Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [85]
As the light faded on that cold afternoon, Brătianu presented Rumania’s case. Rich and polished to the point of absurdity, Brătianu had a profound sense of his own importance. He had been educated in the Hautes Ecoles in Paris, and never let anyone forget it; he loved to be discovered lying on a sofa with a book of French verse in a languid hand. Nicolson, who met him at a lunch early on in the conference, was not impressed: “Bratianu is a bearded woman, a forceful humbug, a Bucharest intellectual, a most unpleasing man. Handsome and exuberant, he flings his fine head sideways, catching his own profile in the glass. He makes elaborate verbal jokes, imagining them to be Parisian.” Women rather liked him. “The eyes of a gazelle and the jaw of a tiger,” said one. Queen Marie of Rumania, who knew all about seductions, demurely recalled an evening when the full moon had made him “sentimental.” In a less charitable mood, she told Wilson that he was “a tiresome, sticky and tedious individual.” 4
Throwing open his briefcase with what Nicolson described as “histrionic detachment,” he claimed the whole of the Banat. “He is evidently convinced that he is a greater statesman than any present. A smile of irony and self-consciousness recurs from time to time. He flings his fine head in profile. He makes a dreadful impression.”5 His arguments ran from the strictly legalistic (Rumania had been promised the Banat in the secret clauses of the Treaty of Bucharest of 1916 with which the Allies had enticed Rumania into the war) to the Wilsonian (Rumanians ought to be in one nation). In the course of his peroration he called in ethnology, history, geography and Rumania’s wartime sacrifices. He also hinted that the Serbians had tilted toward Austria-Hungary in the past. (The Serbians were to make the same accusation about the Rumanians.)
Vesnić and Trumbić replied. They pointed out that Serbia was asking for only the western part of the Banat. While they could not call on secret treaties, they could otherwise use the same sorts of arguments as the Rumanians. “Since the Middle Ages,” said Vesnić, “the portion of the Banat claimed by Serbia had always been closely connected with the Serbian people.” Historically, he went on, “as the Isle of France was to France, and Tuscany to Italy, so was the Banat to Serbia.” It had given birth to the Serb Renaissance and later Serbian nationalism. And when the Serbian royal family had been exiled, it had naturally taken refuge there. (To this Brătianu replied, reasonably enough, that the vagaries of Serbian politics had occasionally driven its rulers into Rumania proper, but this was scarcely reason for Serbia to claim that as well. 6)
In the discussion Wilson noted, with some surprise, that the delegates from the Balkan nations did not “represent their facts in the same way, and there would always be something that was not quite clear.” The United States was always ready, he said, to approve a settlement based on facts. Balfour, who had been half asleep, intervened to ask an apparently simple question: Were there any figures as to the ethnic mix of the Banat? Yes, said the Yugoslavs; the western part, which they were claiming, was predominantly Serb and, moreover, so were monasteries and convents all over the Banat. There were, of course, large numbers of Germans and Hungarians, but they would much rather be part of Serbia than Rumania. No, said Brătianu, Rumanians were in the majority if you took the Banat as a unit (for political and historical reasons the only thing to do); monasteries were neither here nor there because everyone knew the Serbs, like all Slavs, tended to be religious; and, as for the Germans and Hungarians, the Serbs would have trouble managing such large minorities.7
On February 1, Brătianu produced the full list of Rumania’s demands: the Banat, Transylvania, Bessarabia on the Russian border, and the Bukovina in the north, all of which he