Feeble Constitution - A Red-and-Green Russia 1917 Timeline
- Thread starter Salvador79
- Start date
At least, it does provide a legal basis if Hungary was ever electing in either near or remote future to go to war with Serbia over this matter.
Hungary may have an opportunity there since the two closest great powers, Russia and Italy, won't lift a finger for Serbia, the former because it's allied to Hungary, the latter because it's already clashing with Serbian proxies in the western Balkans. Not to mention Hungary can rely on at least passive Bulgarian support.
As of the motivation itself, well, they did go to war with Romania over the matter of Transylvania, even though it was brief.
Besides this, what is the potential for a short war with Hungary?
I agree. But OTL's rejection was motivated by considerations about internal balance, and none of that has changed ITTL.
While I agree about the UoE, Italy and Bulgaria, right now, Serbia is armed to the teeth and widely mobilised, while Hungary has complied with the conditions of Chantilly and is officially left merely with some military police and guards. The paramilitary forces of the Hungarian militant Social Democrats are way more powerful than anything the state officially can muster, but then again, they don't have nearly half the equipment of their Chetnik counterparts. A war between Hungary and Serbia would end like Hungary's OTL war with Romania. Hungarian public opinion is enraged, and the opposition is of course blaming the Social Democratic government, while the Social Democrats blame the politicians who are now in opposition for having caused the whole sh*t by going to war alongside Austria, a Hungarian attack on Serbia would be suicide, and everyone knows that, even the opposition. And the Serbians, well, they basically did initiate aggression by militarising Vojvodina and expelling and massacring Hungarians there, and they got away with it. They have bitten off as much as they could want to chew in the North, and they have the Italians to worry about in Montenegro (and Albania), plus matters are still unsettled in Western Yugoslavia.
So, I'd say, at least in the next 4-5 years the chances are low for a war between Hungary and Serbia coming.
The only plausible way for this would be if Serbia's regime should collapse, and Hungary would be part of a greater "intervention force" which would prop up a new anti-Unitarist regime in Belgrade.
And a little more on the plebiscites:
In the Krumau / Cesky Krumlov and the Kaplice / Kaplitz zones, there were solid majorities (>80 %) for Austria over Czechoslovakia. These regions, which IOTL were attributed to Czechoslovakia in the treaty of Saint-Germain without plebiscites, thus stay with Austria ITTL. Likewise, the Burgenland plebiscite resulted in accession to Austria, too, like IOTL.
Austria therefore extends slightly further Northwards than IOTL, and the number of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia is slightly reduced comapred to OTL.
How much - the map will show that.
Dobruja is a tricky issue. I'll have to explain more on that one, when I find the time. Thigns are lighting up here, though: from Monday on, schools begin to open again here, so I will have a little more time again. Thank you all for your patience!
In the Krumau / Cesky Krumlov and the Kaplice / Kaplitz zones, there were solid majorities (>80 %) for Austria over Czechoslovakia. These regions, which IOTL were attributed to Czechoslovakia in the treaty of Saint-Germain without plebiscites, thus stay with Austria ITTL. Likewise, the Burgenland plebiscite resulted in accession to Austria, too, like IOTL.
Austria therefore extends slightly further Northwards than IOTL, and the number of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia is slightly reduced comapred to OTL.
How much - the map will show that.
Dobruja is a tricky issue. I'll have to explain more on that one, when I find the time. Thigns are lighting up here, though: from Monday on, schools begin to open again here, so I will have a little more time again. Thank you all for your patience!
In the case of Czechoslovak borders, there has to be a fair deal of compromise between national aspirations of the particular regions and the need to preserve connections between parts of the new state. OTL, it resulted in regions like Těšínsko/Zaolzie or Lednice-Valtice/Eisgrub-Feldberg being awarded to Czechoslovakia because of the Košice - Bohumín an Břeclav - Znojmo railways passing through. Krumlov and its vicinity are a different case in that respect, but that's possibly about as much as Czechoslovakia will let away. If I haven't missed something, I think ITTL it has an international backing at least as good as IOTL (and being part of the expeditionary force in Germany would add some clout, too), so it must be largely successful in pressing its territorial claims.
