annoying and about which they are asked constantly by foreigners.

The Danube

The Danube is the country’s southern frontier for most of its length, its main artery and the reason it has an economy at all. The river carries grain out and coal and ore in, its ports at Galati and Braila are the oldest industrial places in the country, and the international commission that governs navigation on it has sat, in one form or another, since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Earthquakes

The country sits above a deep seismic source in the bend of the Carpathians, which produces infrequent, very large, very deep earthquakes that shake the plain hardest of all. The shocks of 1940 and 1977 are the modern ones; the second killed well over a thousand people in Bucharest and brought down a number of the fine interwar blocks the capital had been proud of.

The consequence is a national scandal that everybody knows about. The Principalities maintain a register of buildings that would fall, surveyed, classified and marked on the street with a red dot. People live in them. Rents in them are cheaper. Successive federal and royal governments have funded strengthening programmes that reach a few dozen buildings a year against a register of hundreds, and the argument about who pays, the owner, the kingdom or the Diet, has outlasted four ministries.

Climate

Continental: hot dry summers on the plain, cold winters with the wind off the Russian steppe, and a spring flood on the Danube that the dykes are built for and occasionally fail against.

History

The two principalities

Wallachia and Moldova emerged as distinct principalities in the fourteenth century, Orthodox, Romance-speaking, and placed exactly where the empires met. Both came under Ottoman suzerainty without being absorbed: they kept their princes, their church and their laws, and paid tribute, which is the arrangement that preserved them and impoverished them.

The eighteenth century was the worst of it. The Porte, distrusting native princes, appointed Greek administrators from Constantinople who bought the thrones and recovered the purchase price from the peasantry, and the period is remembered in both countries as the low point of their history.

Boyar landholding and Roma slavery are the two institutions that ran through the whole princely period. The first produced the land question that dominated the nineteenth century and killed eleven thousand people in 1907. The second is treated under Failings, where it belongs, and is the oldest thing in this article.

The union of 1859

The revolutions of 1848 produced, among much else, a generation of Romanian liberals educated in Paris who wanted one state. The powers, meeting after the Crimean war, refused: the two principalities might have parallel institutions, they were told, and could not have a single government.

So the assemblies elected the same man twice. In January 1859 Moldova chose Alexandru Ioan Cuza as its prince, and three weeks later Wallachia chose him too, and the powers were presented with a union they had forbidden and could not undo without a war nobody wanted.

The second paragraph is the founding sentence of the country, and its tone, legalistic, slightly impudent, technically unanswerable, is one Romanian diplomacy has never lost.

The failure of fusion

Cuza governed both states for seven years and then tried to finish the job, by fusing the two administrations, merging the assemblies and ending the separate existence of the principalities.

Here he was stopped. The Moldovan assembly refused the fusion, on the ground that a union of two states was not a licence to abolish one of them, and the guaranteeing powers supported the refusal for their own reasons, having no wish to see a single strong state on the lower Danube. Cuza, caught between a conspiracy of boyars and liberals at home and the powers abroad, abdicated under pressure in 1866 and went into an exile he did not return from.

Romanian historians now treat him as a man wronged by people who wanted what he wanted and disliked how he was getting it, and his face is on the stamps.

What was built instead was the federation: two governments, two parliaments, common ministries for the things neither could do alone, and a single foreign prince brought in to hold the two crowns without belonging to either country.

Carol I and the making of the state

Carol of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a Catholic prince of the southern branch of the Prussian house, arrived in 1866, reigned for nearly fifty years, and is the founder of the modern country. His Catholicism was settled by treaty with the two metropolitans: he remained Catholic and his children were raised Orthodox, an arrangement that scandalised the church in his lifetime and is now a footnote.

Under him the Principalities fought the war of independence of 1877 and 1878 beside Russia, against the Ottomans, and came out of it sovereign and suspicious. The campaign is the country’s founding military memory. The peace that followed is the origin of a national conviction that allies are more dangerous than enemies, because the Russians took Bessarabian districts from their own co-belligerent as the price of the victory, and the Principalities gained Dobruja and a seaport in exchange, which they had not asked for and have been grateful for ever since.

In 1881 both princes’ thrones were raised to kingdoms, and Carol was crowned twice, once in each capital, which established the practice.

The land question and the rising of 1907

The nineteenth-century land settlement gave too little land to too few men and left the rest tied to the estates by labour dues that amounted to serfdom conducted by contract. Rural debt, absentee landlords and leaseholders who squeezed what the landlords would not bother to collect produced, in the spring of 1907, a rising across both kingdoms.

