Introduction
On the 27th of July 1926 the League of Nations Secretariat received a telegram from a certain Professor Kyroff in Sofia. The telegram was briefly describing the recent shootings of 55 ethnic Bulgarian peasants by the Romanian military in the Romanian county of Silistra, in the region of South Dobruja. It concluded with the request of a League of Nations investigation into the case, short of which the “population, afraid and left without protection, would seek refuge to [neighboring] Bulgaria in a mass influx, which would complicate the internal situation”Footnote 1. Professor Kyroff, the president of the Bulgarian Union for the League of Nations, carried on his correspondence at length with the League of Nations on the issue of Bulgarian minorities in Romania.
Around one month later, on the 24th of August 1926, the Romanian Government extended the application of the state of siege on the territory of South Dobruja up to 30 kilometers from the border with Bulgaria. The state of siege was already a reality at the border with Bulgaria, but its extension increased the territory where fundamental rights were limited and the War Council of the 9th Division Infantry had increased authority over prosecuting and judging crimes. The legal situation continued in different variations throughout the interwar period, until finally the region of South Dobruja was returned to Bulgaria through the treaty of Craiova in 1940.
In the same year, the Bulgarian Union for the League of Nations published a booklet called “La tragedie de Staro-Selo (6 juillet 1926) (Sur le regime de la minorite bulgare dans le Dobrudja de Sud, sous la domination roumaine). The booklet starts with this quote:
The affair is taking on scandalous proportions, engaging Europe’s responsibility. The intervention of the League of Nations, which has a moral duty of guidance and is qualified to intervene, has been requested. May it act swiftly and decisively.
The extract is taken from Les Balkans et la Paix, a short monograph written in Reference Vandervelde1924 by a well-known Belgian socialist politician, Emile VanderveldeFootnote 2. The main body of the booklet itself is a rendition of the mass shooting of the ethnic Bulgarians on the 6th of July 1926, followed by an analysis of similar incidents reported in the area. The work presents the shooting as an intentional act of the Romanian military (36th Infantry Regiment supported by gendarmes), motivated by revenge against a previous attack carried out by four banditsFootnote 3 on the 3rd of July, in the village of Staro-Selo, in which the station chief and a militia member tasked with the defense of the village during night time were killedFootnote 4. The attackers managed to escape during the night. In the aftermath, the Romanian authorities rounded up approximatively fifty potential suspects, including many local peasants, in order to transfer them to the city of Silistra for further interrogation. On the 6th of July the suspects were tied up and escorted by gendarmes to the edge of a forest, where the soldiers of a company of the 36th Infantry Regiment shot them, killing them all.Footnote 5 Four days later, a mourning ceremony was held in Silistra. The mourning was, however, for the station chief of Staro-Selo, and was organized by a “chavine Romanian organization, […] composed only of KutsovlachsFootnote 6, or Romanians recently established in the village”. The ceremony was accompanied by discourses against the local Bulgarian population, “which was threatened with complete extermination, starting with the intellectuals” and a resolution which recommended the taking of hostages from “each village and city”, which would be then held responsible for the crimes of the komitadjis.Footnote 7 The brochure further accused the Romanian press of propagating calumnies about the Bulgarian minority, which, taken together with the event of Staro-Selo, was part of a larger system of “sowing terror amongst the aboriginal population, in order to constrain it to abandon in the hands of their new masters all their goods: their fields, their livestock, their pastures and their dwellings” (L’Union bulgare pour la Paix et pour la Société des Nations 1926, 5).
This incident could be considered as a peak of the ethnic tensions in the 1920’s South Dobruja. It has even been artistically rendered within a Romanian novel (Dumitriu Reference Dumitriu1963, 137) and, later on, motion picture (Pintilie Reference Pintilie1994). While it is uncertain how many of the accusations brought by Professor Kyroff and the Bulgarian Union for the League of Nations can be fully verified, it is clear that during this period and in this region many people were unlawfully tried, sentenced, or simply found their ends at the hands of the Romanian military, at times operating under state of siege conditions while consistently acting under a state of siege mentality.
This article will present how international law, Romanian constitutional structures of the interwar era and military thinking became intertwined in the 1920’s South Dobruja, creating a legal framework ripe with tension between the different institutional components. To achieve this goal, I will take into account the social context in which the legislation concerning the state of siege and the military measures were enacted and also the international connections relevant to the situation, as South Dobruja and, more generally, the Kingdom of Romania, were not isolated territories, hermetically closed, but parts in the larger European chessboard.
For this purpose, there are several questions that will guide my inquiry. First, was South Dobruja an outlier amongst the Romanian kingdom’s newly acquired territories, and if so, in which way? What was the nature of the perceived threat for which emergency measures had to be applied? In which way did the transfer of power from the civilian institutions to the military administration take place? Were the measures taken by the military in accord with the Constitution? If not, why? If yes, why was the Constitution so permissive? And finally, was there an endgame for the use of the state of siege and could that endgame be considered as nation-state building? In asking these questions, my aim is to clarify and identify the legal processes through which the Romanian state and nation continued to be “produced” in the interwar period. In this sense, the proposed article aims to deepen our understanding of how public narratives on ethnicity, nationality and citizen rights are moulded in specific historical conditions, at the interface between law, political discourse and military practice.
With regards to the terminology employed throughout the study, it is important to distinguish between the notion of “state-building” and that of “nation-building”, which are often confounded or chosen merely out of stylistical preference (Grotenhuis Reference Grotenhuis2016, 74). The two concepts have different genealogies. “Nation-building” as a term was popularized during the Cold War era by political scientists Karl Deutsch (Reference Deutsch1966) and Stein Rokkan (Eisenstadt and Rokkan Reference Eisenstadt and Rokkan1973), while “state-building” is a concept put forward by other thinkers such as Charles Tilly (Reference Tilly1992), Samuel Huntington (Reference Huntington1969) or Francis Fukuyama (Reference Fukuyama2004). Working explanations of the two concepts are provided by Grotenhuis (Reference Grotenhuis2016), who in turn is drawing on definitions provided by OECD and the World Bank. Thus, the World Bank defines state building as
the centrality of efforts to build state capacity and accountability, including strong attention to the most basic state administrative and delivery systems, complementing capacity investments with robust efforts to improve accountability, and balancing state capacity-building efforts with support for civil society and the private sector.
In turn, the OECD considers nation building as consisting of
[a]ctions undertaken, usually by national actors, to forge a sense of common nationhood, usually in order to overcome ethnic, sectarian or communal differences; usually to counter alternate sources of identity and loyalty; and usually to mobilise a population behind a parallel state-building project.
There are issues with both definitions, first of all because they are contemporaneus and thus do not completely correspond with what the interwar political elite thought of either of the two concepts. The prevailing theoretical framework of the period was dominated by the nation-state, an intellectual construction in which the state and its institutions are built in order to support the nation and its growth: thus, an inverse relationship than what is provided by the OECD definition.