Czechoslovakia's international back and political clout are very good, better than OTL even, yes. Yet, it does have slightly less territory than IOTL because Ruthenian territory in the East is annexed to the Ukrainian FR and the Krumlov-Kaplice region, which is infrastructurally not quite so interesting, was allowed to vote for Austria. But we all know that there are many, many other regions in Czechoslovakia where German-speakers are a majority or plurality, and none of those was given a say in whether they wanted to belong to Czechoslovakia or not. There are plenty of Sudeten Germans around in Czechoslovakia ITTL, too.
And ITTL, Bavaria and Saxony have already recognised Czechoslovakia's annexations of German-speaking territories and there is no united German state anymore. Considering the UoE's very different relations to CZ compared to OTL's Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia is a lot more secure on all sides. They can afford to hand some woodlands to the Austrian Republic, especially if this speeds up a normalization of relations between these two countries, too, and slightly reduces the amount of German voters in their democratic republic.
Yes, I expected the Subcarpathian Ruthenia being part of the UOE Ukraine from the get-go (rather than silently annexed by the Soviets in the end of WW2 as per OTL, with the ČSl. government left to deal with the fait accompli).
I should have mentioned, though, that OTL's Lednice-Valtice hasn't even been part of the lands of the Bohemian Crown by 1919, but still was made Czechoslovak because of that railway. Perhaps a few border adjustments with Saxony or Bavaria might be made in CSR's favour, too, because of the same reasons, especially with the Czechoslovak army on the ground. Look for instance at that pocket around Zittau, near OTL's Czech-Polish-German border meeting point.
I should have mentioned, though, that OTL's Lednice-Valtice hasn't even been part of the lands of the Bohemian Crown by 1919, but still was made Czechoslovak because of that railway. Perhaps a few border adjustments with Saxony or Bavaria might be made in CSR's favour, too, because of the same reasons, especially with the Czechoslovak army on the ground. Look for instance at that pocket around Zittau, near OTL's Czech-Polish-German border meeting point.
Correcting the border there so that the railroad line runs all the way through Czechoslovak territory would imply including all of Zittau, from Varnsdorf Eastwards, including Reichenau / Bogatynia and Ostritz, into CZ. That's quite a few Germans (and only very few Sorbs). But infrastructurally, it would make sense.
On the other hand, at the moment Saxony is basically a Czech puppet state and Czech military easily controls that railroad line anyway...
So, here is the map, finally:
You can see Vorarlberg staying with Austria, small parts of Carniola being under EFP Western Yugoslav Mandate (which undergoes changes in 1922 in reaction to Serbian annexations and aggression, will have to describe that, too), in exchange a small part of the Bohemian crown lands which IOTL went to Czechoslovakia is awarded to Austria after plebiscites.
I followed @Kammada's advice on Zittau, and added Kladsko and Cieszyn for good measure, too, while Poland has grabbed more than IOTL, too, but I haven't drawn that, I just realise.
Hungary is slightly bigger both in the East and in the North, including a few more majority-Hungarian areas in the absence of the wars which IOTL cost them that.
More on Dobruja this week.
You can see Vorarlberg staying with Austria, small parts of Carniola being under EFP Western Yugoslav Mandate (which undergoes changes in 1922 in reaction to Serbian annexations and aggression, will have to describe that, too), in exchange a small part of the Bohemian crown lands which IOTL went to Czechoslovakia is awarded to Austria after plebiscites.
I followed @Kammada's advice on Zittau, and added Kladsko and Cieszyn for good measure, too, while Poland has grabbed more than IOTL, too, but I haven't drawn that, I just realise.
Hungary is slightly bigger both in the East and in the North, including a few more majority-Hungarian areas in the absence of the wars which IOTL cost them that.
More on Dobruja this week.
So, here are some thoughts on Dobruja (and Thrace, by the way), which touch upon wider questions concerning UoE Balkan policies.
