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Introduction
On February 3, 1917 Gerhard Vehlburg discovered that he had joined a grain requisition commission. He had been stationed in Fetesti, near the Romanian Danube, for about a month. Fetesti was strategically located on the railway between Bucharest and the last, enormous bridge across the Danube at Cernovoda (which had been financed by Disconto Gesellschaft twenty years earlier and across which Maffei locomotives had pulled Deutsche Bank petroleum to the recently constructed port of Constanta for shipment west). Vehlburg had been hurriedly mobilized from the Landwehr and sent to Romania the previous autumn. His experience of Romania thus far had been strongly shaped by food – alternating experiences of plenty and shortage. His experience of rich tables, of widely available, inexpensive meat and bread – he claimed to have gained weight – were contrasted with reports of starvation and shortages in the newspaper accounts from home. Now he found himself tasked to join Sergeant Vieweg in searching the homes of the local peasants for food to be sent back to Germany.
Vehlburg arranged to have a portion of the requisition order translated into Romanian so that a local policeman might read it aloud to the terrified farmers. The order noted that Romanians were not permitted to retain more than 750 grams of corn per person per day. Everything above that was to be surrendered to the Vieweg, Vehlburg and the other Germans. All grain sacks and weapons were also to be surrendered, as well as all copper, tin, lead, and old iron and rubber. Furs and pelts were also to be turned over. Vieweg thoughtfully added peas, beans, lentils, onions, and any petroleum to the list. The local field kitchens needed additional provisions, he reasoned.
Outfitting themselves with ten ox carts requisitioned for the occasion, Vehlburg , Vieweg, several other Germans, and the Romanian policeman began searching Romanian homes for food and scrap metal. To encourage his charges, Vieweg first reminded his men that their families back in Germany were starving, and “now it was the enemy’s turn to go hungry.” Romanian families were gathered together so that they could hear
the requisition order – they paled visibly when death was threatened for those who did not surrender their weapons. After the order was read, the Germans began their search of the premises. The homes of Romanian peasants were hardly sprawling structures; nonetheless, the “commission” averaged only six homes daily – the result of Vieweg’s “German attention to detail,” thought Vehlburg. Thus, for example, Vieweg determined that a straw mattress was in reality a sack and therefore had to be turned over to the German army. Vehlburg , dispirited by the thoroughness and brutality of the requisitions, would equate the process to the straightforward plundering of Bulgarian soldiers.1
Vehlburg’s experience is a crucial one for this book. He stands at the center of a profoundly shifting system for the appropriation and distribution of Romanian products, a shifting relationship between Germans and other Europeans. Before the war, Germans had accessed Romanian resources, but mediated by the institutions of a global market system. As the war severed Germany’s access to those markets, Germans turned to alternative mechanisms to ensure that Germany could maintain a social system that had come, decades earlier, to depend on the labor and resources of others living beyond Germany’s frontiers.
While there is room to extend the exploration of the First World War to encompass Romania – the literature is not extensive2 – this is not simply an exercise in expanding the geographic range of our understanding of the Great War. What Germans did in, to, and with Romania, and what they hoped to do in the future, highlights how systems of international order shaped German interests and how they were pursued. When those systems collapsed in the First World War, German interests were transformed. The experience of Germany’s profound vulnerability to disruptions in international markets prompted German policymakers to embrace new understandings of legitimate policy aims as they sought to cope with the global reach of Anglo-American economic power through control over eastern Europe. This effort to construct an alternative international system in rivalry with Anglo-American hegemony
1 Vehlburg , Gerhard, Rumänische Etappe: Der Weltkrieg, wie ich ihn sah (Minden–Berlin–Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Köhler, 1930), 61–64.
2 Mayerhofer, Lisa, Zwischen Freund und Feind: Deutsche Besatzung in Rumänien 1916–1918 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang , 2010); Bornemann, Elke, Der Frieden von Bukarest 1918 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang , 1975); Torrey, Glenn, The Romanian Battlefront in World War I (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011); Torrey, Glenn, Romania andWorldWar I (Iasi: Center for Romanian Studies, 1998); Radulescu-Zoner, Serban, and Marinescu, Beatrice, Bucurestii in Anii Primului Razboi Mondial, 1914–1918 (Bucurestii: Editura Albatros, 1993); Boia, Lucian, ‘Germanofilii’; Elita Intelectuala Romaneasca in Anii Primului Razboi Mondial (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 2009); Racila, Emil, Romania in Primul Razboi Mondial 1916–1918 (Bucaresti: Ed. Ager Economistul, 2005); Mitrany, David, The Effect of the War in Southeastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936).
authorized (to German eyes) deep interventions in Romania (and other European states) both during and after the First World War. The outcome was not simply an effort to open markets to German capital, but rather a transformation in how Germans approached foreign policy. Vehlburg’s modest expedition was a herald of a prospective new order.
International Order
Germany’s engagement with Romania over the period roughly 1866 to 1918 was a multifaceted thing. Central to the argument presented here is the role of international order in shaping how Germans perceived their own interests. International order functions in this analysis in two ways. It describes the routinized pathways of interaction across political borders as well as a way of expressing the loose collection of ideas of what were the legitimate and expected forms of international behavior. It reflects both the actual relations and also how contemporaries commented on and thereby shaped what was considered possible, desirable, beneficial in international conduct, eventually firming into norms, ethics, even laws.
The idea of an actual structure of international relations is central to international relations theory as well as many works of history, most recently Adam Tooze’s, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, but also in the work of scholars ranging from Paul Schroeder to Marc Trachtenberg. In works such as these, order refers to the relations of power that define what is and is not possible for individual states; as Trachtenberg argues, “[t]he structure of power as a whole, both what it was at any particular moment and the way it was changing over time, was bound to come into play.” In this way, the system as a whole conditions the policies pursued by states.3 Similarly, an international economic order shapes how money, goods, and services flow across international borders. One can easily point to several such orders in the twentieth century alone, ranging from a gold-standard free
3 Trachtenberg , Marc, The Craft of International History: A guide to method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 36; Tooze, Adam, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking , 2014); Schroeder Paul W., Systems, Stability and Statecraft; Essays on the International History of Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Martin, 2004). The foundational text for this perspective is Waltz, Kenneth N., Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). See also Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations, ed. Michael C. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For an IR treatment of the origins of the First World War, see the essays in The Outbreak of the First World War: Structure, Politics and Decision-Making. Levy, eds. Jack S. and John A. Vasquez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Christopher Clark’s argument also turns on ideas of an international order shaping the perceptions and actions of individual actors.
market era to Bretton Woods to the present system of floating currencies and regulated immigration.4
Such structures are inevitably abstract, invisible things. They take on shape as men and women imagine and write about them. In the collaborative process of description and definition, international order also becomes a normative order. Inevitably, any such vision of order turned on ideas about the nature of the state, the proper functions of the state, and the proper relation of the state to nonstate actors. Such ideas of legitimate order mediate between ideas and actions, giving a sense of what is thinkable or plausible or, perhaps, moral in any given situation.