The aim of this article is to focus on how the state of siege, as a legal-military institution, was used as a tool of nation-state building. As Juan J. Linz (Reference Linz1993) observed, nation building and state building partially overlap and are quite entangled in practice. Furthermore, according to Lemay-Hébert (Reference Lemay-Hébert2009), “it is impossible to conceive of statebuilding as a process separate from nation-building," because “all statebuilding policies have repercussions on socio-political cohesion, intentionally or not.” Harris Mylonas (Reference Mylonas, Chenoweth and Lawrence2010, 83), in turn, considers nation-building as “the process whereby ruling political elites attempt to make the political and the national units overlap”. Taking into considerations these studies, I will indicate when a particular measure or concept falls more or less clearly into one of the two categories; however, in the cases where both are relevant at the same time, the argument can be sufficiently and efficiently conveyed by using the umbrella term nation-state building. In this fashion, I will try to bring insights from both intellectual genealogies to the current analysis, as the Kingdom of Romania presented itself in the interwar as a nation-state and its government and public discourse reflected this status.
To answer the questions enumerated above, I will first present the background of Romania’s emergence as a modern nation-state. The watershed historical event in this regard is the unification of the historical provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859, when the assemblies of the two states “coincidentally” chose the same person, prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza, as their sovereign. The European concert of powers, faced with this development, done in the letter but not in the spirit of the Paris Treaty of 1856Footnote 8, begrudgingly accepted the “fait accompli” (Hitchins Reference Hitchins2014, 104). It might not be insignificant that the individual who was the living embodiment of the creation of the Romanian state also decided to create a law concerning the state of siege in 1864, which was to be used and reproduced and referenced for almost a century, either in spite of or in agreement with the changing constitutions (Popescu Reference Popescu1942, 30).
Fast forward to the end of the Great War. Romania had accomplished its national dream to incorporate most of the surrounding territories with a considerable ethnic Romanian presence. The main reason for which the political elites of the moment decided that Romania should enter WWI on the side of the Allied Powers was the goal of annexing Transylvania, a region with a sizable Romanian population. It corresponds with a certain “national ideal” much discussed in the intellectual and political circles. The level of the actual allegiance of the general Romanian population however probably varied depending on social class and personal interests. Glenn E. Torrey presents an atmosphere of euphoria in the cities, comparable to the “mass hysteria that gripped Berlin in August 1914” (Reference Torrey2011, 40), while Lucian Boia cautions about generalizing this sentiment, especially in the countryside (Reference Boia2014, 68). Perhaps the declaration of war itself and accompanying mobilization were the greatest propaganda methods through which this national ideal morphed from the dreams of the intellectual elites to a shared mythos. As 30% of the country’s male population went through mobilization and integration into the military (Torrey Reference Torrey2011, 14), a mass exposure to militaristic “national ideals” is very likely.
The long task of actually integrating the annexed territories began. It was no easy endeavor. One can just take a look at the massive production of new legislation (Duțu Reference Duțu2018, 38), or the feverish academic activity in the field of law (Iancu Reference Iancu2003, 133), and the difficulty of the undertaking becomes apparent. Indeed, some of the key characteristics of state building are represented by institutional building and legislative production (Grotenhuis Reference Grotenhuis2016, 80). These territories did not only have to transition from a different administration and legal system (be it Austrian, Hungarian or Russian), but also contained sizable ethnic minorities, at times unhappy with their new sovereign. However, the Romanian administration was spurred onwards by hopes of assimilation. Where hope failed, more drastic means were employed, to press the minorities to acquiesce to the homogenizing and assimilating intentions of the state (Korany and Struck Reference Korany, Struck, Livezeanu and von Klimo2017, 55).
One of their favored methods was to be the employment of the state of siege – the constitutional mechanism designed to facilitate the state’s response to a situation of crisis, through the transference of certain judicial and administrative powers to the military and the temporary limitation of the civilian population’s rights and liberties. The French-inspired late nineteenth century to mid twentieth century Romanian state of siege was a legal instrument contained, from a comparative point of view, in the greater legal family of emergency measures. A good historical analysis of the various national iterations of the phenomenon of extraordinary measures can be found in Clinton Rossiter’s classic treatise, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Reference Rossiter1948), where the state of siege is contrasted with the means of crisis government in the German Republic, French Republic, Great Britain and the United States. For an introduction into the French roots of the concept Reinach (Reference Reinach1885) is quite valuable. Within Romanian legal history, Grecul (Reference Grecul1928), Pantelimonescu (Reference Pantelimonescu1939) and Popescu (Reference Popescu1942) provide contemporary commentary of the theory and practice of the state of siege. The state of the science on interwar Romania is well represented by analyses by Cercel (Reference Cercel2013, Reference Cercel2021), Ghitulescu (Reference Ghițulescu2020, Reference Ghițulescu2021) and Pintilescu (Reference Pintilescu2018).
The Particularities of South Dobruja
Indeed, throughout the interwar period, the state of siege was an almost permanent phenomenon, especially within the newly acquired provinces. With regard to the difficulty of integration, each of the provinces had its own particularities. In terms of population and ethnicities, while the Romanians represented indeed the majority in Transylvania or Bukovina or Bessarabia (Boia Reference Boia2015, 44), South Dobruja stands as an outlier. If one takes a glance at an ethnic map of Romania from that period, and examines the various territories acquired in the twentieth century, most of them would appear to have a Romanian majority indeed. Except one: the land that was called South Dobruja, or New Dobruja, or the Quadrilateral (in original Romanian, Cadrilater).
One can take, for example, a map provided by the Romanian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, a participant in which some historians call “the battle of the maps”, in which each European country’s delegation made a case of how much territory they should receive from their rivals, arguments which were heavily supported by propagandistic ethnic maps (Athanasiu Reference Athanasiu1919). It is interesting to notice that no matter how much the Romanians may have exaggerated with this particular map, they still did not dare to claim a Romanian majority in South Dobruja (see also Anghel Reference Anghel2021).
It was not a particularly substantial piece of land, at least compared to the rest of the Kingdom. Only 76 855 square kilometers (Ungureanu Reference Ungureanu2020, 57), as opposed to the grand total of 295 641 square kilometers (Tudor Reference Tudor2005, 77). The reason for selecting this particular piece of territory for a study lies however not in its size, but rather in its specific circumstances.
South Dobruja became part of the Kingdom of Romania even before the Great War, as a result of Romania’s involvement in the second Balkan War (29 June 1913 – 10 August 1913). Thus, on the 10th of August 1913, the treaty of Bucharest was concluded, putting an end to Bulgaria’s ambition to become the dominant power of the Balkans. The treaty, and the following royal decree, incorporated the former Bulgarian region into Romania. Historically, it was not a familiar realm for Romanians. The pre–Balkan War Bulgarian census gives us an image of the proportions between the different ethnic groups. The Romanians were only 2,4% of the population, which, even accounting for possible Bulgarian bias in the census and subsequent immigration once South Dobruja became a proper part of Romania, is still much less, compared to the other territories that were to be acquired by the Romanian state. The majority of the population was split between Bulgarian ethnics (44,7%) and Turks (40,6%), while the Tatars were represented by 4,5% of the total (Boia Reference Boia2015, 28). As historically, the Black Sea coast had been controlled by the Ottoman Empire for many centuries, in the years right before the Quadrilateral’s integration into the Romanian state, the Bulgarian kingdom was also carrying out policies of “Bulgarizing” the province (Tușa Reference Tușa2018, 35), although perhaps not to the same level or intensity as the following “Romanianization” done after the Quadrilateral changed hands. Despite its initial foreignness, historian Florin Anghel (Reference Anghel, Basciani and Brăgea2025, 117) maintains that after the Great Union, the province became an instrument in the promotion of an “imperial idea”, together with means such as projects of personal union and other royal dynastic stratagems.