With Dobruja and Thrace, UoE foreign policy has been absolutely self-defeating so far, and there's no end in sight to this sad record.
Why is that so, when the UoE is the region's clear hegemon?
Well, probably precisely because it is. And because of the shifts, twists and jerks at the topmost level of UoE politics over the past four years. Or maybe, you could interpret it as a continuation of Russian inability to grapple with the region (a continuity which IOTL was only broken in 1945, when Stalin brought everyone except for Tito and Hoxha to heel and the Soviet Union kept the Eastern Bloc cohesive with an iron fist until 1989), a repetition of the 19th century in which the Russian Empire lost much of its huge political capital in the region.
When the war ended, all countries in the region saw themselves more or less as allies of the UoE. Romania, Serbia, and at least Venizelist Greece had fought and won the war alongside the UoE and the rest of the Entente. Bulgaria had a Revolutionary government led by Left-Agrarians, who looked to the UoE as their close ideological friend and big Slavic brother. And Hungary was on its way towards Social Democracy (in TTL's meaning of the word) and likewise looked to the motherland of the Revolution for aid.
From there, things could only go downhill... and they did. Fast. That started long before the Paris Peace Conference already with the shitshow of the Western Yugoslav Civil War in which the UoE alienated Serbia, the Western powers and the old elites of Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia with its pro-Greater Yugoslavia policy.
The Treaty of Chantilly included provisions that a plebiscite be held to determine the future of Dobruja, and it established a temporary EFP Mandate over Thrace. Both came at a high price for the not-quite-perfectly-attuned tandem Avksentiev/Kerensky - only for any of its gains to be given away by Volsky less than a year later. The EFP Mandate over Thrace was not such a scandal - the region had been Bulgarian before the Great War, now Greece coveted it, and France and Britain were principally disposed to award it to them, but the temporary construction of an EFP Mandate was, at least from the French point of view, not a bad way to proceed at all, and Lloyd George did not mind all that much, either. As for why the UoE pushed it, well, here Avksentiev and Kerensky had slightly different motives, but they went in the same direction: Avksentiev, who had been a great promoter of Narodnik Internationism / Left-Agrarian Solidarity already during the war and to whom Bulgaria's new government and Stamboliysky were really close to his heart, wanted to avoid a complete humiliation of Bulgaria. For Kerensky, who favoured a much more classical interpretation of power spheres, it was about balancing the Bulgarians and the Greeks while at the same time strengthening Russian/UoE involvement in the immediate vicinity of the straits. In Kerensky's mind, Chantilly balanced it out quite evenely for everyone except the defeated Ottoman enemies: Greece got Ionia and Pontus, Serbia got parts of Bosnia, Romania got most of Transilvania and the Banat, Hungary was assured a chance to maintain some of its territories which the victors coveted via plebiscites, and the same went for Bulgaria: it lost its access to the Aegaean but it stood a chance to recuperate the "Quadrangle" of Dobruja and the future of Thrace was not yet determined.
Unfortunately for Kerensky and the UoE, almost none of the political forces in the countries in question viewed it that way. After a century of nationalist craze and hubris, almost everyone felt betrayed and back-stabbed in some way or other. Dobruja was a particularly striking case because here, a victor - Romania - had to concede a plebiscite in a part of the territory it had already acquired before the Great War, namely with the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest. Admittedly, it was a territory with very few Romanians and very many Bulgarians and Turks in it, and admittedly, Chantilly made sure that no comparable thing would happen to potential enclaves in Transilvania. But still, having to admit the Dobrogea Clause did not make Chantilly very popular in Romania. The idea had been something Avksentiev and Wilson very quickly agreed with each other on, and Kerensky thought it served the Romanians well whose end-of-the-wartime Prime Minister Bratianu had struck rather anti-UoE rhetorics. When the Romanians elected a Left-Agrarian government of their own, too, in the spring of 1919, Avksentiev almost got cold feet and considered dropping the Dobrugea Clause, but Kerensky convinced him that it was for the best to keep it in the Treaty.
