The nation against democracy: state formation, liberalism, and political participation in Romania

Abstract

The National Liberal Party was created in 1875, but various radical and liberal factions were already the driving force behind the unification of the Romanian Principalities in 1859. The same factions fomented the coup against prince Cuza in 1866, offered the crown to a foreign dynasty and wrote the Constitution of 1866. Inspired by the Belgian model and amended several times, the Constitution lasted until 1938. A liberal government sent the Romanian army to fight successfully in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877, proclaimed the independence of the country and negotiated its full recognition at the Congress of Berlin one year later. Other liberal governments gave their unremitting support to the Romanian national movement in Transylvania, established a Central Bank and a national credit system, and bloodily crushed the peasant uprising of 1907. Finally, another liberal government overturned the alliance with the Central Powers concluded by the Crown and backed by the Conservatives, took the French and English side in the Great War, resisted the German and Austro-Hungarian invasion, aggrandized the Kingdom of Romania by bringing the Western provinces of Transylvania and Banat into the nation, introduced universal suffrage and set in motion the agrarian reform. From 1866 to 1919, helped by an electoral system based on limited representation, the Liberals held the reigns of the government twenty one times, being in charge of the country for 38 years. The Liberals' strategic choice was to build the nation-state at the expense of democracy. In order to assemble and strengthen the political nation they choose to exclude from any significant form of participation in the public life the majority of their countrymen. The reasons and consequences of this option are explored in this paper.