From a legal-administrative point of view, after the province moved under Romanian sovereignty, the process of assimilating the Quadrilateral and its population into the Romanian politico-legal structure started with the Law for the organization of New Dobruja of 1/14 April 1914, which was bringing into effect art. 3 of the Law of 13th of December of 1913 for the ratification of the Bucharest Peace Treaty (Tudor Reference Tudor2005, 89). The Law settled the general framework of the new provinces’ administration. It established the territorial organization – South Dobruja was to be composed of two counties, Durostor, with the county seat at Silistra, and Caliacra, next to the Black Sea, with the county seat at Bazargic. It also granted Romanian citizenship to the willing populace present on the territory of the province. With regards to the unwilling, article 4 of the law provided that the inhabitants of the mentioned counties will have the possibility to write a refusal declaration in the time period of one year starting from the enactment of the law, after which they had another two years to sell their rural real estate to the Romanian state, an obligation enforceable by the courts. This fell into a greater framework of exceptional property regulation proposed by the law, where, despite indicating the application of Romanian general real estate legislation to the Quadrilateral, the state had a right of preemption for any rural real estate disposal. In other words, the State had priority in acquiring any such property that was being sold in the province (Tudor Reference Tudor2005, 95).
Although the Quadrilateral’s population was to enjoy the similar rights, be held to the same obligations and generally benefit from the same laws as the rest of the country, the exceptions were obvious. For example, the two representatives of the government (the prefects) in those territories received increased attributions compared to their counterparts in the rest of the kingdom, being endowed with the attribution to control all the public services in the county, with the exception of justice and military affairs (Tudor Reference Tudor2005, 92). Thus, more power was given to the central administration in Bucharest, to the detriment of the local authorities. Exemplary for this issue is the fact that the mayors of the urban communes were not elected, but appointed by the king through royal decree, at the prefect’s proposal, while the mayors of the rural communes were appointed directly by the prefects (Tudor Reference Tudor2005, 92).
Concessions were made to the ethnic characteristics of the newly integrated province, though. A particularly interesting example was contained in article 77 of the law, which established four special Islamic law tribunals for family affairs and successions, as the powers of the time acknowledged the very visible fact that a large part of the population of the Quadrilateral was Muslim (Tudor Reference Tudor2005, 94).
Taking into consideration these aspects that departed from the norm, it is not surprising that a contemporary legal scholar working in Constanța, the biggest city in “Greater Dobruja” even wrote about the Law for the organization of New Dobruja that “[it] appears, with regards to the national legal system, as a bundle of exceptional norms” dedicated to “embracing” this “new world” and “bringing it closer” to the rest of the country (Stoicescu Reference Stoicescu1938, 169). While the exceptionality of the regime is a more or less objective statement, which concerns the application of the state of siege as well, the other terms are telling with regards to the discourse that circulated in the public space during the period. This is consistent with Ana-Teodora Kurkina’s (Reference Kurkina2013) analysis of the Romanian propaganda concerning the province. In her work, she envisaged the process of nation-building as a “propagandistic construct, generated on the basis of already given natural characteristics and attempting to fill the unclear gaps in any arguable case.” While I do not agree with the author’s naturalist-organic view of the nation, as opposed to the “artificial invention” approach assigned to Anderson (Reference Anderson2016) and Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1992), Kurkina is correct in noticing the important role of propaganda in nation building (Reference Kurkina2013, 20). This particular example shows how propaganda permeated the legal writing of the epoch. It will not be the only one, as I will continue to show in the article.
In any circumstance, what seemed as a promising debut for nation-state building through annexation became a much more complicated situation with Romania and Bulgaria entering the Great War on opposite sides. In the end the military strategy for the Southern border failed and South Dobruja was occupied by the Bulgarians, a state of affairs which was to last until the end of the war, when the region was grudgingly returned to the Romanians via the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine of 1919 and the Romanian administration was reinstated.
The situation changed somewhat after 1919, as a result of the rearrangement of the European map and general power dynamics. One important point of concern during the interwar would be the colonization efforts led by the Romanian government, especially with regards to the resettlement of Aromanian ethnics from the Balkan peninsula to the Quadrilateral. The idea first entered the public space in 1913, when G. A. Dabija, the Romanian military attache in Sofia, proposed the deportation of the Bulgarians from South Dobruja and their replacement with Romanian ethnics from the motherland, from Bulgaria and Macedonia (Aromanians) (Minov Reference Minov, Boyar and Fleet2023, 62). The proposal remained in the public debate and finally caught a less xenophobic form in 1925, the year which marked the beginning of the colonization of the Aromanians to South Dobruja. For the colonization to succeed the legal framework had to be adapted. Thus, on the 22 of April 1924, a Law for the modification of some provisions of chapter VI of the Law of the 1st of April 1914 regarding the organization of New Dobruja established that, while “mulk” property (private property) would remain untouched, the holders of “mirie” property (formerly state owned), would have to hand over one third of the agricultural land and forests to the Romanian state, with the exception of properties smaller than 5 hectares. This land, according to the same law, would be destined to the colonization project (Minov Reference Minov, Boyar and Fleet2023, 65). The law was heavily criticized by the Bulgarian ethnics in the region, who accused it of referencing old Ottoman property rights, without taking into consideration the fact that the Bulgarian laws which intervened in the meantime modified the legal status of property (Răzvan Reference Răzvan2009, 72).
In consequence, in September 1925, Greece permitted the emigration of 1500 Aromanian families, and the first ships started to bring them to the port of Constanța (Minov Reference Minov, Boyar and Fleet2023, 66). Even if the deportation or exile of the former inhabitants was not considered appropriate anymore, the measure was still continously contested by the inhabitants of South Dobruja. As an example, in 1925, 36 residents from Durostor wrote a memorandum in which they rejected the colonization, considering that “the Romanians from Macedonia, born and bred in the south of the Balkans, have Balkan traditions and do not know the Romanian language. They have a different character from the Romanians from Dobruja, and they cannot develop a culture or activities which would correspond with the Romanian national interests” (Minov Reference Minov, Boyar and Fleet2023, 64).
This process added another layer of complexity and contentiousness to the situation in the province. Roland Clark (Reference Clark2015) observed how the Aromanian migrants were not as privileged as the Romanians from the “Old Kingdom”, and their experience of deterritorialization and reterritorialization led to the development of an extreme form of nationalism, and later, fascism, amongst their ranks. Minov (Reference Minov, Boyar and Fleet2023) demonstrates how the insertion of a new ethnic group in the region led to explosive results, where the colonists were threatened and as a response, they requested to bear weapons (and received the permission) and band together against the threats (72). Thus, Minov aptly names them “keepers of the border”.