This usage grows out of a number of recent works attempting to reimagine how we understand international law and international politics. Particularly noteworthy in this respect has been Martti Koskenniemi’s effort to break with structural, inward looking interpretations of international law. Koskenniemi emphasizes a “sense of historical motion and political, even personal, struggle.” He is interested less in a particular set of legal ideas than in the development of a “sensibility that connotes both ideas and practices but also involves broader aspects of political faith, image of self and society, as well as the structural constraints.” In the process, Koskenniemi embeds the development of international law in wider perspectives of politics, creating an analysis that is as much about legitimacy in politics as about law narrowly understood.5 Mark Mazower likewise seeks to explore the many competing visions articulated by westerners over the last 200 years for organizing and administering international relations. The emphasis is less the politics of Great Powers and much more the ways that groups and individuals imagined the proper organization of international politics.6 Koskenniemi and Mazower highlight the ways that order could be imagined at the international level, and the implications these had for international law and politics. For both writers, the normative visions sketched for international relations played substantial roles in formulating new institutions and new orders.
Central to understanding the nineteenth century liberal order was the distinction made between the state and its public actions and the
4 A short set of references would include Gilpin, Robert, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); James, Harold, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Eichengreen, Barry, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
5 Koskenniemi, Martti, Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2.
6 Mazower, Mark, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). See also Armitage, David, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
individual and his or her private enterprises. The liberal order enabled the simultaneous existence of a state system based on finite, territorial states with clear borders, and a transnational market that was in principle limitless. The tension between organizing people and space simultaneously around transnational markets and territorial nation-states emerged repeatedly in German discussions of international politics. In the absence of an organized discipline of political science or international relations theory, we can use the discursive fields of history, international law, and the political economy of Weltpolitik to understand the ways that these forms of order were understood to interact. Historians and international lawyers tended to construct an ideal image of international order that emphasized that politics and economics moved in separate spheres, a tradition that will be termed here Realpolitik. This was a selfconsciously European vision, one that could be imagined to apply only to certain western, “civilized” states. International lawyers understood the European international order to be structured around competing territorial states. These states were defined by their absolute sovereignty over a particular territory. If another could claim to administer or organize some element of the public life of that territory, a state’s claim to be a state was cast in doubt. Non-Europeans, by contrast, existed in a different legal and political realm, which left their control over their own territory subject to challenge by Europeans. In-between, around and throughout existed a civil, economic order that was intended to be as independent of the state as possible. Carl Schmitt would describe a nineteenth century habit of mind in which “the economic is situated as something essentially non-political, and the political as something essentially non-economic.”7 In this profoundly liberal vision, it was hoped that the European private citizen and his/her property might be protected from the depredations of states.
Perhaps the clearest representation of this type of legal imagination was the Hague Conventions on the Laws and Customs of War on Land. Over the course of the nineteenth century, European armies had moved away from wholesale looting and plunder as a means of either supplying or paying their armies.8 To rationalize the procurement of food, fuel, and housing, armies sought de facto cooperation with local civil authorities.
7 Schmitt, Carl, “Forms of Modern Imperialism in International Law,” Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt Geographies of the Nomos, ed. Stephen Legg (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 29. On separate legal treatment of European and nonEuropean worlds, see Schmitt, also Mazower, Governing the World.
8 Creveld, Martin van, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42–60; Best, Geoffrey, Humanity in Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 185–190.
This practical solution to a recurring problem – feeding hundreds of thousands of new and transient mouths – happened also to coincide with general principles guiding nineteenth century legal theory, limiting the unnecessary misery and wastage of war and the rights of private property. To this end, the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions set about limiting the nature of occupation. Occupation was defined as a temporary phenomenon, during which the occupying power should respect the prevailing legal and social systems. Local law was to remain in force – occupation authorities were required to enforce it – and requisitions were to be limited.9 The 1907 Convention explicitly states in Article 46 that private property must be “respected” and that “private property cannot be confiscated.”10 The general principle was to limit the impact of the occupation to the level necessary to maintain the occupation forces and uphold public order. As Jonathan Gumz has observed, “Occupation sought to protect European state sovereignty through treating the occupying power as a ‘trustee’ for the departed sovereign government . . . The occupier was bound to respect existing laws as long as they did not interfere with ‘military necessity’ and to, as much as possible, avoid transforming the country it occupied.”11 The Hague Conventions reflected the general legal imagination of nineteenth-century Europe. They assumed that war was an intrinsic part of the international system, and a supremely public undertaking. As such, European war could be hedged around with certain limits (outside Europe, this was not presumed to be the case).12 In this manner, the political was conceived of as separate from and superior to the interests of civil society. Once separated thus, it became logical to imagine that political rivalry might unfold with only tangential implications for civil society.
9 Hull, Isabel V., Absolute Destruction; Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 124–125.
10 “Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, Annex to the Convention,” in The Laws of War: A Comprehensive Collection of Primary Documents in International Laws Governing Armed Conflict, eds. Michael Reisman and Chris T. Antoniou (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 232–233. See also Bluntschli, Beuterecht, 5–11.
11 Gumz, Jonathan, “Norms of War and the Austro-Hungarian Encounter with Serbia, 1914–1918,” in Military Occupations in First World War Europe, ed. Sophie De Schaepdrijver (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 99. See also Hull, Isabel, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (Ithaca, NJ: Cornell University Press, 2014), 61–76; Best, Humanity in Warfare, 185–189; Dülffer, Jost, Regeln gegen den Krieg? Die Haager Friedenskonferenzen von 1899 und 1907 in der internationalen Politik (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein, 1978).
12 For the argument about the specifically European limits of war, see Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Schmitt, Carl, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006).
This Realpolitik presumption of the proper structure of international order comes into relief when contrasted with the developing norms of articulated by a school of writers we will call Weltpolitiker. The Weltpolitiker argued that far from keeping separate the threads of the state system and the transnational market, they had to be consciously entwined. The wellbeing of a modern, industrial society depended on its commercial links to the rest of the world. As Friedrich Naumann put it, “our grain lies on La Plata, our sheep in Australia, and our iron is mined in Sweden.”13 As a result, the prosperity and physical survival of the German people depended on state attention to the flow of money and resources across state boundaries. The transnational networks in which states and businesses were embedded could not be treated separately, as if commerce occupied a sphere wholly divided from politics. As Paul Rohrbach would argue, “all questions of foreign policy must be seen through the lens of the creation and retention of markets abroad.”14 Since the state served as a vehicle for the interests of society, it had to attend to those networks of supply and commerce. Thus politics had to focus on the private acts of commercial agents as well as the undertakings of states. As a consequence, Weltpolitik was less attuned to the hard claims of territorial sovereignty. They could imagine with Kurt Reizler that the development of modern industrial economies meant that populations could grow, securing food through export and trade rather than being forced to conquer new lands. Nations could now seek expansion Nebeneinander (next to one another), even Ineinander (in one another) rather than being condemned to the traditional Gegeneinander (against one another).15 This was a vision, as the name suggests, that made little distinction between geographic regions. The global markets that were assumed to guide politics did not differentiate sharply between Europe and the Global South, much as Naumann’s list implied.
