alternatehistory.com

WI after WW1, instead of being awarded to Romania, Transylvania became an independent country of its own?

Of course, Romania was on the winners' side and one of its major war objectives, arguably THE war-objective, was to create a Greater Romania in the historical lands inhabited by Romanians. Hungary keeping Transylvania is out of the question- it would have made no sense in the given political context to let the defeated Hungarians keep a Romanian majority land which Romania was expressly asking for. After all, even with the many notable exeptions- ex. 3 milion Germans & 1 million Hungarians left in Czechoslovakia- the goal was still to somehow draw the boundaries of the new Eastern Europe mainly along ethnic lines and to create nation-states strong enough to survive in the long run.

The problem with Transylvania is that you cannot draw a boundary that can be called even remotely fair, at least you couldn't at that time. After the war the ~100 square km land awarded to Romania- often called Transylvania; more precisely historical Transylvania made up over half of the land and the regions of Banat, Crisana and Maramures the rest- had approximately 5 million inhabitants of which ~ 55% Romanian, 30% Hungarian and 10% German with important communities of Jews and also Gypsies, Armenians, Serbs, Ruthenians and others. A glance at the ethnic map makes it clear that any 'fair' arrangement between Romania and Hungary was impossible: the largest compact Hungarian-inhabited region, the Szeklerland, was-is-, for instance, in the East of Transylvania, separated from Hungary by large Romanian-inhabited areas; in regions like Banat the ethnic mosaic was even more convoluted.

So, long story short, what if the Great Powers had made the decision to create an independent country in this land and to foster some sort of ethnic coexistence, instead of the dominance of one ethnicity over the other?

1. An independent Transylvania could have acted as a buffer between the two coveting states on its either side; maybe the unfortunate and heavy-handed divison during WW2 could have been avoided.
2. Romania got Bessarabia, Bucovina and some other lands too so it would have been by no means left without nothing, although it would have obviously protested vehemently against such a decision. But as merely 20 years later the surrender of Bessarabia to Stalin has shown, it could have done nothing against an unanimous Great Power decision.

Finally, a personal opinion: I do think that an independent Transylvania would have been the best solution, if only from a cultural and ethnic point of view. A balanced state, with a history of self-governance, making perfect sense geographically and historically, a kind of Switzerland of the East, as it is sometimes called, could have helped preserve much more of the heritage of these lands than either a Hungarian or a Romanian dominace. In reality, the centuries old and once flourishing German community is virtually gone- expulsed, resettled, emigrated, falling from the mentioned 10% to basically nothing; the Hungarian community, although still very important, has remained stagnant in number, and has fallen in percenatge to slightly less than 20%. Even Romanians have had their share of historical misfortunes: the Greco-Catholic Church(also known as the Romanian Church United with Rome) to which once almost half of Transylvanian Romanians belonged was banned by communists in 1948 and the people were forcibly converted to orthodoxy.

Now these events are very complex and influenced by many factors; I don’t want to go too deep; my point is merely that although Transylvania is still a great multicultural place, too much of its fomer potential was lost in too short of a period. Maybe independence would not have prevented anything- I don’t know. It seems a sweet idea though.

So, what do you think?
Top