The colonization, accompanied by its inherent legal and administrative measures, can be considered as both a nation-building and a state-building mechanism: nation-building, because of the diffusion and encroachment of Romanian culture, language and values as brought by the colonists; state-building, because of the reliance of the Romanian government on these very colonists to support the administrative apparatus of the state, which in turn produced legal norms and administrative measures in a feedback loop, destined to integrate the province within the state, as part of the larger nation-state project. The colonization however provoked the ire of the preexisting inhabitants and became a public reason for organized violence on the part of irredentist, independentist or communist organizations, whose members were known as komitadji in the epoch. The increase of violence in turn weakened the nation-state building project as a civilian enterprise and accentuated the role of the military, especially in the areas where the state of siege was declared. Thus, from the toolkit of nation-state building, the administrative capacity of the military became perhaps the most important element, with its trademark symbol being the state of siege.
Post-WW1 International Law and Minority Rights: The Superstructure and its Integration
The Treaty of Neuilly sur Seine was part of a larger endeavor of legal remapping of the post-war international order, with the Versailles Peace Treaty as its vanguard and symbolic center. The Versailles Treaty was heavily inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, without being a faithful copy to its idealism, but rather a compromise between the different interests of the belligerents. It provided a general model for the other treaties, and a comprehensive framework for the post war international society, by including in its provisions the Covenant of the League of Nations and establishing the International Labour Organization. Furthermore, the Paris Peace Conference, which was dedicated to the negotiation and drafting of the treaty, ended up being a common hub for most of the other treaties (Schorkopf Reference Schorkopf, Peters and Wolfrum2010, para. 28). Of great importance to Romania was the Treaty of St-Germain, concluded with Austria, the Treaty of Trianon, with Hungary, and of course, Neuilly-sur-Seine, with Bulgaria.
The peace treaties could thus be considered as being part of a system, with similar drafting techniques and central principles, amongst which was the principle of minority protection, as the Covenant of the League of Nations itself lacked express references to the issue (Meijknecht Reference Meijknecht, Peters and Wolfrum2010, para. 2). The closest provision that can be found in this regard, art. 23 of the League of Nations Covenant stated that:
Subject to and in accordance with the provisions of international conventions existing or hereafter to be agreed upon, the Members of the League: […] (b) undertake to secure just treatment of the native inhabitants of territories under their control.
This provision was however mostly intended to address colonial issues and was in no way sufficient for the numerous challenges encountered by European minorities, or for that matter, for the actual native populations under colonial rule.
The issue of European ethnic minorities was to be handled not by the Covenant, but with two different types of legal instruments. Firstly, the regular peace treaties with the defeated Powers, contained provistions with regards to the minorities present on their territories. Secondly, and more important to the scope of this article, specialized minority protection treaties were to be concluded, concerning the minoritarian populations found on the territories of victorious Central and Eastern European Countries. Thirdly, unilateral declarations in front of the League of Nations Council were also made by some states for the purposes of protecting minorities on their territory (Spiliopoulou Åkermark Reference Spiliopoulou Åkermark1997, 105; Meijknecht Reference Meijknecht, Peters and Wolfrum2010, para 10 and following).
Thus, South Dobruja was returned to Romania through the Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers and Bulgaria, signed at Neuilly-sur-Seine on the 27th of November 1919, but the international act directly responsible for the well being of the ethnic minorities in the region, now found under Romanian sovereignty, was the Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Romania, of 9 December 1919, henceforth called the Romanian Minorities Treaty, which entered into force on the 4th of September 1920 (Cercel Reference Cercel2023, 167).
Romania, through its representative at the Paris Peace Conference, Ion I. C. Bratianu, actively led the opposition against the establishment of the minority protection system in this iteration, invoking the inherent inequality of obligations assumed by smaller allies of the victorious Powers, but not by the Powers themselves, and decrying the immixtion of the Big Four in Romanian sovereignty and internal affairs (Hitchins Reference Hitchins2011, 107; Spector Reference Spector1996, 176). Woodrow Wilson replied that, considering the great gains in territory Romania had achieved as a result of the war, the Allies needed stability guarantees, and the adhesion to the minority protection system was one of them (Meijknecht Reference Meijknecht, Peters and Wolfrum2010, para. 7). In practice, the League of Nations minority protection system was to fail for a number of reasons, amongst them the inequality in which it had been conceived (Nijman Reference Nijman, Fassbender and Peter2012, 114) yet, for a number of years and a number of occasions, it proved useful (Hilpold Reference Hilpold2013, 27).
The Romanian Minorities Treaty contained 17 articles and was molded in close resemblance to the Polish Minorities Treaty of 28 June 1919 (Riga and Kennedy Reference Riga and Kennedy2009, 3). The treaty contains two chapters, of which only the first one is of direct relevance to the minority protection system, the second one containing provisions related to tariffs and commerce. The first article of the treaty delineates the relationship between itself and the Romanian national legal system. Thus, “Roumania undertakes that the stipulations contained in Articles 2 to 8 of this Chapter shall be recognised as fundamental laws, and that no law, regulation or official action shall conflict or interfere with these stipulations, nor shall any law, regulation or official action prevail over them”. A contemporary reader might immediately think about the current debates about the primacy of international law, and specifically international human rights law, over the domestic legal systems. They would not be far from the truth.
The legal content of the treaty concerns the protection of life and liberty of all the inhabitants of the country, without distinction of origin, nationality, language, race, or religion; free exercise of creed, religion or belief; acquisition of Romanian nationality; equality in front of the law; enjoyment of civil and political rights; free exercise of different languages; facilities given to non-Romanian speakers in front of the courts; right to establish institutions such as schools and associations; the duty of the Romanian government to provide schooling in the mother language of minorities with a significant presence in a region; equitable provision of funding for educational, religious and charitable purposes. The last few articles of the first chapter deal with defining the provisions of the treaty as international obligations placed under the League of Nations guarantee and granting the members of the Council the right “to bring to the attention of the Council any infraction, or any danger of infraction, of any of these obligations”. The Council itself, presented with such a breach, had a certain largesse in its potential actions, the treaty text being vague enough as to be extensively interpreted. In its actual words, “the Council may thereupon take such action and give such direction as it may deem proper and effective in the circumstances”.
The different provisions in the Romanian Minority Treaty acted as constraints to the Romanian nation-state building process. Harris Mylonas’s work is particularly relevant with regards to this aspect, as he argues that “a state’s choices of nation-building policies toward non-core groups are driven by its foreign policy goals and interstate relations” (Reference Mylonas, Chenoweth and Lawrence2010, 86). Mylonas distinguishes between revisionist states and status-quo states, the latter category being which the Kingdom of Romania belonged to after World War I. As with the minorities, or, in the words of Mylonas, “non-core groups”, there are three possible paths: exclusion, assimilation, and accommodation, with the status-quo state being more “likely to assimilate a non-core group if the state favors the status quo and the non-core group is supported by a rival state” (Reference Mylonas, Chenoweth and Lawrence2010, 86). In the case of Romania, this would mean the pursuance of “educational, cultural, occupational, marital, demographic, political, and other state policies aimed at getting the non-core group to adopt the core group’s culture and way of life” (Mylonas Reference Mylonas, Chenoweth and Lawrence2010, 85).