Quite some shards left when the UoE bull left the china shop of Chantilly - but with Volsky's volte, it would also all prove for nothing. Guarding against a marginalisation of Bulgarians and other minorities in the region before the plebiscite required the maintenance of a military base in Silistra, and the EFP Mandate in Thrace was an even bigger drain of military and financial resources. Together with Prussia, these were the top priorities on Volsky's red list of expenditures to be slashed. And so Kerensky met with his delighted Romanian counterpart Diamandy to hammer out a plan for a Romanian minorities policy which would allow the UoE a face-saving option of withdrawal from Dobrogea, and from there he travelled on to Athens to surprise Venizelos with his super-sale offer of ships and UoE acquiescence with a Greek Thrace if Greece dedicated more forces to the counter-insurgency campaign in Anatolia and stopped nagging about other EFP projects like Albania. Soon after the conclusion of that secret deal, the UoE envoys in the Supervisory Council of the EFP Mandate for Thrace surprised their French counterparts by proposing that - given the "present tranquility"! -, the UoE would consider a massive reduction of Mandate forces and a plebiscite within one year as viable. The French were not in such a hurry to withdraw, though, and their presence was crucial in helping the outcome reflect not so much the ethnic affiliations on the ground but the desire to stabilise a Greek state which would hopefully not forget.
And just like Thrace thus became Greek, in the Dobruja, there would be merely a referendum on two Autonomy Statutes (I'll elaborate a little on Romanian minority policies and constitutional change projects of the Centre-Left government in another small authorial note in a few days.), without the option of seceding from Romania and joining Bulgaria being even on the ballot. These plebiscites were held in early 1922 and adopted with large majorities, but at the cost of a very low voter turnout as both moderate pro-Bulgarian parties and the more militant groups, who were split among themselves into the right-nationalist and anti-Stamboliysky "Internal Dobrujanian Revolutionary Organization" and the leftist-Pan-Yugoslavian militants of the local IRSDLP chapter, were successfully appealing to boycott the referendum.
But that would, of course, not make Greece and Romania best friends with the UoE again. Especially since the government of the Turkestani FR of the UoE has repeatedly nagged the Romanians about its Tatars and equal treatment of all religions in the Kingdom. Except for Serbia, none of the governments in the region is really hostile to the UoE - even the Bulgarians, who were really screwed over, know that they need UoE support like in the case of the "International Cossacks" who guard their border against Serbia and their capital against insurgents now. It's more that they've disillusioned and know that UoE foreign policy often follows rather pragmatic and shifting domestic interests and that seizing one's opportunity when it arises should never be wasted out of respect for the Union's friendship...
With Dobruja and Thrace, UoE foreign policy has been absolutely self-defeating so far, and there's no end in sight to this sad record.
Why is that so, when the UoE is the region's clear hegemon?
Well, probably precisely because it is. And because of the shifts, twists and jerks at the topmost level of UoE politics over the past four years. Or maybe, you could interpret it as a continuation of Russian inability to grapple with the region (a continuity which IOTL was only broken in 1945, when Stalin brought everyone except for Tito and Hoxha to heel and the Soviet Union kept the Eastern Bloc cohesive with an iron fist until 1989), a repetition of the 19th century in which the Russian Empire lost much of its huge political capital in the region.
When the war ended, all countries in the region saw themselves more or less as allies of the UoE. Romania, Serbia, and at least Venizelist Greece had fought and won the war alongside the UoE and the rest of the Entente. Bulgaria had a Revolutionary government led by Left-Agrarians, who looked to the UoE as their close ideological friend and big Slavic brother. And Hungary was on its way towards Social Democracy (in TTL's meaning of the word) and likewise looked to the motherland of the Revolution for aid.
From there, things could only go downhill... and they did. Fast. That started long before the Paris Peace Conference already with the shitshow of the Western Yugoslav Civil War in which the UoE alienated Serbia, the Western powers and the old elites of Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia with its pro-Greater Yugoslavia policy.