It was put down by the army with artillery. About eleven thousand people were killed, a figure nobody disputes and which the state did not formally acknowledge until the present century. It is the largest single act of violence this state has committed against its own people, there is now a memorial in every county town, and the day of its commemoration is recent and contested.

The real land reform came after the first war, in the 1920s, and broke the estates at last.

The neutrality, 1914 to 1918

When the great powers went to war in 1914, the Principalities had one territorial want and it was Austrian. Transylvania’s Romanians were subjects of the Emperor, and the only way to take the province was to join the side that Austria-Hungary and Germany were not on, which was the side that the Ottomans and the Russians were: the side that lost.

The country stayed out. The decision brought down two governments, came within a handful of votes of being reversed in the Diet, and was sustained by two things: Austrian guarantees about Transylvanian schooling and courts, offered to keep Bucharest quiet and, in the event, honoured; and money, because grain and oil sold to both belligerents at rising prices made the neutrality profitable as well as prudent.

It cost the country at the peace. The Principalities sat at Berlin as spectators, received nothing, and watched the collapse of Russia produce a settlement of Bessarabia in which they had no part. The humiliation fed twenty years of national argument, and the far right fed on it in turn.

The interwar years

The interwar decades were, by the standards of eastern Europe, unremarkable, which is itself the remarkable fact. There was no coup, no royal dictatorship, no abolition of parties and no colonel in the palace.

Romanians give two reasons and the second is the one they give first. A coup would have had to be made twice, in two capitals, against two royal governments, two parliaments and a Diet, and nobody ever worked out how. And the country had nothing to avenge, having lost no war, no province and no generation.

What it did have was a violent, mystical, antisemitic movement of students and villages, the Brotherhood of the Cross, with uniforms, hymns, a cult of death and a fifth of the vote. Its eleven months in office are treated below.

The second war

The Principalities were Allied, with Germany, Britain, the Realm and the Byzantine Federation, against fascist France and Japan.

The country’s contribution was its oil, which fuelled the alliance’s eastern industry, and the cost was four years of French bombing of the refineries at Ploiesti and the bridges and ports of the Danube, heavy and repeated, remembered in the towns that were hit rather than nationally. A Romanian corps fought in the counter-invasion of France, which is the modern army’s founding story and a smaller part of the war than Romanians like to remember.

No enemy army crossed the frontier. The Straits were slowed twice and never closed entirely, which was enough to teach the country what its dependence meant.

And the Principalities took in refugees from the French genocide in large numbers, which is the best thing this country did in the twentieth century and is barely taught in its schools.

The postwar decades

Reconstruction was paid for with oil money and the grain trade. Industry grew slowly and unevenly, and the country settled into the position it still occupies: middle-income in a rich continent, which is the modern grievance and the reason for the emigration.

The oil ran down. The refineries stayed, working on imported crude. The Danube was dammed jointly with Serbia at the gorge, the canal to the sea was cut in the 1960s with foreign loans and paid labour, and a nuclear station was bought from abroad and built on the river.

The present century

Two events, a decade apart, define the country’s recent politics.

The corruption crisis of the late 2010s brought a million people into the streets of both capitals over a decree that would have narrowed the offence of abuse of office, broke a governing party, and left the anti-corruption prosecutors entrenched, admired and permanently under attack.

Accession to the European Concert followed in 2027, after a decade of preparation in which courts were rebuilt and standards were imposed from outside that the country had proved unable to impose on itself. The single market opened the borders to Romanian grain and wine, the black-soil estates gained and the smallholders lost, and the villages, already emptying under the older bilateral labour agreements, are expected to empty faster when free movement reaches all workers in 2030.

The federation

The dual crown

The sovereign is King of Wallachia and King of Moldova, Prince of the United Principalities, in that order, and the order is the constitution stated in a signature: the royal titles are the substance and the federal one is the arrangement between them.

There are two coronations, one in each capital, some weeks apart, with identical rites and different crowns. The order in which they are held is negotiated at the start of every reign, and the negotiation is followed by the newspapers of both kingdoms with an attention that outsiders find comic.

The two succession laws are identical and neither kingdom may amend its own without the other’s assent. This is the pragmatic sanction of the union: it makes divergence of the two lines legally impossible, and it is the answer to the question every foreign lawyer asks first.