The drafters of the next Romanian constitution, which was to arrive in 1923, integrated the main points of the non-discrimination provisions contained by the Minorities Treaty within the text of the Constitution. This constitution was widely regarded as progressive and democratic for that period and it came as both a practical response and symbolic statement. After the Great War, Romania almost doubled in size and population, having gained Transylvania and Banat from Hungary, Bukovina from Austria and Bessarabia, together with numerous ethnic minorities – Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians and Jews. Thus, the non-Romanian population jumped to almost 30% of the total population (Georgescu Reference Georgescu1991, 189). While the shared national dream – to acquire all the Romanian-inhabited territories in the vicinity – was mostly accomplished, the political establishment faced a more complex reality. A reality where various ethnic groups and even Romanians (as, despite speaking the same language, the Romanians from Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina or Bessarabia were accustomed to totally different legal frameworks) had to be integrated into the legal and cultural system of the country. Furthermore, the government was forbidden to engage in more questionable practices, due to the minority protection system established by the League of Nations.
Thus, at least as a symbolic statement, the 1923 Constitution was explicit. Article 5 proclaimed that “Romanians, without ethnic, linguistic or religious distinctions, will enjoy the freedom of conscience, freedom of education, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and all other freedoms and rights established through laws.”
Once again, in article 7, it provided that “different religious beliefs, confessions, ethnic origin and language do not constitute in Romania a hindrance for the acquisition and exercise of civil and political rights.” And again, in art. 8: “There will not be allowed in the State any difference [of treatment] due to birth or social class.” All Romanians, without distinctions of ethnicity, language or religion are equal before the law and obliged without distinction to the public duties and taxes”. These provisions had a dual purpose: create the image of a modern state, image to be delivered both to the domestic public and the international society, and avoid any detrimental actions from the part of the League. However, this very constitution, that promoted equality and non-discrimination, contained its own workaround – the provisions regarding state of siege.
The State of Siege as Constitutional Loophole
Enter article 128 of the 1923 Constitution. It stated that “[t]he present Constitution cannot be suspended, either fully or partially. In the case of State danger, partial or general state of siege can be instituted through a law.” During the parliamentary debates one important question was asked by the Romanian deputy, historian and future prime-minister Nicolae Iorga – what does the expression “state danger” actually mean? The response of the rapporteur was: “a danger that affects public order or the existence of the State”. Nicolae Iorga retorted: “then write public order or war, don’t write state danger”. In the end, art. 128 kept its reference to the idea of state danger (Lascarov-Moldovanu and Ionescu Reference Lascarov-Moldovanu and Ionescu1925, 444).
In Lascarov-Moldovanu and Ionescu’s (Reference Lascarov-Moldovanu and Ionescu1925) academic commentaries of the 1923 Constitution, this provision was interpreted as referring to internal troubles, strikes, enemy occupation or civil war. The state of siege had the purpose of limiting public and private liberties, and “concentrating the public authority in the hands of the military”. In this case, the existence of the state was considered as more important than the full exercise of the citizen’s rights and freedoms. Referencing the previous Constitution of 1866 and the 1864 Law regarding the state of siege, the authors interpret the effect of such a law as a necessary sacrifice of the individual for the purpose of the common good. Furthermore, the commenters ask an important question: whether the state of siege can be invoked by another public authority, such as the government, if the Parliament is incapable of functioning because of the state of the country, as it happened during the Great War. They inquire whether a certain “right of necessity” might exist, where for the very purpose of preserving its existence, the state will surmount “the rigid texts and forms of the Constitution and laws”. The conclusion is quite philosophical: in this scenario the State would find itself “beyond the law and not in its breach”. However, even beyond the law, the acting authority working for the preservation of the State would have to respect certain criteria of necessity and transience. The normative nature of these criteria is not detailed, but they would be linked with the idea of “the society’s primordial right to life” or to a so-called raison d’etat. The commentators propose that the judicial system should measure the legitimacy of such measures and decide based on the criteria mentioned before whether the public authority’s actions are permissible or not (see also Stambulescu Reference Stambulescu1924, 50).
The Permanent War Council’s composition and functioning was regulated by the Code of Military Justice of 1873, which was still in force during the 1920’s, albeit with several amendments. The Code was inspired, some authors daresay copied, from the French Military Justice Code of 1857 (Corciu Reference Corciu2021, 22). According to the Code the Permanent War Councils were composed of one colonel or lieutenant-colonel as president, two majors and two captains (art. 3). There was no requirement for the members of the War Council to have previous experience in the legal field, either practical or theoretical. Furthermore, the role of prosecution was entrusted to the so-called “royal commissioners”, who were also designated from the available higher officer corps (art. 5, art. 7) and were selected by a War Ministry decision, from a list drafted by the commanding general of the territorial circumscription. The royal commissioners, while being in charge of directing the prosecution during a trial, did not have, however, the regular prosecutor’s right to initiate an investigation. This was the sole attribute of the commanding general, who was also in charge of selecting the president of the War Council and the judges (art. 5, art. 8). According to art. 104, the defense is ensured by giving the right to the accused to pick freely from any military officers (active or retired) or lawyers. Already, from a contemporary point of view, it seems that the formation of the War Council does not seem to respect the present principles of a fair trial, as the commanding general’s role in the selection of the council’s members appears to be excessive.
With regards to the role of the War Councils under the state of siege during the interwar period, the 24 August 1926 State of Siege Law seems to make an exception from the regular procedure, which was a strange mixture between the general provisions within the code and the special provisions found in Additional Title II regarding the organization and functioning of military justice in time of mobilization and war, which was introduced through the Law of 28 December 1916, as a result of Romania’s entrance into the Great War. According to Additional Title II, Courts Martial would have been constituted, yet the State of Siege Law, as the lex specialis, instead makes express reference to War Councils.
The Object of State Danger between Criminality and Propaganda: Who were the komitadjis?
After the treaty of Neuilly, The Bulgarian government, deeply wounded in its ambitions, monitored the region closely, and for the very least indirectly supported revolutionary and irredentist activities, allowing the border between Bulgaria and Romania to be sufficiently porous for bandit raids, organized irredentist propaganda and other subversive activities (Iordachi Reference Iordachi, Daskalov, Mishkova, Marinov and Vezenkov2017, 381; Kurkina Reference Kurkina2016, 58; Niculae Reference Niculae2023).
The actual extent of organized criminal activities in the Quadrilateral is difficult to measure, as both the Romanian and the Bulgarian contemporary sources were heavily biased in their analyses (Njagulov Reference Njagulov2022, 170). The ruthless ethnic Bulgarian terrorists and spies described by the Romanian newspapers were, for the Bulgarian media, merely freedom fighters rising against the unjust Romanian oppression and discrimination or regular bandits whose actions had no political significance (Kurkina Reference Kurkina2013, 99). Specific to the organized crime landscape of South Dobruja were the gangs of “committee men”. Rather than designate them in more general terms, such as bandits, thieves, burglars or highwaymen, the Romanian authorities and press favored the former appellant (in Romanian “comitagii”), laden with political significance.