The Treaty of Chantilly included provisions that a plebiscite be held to determine the future of Dobruja, and it established a temporary EFP Mandate over Thrace. Both came at a high price for the not-quite-perfectly-attuned tandem Avksentiev/Kerensky - only for any of its gains to be given away by Volsky less than a year later. The EFP Mandate over Thrace was not such a scandal - the region had been Bulgarian before the Great War, now Greece coveted it, and France and Britain were principally disposed to award it to them, but the temporary construction of an EFP Mandate was, at least from the French point of view, not a bad way to proceed at all, and Lloyd George did not mind all that much, either. As for why the UoE pushed it, well, here Avksentiev and Kerensky had slightly different motives, but they went in the same direction: Avksentiev, who had been a great promoter of Narodnik Internationism / Left-Agrarian Solidarity already during the war and to whom Bulgaria's new government and Stamboliysky were really close to his heart, wanted to avoid a complete humiliation of Bulgaria. For Kerensky, who favoured a much more classical interpretation of power spheres, it was about balancing the Bulgarians and the Greeks while at the same time strengthening Russian/UoE involvement in the immediate vicinity of the straits. In Kerensky's mind, Chantilly balanced it out quite evenely for everyone except the defeated Ottoman enemies: Greece got Ionia and Pontus, Serbia got parts of Bosnia, Romania got most of Transilvania and the Banat, Hungary was assured a chance to maintain some of its territories which the victors coveted via plebiscites, and the same went for Bulgaria: it lost its access to the Aegaean but it stood a chance to recuperate the "Quadrangle" of Dobruja and the future of Thrace was not yet determined.
Unfortunately for Kerensky and the UoE, almost none of the political forces in the countries in question viewed it that way. After a century of nationalist craze and hubris, almost everyone felt betrayed and back-stabbed in some way or other. Dobruja was a particularly striking case because here, a victor - Romania - had to concede a plebiscite in a part of the territory it had already acquired before the Great War, namely with the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest. Admittedly, it was a territory with very few Romanians and very many Bulgarians and Turks in it, and admittedly, Chantilly made sure that no comparable thing would happen to potential enclaves in Transilvania. But still, having to admit the Dobrogea Clause did not make Chantilly very popular in Romania. The idea had been something Avksentiev and Wilson very quickly agreed with each other on, and Kerensky thought it served the Romanians well whose end-of-the-wartime Prime Minister Bratianu had struck rather anti-UoE rhetorics. When the Romanians elected a Left-Agrarian government of their own, too, in the spring of 1919, Avksentiev almost got cold feet and considered dropping the Dobrugea Clause, but Kerensky convinced him that it was for the best to keep it in the Treaty.
Quite some shards left when the UoE bull left the china shop of Chantilly - but with Volsky's volte, it would also all prove for nothing. Guarding against a marginalisation of Bulgarians and other minorities in the region before the plebiscite required the maintenance of a military base in Silistra, and the EFP Mandate in Thrace was an even bigger drain of military and financial resources. Together with Prussia, these were the top priorities on Volsky's red list of expenditures to be slashed. And so Kerensky met with his delighted Romanian counterpart Diamandy to hammer out a plan for a Romanian minorities policy which would allow the UoE a face-saving option of withdrawal from Dobrogea, and from there he travelled on to Athens to surprise Venizelos with his super-sale offer of ships and UoE acquiescence with a Greek Thrace if Greece dedicated more forces to the counter-insurgency campaign in Anatolia and stopped nagging about other EFP projects like Albania. Soon after the conclusion of that secret deal, the UoE envoys in the Supervisory Council of the EFP Mandate for Thrace surprised their French counterparts by proposing that - given the "present tranquility"! -, the UoE would consider a massive reduction of Mandate forces and a plebiscite within one year as viable. The French were not in such a hurry to withdraw, though, and their presence was crucial in helping the outcome reflect not so much the ethnic affiliations on the ground but the desire to stabilise a Greek state which would hopefully not forget.