The two kingdoms

Each kingdom has its own parliament, its own government under its own Prime Minister, its own courts, its own police, its own schools and its own church province. Between them that is most of what touches an ordinary life, which is why turnout in the royal elections is consistently higher than in the federal ones.

The Kingdom of Wallachia holds about two-thirds of the population, the capital, the oil, the ports and the plain. Its government sits at Craiova, moved there in the nineteenth century so that Bucharest would not be the seat of three administrations at once.

The Kingdom of Moldova holds the hills, the northern towns, the wine country and Iasi, which was the older capital of the two states and has spent a hundred and sixty years insisting that it was not demoted.

The Diet

The Federal Diet has 200 members, elected for four years by proportional representation in both kingdoms on the same day. It legislates on the common matters, votes the common budget, and confirms and can remove the Common Minister-President.

The Diet replaced an older arrangement of joint delegations from the two royal parliaments, and the change is the most important constitutional event since the union, because it gave the federation a body with a mandate of its own rather than one borrowed from its members.

The common matters are foreign affairs, defence and the finance that pays for them; customs, currency and the railways; and the Danube administration and the ports. Everything else belongs to the kingdoms, expressly and by design.

The quotas

The federation is financed by quotas paid by the two kingdoms, fixed in the constitution and alterable only by amending it.

They were set on the population figures of the 1890s and have not been changed since. Wallachia industrialised, the ports grew, the oil came in, and the relative weight of the two kingdoms moved decisively, and the numbers did not. Both kingdoms believe they are overpaying, each with arguments that are impossible to refute from the other side of the table, and every serious attempt to update the schedule has failed in the Diet.

The quota question is the permanent business of Romanian federal politics, the reason governments fall, and the subject on which separatist language is used by people who do not mean it.

Separation

Nobody seriously proposes to dissolve the union. Separatism in the Principalities is a negotiating device, deployed in quota years by members who want a better settlement, understood as such by everybody including the people deploying it, and believed by nobody.

The Common Minister-President

The Common Minister-President leads the federal government, is confirmed by the Diet, and is by design a broker: the office goes to a figure acceptable to both royal governments and to the Diet’s arithmetic, which in practice means a person of no great personal following.

Sorin Mavrodin, a former mayor of Iasi and an economist by training, has held the office since 2026 at the head of a centrist coalition. He is held together by the Concert accession and threatened by the quota question, is described by his own supporters as competent and unloved, and is the third Moldovan to hold the office in the last forty years.

The Crown

The house

The sovereigns are of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the Catholic southern branch of the Prussian royal house, which the country calls by its German name without embarrassment and without Romanianising it. Their Catholic origin was settled by the treaty of 1866 with the two metropolitans: the prince remained Catholic and his children were raised Orthodox.

The reigns

Carol I (prince from 1866, king from 1881, died 1914) made the state: independence, the royal titles, the railways, the oil concessions and the two-coronation practice.

Ferdinand I (1914 to 1927) is the king of the neutrality, which he supported when it was unpopular and defended for the rest of his life.

A regency followed for a child sovereign, and then Carol II (1930 to 1940), the most disliked of the line, whose conduct during the Brotherhood’s eleven months in office is the subject of the reign and is argued about still.

Michael (1940 to 2017) reigned for seventy-seven years, the longest reign in European history. He came to the throne as a young man in the second week of the war and died at ninety-six, having outlived the fascist France he went to war against, the empires of his youth, every minister of his first four governments and most of his own children’s generation. The country he left was not the country he inherited in any respect except its constitution, which is the thing he is given credit for.

His son reigned eight years and died suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-eight, in the middle of a state visit, with nothing mysterious about it and no preparation made for it.

Ferdinand III succeeded in 2025 in his twenties. The dynastic name was chosen to signal continuity at a moment when continuity was what was wanted. His heir presumptive is his sister, Princess Elena, until he has children of his own, and she is noticeably more popular than he is.

The Crown’s place

The monarchy is popular mostly because it is boring. There are no scandals worth the name, the civil list is voted and audited, the palaces are open and the family is photographed at its duties.

It is warmer in Moldova, where the crown is understood to protect the smaller kingdom against the larger, than in Wallachia, where it is one institution among several. Its most trusted work is the least constitutional: the rural nurse service under royal patronage, which reaches villages the health insurance does not and is the most trusted institution in the countryside.