According to the sixth edition of the Universal Dictionary of the Romanian Language (Șăineanu Reference Șăineanu1929), the “committee men” were “gangs of Bulgarian revolutionaries from Macedonia”. Fast track 10 years, and the August Scriban’s Romanian Language Dictionary of Reference Scriban1939 rather defines a committee man as a “Bulgarian terrorist”, while indicating the etymology of the word to be taken from the Bulgarian language”komitağiĭa” – “comrade of a revolutionary committee”. This axiological shift of the term’s meaning is relevant not only to Romanian history or the history of Romanian-Bulgarian diplomatic relations. Its web of significance is linked to the modern history of the Balkan peninsula. It has to do with the fuzzy perception of organized criminal and/or revolutionary groups in the Balkans during the last century of Ottoman Empire administration and sovereignty. As a general statement, the premise of the issue is that “[m]odern Balkan national traditions have regarded armed groups of outlaws as folk heroes in nineteenth and early twentieth century struggles against the Ottoman Empire for independence”, as Frusetta and Papaioannou (Reference Frusetta, Papaioanno, Lampe and Iordachi2020, 151) put it in their treatment of irregular violence in the historiography of the Balkans.
However, after the various states in the region gained independence from the Ottoman Empire, the perception of the activities of organized paramilitary or guerilla groups changed (Todorova Reference Todorova2009, 132; see also Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm1981, 70). Since the liberated countries were now vying for power and territory with each other, rather than having the Ottoman Empire as the sole common enemy, the paradigm had shifted. Supposing komitadjis were just bandits, glorified because of their targeting of the Ottoman administration, if they planned to continue with their business, then by necessity their new deeds would weaken the newly formed states’ administrations. Thus, generally speaking, it was favorable to the governments of the Balkan countries to maintain an ambivalent relationship with these groups, neither openly supportive nor fully disproving of them. A good cooperation with such elements could drive them towards their geopolitical rivals rather than disturb the interior of their own country. If indeed the komitadjis were rather mainly politically driven, then the previous statement is a fortiori more reasonable. The different accounts of komitadji activities seem to be divided amongst the two lines, giving the impression of only a loosely knit together category, with rather different purposes varying amongst the multiple groups within the genus.
One particular article on the komitadji issue, written by Valerian Petrescu and published in Reference Petrescu1926 in the newspaper “Neamul Românesc” (The Romanian People), whose director was Nicolae Iorga, a prominent nationalist Romanian historian and politician, provides a standard example of their characterization in the Romanian press of the decade. The article starts by describing them as “exceptional criminals” with “a special psychology, whose pathological origins are inherited from those cosmopolitan people of the Balkans, peoples whose ethnography is completely obscure”. The article further proceeded to explain that, if some of the komitadjis were Romanian citizens, that was only because some of them were proclaimed so by the law for the organization of New Dobruja, and others were Romanian deserters from the army. The vast majority were considered to be Bulgarian, Turkish, Tatar or Gagauz.
Furthermore, the article described their “monstruous” offenses and crimes as being separated into three categories: banditry, attacks against public authorities and punishments against locals that gave away their identity. The author further accused them of mutilating their victims by cutting off their ears (and sometimes other members) and taking out the eyes. The tactics described in the article – hit and run attacks done in numbers varying from 3-4 to 70 members, profiting from difficult terrain, like forests and ravines – seem characteristic of guerilla warfare. The terror provoked amongst the local villagers is another important outcome of their actions. The author further mentions and refutes the hypothesis of Soviet infiltrators mixed amongst the gangs, bearing the purpose of “fomenting discontent amongst the local population and even starting a revolution”. According to him, there is dissimilarity of purpose between the Soviet state intentions and the komitadji; however, he proposed a connection between the bandits and the “Dobruja” Irredentist Association, with the purpose of reannexing South Dobruja to Bulgaria, which he says that it was proved by the frequent findings of identification documents pertaining to that organization on the bodies of dead komitadji or found in the possession of those captured alive.
The article also maintains that the komitadjis were in close cooperation with some of the inhabitants of the different villages in the region, which were not deterred by the high punishments provided by the Law for the Organization of New Dobruja. In the article’s conclusion the author proposes the application of more effective administrative measures. Additionally, the colonization policy of the Kingdom of Romania is proposed as an alternative means of securing the region. Lastly, for those inhabitants of South Dobruja with proven connections with the komitadjis, the measure that should be taken, in the author’s vision, should be “their displacement, together with their families, in another part of the country, while their place should be taken by the most virtuous autochthonous element”.
Indeed, within the interwar Romanian press and official discourse, komitadjis were very much linked with three irredentist organizations closely connected to each other: the Dobruja Cultural and Charity organization, established in 1913 after the end of the Second Balkan War with the headquarters at Sofia (Negoiță Reference Negoiță2008, 318), and two of its offshoots, the Internal Dobrujan Revolutionary Movement (V.D.R.O), and the Dobrujan Revolutionary Organization (D.R.O). The Dobruja Cultural and Charity organization, followed in its steps by V.D.R.O., had as its final purpose the Bulgarian annexation of Dobruja. The D.R.O. however had an international communist ideology, with the intention of creating an independent communist republic of Dobruja which would have joined a future federation of Balkan workers’ republics (Tudor Reference Tudor2005, 236). Undoubtedly, in the Romanian interwar, the fear of communism was real and visibile. As Giuseppe Motta (Reference Motta, Akıncı, Aladağ, Ennas and Rohdewald2026, 148) remarks, “during this period, many believed that local minority support could be harnessed to trigger revolutionary change, and Romania was seen as a promising context for such strategy.”
A short foray in the political situation in neighboring Bulgaria is also necessary for having a greater picture of the conditions that enabled the return of the state of siege in 1926 in Romanian South Dobruja. After the signing of the 1919 Neuilly-sur-Seine peace treaty, elections were held, in which the agrarians won, and together with the democrats formed a left-wing coalition with Aleksandar Stamboliyski as prime minister. The Stamboliyski government made efforts to reestablish Bulgarian relations with the victors of WWI, Bulgaria being thus the first defeated nation to join the League of Nations in 1919 (Crampton Reference Crampton2005, 150).
While his reformist policies, focused on land redistribution and improving upon the standard of living of the general population, were well received, his inability to solve the Macedonian question, the widespread corruption and inflation and the political opposition’s fear of Bulgaria going the way of a one party state and becoming a republic ultimately brought his downfall (Crampton Reference Crampton2005, 151). His government was displaced by a coup on the 9th of June of 1923, and Stamboliyski himself was killed on the 14th, after being captured by Macedonian revolutionaries and having been subjected to torture during which his right hand was severed, and was ultimately decapitated (Bell Reference Bell1977, 237).
The government that followed, led by Alexandar Tsankov, while keeping and continuing many of the agrarian reforms (Crampton Reference Crampton2005, 153), found itself in a mounting struggle against the communist party. The struggle culminated on the 16th of April 1925, when the communists bombed the Sveta Nedelya Cathedral in Sofia during a state funeral, killing 134 people and wounding around five hundred (Vukov Reference Vukov and Luthar2016, 162). A contemporary Romanian newspaper, (“Războiul Civil din Bulgaria”, Lumea politică și socială, April 24 1925) reports how this led to the adoption of a royal decree declaring the state of siege on the 17th of April, which would be ratified by the Bulgarian National Assembly on the 21st of the same month (see also Harvey Reference Harvey1992).
