Talk:Ferdinand I of Romania

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in "After the war" section: Romania before WWI was already a country in persistent social turmoil[1] and under the threat of a revolution, tragedy avoided after the brutal repression of the 1907 peasant revolt only by the outbreak of the war.[2] Some 10 000[3][4][5][6][7][8] peasants were killed by the Romanian Army during the 1907 crushed rebellion, which was the direct result of decades of political inertia: at the beginning of the (20th) century the Romanian political régime was the bad example in the Balkans, which anyway as a region had a bad political reputation in Europe. Class conflict was ripe for social explosions, the population being exploited and opressed by a parasitic landed aristocracy and their middlemen.[9] As a consequence of the untenable statu quo, the first interwar years saw the adoption – unenthusiastically[10] and in much diluted forms[11] - of a land reform and of a new constitution (1923) as well as the extension of the democratic franchise to universal (male) suffrage. Because king Ferdinand I sided,[12][13][14] as his predecessor, king Carol I,[15][16] with the landed aristocracy and the corrupt[17] oligarchy (groups politically defended after the war by the Liberal party and its substitute, People's Party of general Averescu[18][19]) against the pro-democracy forces that won the first post-war elections, all these much-needed reforms finally did nothing[20][21][22] but add a new baroque and useless layer to the already[23] crumbling façade[24][25][26] of the epigonic[27] antebellum political[28] system,[29] a façade democracy which will produce before long a vigorous fascist backlash against it[30] and against the corrupt dynasty that used it.[31] Under this old[32] Romanian political system[33] the king easily manipulated[34][35] the results of the elections,[36] by dismissing an acting cabinet/prime-minister and thereafter choosing his favored party-leader as the head of a new cabinet in charge with organizing the ensuing elections;[37][38] this new cabinet could, in turn, use at will the state power (police[39][40]) in order to guarantee electoral victory for itself and the fulfillment of the king`s political choice,[41][42] by the extensive use of intimidation,[43][44] censorship[45] and electoral fraud.[46][47] As such, the system ensured invariably ballot victory for all king`s governments organizing elections before the war,[48][49] as it ensured also ballot victory for all king`s governments organizing elections after the war, as long as king Ferdinand I reigned.[50][51][52][53] That unfortunate situation prevailed for the king himself had vested interests (he was a big land-owner[54]) in perpetuating his and the oligarchy`s grip on power.[55][56] Politically speaking as the first fiddle[34] in Romania, