Romania and the Central Powers in WW1

Deleted member 1487

Jokerang said:
What would it take for Romania to join the Central Powers in WW1?
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Russia to have lost every major battle from August on. And then it still would be hard. I have a half-finished TL about this with the Austro-Hungarians doing very well early on, changing the nature of the campaign in the East entirely, with Romania likely soon entering on the side of the Central Powers.

Honestly though it would be better for the Romanians to stay neutral and continue to act as a resource farm for the Central Powers. Sure their inexperienced and poorly led armies could be useful in the East, but their farmers and oil products were much more useful to the CP war effort. That was the big problem in 1916: the Romanian food and oil resources were cut off and the resources captured in battle were only a fraction of what was being sold at the beginning of 1916 IOTL.
 

Tom_B

Your best bet is with King Carol still alive. Either have things go very badly for the Russians very early and/or delay the king's death.

In "Operation Heinrich" Marina and Chris had a CP Romania but that was a very divergent TL with Germany attacking in the East and defensive in the west and even they had to bribe Romania with a battleship IIRC.

After that another possibility is that if things are going better than OTL in the East then Romania might do something halfway like give the CP exclusive rights to their oil and letting a CP army pass through their territory to outflank the Russian forces in the Bukovina. This might be perceived in Petrograd as a causus belli.
 

cbr

Your best bet is with King Carol still alive. Either have things go very badly for the Russians very early and/or delay the king's death.
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I doubt delaying Carol's death would do anything, while he was pretty pro CP himself, the political class and the population in general was pro Entente, Carol couldn't join the CP by himself.

For Romania to enter the war on the side of the CP it would require the CP to do a whole lot better in the war, especially in the East.
 

Black Sept

Greater Romania

It wouldn't have made much sense for Romania to fight alongside the Central Powers as one of its major war objectives was to gain Transylvania FROM the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

At the time Transylvania was over half ethnic Romanian, which was actually down from over 60% in the mid 19th century (due to many demographic processes ex. emigration & also a policy of 'magyarization'-hungarization). Either way even Hungarian historians agree that Romanians have been a majority at least since the 17th century (Romanians believe they've always been a majority). This is one of the 3 historical Romanian lands, and uniting it with Wallachia and Moldavia (which joined already in 1859 to create Romania) has been THE objective of Romanian nationalism since its very beginnings.

A victory of the Central Powers with or without Romania would have made the union of Transylvania with Romania impossible. Even if the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have suffered some kind of implosion, regardless the victory- which is probably a scenario worth exploring- the Hungarian Kingdom would have likely gained independence and preserved the unity of Greater Hungary.

Romania, as an ally, would have likely received Bessarabia- the Eastern part of historical Moldavia, occupied by Russians in 1812. But that is hardly comparable to Transylvania in any way (population, area, wealth, national mentality importance etc.). As it happened, for the short period between the two world wars Romania got both Transylvania and Bessarabia plus a number of smaller lands like Bucovina, thus, despite the initial military setbacks, joining the Entente paid off as much as it could possibly have had.
 
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