The Brotherhood of the Cross in office

The Brotherhood of the Cross was the Romanian far right: mystical, Orthodox, violently antisemitic, drawing its strength from students and villages, with uniforms, hymns and a cult of the martyred dead. At its height it took about a fifth of the vote in both kingdoms.

In the later 1930s it entered a coalition government and held office for eleven months.

What happened next is the best argument the federation has ever produced for itself. The Brotherhood’s ministers brought forward antisemitic legislation, stripping citizenship, excluding Jews from the professions and confiscating property. It passed in one kingdom and was blocked in the other. The Wallachian parliament carried it; the Moldovan parliament, where the Jewish population was larger, the towns older and the liberal tradition stronger, refused, and the federation had no mechanism by which one kingdom’s law could be made to run in the other.

The coalition then attempted to legislate federally, and the Diet refused the common budget.

The government fell within a fortnight. The Brotherhood’s leader died in custody the following year, in circumstances the state has never explained, and the movement never recovered.

The article is careful about the moral. The federation saved its Jews by being slow, not by being good: what stopped the law was an absence of machinery, a conservative second chamber of a kind that exists to obstruct, and a chamber’s refusal of money. The legislation that passed in Wallachia was not fully repealed for years, the confiscations under it were never fully reversed, and the country’s own record before and after the eleven months is in Failings.

Transylvania and the irredentist claim

Transylvania is the province the Principalities wanted for a century and stopped wanting, and how that happened is the most interesting thing in the country’s modern history.

The claim

Transylvania’s Romanians are the largest Romanian population outside the Principalities, and for two generations the national theory held that a Romania without them was incomplete. The irredentist parties of the 1900s and 1920s were serious: at their height they held about a quarter of the Diet, and in the 1920s a crisis in Transylvania came close to producing a frontier incident that both governments worked, separately and successfully, to prevent.

Why the claim lapsed

Four things killed it, and Romanians will tell you the fourth.

The imperial statute. Austria-Hungary, over Hungarian obstruction, gave the Transylvanian Romanians their schools, their courts, their church and a national council, guaranteed by imperial law rather than by Hungarian goodwill. It was granted grudgingly and honoured slowly, and it was honoured.

The neutrality. A country that had not fought for the province had no dead whose sacrifice demanded it.

Money. The Transylvanian Romanians became, on average, richer than the Romanians of the Principalities, and unification stopped looking like a rescue and started looking like an offer.

And time. The generation that remembered Hungarian-language schooling died. Their grandchildren cross the passes for work, for university and for holidays, and regard the question as their grandparents’ business.

Opinion in Transylvania

They say, loudly and in public, that they are Romanians of the Empire; that their institutions are better funded than the Principalities’ own; and that nobody in Bucharest is entitled to speak for them. The Principalities’ occasional attempts to do so are met with letters to the newspapers of both countries.

Effect on the national idea

The Principalities reorganised their self-understanding around the two kingdoms. The national idea here is now a union of Wallachia and Moldova rather than a gathering of all Romanians, the Transylvanians are cousins abroad, and the theory that a nation must be a single state is treated in Bucharest as a nineteenth-century enthusiasm that cost other countries a great deal more than it cost this one.

Bessarabia

The province between the Prut and the Dniester is Russian, and is the claim the Principalities have never given up.

It was taken from them in stages in the nineteenth century, by the ally they had just fought beside, and the settlement that followed the collapse of Russia in the first war was made without them because they had stayed out of it.

The claim’s legal form is an annual resolution of the Diet, renewed each session, declaring the province unlawfully detached. It is weaker than a constitutional clause and more embarrassing, because it must be voted every year in public, and because everybody in the chamber knows the country will not fight for it.

Russia’s answer is silence. The Russian Republic never accepted the frontier as an open question and stopped replying to the resolution, and the empire proclaimed in October 2028 has not yet replied either, which Romanian diplomats describe as the most effective thing Russia does.

On the ground there is a quiet migration across the Prut which Russia restricts and the Principalities encourage, an exile community with its own press and a few seats in the Moldovan parliament, and a city, Iasi, twenty kilometres from a closed frontier whose horizon is the province it cannot have.

The Danube and the Straits

Everything this country sells by sea leaves through a channel it does not control.

The Danube carries the grain to the ports. The ports load it into ships. The ships pass the Straits, which belong to the Byzantine Federation, and a convention of the 1930s guarantees free commercial passage in peacetime while leaving wartime closure to the Federation’s discretion. Romania has spent ninety years trying to soften that clause and has not moved it.