This measure was to be mirrored by the Romanian authorities for South Dobruja, one year later. The succession of similar laws in two different countries does not seem to be a coincidence. First of all, South Dobruja was highly connected to its previous motherland. Many Bulgarians living there had family or friends back in Bulgaria and visits across the border, either for business or leisure. Furthermore, some of the property of the locals was split as an effect of the annexation of South Dobruja, and now, in order to administrate it, they had to cross the border regularly, in both directions.Footnote 9. The porousness of the border was a constant topic in the contemporary reports, which were bemoaning the ease with which different criminal fugitives (from either Romania or Bulgaria) were finding safe haven across the border. This is confirmed by the reports made by the military information services present in the areaFootnote 10. These two elements – the close connection between the populace of South Dobruja and that of Bulgaria and the weak borders – certainly made the province more likely to be affected by major unrest in Bulgaria. After the 1925 bombing, prime minister Tsankov drowned the country in a bloody suppression of the leftists, detaining thousands of persons, amongst which many were publicly executed, while others “mysteriously” disappeared, without having participated in a trial (Petrova Reference Petrova2007, 54; Crampton Reference Crampton2005, 154; Promitzer Reference Promitzer and Ramet2020, 182). It is not unlikely that Tsankov’s repression and the violent political turbulences of Bulgaria reverberated across this porous border to South Dobruja.
Legal-Military Praxis on the Ground in South Dobruja
Quite soon after these events, in Romania we can already notice a build up of administrative tension before the decision of the extension of the state of siege was taken in 1926. Of note is the correspondence between the 2nd Army Corps General Staff and the 9th Division Infantry, concerning the establishment of a protection plan against komitadji on Dobruja’s border. Thus, on the 30th of May 1925 the 2nd Army Corps is relaying to the 9th Division Infantry (under whose military jurisdiction South Dobruja was) the “Instructions for the protection of Dobruja’s border against gang attacks”, drafted by the General Staff’s IVth Division – OperationsFootnote 11. The instructions establish the 9th Division as the main actor, supported by the border guard troops and gendarmes and propose two possible defense plans – the current one, pertaining to border defense against armed gangs, and a second, enhanced defense plan, in the event of the apparition of more powerful and organized gangs, possibly intertwined with political tensions.
The enhanced defense plan could be put in action with the prior approval of the War Ministry, or by the commandment of the 9th Division itself, when the situation was of such a nature as to require it, but with “immediate notification of the War Ministry”. Of interest regarding the relationship with non-combatants, were two instructions. First of all, in case the gangs manage to enter a settlement, the town or village’s exits would be barricaded, until the gang would be “forced to submit”. Secondly, a troubling instruction mentions that, in the case that the population would be on the side of the enemy, it should be treated as the “foreign gangs”. The mention is disturbingly vague, in the sense that it does not develop the idea of what would it mean to be “on the side of the enemy” – armed participation, aiding and abetting, simple support? – thus giving way to potential abuses.
In accordance with these instructions, the General Staff of the 9th Division Infantry elaborated an “Action plan against komitadji gangs”Footnote 12, which was forwarded back to the General Staff of the 2nd Army Corps, together with several requests, amongst which the most interesting was the appeal for the establishment of village citizen guards, which would later be approved by the 2nd Army CorpsFootnote 13. The 9th Division’s action plan begins with a geographical description of South Dobruja. With regards to its population, the drafters indicate on a very convinced tone that it is “of mostly Bulgarian origin and it underhandedly maintains relations with the komitadji”. The local Bulgarians are furthermore accused of facilitating the komitadji’s well being, providing them with resources and information needed for avoiding the security measures adopted by the Romanian administration. The support of the population is indicated as the main reason for the komitadji’s action’s success.
The action plan presents the komitadji attacks as being directed on the criterion of ethnicity – against the Romanian and Turkish population, and Romanian administration and avoiding the Bulgarian population, which is targeted on occasion only as punishment, when “it is believed they have not served a common cause”. The komitadji are however classified in two main categories: those whose gangs are formed within the territory of South Dobruja, which are mostly “common thieves and robbers”, and the gangs originating in Bulgaria, which are believed to belong to the Dobruja Irredentist Organization. Furthermore, the objectives of the second type of gangs were categorized as being economical – raids for securing financial resources necessary for the other types of objectives, and political – terrorizing the Turkish and Romanian population and administration, propagandistic and espionage related.
Interestingly enough, a fourth possible objective was proposed – an operational one, in preparing the terrain and securing the support of the population for a Bulgarian invasion. Regarding the content of the action plan, besides the main objectives of defending the frontier and the interior and destroying the gangs, the prevention of a Bulgarian invasion has also been indicated – with the instructions to thwart gang attacks that might precede attacks from regular troops and also to impede population movements. In order to prevent population support for the komitadji, the action plan provides that the gendarmes should closely monitor the “daily activities of the inhabitants, […] especially of those who spend more time at home”.
An extremely problematic measure would be that of a triage, that would be made by the gendarmes between “trustworthy” inhabitants and “untrustworthy” ones, which would have their own administrative profile sheets made. The “trustworthy” citizens would then be conscripted and organized in a “citizen guard”, but only in the villages without “Bulgarian elements”. A whole chapter was dedicated to the military organization of the villages, which would be coordinated and commanded by the gendarmes.
For the prevention of attacks by gangs activating in the interior of the region (a first category gang), a citizen patrol service would be organized, under the direction of the gendarmes. The units would be composed of two persons each, and would patrol roads selected in accordance with two criteria: frequency of utilization and exposure to attacks (roads that pass through forests, brambles and similar vegetation as well as roads on which raids have been done in the past).
The General Staff of the 2nd Army Corps was however, not satisfied, ordering on the 10th of September 1925 that the action plan be redrafted, taking into consideration several indications, amongst which the requisition of carriages was also advised, when the need for troop transportation would ariseFootnote 14. The 2nd Army Corps also underlined the necessity of carefully vetting the inhabitants eligible for the “citizen guards”, insofar that they should only be Romanian ethnics, and whose good faith has been proved. Further information about the action plan can be found in Daniel Niculae’s (Reference Niculae2024) dedicated analysis that focuses on its military organizational details, but shies away from criticism and has a Romanian nationalistic bias.
In the same year, on the 3rd of November, the General Staff of the Army instructs the 2nd Army Corps (which would relay the instructions to the 9th Division infantry), to take “the strictest measures for establishing the reign of peace in the Quadrilateral, through the extermination of the gangs that are terrorizing the population and administration”. This order was based on a reported intensification of the komitadji raids, which, connected with the holding of the 9th congress of the Organization of Dobrujan Refugees at the end of September, amplified the tensions in the area. Thus, the order cites a secret police report of the mentioned congress, which relates that its members voted, amongst other things, for acting against the colonization of South Dobruja with Romanians and the “liberation” of the provinceFootnote 15. The Romanian secret police also relates of a “secret motion” enumerating the means of accomplishing such actions: the assassination of the Romanian colonists by either komitadji or Bulgarian locals. Moreover, the communists in the Organization succeeded in securing a vote that in the event of a war between Romania and Russia, komitadji gangs would invade Dobruja and stir the population in order to fight for its independence.