The First World War was a profound crisis in both the established international order and norms of behavior. Writers like Adam Tooze, Jesse Kauffman, Isabel Hull, and Mark Mazower16 have emphasized
13 Naumann, Friedrich, Die wirtschaftlichen und politischen Folgen der BevölkerungsVermehrung (Berlin: Die Hilfe Verlag , 1903), 8.
14 Rohrbach, Paul, Deutschland unter den Weltvölker; Materialien zur auswärtigen Politik (Berlin: Buchverlag der ‘Hilfe’, 1903), 11–12.
15 Ruedorffer, J. J., Grunzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1915), 194–195. The first edition was published in 1914. Reizler published pseudonymously in light of his official position as Bethmann-Hollweg’s close aide. A lengthy note was added to the otherwise unaltered text in later editions to deal with the implications of the First World War
16 Hull, Scrap of Paper; Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
the impact that the war had perceptions of order and the need to reconstruct a different political order in Europe. In the telling of Tooze and Kauffman, the war profoundly upset the delicate balance of relations between the Great Powers, and German policymakers were animated by a deep concern with reconstructing a functional order. In the hands of moderates such as the Reichstag majority parties and General Beseler, this involved a search to find a modus vivendi between German power and security and the national ambitions of Poles and Russians. For men like General Ludendorff , however, that same crisis of order also authorized sweeping visions of German annexations and the refashioning of the European order to enable German dominion. The routinized structure of power, the ways that German and Russian relations had shaped so many other interactions, had been disrupted and had to be reconstructed. Order also refers to normative ideas of what should be. It is this sense that Isabel Hull invokes when she suggests that international law was central to what the western powers were fighting for. She argues that not simply a particular distribution of power was at stake – a weaker Germany, for example – but also a normative understanding of how states should act and relate to one another. Likewise, Mark Mazower’s treatment of the emergence of the League of Nations relies on shifting ideas of how the structure of international relations might be improved by creating a permanent body outside and in some sense above the states.
The crisis generated by the war extended well beyond the collapse of the balance between the European Great Powers, and the political order was not the only organizing international system that disintegrated into hostilities. Nicholas Lambert has recently demonstrated the remarkable ways in which the British government sought to operationalize the central position of the City of London in the global economy. The economic war waged by Great Britain used naval blockade, but also the basic institutions of commercial life – short-term debt, insurance, shipping, sometimes access to coal – as instruments to coerce neutrals into cooperating with British policy. This overt policy, which aimed at the destruction of the German economy and the creation of starvation among German civilians, was the public face of German shortages. It amounted to a novel use of private institutions to attack other civil institutions and thereby create coercive pressure on an enemy state. This tended to obscure in German discussions the other, perhaps more profound, causes of social
2013); Tooze, Adam, The Deluge; Mazower, Governing the World; Kauffman, Jesse, Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
crisis in German cities. The war created an immense demand for material purchased from abroad, but at the same time, it ensured that Germany had very little to sell abroad. Meanwhile, the capital assets that had once enabled Germany to balance its annual trade deficit were often either seized or forced into inactivity. The German economy during the war existed more or less permanently on the edge of a payments crisis, dependent on the willingness of neutrals to advance credit and the income from a handful of German enterprises – German oil companies in Romania were one until summer 1916. The consequence was an economy locked in an “economy of reciprocal shortage,” as Roger Chickering argued. Shortages in one area exacerbated shortages elsewhere. Starvation was only the most evocative form of this general problem.17
The blockade and other components of the economic war against Germany, accompanied by the other inescapable crises affecting the German position in the international economy, prompted a search for a new international order in international economics, much as it did in politics. Moreover, the prevailing German construction of order, the presumption that the contractual relationships between private individuals should in some measure be shielded from the actions of states even in wartime, suggested that British economic warfare was not simply dangerous but also transgressive. An order that both had manifestly failed and was presumed to have been systematically violated invited revision.
In this crisis, ideas that had circulated before the war but had had limited political impact were taken up and refashioned. For example, prewar efforts to organize a state petroleum monopoly in Germany had failed in the face of political opposition, but they anticipated wartime efforts to organize distribution and consumption. More sweepingly, Weltpolitik ideas about the proper relation between economics and politics were likewise explored in a radically new international context, one in which the market could not be relied on to provide Germans whatever they had the money to purchase.
A multitude of German writers struggled to assimilate the significance of the British economic war and the threat of its continuation into the
17 Lambert, Nicholas, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Chickering , Roger, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany; Freiburg 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Davis, Belinda, Home Fires Burning; Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Roerkohl, Anne, Hungerblokade und Heimatfront; die kommunale Lebensmittelversorgung un Westfalen während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag , 1991). See also Feldman, Gerald, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Hardach, Gerd, The First World War; 1914–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
postwar world. To their mind, these were far more radical challenges to the international system than the fate of Belgian civilians or the specific ways in which submarines were employed. German legal minds argued that a new international law would have to be fashioned that would take into account the ways that states could now make war through and on the systems sustaining civil life. This intellectual challenge was reflected in a number of interventions in German public life. Josef Kohler, the editor of Germany’s premier journal of international law, for example, began imagining a less rigid international law, one that turned on the natural right of states to defend themselves. More notably, he paid considerable attention to the ways that state sovereignty might be mitigated or relativized, universalizing examples drawn from the European colonial experience. State sovereignty was not really the foundation of the international political order, but rather was a repeated victim of the interests of the powerful. The center of any international policy system was instead the right of the strong to defend themselves from whatever threat by whatever means.18
Perhaps more intriguing was Rudolf Kjellen. Kjellen, a Swedish professor of politics, published widely in Germany during the First World War and is recognized as a crucial figure in the development of German geopolitics, particularly through his influence on Karl Haushofer. At several points, Kjellen referred to the war almost as an epistemological event: “War, like wine, speaks the truth.”19 The truth Kjellen detected was complicated. In essence, he saw the state as an “independent, supraindividual personality,” an organic whole. This personality possessed several attributes; most notably, it occupied a specific geographic space and possessed a specific group of people. Between these two attributes on a spectrum existed the economic policy of the state.20 From these elements, Kjellen asserted an encompassing theory of international politics. Political conflict was rooted in the relationship between space and population, he argued. As population expanded, the state too had to expand. It was a “mathematical” relationship. Since the state’s task
18 Kohler, Josef , and Fleischman, Max, “Zur Einführung ,” Zeitschrift für Völkerrecht, 9 (1916), 1–4; Kohler, “Das neue Völkerrecht,” ZfV, 5–10; Kohler, Josef , Grundlagen des Völkerrechts: Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, Zukunft (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1918).