The passage has never been closed against the Principalities outright. It was slowed twice in crises, which was enough to teach the lesson, and the lesson is the whole of the country’s foreign policy: be friendly to whoever holds the Straits, and never be the reason they close.

The alternatives are expensive and are maintained anyway. The canal from the Danube to the sea, cut in the 1960s with foreign loans and paid labour, shortens the route to Constanta. The railways west into the Concert’s market carry what can bear the freight rates. Neither replaces the water.

Politics

The parties

Romanian politics is conducted twice over: in each kingdom’s parliament, where most of what matters is decided, and in the Diet, where the money and the foreign policy are.

The kingdoms have their own traditions. Wallachia runs on a liberal and a conservative bloc, city against country, with the industrial towns and the ports on the liberal side. Moldova has an agrarian tradition older than either, cooperative in economics and conservative in manner, which no Wallachian party has ever successfully imitated.

Above them are union-wide parties that contest both kingdoms and have quietly made the federation more of a single country than its constitution admits. The tension between the two layers, the kingdom parties and the union parties, is modern Romanian politics in one sentence.

A socialist party of the ordinary European kind sits in both parliaments and has governed in both. There is no communist tradition to speak of, and the Romanian left’s formative memory is the land reform of the 1920s rather than any revolution.

Minority parties hold seats by right of numbers: a Jewish party in the Moldovan towns and in Bucharest, a Roma civil rights party with a handful of seats and a long record of court victories and little else, and Turkish and Tatar members from Dobruja.

The present government

Sorin Mavrodin’s centrist coalition governs federally. In Wallachia the liberals hold office; in Moldova the agrarians lead a coalition with the socialists. The three governments agree on the Concert, disagree on the quotas, and are jointly responsible for the roads, which nobody wants to be.

Corruption

Corruption is the defining domestic subject, and the federation makes it worse: two royal administrations and a federal one give three places for a contract to be lost in, and jurisdiction between them is a lawyer’s playground.

The anti-corruption prosecution service, entrenched after the crisis of the late 2010s, is the most admired institution in the country and the most attacked. It has convicted ministers of both kingdoms and one Common Minister-President, and every government since has proposed a reform of it that its supporters describe as an attempt to blunt it.

The press

Free, noisy, poor and substantially owned by businessmen with interests, which is the usual shape in a small market and worse here because there are three governments to be friendly with. There are two papers of record, one in each capital, rivals since the union. The public broadcaster’s independence is contested at every change of government. And the country’s political culture lives on long argumentative television talk shows, which shape opinion more than the papers do.

Economy

The Principalities are a middle-income country in a rich continent, which is the grievance behind most of their politics.

The land

Agriculture is the foundation: grain, maize, sunflower and rape off the black soil of the Wallachian plain, wine and fruit from the Moldovan hills, and vegetables from the river valleys. The country is one of the Concert’s largest grain exporters and sends most of it downriver and out through the Straits.

The reform of the 1920s made a country of smallholders, and what happened next differs by kingdom. Moldova cooperated: a strong cooperative movement from the 1930s kept land in local hands, ran the mills and the wineries, and is the reason the Moldovan countryside is not owned from abroad. Wallachia consolidated: plots were bought up, first by Romanian companies and then by foreign ones, and the black soil is now farmed in blocks of a size the smallholders could never achieve.

A large share of rural households still grow much of what they eat. That is poverty by any measure the Concert uses, and it is also the reason nobody went hungry here in the bad years of the last century.

Oil and its successors

The Principalities had Europe’s oldest oil industry, which made them strategically important far beyond their size, brought British and German capital in the nineteenth century on concession terms that were a standing grievance, and is now largely exhausted.

What remains is downstream: refining, chemicals and fertiliser at Ploiesti and on the river, running on imported crude. Offshore gas in the Black Sea is the modern hope and has been slow to arrive, held up by pipeline politics and by an argument between the two kingdoms and the Diet about whose revenue it is.

Industry and power

Shipbuilding and river engineering at Galati and Braila, the oldest industrial trades in the country. Hydroelectricity on the Danube at the gorge, built jointly with Serbia and the largest thing either country has ever built. A nuclear station on the river, bought from abroad, supplying about a fifth of the electricity and argued about at every election.

Modern growth

Software and engineering services, concentrated in the two university cities, are the fastest-growing part of the economy and the reason a Romanian graduate can now earn a western salary without leaving. The country has some of the fastest and cheapest internet in Europe, which is the one modern thing it is unambiguously good at.