And just like Thrace thus became Greek, in the Dobruja, there would be merely a referendum on two Autonomy Statutes (I'll elaborate a little on Romanian minority policies and constitutional change projects of the Centre-Left government in another small authorial note in a few days.), without the option of seceding from Romania and joining Bulgaria being even on the ballot. These plebiscites were held in early 1922 and adopted with large majorities, but at the cost of a very low voter turnout as both moderate pro-Bulgarian parties and the more militant groups, who were split among themselves into the right-nationalist and anti-Stamboliysky "Internal Dobrujanian Revolutionary Organization" and the leftist-Pan-Yugoslavian militants of the local IRSDLP chapter, were successfully appealing to boycott the referendum.
But that would, of course, not make Greece and Romania best friends with the UoE again. Especially since the government of the Turkestani FR of the UoE has repeatedly nagged the Romanians about its Tatars and equal treatment of all religions in the Kingdom. Except for Serbia, none of the governments in the region is really hostile to the UoE - even the Bulgarians, who were really screwed over, know that they need UoE support like in the case of the "International Cossacks" who guard their border against Serbia and their capital against insurgents now. It's more that they've disillusioned and know that UoE foreign policy often follows rather pragmatic and shifting domestic interests and that seizing one's opportunity when it arises should never be wasted out of respect for the Union's friendship...
In short, the UoE is suffering from similar problems to the United States (well, the more recent, IOTL, United States, not quite so much the United States of this time period). Being inconsistent and "pragmatic," it only encourages inconsistent and "pragmatic" behavior in those who interact with it.
That analogy makes sense to me!
OK, as promised, here are a few small comments about minority policies and constitutional reform projects in Romania IOTL and ITTL:
Romania has already undergone a constitutional change, like IOTL, with the introduction of universal male suffrage. But the constitutional reform goals of the various parties which make up the current Centre-Left coalition government are not limited to that, they want more. (They wanted more IOTL, too. ITTL, they have much better chances to push for them.) Agrarian reform has been mentioned: it has been legislated and begun to be implemented, but the Peasant Party also wants to enshrine its principles in the constitution so it can't be reversed. Likewise, they want to codify labour and social rights constitutionally. All of that faces stiff liberal and conservative opposition, but it's basically just about adding new words to the constitution since the reform facts on the ground have been created already, and King Ferdinand, while not supportive, has not been as outraged by them as the liberals and conservatives are who want him as the spearhead of their attempt to prevent or roll back these changes.
But the next constitutional reform project really antagonises not only the parliamentary opposition and the old elites who compose them, but also the King: Political decentralisation and cultural autonomy. These ideas are not just imposed by the UoE (although the UoE does hint in that direction, see Dobrogea) or mirroring the purely TTL EFP Charter. They have OTL roots in the manifesto of the National Party of Romanians in Transilvania, Banat and Crisana unified in 1881. The National Party, its name notwithstanding, was an outspoken supporter of regionalism and national autonomy not just for the Romanians in A-H but for all minorities. In their 1881 manifesto, they call for civil servants drawn from the groups which inhabit a region, instead of appointed governors from far away; for the languages spoken in a region to be the administrative and judicial languages there, too; for education on all levels to be available in the native languages of its speakers on equal quality, self-organised by the members of these communities etc. The party's OTL and TTL's post-Great War leader, Iuliu Maniu, has advocated decentralisation and regional autonomy - IOTL probably also in resistance against the domination of a cartel of "Old Kingdom" political elites tied to the PNL, and in vain. ITTL, things look different. His Peasantist, Popular Socialist and Labour coalition partners support the "Russian model" (good neo-poporanisti, i.e. Romanian neo-Nardoniks that some of them are) of local autonomy and a federal outlook of the state, too. Maniu and the National Party have a different model in mind, though, one which has more tradition in Transilvania: the "universitates", which do not refer to institutions of higher learning and research, but are the names of the traditional privileges of self-government and preservation of their own legal traditions awarded by the medieval Hungarian Kingdom to the Saxons and the Szekely (and initially also the Vlachs, i.e. Romanians). Maniu has proposed a revival and modernisation of this concept along the lines of the Western Yugoslav "personal nationality" model. In the end, the Coalition has come up with a mix of both, but one which has already drawn the first lessons from the failures and dysfunctionalities of the personal statehood model in Western Yugoslavia in the face of Serbian aggression.