19 Kjellen, Rudolf , Die politischen Probleme desWeltkrieges (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1916), 3; also Kjellen, Rudolf , Der Staat als Lebensform (Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag , 1917), 23–34. On influence of Kjellen, see Dorpalen, Andrew, The World of General Haushofer: Geopolitics in Action. (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1942); Murphy, David Thomas, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997).
20 Kjellen, Politischen Probleme, 3, 43; Kjellen, Lebensform, 23–24, 30, 35.
was to organize the necessities of life for its population, insufficient raw materials or markets were ultimately foreign policy issues. The solution was ultimately war and autarky. This preference for autarky made it simple for Kjellen to treat economic and political problems as functions of space and geography. The suspicion of international markets was clear, and explicitly tied to the experience of the war.21
These explorations of a new postwar world represented efforts to reimagine the foundations of economic and political order. In effect, they adapted some of the philosophic assumptions about the proper relationship between politics and economics developed before the war by the Weltpolitiker and turned them into policy guiding European policy. They authorized an extension of German power beyond its borders, so that it might address its own vulnerabilities to Anglo-American economic power by relativizing the sovereignty of east European peoples and states. These were faithfully reflected in the policy preferences of the German state.
The German experience of the First World War, and the political and intellectual response to the crisis of international order that it provoked, anticipated the later work of Carl Schmitt in intriguing ways. Evolving out of his critique of the League of Nations and the Monroe Doctrine, but also responding to the imperatives of Nazi policy, Schmitt developed a politico-legal theory of international relations that would mature into his postwar classic The Nomos of the Earth. Schmitt argued that for centuries, a European order had rested on a spatial division (indeed all order rested on the creation of spatial differentiation). Inside Europe, a legal order that limited, or “bracketed,” war had sustained a more humane order of limited conflict over limited aims. Outside Europe was a legally empty space that Europeans could violently appropriate and on which they could create new social orders. Ultimately, Schmitt argued, the one was dependent on the other, as limited war relied on wider, more violent fields outside Europe. As the spatial divisions declined, undercut by the rise of modern extra-European states, the transnational market, and the universal claims of particularly American policy, the bracketing of war inside Europe disintegrated. As a consequence, some new spatial order was required. For Schmitt, this was most reasonably the creation of new exclusive imperial zones modeled on the Monroe Doctrine. These zones would integrate regional economies under a dominant political power, aligning the boundaries of political power and market society a little more closely. For Germany, this meant a Grossraum in central
21 Kjellen, Lebensform, 154, 156, 161–166. For examples of Kjellen’s impulse to treat politics as an extension of geography, see his famed article on the three rivers of Central Europe, “Das Problem der drei Flüsse. Geopolitische Konturen,” Studien zur Weltkrise., München, 1917, 75–89; also the approach to geography in Politischen Probleme, 9–45.
and eastern Europe (perhaps all of continental Europe) that would be dominated by Germany and serve German interests. This would not be simply a reorganization of borders within the old system, but rather a new approach to politics that dispensed with state sovereignty as an organizing principle. In its stead would be myriad formal and informal ties of dependency subordinating weaker states to the strong. The disintegration of an established legal and spatial order, therefore, prompted a search for alternatives culminating not just in a new spatial ordering but also in new norms of international behavior.22 Schmitt’s analysis is offered here not to suggest that he was correct but rather to highlight a certain tradition of German perceptions of crisis in international order and the implications of that crisis. His argument can be seen as a particularly clearly articulated expression of a wider trend in German thinking in the early twentieth century, the culmination of ideas developed during the Great War.
Corollaries
If a wider international order did indeed shape German perceptions of and policy toward Romania, and if the First World War represented a deep crisis in the structure and legitimacy of the nineteenth century liberal order that reshaped German interaction with Romania, then a number of corollaries should follow.
The impact of international order should be visible in German policies toward Romania. Indeed, from the creation of the unified German state and the independent Romanian state in the mid-nineteenth century, international order played a large role shaping German interaction with Romania. Germany and Romania developed into nation-states at roughly the same moment. The year 1866 emerges as a particularly noteworthy one in this process, as it marks both the familiar emergence of a Prussian-dominated central Europe, but it is also the year that Romania selected a foreign, Hohenzollern prince to occupy the Romanian throne: Carol I. At the same time, as the Romanian elite made progress toward leaving the orbit of Ottoman rule and assuming a place in the
22 Schmitt, Carl, Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte (Berlin and Wien: Deutscher Rechtsverlag , 1939); Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth. See also Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt; Geographies of the nomos, ed. Stephen Legg (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Hull, Isabel, “Zwischen Konservatismus und Revolution: Carl Schmitts völkerrechtliche Schriften,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 26 (2012), 1–14; Minca, Claudio, and Rowan, Rory, “The Question of Space in Carl Schmitt,” Progress in Human Geography, 39:3) (2015), 268–289; Minca, Claudio, and Vaughn-Williams, Nick, “Carl Schmitt and the Concept of the Border,” Geopolitics, 17 (2012), 756–772.
European state system, it also sought to profit by integrating Romanian lands and peoples into an emerging European market society.
The ways in which Germany and Romania became entwined in broader systems of political and economic order did not merely structure how relations were conducted. Rather, those systems of order actively shaped perceptions of self-interest over time. So, for example, the German state initially sought to limit its interest in and engagement with Romania. Despite the fact that a Hohenzollern reigned over Romania, Bismarck emphasized to his representatives in Bucharest that Germany would do nothing for Romania or for Carol. During the Great Eastern Crisis, German policy toward Romania was governed entirely by German policy toward Russia and Austria-Hungary. One might say with some fairness that Germany actively sought not to have a Romanian policy. That changed. By 1883, Germany was allied with Romania. By the early 1900s, Romania was seeking German backing for a forward Romanian policy in Macedonia. By 1913, the German Emperor was fulminating against Austria-Hungary for endangering the alliance with Romania. German policy changed dramatically over the decades because of wider changes in the European political system, most notably the collapse of the relationship between Russia and Austria-Hungary and the emergence of two competing political blocs, with Russia on one side and Germany on the other.23 The emergence of blocs interacted with the politics of the Balkans to transform how German politicians perceived Romania.
