Greater Romania
[4][5][6][7][8] In 1920, after the incorporation of Transylvania, Bukovina, Bessarabia and parts of Banat, Crișana, and Maramureș, the Romanian state reached its largest peacetime geographical extent ever (295,049 km2).
[17] The Romanian revolution in 1848 already carried the seeds of the national dream of a unified and united Romania,[6] though the "idea of unification" had been known from earlier works of Naum Ramniceanu (1802) and Ion Budai-Deleanu (1804).
However, before the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the elite of the Transylvanian Romanians did not support the concept of "Greater Romania", instead they wanted only equality with the other nations in Transylvania.
[19] The treaty stipulated the conditions under which Romania agreed to join the war on the side of the Entente, particularly territorial promises in Austria-Hungary.
In our moral energy and our valour lie the means of giving him back his birthright of a great and free Rumania from the Tisza to the Black Sea, and to prosper in peace in accordance with our customs and our hopes and dreams.
(...) Part of the proclamation by King Ferdinand, 28 August 1916[20] Lucian Boia summarised the territorial extent of the nationalist dream as following: The concept of "Greater Romania" materialized as a geopolitical reality after the First World War.
[24] Due to the inability of the government to solve the problems of the Transylvanian Romanians' integration and the effects of the worldwide and national economic depression, "the population gradually lost its faith in the democratic conception of Greater Romania".
[26] Bessarabia declared its sovereignty as the Moldavian Democratic Republic in 1917 by the newly formed "Council of the Country" ("Sfatul Țării").
In January 1918, the "Sfatul Țării" called on Romanian troops to protect the province from the Bolsheviks who were spreading the Russian Revolution.
Despite clear Ukrainian majority in the governorate's ethnic composition, demonstrated by a census conducted in December 1941, Romanian government hoped to annex it eventually as a "compensation" for Northern Transylvania lost to Hungary.
[38] Gheorghe Apostol's reminiscence strengthens the view for the nationalist argument of the Communists at the negotiations with Stalin about the future of Northern Transylvania.
[24] In contrast with this view, Romsics quotes Valter Roman, one of the heads of the Romanian Communist Party, as writing in his memo of April 1944: "the two parts of Transylvania should be reunited as an independent state.
[40] According to Trond Gilberg the regime needed the strongly nationalist attitude because of the social, economic and political challenges.
[38] After the retreat of the Soviet troops from Romania in 1958, the national ideology was reborn, however it raises questions about its reconcilability with internationalist communism.
[24] Nicolae Ceaușescu fancied the idea that the creation of Greater Romania was the fruit of the end of the nation-formation process.The setting up of the (Romanian) unitary national state six and a half decades ago was a brilliant historic victory of the long heroic struggle of the masses for creating the Romanian nation and the coming true of the age old dream of all Romanians to live in unity within the borders of the same country, in one free and independent state.The fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the economic downturn accompanying it led to a resurgence of nationalism in the region.
Romania and Moldova, state comprising the bulk of Bessarabia which had become independent after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, confronted with their eastern neighbor, Ukraine.
[41] Bulgaria surmised that the concept of Greater Romania stood behind Romanian foreign policy toward Moldova therefore expressed concerns about possible developments on Dobruja.
[8] In 1992, the issue on unification of Moldova and Romania was negotiated between the Romanian and Moldovan governments and they wanted to achieve it by the end of the year.
[8] The Moldovan Snegur government became more pragmatic and realized that the nationalist propaganda from Bucharest did not help their aims especially on the problem of "Soviet annexed Bessarabia".
"[8] Furthermore, Bucharest's behavior toward Ukraine did not change until 1997 when Romanian politicians realized that resolving border disputes was a precondition for NATO membership.