The plan is as follows:
All recognised national minorities (i.e. in contrast to WYug, no self-chosen denomination like the "Toilers of Greater Yugoslavia" can form) can incorporate themselves / form "national councils" and enrol in these. The internal constitution of these national corporations is chosen by themselves, but it must follow a number of principles laid out in the constitution, which include the principle of internal democracy, equality before the law etc.
In addition to this, Regional Assemblies (Sfaturi) are to be established for Transilvania, Banat-Crisana, the two former principalities of the Old Kingdom Moldova (to which newly-Romanian Southern Bucovina was added) and Wallachia, and - here comes the compromise with Kerensky - also Dobrogea. For these Regional Assemblies, people can either vote for general candidates in local constituencies, or they can vote for minority representatives in the incorporated nations they have enrolled into. The general constituencies would be drawn up in accordance with how many non-minority-enrolled voters live in which region by the Regional Assemblies. The Regional Assemblies would organise and oversee administration on the county level (and according to the Coalition draft, these administrative divisions would continue to be called "megiesii" in Transilvania and Banat-Crisana and remain the way they are instead of streamlined into Judete like in the Old Kingdom; Dobrogea has as its two "ocruguri" Durostor and Caliacra. The national councils would organise possible sub-divisions on their own. Together, Regional Assemblies and National Councils would oversee and organize education, religio-cultural matters (like public holidays and a few other laws, too) etc.
But regionalisation would not stop there: Iuliu Maniu and the Peasantist Constantin Stere also hammered out a compromise among each other for yet another re-organisation of the only recently reformed parliamentary chambers and electoral provisions for them: While Stere wanted a unicameral parliament with proportional representation, Maniu and other decentralisers managed to combine a proportional representation-based Chamber of Deputies with a reformed Senate, into which the Regional Assemblies / Sfaturi and the National Councils / Sfaturi Nationalitatilor Minoritare would send a number of delegates in accordance with their numerical strength (but minium 1) in a voting manner determined by themselves.
This checkerboard of regional traditions, autonomous minorities, a strengthening of smaller nation-wide parties etc. was too much for King Ferdinand, who looked enviously to the Unitarist regime in Serbia which, to him, provided the - maybe not ideal, but way superior - counter-example of a strong, united, centralised state rallied behind the king. So far, Ferdinand has announced that such a draft would never be signed by him.
And so, while the Coronation Cathedral in Alba Iulia is almost finished, on OTL schedule, Ferdinand probably will not yet be crowned anew King of Greater Romania with all the pomp and circumstances because his government has drawn up a plan for the makeup of this Greater Romania which he finds unacceptable. We'll see how this turns out.
Take Ionescu's coalition government has, in the meantime, held plebiscites, not just in Dobrogea, but everywhere in Romania, in order to provide the new constitution with greater legitimacy than just a narrow parliamentary vote. PNL and Conservatives and the press associated with them have conducted a very aggressive campaign against the new constitution. But the excellent territorial organisation and strength of the Peasant Party, the National Party's strength in Transilvania, the support of the German and a few other minorities, and pro-constitutional marches organised by the labour unions together have provided the draft with a majority of 61.3 % Romania-wide, with support margins highest in Transilvania, Banat-Crisana, and (albeit with, as mentioned, very low voter turnout) Dobrogea, while support in Moldova and Wallachia was very narrow, and the capital of Bucharest voted narrowly against it.
Recently, coups have failed in Hungary and Bulgaria. Only the auto-coup in Serbia succeeded. I agree that this sounds like a pre-coup-situation, but I wonder If the military is probably wary...
If the King is said to oppose the reform, that should be enough to motivate the army cadres.
I'm optimistic that I can post a new update tomorrow, in which we'll meet an old acquaintance again.