23 For Romanian foreign policy generally, see Vesa, Vasile, Les Relations Politiques RoumanoFrancaises au Debut du XX Siecle (1900–1916) (Bucarest: Editura Academiei Republici Socialiste Romania, 1986); Cazan, Gheorghe Nicolae, and Radelscu-Zoner, Serban, Rumänien und der Dreibund, 1878–1914 (Bucharest: Editura Academii Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1983); Campus, Eliza, “L’activite diplomatique de la Roumanie entre les annees 1914 et 1918,” Revue Roumane d’Histoire, 7 (1968); Volkmer, Gerald, “Außenpolitische Orientierungsmuster Rumäniens im europäischen Kontexte, 1866–1918,” Die Hohenzollern Herrschaftsordnung im europäischen Kontext, eds. Edda BinderIljima, Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, and Gerald Vollmer (Köln: Böhlau Verlag , 2010). On Romania and the Great Eastern Crisis, see Anderson, M. S., The Eastern Crisis, 1774–1923 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966); Mendlicott, W. N. The Congress of Berlin and After: A Diplomatic History of the Near Eastern Settlement 1878–1880 (Edinburgh: Frank Cass & Co, 1963); Jelavich, Barbara, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian Nation State, 1821–1878 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Constantinescu, Nicholas, Romania on the European Stage 1875–1880: The Quest for National Sovereignty and Independence (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1998). For Germany and the Great Eastern Crisis, see Hillgruber, Andreas, Bismarcks Außenpolitik (Freiburg: Verlag Rombach, 1972); Rhode, Gotthold, “Der Berliner Kongress und Südosteuropa,” Bismarcks Aussenpolitik und der Berliner Kongress, ed. Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag , 1978); Winkler, Martin B., “Bismarcks Rumänienpolitik und die europäischen Großmächte 1878/79,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Bd. 2 (1954). Balkan politics before the July Crisis are covered in a number of places, but most notable in several respects are Clark, Christopher, The Sleepwalkers: How
Similarly, the German economic relationship with Romania was shaped by an emerging transnational market. German investment in Romania began not to exploit Romanian resources for the German market, but rather to build a railroad to help send Romanian grain largely to Great Britain. The Romanian landowning class had discovered that they could profit by converting land from pasturage to wheat cultivation. The grain could then be sent west. In this way, they participated in a profound transformation of western society. The flow of food into western Europe was a crucial precondition for the rapid urbanization of western and central European lands. Meanwhile, the diets of west Europeans became, gradually, more diverse, nutritious, and richer as western European farmers diversified into market gardening. In this way, Romanian farmers (and their counterparts in the United States, Russia, Canada, and elsewhere) played a crucial role in enabling industrialization, freeing up European labor for industrial work and, as Robert Fogel has shown, permitting longer hours of labor through increasing caloric intake.24 Similarly, growing western appetites for illumination and fuel created a market that Romanian landowners and German bankers could profitably exploit by drilling for petroleum. As a consequence, Romanians entered into commercial relationships with German, French, and Russian capital, and found themselves in competition for market
Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harpers Perennial, 2012); Williamson, Jr. Samuel R., Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Afflerbach, Holger, Der Dreibund; Europäische Großmacht- und Allianzpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag , 2002); Hitchens, Keith, Ion IC Bratianu (London: Haus Publishing , 2011); Leslie, John, “The Antecedents of AustriaHungary’s War Aims: Policies and Policy-Makers in Vienna and Budapest before and during 1914,” Wiener Beiträge zur Gecshichte der Neuzeit, 20 (1993). Somewhat older treatments include Lieven, D. C. B., Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983); Remak, Joachim, The Origins of World War I, 1871–1914 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967); Schroeder, Paul, “World War I as a Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak,” Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Hantsch, Hugo, Leopold Graf Berchtold; Grandseigneur und Staatsmann (Graz:Styria Verlag , 1963).
24 On the transformation of food markets and the significance of changing diets for western economic development, see Fogel, Robert William, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Teuteberg , Hans-Jürgen, “Zum Problemfeld Urbanisierung und Ernährung im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Durchbruch zum Massenkonsum; Lebensmittelmärkte und Lebensmittelqualität im Städtewachstum des Industriezeit, ed. Hans Jürgen Teuteberg (Münster: F. Coppenrath Verlag , 1987); Teuteberg , Hans J., Der Wandel der Nahrungsgewohnheiten unter dem Einfluß der Industrialisierung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972); Floud, Roderick, The People and the British Economy 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Collins, E. J. T., “Dietary Change and Cereal Consumption in Britain in the Nineteenth Century,” The Agricultural History Review, 23 (1975), 97–115. The various essays collected in The Cambridge World History of Food, ed. Ken Kiple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) are excellent as well.
share in western Europe against American oil interests.25 German capital engagement in Romania was animated by the existence of markets that eluded political boundaries.
The ways in which the German state and German capital approached Romania were conditioned by the structure of international order. But that is not to claim some overarching, homogeneous “logic” of capitalism. Indeed, local factors repeatedly shape the specific ways that systems develop. So, the specific structure of Romanian agriculture was deeply influenced by the existence of western markets for food and a vast infrastructure of global exchange. But just as crucial were the actions of the Romanian state to create the legal and commercial institutions ranging from the commercial legal codes to the leu that permitted integration with western market society. The local political dominance of Romanian landowners shaped labor relations as well as the structure of landowning. Similarly, Germans during the First World War experienced deep crises rooted in the disruption of global networks of supply, but the social consequences of those disruptions were experienced in the cities of German cities, exerting powerful political pressure on the German state, prompting German state action in the villages of Romania and eastern Europe. The effectiveness of German efforts to extract resources was in turn intimately connected to the strength of the administrative structures inherited by the occupation authorities. The global shaped the local, and the local informed the global.
If a crisis of international order shaped German interaction with Romania during the war and German ambitions for the period after the war, then prewar discursive traditions as well as prewar patterns of trade and capital investment could have only a limited impact on German policy during the war. Arguments that emphasize the significance of prewar structures of capital investment and trade (most notably Fritz Fischer) or discursive formations (Kristin Kopp, for example) suggest that a stability in German interests in and perceptions of East Europeans from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Fritz Fischer’s classic analysis, for example, suggested that the dynamics of German capitalism before the war pushed the German state to open Balkan markets to German trade and investment before the war. This effort led directly to the war
25 Pearton, Maurice, Oil and the Romanian State (London: Oxford University Press, 1971); Brack, Ulrich, Deutsche Erdölpolitik vor 1914: Eine Fallstudie zu den Problemen der Marktbeherrschung und Staatsintervention im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Diss. Phil Hamburg, 1977; Hasse, Friedrich, Die Erdöl-Interessen der Deutschen Bank und der Direction der Disconto-Gesellschaft in Rumänien (Berlin: Verlag für Fachliteratur GmbH, 1922); Pohl, Hans, “Die Steaua Româna und die Deutsche Bank (1903–1920),” Beiträge zu Wirtschafts- und Währungsfragen und zur Bankgeschichte, Band 24 (1989), 83–102.
and informed subsequent German war aims. Kristin Kopp, meanwhile, identifies the late nineteenth century as “the beginning of a period in which representations of the German ‘colonial East’ found their greatest density of occurrence and achieved their most powerful effect: by the mid-1920s, certain aspects of this colonial construction had become so widely circulated – and so widely accepted by the general population –that they created the foundation for a social consensus claiming Germany’s right to acquire additional state territory in the East.”26 For both Fischer and Kopp, despite all the differences in their methodologies, the prewar period can be seen as the beginning of a longer period that encompassed both the First World War and the Third Reich. By contrast, the argument advanced here emphasizes the discontinuities between German policy before and during the war.