Work and wages

Wages are low by western standards and rising fast, which is why the emigration has begun to slow. A large informal sector persists: work paid in cash, an envelope on top of the declared wage, and a tax base everybody knows to be fictional.

Unions are strong in the refineries, the railways and the yards and absent almost everywhere else. Remittances from the diaspora hold up whole counties.

Infrastructure

The railways were built early and well and maintained badly, and are still how most people travel. The roads are the standing national embarrassment, with a motorway programme forty years behind schedule and two federal transport ministries quarrelling about it, because the railways are common and the roads belong to the kingdoms.

Society

Population

About 15 million, in a country that is smaller than it wanted to be and larger than a plain and a hill country might expect.

Roma are the largest minority and the oldest, and their position is the subject of the Failings below. A Jewish population of real size, urban, concentrated in the two capitals and the Moldovan towns, is the largest in eastern Europe, with schools, a press, seats in both parliaments and a restitution question that has been litigated for eighty years. Hungarians and Germans live along the Austrian frontier, Turks and Tatars in Dobruja with mosques older than the state, Bulgarians and Serbs along the Danube and Ukrainians in the north.

Religion

Orthodoxy is the national religion in fact and not in law, with very high declared belief and moderate attendance. The church is organised, like everything else here, in two: two metropolitanates in communion but not united, one for each kingdom, an arrangement that mirrors the constitution and irritates the clergy of both.

Its greatest possession is the painted monasteries of the Moldavian hills, frescoed on the outside and still legible after five centuries.

The Orthodox year organises social life more than doctrine does. Name days are kept rather than birthdays; the fasts are observed loosely in the cities and strictly in the villages, which restaurants now cater for; and Easter is the great festival, bigger than Christmas, which empties the cities into the countryside for a week.

Education and health

Two school systems, one per kingdom, working to a common curriculum agreed in the 1920s and quietly diverging ever since. Universities at Bucharest and Iasi, both old, both jealous, with a mathematical school of real international standing and medicine and engineering faculties that supply the Concert with doctors and programmers.

Health insurance covers everyone and works in the cities and barely reaches the villages, where the doctors have left. Life expectancy is several years below the Concert average. The one exception is the rural nurse service under royal patronage, which is trusted in the countryside more than any other institution of the state.

Welfare and demography

Pensions are too small in the villages, child poverty is the worst in the Concert, and the welfare state was designed for a country with more workers than it now has.

The birth rate is low and the population is ageing, as everywhere, though without the violent swings that a coercive natalist policy would have produced. The villages empty while the two capitals grow. And a returning generation is buying houses in the villages it left, with savings and western habits, which is changing the countryside faster than any policy has.

Housing

Ownership is very high and quality is low: interwar and postwar blocks in the cities, self-built houses in the villages, and almost no rental market at all. The capital has a building boom that nobody regulates properly, which is the sharpest planning fight in the country and a serious problem in an earthquake zone.

The diaspora

About a million Romanians work in the west, mostly in the German Empire and Italy. They vote from abroad in numbers large enough to decide federal elections, which the parties at home resent and court in equal measure.

Culture

Literature

The national poet of the 1880s is romantic, melancholy, on the currency, and quoted by everybody including people whose politics would have appalled him.

Beneath the literature runs the argument that organises Romanian intellectual life: is this a Latin island misfiled in the Balkans, or a Balkan country with a Latin vocabulary? The nineteenth century answered the first way, resupplied the language with French words, changed the alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin as a political act and rebuilt the capital in imitation of Paris. The twentieth century complicated the answer, and the twenty-first mostly enjoys the question.

The generation of the 1930s went to the far right and wrote well, and their books are still read and their politics still argued about, which is a problem this country shares with several others and has handled better than most by not pretending the books are bad.

And there is a Jewish literature in Romanian and in Yiddish that did not have to be reconstructed after the war, because it was not destroyed. Professional Yiddish theatre was born at Iasi in the nineteenth century and is still performed there.

Music

A composer of the first rank wrote the country into the European repertoire and has a festival in his name. The conservatories export players to every orchestra in Europe. The doina, the long solo lament, is the folk form everybody recognises.

And the lautari are the country’s musicians: professional Roma players who have carried Romanian secular music for centuries, whose repertoire is the national one, and whose families were, until the 1850s, owned by the people who hired them. The article states that in one sentence because it cannot be improved by being spread over several.