At the local civilian administrative level, the much hated prefect, Tașcu Pucerea, on the 7th of November, published a reminder of all the criminal punishments that awaited those who indulged in acts of banditry, aiding and abetting, etc. These punishments were already provided by the criminal code, but the prefectural publication of the 7th of November adds the interesting bits that all inhabitants over 18 years old are required to have on them identity documents or certificates. Furthermore, the locals were to be rewarded monetarily for reporting and helping the authorities apprehend bandits. The publication ends with a grand finale: “[a]ll those who will shoot a bandit or an armed komitadji will be rewarded with the sum of 10.000 lei per head of bandit or komitadji”Footnote 16.
On a greater political scale, concerning the whole country, on the 20th of November 1925, the Council of Ministers gathered in a session decided that most radio installations would be banned within the territory subjected to the already existing state of siege measures.Footnote 17 The exceptions would be established by the commanding general of the state of siege zoneFootnote 18. Similar procedures were established for the written press – in June 1926 the War Ministry established that “alone the Military Commandment of the territories under state of siege has the right to approve or suspend the apparition of publications”Footnote 19.
We can already observe that, even without the formal declaration of the extension of the state of siege, which would happen in August 1926, the local security measures were highly intensified, to the point that South Dobruja was a de facto militarized province by the autumn of 1925. Further evidence supporting the increase of the Romanian military’s interest in the region is given by the Great General Staff’s Counterintelligence Section Order no. 338/03.02.1926Footnote 20, to the 2nd Army Corps, which presents, besides tables of suspected komitadji and their hideouts, a hand drawn sketch of “terrorist” centers and subcenters in localities around South Dobruja and across the border, along with the numbers of attacks committed by komitadji for each village or townFootnote 21. From the map we can observe that around two thirds of the territory of South Dobruja is being penetrated by the komitadji (the sketch can be found in the Annex of this article). Strangely enough, if we compare the territory with a sizeable komitadji presence with the different villages and towns mentioned seven months later by the Council of Ministers as the limit of the geographical application of the extension of the state of siege in the region, the surfaces are similarFootnote 22. It could be considered thus that either the build-up of the security measures in the area prior to the extension of the state of siege was intentionally coordinated, or that, at the moment of the taking of the decision, it was deemed appropriate by the government to take into consideration preexisting studies and measures. Furthermore, the very fact of mentioning in the act of extension a list of towns and villages that form a single line more or less parallel with the Bulgarian border creates a de facto second border within the state and has operational significance, being in line with the previous instructions for preparedness for a Bulgarian invasion. It seems entirely probable that in case the towns and villages most at risk would be lost, the Romanian forces and administration would retreat past the edge of the imaginary line between the indicated localities.
While the state of siege was invoked ever since its reattachment to Romania through the treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, it was mostly confined to the border with Bulgaria. However, on the 24th of August 1926 the state of siege was extended to up to 30 kilometers, giving the War Council of the 9th Division Infantry increased authority over prosecuting and judging crimes, measure published in the Journal of the Council of Ministers no. 2807 of 1926.
The details of the measure enacted in 1926 with regards to South Dobruja are quite interesting. What catches the attention is that instead of extending the state of siege throughout the whole territory of the two counties composing the province – Durostor and Caliacra – it was deemed necessary to indicate a line of demarcation which connected different settlements within the region (which were considered to be either included or excluded from the effects of the measure). No less than 26 settlements are indicated in the content of the Journal of the Council of Ministers. One reason for this specific delimitation lies less in political calculation but rather in military thinking. At the time of the extension of the state of siege the military command was on high alert, because of rumors of an upcoming imminent Bulgarian invasion of South Dobruja. This can be inferred from the archives of the 9th Division Infantry, the same structure given judicial competence for crimes committed in the delimited area mentioned before. Thus, a report from one captain Popescu of the Durostor Gendarmes Company to the 9th Division Infantry notes that “[I]n Bulgaria, lately, serious preparations for an eventual war have commenced, which, according to the Bulgarian political and military circles, seems to be unavoidable.”Footnote 23 The rumors proved to be unverifiableFootnote 24, but the heightened tensions were already moving things forward towards the extension of the state of siege.
Conclusion
This article explored three different ways to see law – the international law of the time, full of hope and impetus in the early years of the interwar, the Romanian constitutional law, forced to (apparently) comply with the previous, and the military-administrative corpus of measures and orders concerning the bare life of the population of South Dobruja. Law acts as both a limiting and permitting framework, in which the nation-state building activities can be carried out. International law acts as a constraining factor for a “status-quo” state without revisionist ambitions. According to Mylonas (Reference Mylonas, Chenoweth and Lawrence2010, 85), we should not therefore see violent exclusionary policies. While within Mylonas’ theoretical framework assimilation, the outcome most associated with the type of international entity the Kingdom of Romania was, can also be carried out through violent means, I do believe that due to the complex overlap of circumstances (annexation, colonization, banditry, Soviet threat, propaganda, the creation of an epistemic community involving both Romanian and Bulgarian elites, Aromanians claiming ethnic privilege), the situation was so explosive that the limitations of the international law were disconsidered on the ground.
The Romanian constitution of 1923 seems at times stretched between the need to comply with international obligations – the minority treaties – and the fear of losing its very purpose: nation-state building. The military-administrative measures of the state of siege wear a mask of constitutionalism that falls, every now and then, revealing the primordial forces hidden as much in the depths of the individual as in the shadows of a society as a whole: the fear of the other, the lusting for power, territory, souls – be they “dead” or alive. Amongst all the possible means of nation-state building, the state of siege occupies a prominent role with regards to the integration of South Dobruja. An exceptional region with an exceptional legal regime, the Quadrilateral showed how the military can remove their veil of legitimacy, and appear, as Charles Tilly (Reference Tilly, Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol1985) put it, not much different from a protection racket.
I have analyzed the Romanian state’s reaction to a perceived threat to its nation-state building project, the legal conception of the reaction and the administrative/military mechanisms through which it was implemented. While struggling to maintain the appearance of a well behaving member of the League of Nations, the Kingdom of Romania reserved a loophole in its constitutional framework, through which it could accomplish its desire for wholeness without losing face in front of its contemporaries. The state of siege could be used to micro-regulate the lives of Romanian citizens on the territory and during the times it was applied, while limiting their fundamental rights. It introduced within the functioning of the state a military logic, while creating a division within the population based on a military “gaze” – between trustworthy and untrustworthy. We could consider South Dobruja as a province militarized to the degree where it can be said that it was under the occupation of its own government. While the necessity of these measures can be argued for and against, depending on the objective circumstances, their overuse led to a weakening of the Constitutional structure over the years. South Dobruja is an example of such a usage and how it was connected with the social perception of the “danger”, the desire to belong in the newly created international community at odds with its ambition for the wholeness of nation.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2026.10196.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Prof. Dr. Cosmin Cercel (Ghent University) for his constant feedback and the EMERGE team from Ghent University (Louis Bremond, Elias Dessantis, A. James Hannaford, Anna Piekarska) for their valuable insights and comments. Last but not least I would like to thank Col. Dr. Liviu Corciu, the director of the Romanian National Military Archives, for his support with regards to archival research.
Financial support
This study is part of the doctoral research project “The international connection: limiting human rights in Romania through emergency measures 1920-2020”, within the EMERGE research project (grant agreement ID: 101087876), funded by the European Research Council.
Disclosure
None.
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