In the case of Romania, we can clearly see the deep divide between prewar and wartime discourse. Before the war, Germans largely celebrated Romania as an example of progressive development. Germans gradually moved Romania from a paradigmatic example of the Orient to a liminal state between Orient and Occident and finally to a protoOccidental state, the “gateway” to the West in the words of one traveler. During the war, by contrast, Romania became a deeply problematic land with a staggeringly ignorant peasantry dominated by a feminized and decadent elite. The only hope seemed to reside in the innate good nature of Romanian peasants and a small cadre of conservative politicians.
But even economic interests, the foundation stones of Fritz Fischer’s analysis, demonstrate enormous differences. Before the war, the German state had eschewed opportunities to link diplomatic and trade policy and had done little to obstruct a possible sale of private German petroleum interests in Romania. Those oil interests, meanwhile, had operated within the framework of Romanian law intended to limit their influence. The German state had instead prioritized the political relationship anchored in its alliance with the Romanian state. During the war, by contrast the German state would seek a powerful and direct role for itself inside the Romanian economy, including a dominant position in an enormous German oil company that operated under German law, controls over Romanian transportation systems, and a lien on the Romanian financial system. Despite a continuous German interest in the Romanian economy, the purposes and means of securing German economic interests diverged enormously.
26 Kopp, Kristin, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 5.
The suggestion that German prewar interaction with its east cannot reliably predict German wartime policy does not mean that the First World War exists in some sort of time capsule, isolated from broader historical developments. As Timothy Snyder has recently suggested, the territorial borders of Hitler’s imperial imagination developed as a result of the experience of the First World War. In light of British power, Hitler argued, the only secure foundations for the German race and a German Empire could not be in Africa, but rather in Europe. Imperial expansion into European Russia would be modeled on the United States’ appropriation of Native American land. Snyder in effect believes that Hitler’s imperial imagination was fed not by prewar discursive formations about eastern Europeans, but rather by visions of the American frontier and by the experience of imperial conquest in the First World War and the crises of supply that so deeply affected the German home front.27
The relationship between the German policy in the First and Second World Wars is a fraught topic for historians. Some historians have posited a continuity in violence against civilians. Such an argument is suggested in the treatment of the Belgian atrocities in the first weeks of the war offered by John Horne and Alan Kramer. It is also a clear implication of Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction. Alan Kramer and Jonathan Grumz have argued that the ways that European conducted warfare began to change in dangerous ways in the early twentieth century, opening the way to much greater violence against civilians.28 Meanwhile, Vejas Liulevicius and Christian Westerhoff have argued that ways that the Third Reich perceived the east was in many respects an artifact of the experience of the First World War.
As Jesse Kauffman forcefully argues, however, there was a world of difference between German actions in the First World War and the Second World War. Kauffman notes that
. . . the Imperial German occupation of Poland was in no way comparable with the grotesque barbarity of the Nazis’. It is certainly true that the occupied population suffered numerous and serious hardships under the Germans during the First World War. However, these were primarily economic in nature, the wanton, unrestrained, and chaotic violence and murder that were the essence of the experience of occupation in Poland during the Second World War were largely absent. The differences, however, run deeper than this. The two occupations were
27 Snyder, Timothy, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 15–17
28 Horne, John, and Kramer, Alan, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Hull, Absolute Destruction; Kramer, Alan, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gumz, Resurrection and Collapse of Empire.
fundamentally different in both the political ends they wanted to achieve and the means employed to achieve them.29
The level of violence employed by the Imperial Army against civilians, its relative propensity for atrocity, was substantially lower than that of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. In Romania, there were several publically acknowledged executions and suggestions of other, less judicial killings of civilians. The scale of direct violence against civilians during the entire occupation, however, paled by comparison to one day at Oradour-sur-Glane, to say nothing about Nazi-occupied Poland or the Soviet Union. For Kauffman, this calls into question the continuities between Wilhelmine and Nazi expansion.
The German project in Romania during the First World War, however, suggests some alternative continuities with the Third Reich. One can see such continuities in the common efforts to use political and military power to limit food consumption in occupied territories in order to maximize supplies sent back to Germany, and the sometimes calamitous consequences for civilian populations (this should not be confused with the Hunger Plan, the Nazi effort to deliberately starve millions of Soviet citizens to death).30 This common project was not an expression of an identity between the regimes, but rather the manifestation of a common dilemma.
During the First World War, Germans began to develop a collection of ideas about Germany’s relation to British, French, and American power, and the ability of those states to mobilize labor and resources on a global scale. Those ideas grew into one of the most substantial alternatives to the world that we occupy today. The Germans in the First World War cobbled together a vision of order in which Germany’s neighbors would labor for the benefit of Germans in an effort to mimic the global success of Anglo-American capital. Various tools, ranging from German state-owned enterprises operating inside Romanian territory to manipulation of currencies would ensure a position in which German economic interests shaped the economic structure of Europe. The Second and Third Reichs both faced a common strategic dilemma rooted in the Anglo-Americans domination of global markets. The ways
29 Kauffman, Elusive Alliance, 13.
30 For Nazi food policies, see Collingham, Elizabeth, The Taste of War. World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin Books, 2013); Mazower, Mark, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Aly, Götz, Hitler’s Beneficiaries; Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Mazower, Mark, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
in which they moved to resolve that common problem bore hereditary similarities, if I may use the phrase, even though the Nazis embraced a level of violence and a racial ideology different from German policy in the First World War.
The solution to the problem of Anglo-American global market power for both regimes lay in the development of an imperial mission inside Europe. Imperialism here will emphasize the exercise of sovereignty, or elements of sovereignty, over other people. The fl at, homogeneous space that characterized prewar markets, in which goods and currency moved reasonably smoothly across political boundaries, seemed during the war to be an attribute of and vehicle for British power.31 German security appeared to require contouring that market space and using political and military tools to redirect flows to where Germany wanted. That is, political institutions would be used to reshape the market, using state influence inside other countries, control over currency values, the manipulation of debt to create a de facto mark zone, to guide private commercial transactions in prescribed directions. In this respect, the turn to east European empire should be seen as a local response to a global problem. In Romania, as in Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic states, Germans were to gain control over important levers of power to ensure not just political security, but also access to reliable markets. These ambitions could be glimpsed in German approaches to Ukraine and Russia as well, but German policy there had to be modulated with an eye toward political consequences of economic empire.
