Romania’s Geopolitical Position Between the Two World Wars (1919–1940): Security, Revisionism, and the Collapse of the Versailles Order

Romania emerged from the First World War as a substantially enlarged state - “Greater Romania” - whose strategic priorities were shaped by the postwar settlement and by the vulnerabilities created by expansion itself. The central geopolitical problem of the interwar period was how to defend new frontiers in a region where multiple neighbors regarded the Versailles-era territorial order as illegitimate or reversible. This article argues that Romanian interwar geopolitics was dominated by (1) the imperative to preserve the post-1918 territorial settlement; (2) the construction of a “status quo coalition” through regional alliances and collective-security diplomacy; and (3) the gradual erosion of that system under pressure from revisionist states and the reordering of Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, culminating in Romania’s forced territorial concessions in 1940.