Bessarabia and Bukovina – From the Great Union to European Membership
Bessarabia and Bukovina – From the Great Union to European Membership

Summary/Abstract: Even though Bessarabia and Bukovina were the first provinces to join the Romanian Kingdom in 1918, today all of Bessarabia and part of Bukovina are separated from the country. At the risk of walking the well-trodden path on a topic the readers may be familiar with, this paper aims to formulate a series of assumptions and general comments about the Great Union. This risk is well worth taking since I. I. C. Brătianu’s warning that “history holds some truths which, unrepeated, will be forgotten” is worth heeding.At the end of the First World War, and in the context where empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian ones were crumbling, new states emerged such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, the Serbian and Croatian and Slovenian kingdoms (later to become Yugoslavia). Other countries such as Romania or Greece completed their national unity. Thus, without necessarily being a singular event aimed against a particular state, the Romanian Union is an integral part of a wider phenomenon taking place in a vast region between the Baltic Sea and the Adriatic Sea and against a background of political and social transformations in Europe at the end of the Great War.

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