Germany’s new order would call into question earlier ideas about the sovereignty of European states, and introduce elements of control and exploitation practiced rather widely in the Global South. The distinction between the European order and the colonial world, so dear to the liberal of the nineteenth century, was effaced. German policy introduced forms of extraterritoriality common in the Ottoman Empire (and its successor states), as well as the insertion of financial controls and experts into responsible positions seen frequently in places ranging from Egypt to Nicaragua. Indeed, the extension of German controls over the economies of eastern and southeastern Europe during the war paralleled the extension of British controls inside its own empire during the war. For example, the monetary controls London placed on India to cope with the consequences of an overwhelmingly one-sided trade relationship had structural affinities to German currency manipulation in Romania,
31 For a discussion of the spatial politics of British market power, see Goswami, Mark, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
which reflected a common problem as well as a shared impulse to shift costs to dependent societies.32
The effort to construct an imperial position in eastern Europe began during the war itself. As we have seen, occupations were imagined before the war as temporary undertakings, during which the occupying power was charged with altering as little as possible. The prevailing legal regime enjoined armies to respect existing social and political arrangements until a peace treaty created a more permanent settlement. In this way, the basics of state sovereignty would be as little harmed by war as possible. The principle of exclusive state sovereignty over a specific territory could be rescued from the confusion of military defeat.
The occupation of Romania during the First World War did not honor that expectation. The occupation that followed Romania’s decision to enter the war was structured to “get out what can be gotten out” (a phrase that would be repeated with regard to German policy in Ukraine). This ambition shaped the approach to administration (including an aborted plan to change the administrative districts to follow the lines of railroads and rivers), labor policy, and financial policy, down to the level of changing the type of fuel used by Romanian locomotives.
It is perhaps useful to borrow an analytical tool from Ernst Fraenkel and refer to a sort of Dual State33 in the occupation of Romania. This is not to suggest that the occupation was identical to the Third Reich, but rather to suggest a relationship between the norms governing occupation and the German sense of existential danger embedded in the market. Much of the time, the Central Powers administered Romania in accordance with the expectations of international norms and law – the normative state Fraenkel termed it. At the same time, however, where the demands for extraction ran up against the demands of law, the Army freely dispensed with the constraints of law, effectively functioning as what Fraenkel termed the prerogative state. This second face of the occupation reorganized Romanian institutions to the benefit of the Central Powers. Germans exercised effective sovereignty for the benefit of themselves and their allies, and recognized only a grudging responsibility for the continuing physical existence of the indigenous population, but no responsibility for their welfare beyond that. This exercise of irresponsible power was not foreseen in the Hague Conventions that claimed to regulate occupation policy.
32 Tooze, The Deluge, 209–212.
33 Fraenkel, Ernst, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).
In light of the roots of this German turn to the east in the domestic consequences of a crisis of supply, it is perhaps unsurprising that the specific institutions of the occupation emerged first inside Germany itself. That is, the administrative structures elaborated for domination of eastern Europe during the war were not drawn from the colonial periphery. Nor were the controls placed on occupied territories foreseen by the German army. After all, the imposition of administrative controls to direct the flow of resources to the German home front violated the letter and spirit of prewar occupation norms and law. Rather, the experiments conducted inside the Reich itself on controlling and directing the market were exported to the occupied territories. There, structures like wholesale requisitions of crops, price controls, state controls over distribution, even Preisprüfungstellen, were redeployed among a subject population. The intrinsic illegitimacy of an occupation regime coupled with the “lovelessness” of enforcement made such institutions of market control far more intrusive and dangerous, more colonial, in the occupied east than inside Germany. The export of German administrative structures to occupied territories highlights the conceptual radicalism of the occupation of Romania. Far from acting as a trustee, the occupation was substituting many of its own administrative systems for those of its opponents. This inversion of the established norms of occupation suggests the colonial project that coexisted with a traditional occupation.
Vejas Liulevicius argues that the German occupation of Lithuania sought to prepare the land for settlement and annexation into Germany. The German occupation regime – OberOst – set up schools and a system of surveillance and control with an eye toward present control but also what was to come afterwards. Jesse Kauffman shows how the German occupation of Poland sought to create the institutions for a legitimate satellite state. Again, the purpose was not simply to ensure a cooperative Poland in the present war, but rather attention was paid to what sort of Poland would be desired after the war. In this case, a stable Poland that was content with increased domestic autonomy and willing to tolerate German control over its foreign and military policy, as well as close economic connections to Germany.
The Romanian occupation reflected a similar attention to the postwar world. Unlike Lithuania, there was little likelihood that Romania might be annexed to Germany (annexation to Austria-Hungary was another matter). Nor was Romania as crucial and immediate a problem for German security as was Poland. The postwar world that Germany imagined for Romania revolved then around the economic vulnerabilities revealed by the disintegration of the transnational market. Germany would require a
different relation between the political power of the territorial state and the material resources of the transnational market. Romania’s economy was to be reoriented away from the west and the global economy. Through controls placed directly in Romanian institutions, through debt, through currency manipulation, Germany worked to refashion postwar Romania into what the German army tried to make it during the war – a tributary province of the German economy. Romanian grain and petroleum would flow directly to Germany in the volume desired by the Germans. This represented a profound break with the prewar system, as Germans sought to actively reshape the international market rather than simply work through the market institutions constructed by the western states.
German aims for the postwar period aimed at establishing more lasting controls. In evaluating these relationships, we will be exploring the gray areas associated with informal empire. Coined by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in 1953, the concept of informal empire tries to capture the forms of influence and coercion, implicit or explicit, that can be exercised on weaker states and societies by their wealthier and more powerful counterparts. It explores the ways empires thrive on “harboring and building on territorial ambiguity, redefining legal categories of belonging and quasi-membership, and shifting the geographic and demographic zones of partially suspended rights,” as Ann Stoler puts it.34
Informal empire functions within the structures of the state system and of the market, utilizing the attraction of wealth and security as well as the coercive potential of markets and militaries. It can develop out of commercial dominance or be imposed by military power. In each case, it tends to foreclose options, to exercise power in the interests of outside powers as well. It functions to limit sovereignty, to disrupt the ability of the weaker state to administer its territory and people in the way that that state sees fit. The imperial power may even claim to employ discrete elements of the weaker state’s sovereign power for itself or claim a role in reshaping, reforming the subaltern society. At the same time, unlike formal empires, the imperial power does not claim to exercise full sovereign rights over another people or land. Informal empire exists in the interstices between the market and formal empire. So, for example, Middle Eastern oil concessions regularly exempted the concessionaries from local tax and employment laws, thereby limiting the sovereign rights of the host country. Or, the United States appointed American officials to oversee the financial operations of many Caribbean states.
34 Gallagher, John, and Robinson, Ronald, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review, 6:1 (1953), 1–15; Stoler, Ann Laura, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture, 18:1 (2006), 128.