Art and building

A sculptor of world rank, born in a Wallachian village, whose early work is in the country and whose fame was made abroad. The Brancovan style of carved stone porches is the national architectural idiom. The village museums of the two capitals, whole houses moved and reassembled, are how a country that is emptying keeps its architecture.

Cinema

A cinema of unsparing realism that wins prizes abroad and is disliked at home for the picture it paints, which is the ordinary fate of such cinemas and is felt particularly here, in a country that would like to be seen as European rather than as a case study.

Sport

Football first, with two great Bucharest clubs, one army and one railway in origin, whose rivalry is the loudest thing in the country. Gymnastics second, the school that made the country internationally famous, whose methods have since been examined and found to have been cruel to children. Handball and rugby are both stronger than outsiders expect.

Food

Maize porridge is the everyday staple, with sour soups, stuffed cabbage and grilled minced meat whose origins everybody in the region argues about. Plum brandy is distilled at home in quantities the state has given up taxing. Wine is old, decent and now exported, the Concert having opened the trade. And the sweets and the coffee are Ottoman and Greek, which the Latin theory of the nation finds awkward and the Latin theory’s holders eat anyway.

The countryside

Transhumance survives: sheep moved between the plains and the mountain pastures, across an international frontier now, under agreements with Austria-Hungary older than the frontier. It is dying: the flocks are smaller each year and the shepherds are the last generation who will do it.

Defence and foreign relations

Defence

A federal army under the common ministry, recruited from both kingdoms and deliberately mixed at every level, which was for a century the institution that most effectively made Wallachians and Moldovans into Romanians.

Conscription ended in the present century and is quietly missed for exactly that reason. What remains is small and good: a professional army, an air force and the Danube flotilla, the oldest part of the service and the only one with a continuous battle record.

The posture is armed neutrality. The Principalities are outside the Atlantic Treaty Organization, for reasons of geography and inclination, and maintain with Austria-Hungary no treaty but staff talks, shared air policing of the passes and a habit of telling each other things, which produces more cooperation than most treaties do.

Austria-Hungary

The closest relationship the country has: trade, the passes, minorities in both directions, and a Transylvanian Romanian elite that moves easily between Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest. Both governments remember what nearly happened in the 1920s and neither mentions it.

Russia

Cold, correct and watchful. The Bessarabian claim is maintained in law, never pressed in force, and raised at every international meeting in terms the Russians have stopped answering. Trade is small and one-directional: gas and timber bought, little sold.

The Byzantine Federation

The Straits, described above, and therefore the most carefully managed relationship in the country’s diplomacy. Romania pays into the Federation’s pilotage and lighthouse administration, resents it, and would resent the alternative more.

Germany, Britain and the Realm

The German Empire is the largest trading partner and investor and the destination of most emigrants, and the war alliance of 1939 to 1945 is the foundation of the relationship; the dynasty’s German origin counts for something ceremonial and nothing political. British capital built the oil industry and half the railways on concession terms that were a nineteenth-century grievance. The United Kingdom of America is distant and commercial: grain and software, a small Romanian community in its cities, and no security relationship of any kind. Both fought beside the Principalities in the second war, which Romania mentions rather more often than they do.

The Balkans and the Concert

Bulgaria: an old quarrel over southern Dobruja, settled long ago and reopened in rhetoric whenever a Bulgarian politician needs it. Serbia: friendly, river-bound, joint works at the gorge and a shared irritation at Hungarian policy.

In the European Concert the Principalities are a wider member, admitted in 2027. Their federation was the hardest administrative problem of their accession, since the Concert deals with states and this state has three governments, and the solution was a federal law under which only the Common Minister-President sits in Council, which the kingdoms resented and accepted.

In the League of Nations the country is an enthusiastic small-state legalist, a contributor of judges and rapporteurs rather than troops, has sat twice on the Council, and has a reputation for voting with nobody predictably.

What the country wants, and has wanted for a century, is to be taken seriously as a European state rather than a Balkan one. It is a cultural want rather than a territorial one and it shapes the foreign service more than any interest does.

Failings

Roma slavery. Roma were held as chattel slaves in both principalities for about five centuries, owned by boyars, by monasteries and by the princes themselves, bought and sold by advertisement, with families separated at sale. It was abolished in the 1850s. No restitution has ever been made. The sale records of the monasteries and the great houses were published in the present century and name families still living, and the apology, when it came, was late and unaccompanied by anything else.