Romania in the Long Nineteenth Century23
Stephen Gross has developed a useful means of grasping the phenomenon. Gross suggests a “matrix of power,” creating a grid organized by soft and hard power along one axis and formal and informal empire on the other. The effect of the grid is to suggest the differing qualities that characterize relationships based on differing tools. For Gross, informal empire is marked by the construction of cultural and economic hierarchies and depend on some mix of networks and incentives on one hand and threats and coercion on the other. As a consequence, a “power gradient” comes into existence, which the more powerful state can exploit. The successful exploitation of this power gradient, it must be emphasized, relies on a great deal more than simple coercive potential. In fact, it operates most effectively “where networks that spread information and build trust connect the more powerful with the less powerful country.” For this reason, the construction of an informal empire often parallels or piggybacks upon the institutions of the market.35
Gross demonstrates the ambiguity of the phenomenon. We can see German policymakers grasping for the tools to construct a postwar world that would ensure Germany a measure of economic security, tools that combined the use of capital, exclusive marketing arrangements, and control over crucial domestic Romanian institutions. In the background would be overwhelming German military power. They did not aspire to return Romania to the same measure of autonomy and sovereign authority enjoyed before 1914.
Romania in the Long Nineteenth Century
When the nineteenth century began, there was no Germany and no Romania. Romania occupied a peculiar position within the Ottoman Empire. Formally a tributary state, the sultan appointed the rulers of the two principalities that would constitute nineteenth-century Romania: Wallachia and Moldavia. A variety of institutions tied the economies of the principalities closely to the Ottoman state. The principalities were expected to send annual tribute payments, and the Empire possessed wide rights over certain types of products, particularly grain Perhaps more significantly, the sultan was able to secure enormous bribes
35 Gross, Stephen, Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8–12. On informal empire, see also Rosenberg , Emily S., Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1999); Gobat, Michel, Confronting the American Dream; Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Winn, Peter, “British Informal Empire in Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century,” Past & Present, 73 (1976), 100–126.
for appointing individuals as rulers of the two districts. The limited effectiveness of the Ottoman state kept the extraction of wealth within bounds, but they nonetheless tended to limit Romanian economic relations to exchanges with the Empire or more or less open smuggling across the border into Hungary.
Much of the nineteenth century was guided by the assertion of Romanian political independence. The weakening of Ottoman rule was accompanied first by growing Russian influence, manifested in the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) and the Organic Statutes (1831). The period of Russian dominance opened Romania to western markets and solidified the political control of the landed elites (bojars). The opening to the west had wide consequences. Romanian elites traveled west for education and returned wearing western clothes and advancing western ideas of political economy. They also returned committed to western national and constitutional ideas. These ideas inspired the brief effort to construct a united, liberal Romania in 1848, which in turn provoked Russian military intervention. The Romanian economy, meanwhile, swiftly adapted to the demands of a western market, and began producing wheat for export in rapidly increasing volume.
The period of Russian domination came to an abrupt end with the Crimean War (1853–1856). The Treaty of Paris left proto-Romania under titular Ottoman suzerainty, but also made Wallachia and Moldavia wards of the Concert of Europe collectively. Romanian elites used this comparative freedom to advance independence, electing a common Hospodar (prince), Alexander Cuza. Cuza’s domestic reforms proved divisive, and he was overthrown in 1862. After some hesitation, in 1866 a foreign prince was selected to rule in both Wallachia and Moldavia, Karl von Hohenzollen-Sigmaringen, who took the name Carol. After several terrifying years during the Great Eastern Crisis, Romania was granted formal independence in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin.
The creation of an independent Romanian state was in part a function of the self-assertion of the landed elites of Wallachia and Moldavia. They persistently sought to press their claims to represent a separate national group and to turn the historic districts of Wallachia and Moldavia into a united nation-state. Romania was also the creation of international politics, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the assertion of Russian power, and the anxieties Russian power created in the west. That constellation of international factors first detached the principalities from effective Ottoman rule, then from Russian domination with the Treaty of Paris, and then created the conditions for formal independence with the Treaty of Berlin.
Romania in the Long Nineteenth Century25
Romanian liberals constructed a state modeled on western constitutional norms, introduced the Code Civil, adopted the gold standard, and established a central bank. It was a westernized political system, but established with a population still widely pauperized, illiterate, and marginalized. The social divide between a deeply impoverished peasantry and a westernized and increasingly prosperous elite repeatedly challenged the regime, resulting in several peasant uprisings, most notably that of 1907, which swiftly became an anti-Semitic pogrom. That social tension also made Romania into a seedbed for early critiques of underdevelopment and the operations of western capitalism on the periphery.
Romanian nationalists, meanwhile, had come to perceive the greatest threat to their independence in the assertion of Russian power. The Russians had imposed an effective protectorate between 1829 and 1856. They had extracted territory from Romania in 1877, and threatened to reoccupy Romania in 1878 and 1879. Romanian fortifications faced Russia, and the enduring Romanian anxiety was a close relationship between Russia and Bulgaria. In this constellation, Germany and, to a lesser extent, Austria-Hungary, seemed the logical partners. Romanian efforts to build a relationship with Berlin, however, initially foundered on Bismarck’s determination to maintain links to both Russia and Austria-Hungary. Anxious not to antagonize either over what seemed to him peripheral issues, Bismarck spurned Romanian inquiries about improved relations. As Bismarck became anxious about continuing Russian hostility and the consequences of events in Bulgaria, Germany accepted an alliance with Romania in 1883 (formally Germany entered into an alliance between Romania and Austria-Hungary that was signed immediately before) aimed at defending the status quo from Russian adventurism.
For some time, this dual track of Romanian opening to the west and political alliance with Germany worked to good effect for Romania. Political security permitted the Romanian state to consolidate itself, without devoting a great deal of money or attention to national defense. The result was a land widely perceived by Germans as a westernizing land, a “land of the future.” German investment gradually increased, as German banks sought to exploit the comparative political stability and the resources of Romania to sell products across western Europe and the Mediterranean. In that context, Romanian elites became wealthy and compared themselves favorably to the smaller states to their south and west. Romanians began debating the degree to which they should seek to westernize further, or seek to preserve the aesthetic, cultural, and political traditions of Romania. Should Romania seek to be an industrial
state with a growing middle class? Or was it principally a peasant state, intimately connected to agriculture?
That model began to fray as the Balkan political order collapsed. The Balkan Wars (1912–1913) profoundly revised the balance of power within the Balkans, called Austria-Hungary’s future into question, and created growing suspicions among the great powers. Within that suddenly labile political structure, Romanians found that AustroHungarian guarantees were of limited value, and began to fear AustriaHungary’s increasing interest in Bulgaria to its south. Moreover, a Russia tied closely to France seemed less dangerous thirty years after the Treaty of Berlin than it had in the 1880s. When the war began, then, the international system that had tied Romania to Germany was already rapidly disintegrating.