And its continuation. The Roma of the Principalities are the largest such population in Europe and have the worst outcomes in the country on every measure the state itself publishes. Schooling is segregated in practice and denied in law, a question now before the Concert’s Court. The musicians whose repertoire is the national music are honoured; their community is not.

The citizenship disgrace. Jews born in the Principalities were denied citizenship for fifty years by a rule requiring an individual act of parliament for each naturalisation, which kept a population stateless while allowing the state to deny that any bar existed. It was ended under foreign pressure at the price of a treaty, and the resentment at having been made to do it is part of the failing.

The land and 1907. A reform that gave too little land to too few, labour dues that were serfdom by another name, and a rising in 1907 put down with artillery and about eleven thousand dead, acknowledged by the state only in the present century.

The neutrality that was sold. The Principalities made money from a war that other countries’ sons were dying in, and the profit was one of the arguments for staying out. The decision was probably right. The article declines to call it noble.

The 1930s and the war years. The Brotherhood’s legislation passed in one kingdom, was blocked in the other, and was not fully repealed for years. Confiscations under it were never fully reversed. And there was a wartime internal policing of Jewish and Roma communities, of registration, restriction and forced labour on the roads and the river, which fell short of what happened elsewhere and which Romanians do not discuss.

Corruption as a system. For most of the postwar period corruption was not a deviation from how business was done but the way it was done, and the anti-corruption prosecutions of the present century are dealing with a culture rather than a set of offences.

The gymnastics programme. The training system that made the country famous took children at six, separated them from their families, and used hunger and beatings as method. It was examined late, and the examination was resisted by people who had medals.

The register of buildings that would fall. The state knows which buildings will kill people in the next great earthquake, has marked them, and has not strengthened them.

Symbols

The flag is the blue, yellow and red tricolour of the 1848 generation, kept because it flew for the union before either kingdom existed and belongs therefore to neither. The state flag charges it with the arms.

The arms are impaled: the eagle of Wallachia and the aurochs of Moldova side by side beneath a single crown, with no supporters. It is the union in a shield, and the decision to impale rather than quarter was taken so that neither charge could be read as quartering the other.

The anthem is a single federal song of the 1848 generation. Each kingdom also has a royal anthem, played in its own kingdom and nowhere else, which visiting heads of state are briefed about and still get wrong.

The national days are 24 January, for the union of 1859; 9 May, for independence; the two coronation days, kept separately in each kingdom; and a recent and contested day for the dead of 1907.

Assessment

The Principalities are the most fortunate country in eastern Europe and have not entirely worked out what to do about it.

The fortune is real and most of it was not earned. The union was obtained by a loophole. The federation exists because a fusion failed. The country stayed out of the first great war because the province it wanted was held by the side it could not beat, and made money doing so. It avoided the interwar dictatorship partly because a coup would have had to be made twice. It escaped the extermination of its Jews because the genocide of this century was French and was fought on other ground, and it escaped communism because there was no Soviet Union to impose it. Every one of those is luck, or geography, or somebody else’s decision.

What the country did with the luck is more creditable than it usually gets credit for. It built a federation that has held for a hundred and sixty years without a civil war, a separatist movement anybody believes in or a serious proposal to simplify it. It kept its parliaments open in a decade when its neighbours were closing theirs. Its second chamber and its federal Diet together stopped an antisemitic legislative programme that a unitary state would have passed in a fortnight. It took in refugees when it could have shut the ports. And it has spent the present century building courts and prosecutors capable of convicting its own ministers, which is the hardest thing a country of this kind ever does.

The failings are not the century’s failings and are therefore harder to explain away. Nobody imposed Roma slavery on the Principalities; they invented it and kept it for five hundred years and have never paid for it. Nobody required the fifty years of statelessness for Jews, the eleven thousand dead of 1907, or the buildings with red dots on them. These are the country’s own, done by its own governments to its own people, in the long periods when nothing dramatic was happening to it.

The question Romanians ask themselves at anniversaries is this: whether a country spared the worst of a century by neutrality and by luck has earned the settled, unspectacular prosperity it now has, or has merely inherited it. The honest answer is that the union earned the part of it that is constitutional and inherited the part that is historical, and that the difference between those two things is what the next quota crisis will be about, as every one has been.

Chronology

See also

• Austria-Hungary
• The Byzantine Federation
• The Russian Republic
• The European Concert
• The German Empire
• The League of Nations

Trivia

Categories

Nations of the World · Europe · Federations · Constitutional Monarchies · The Danube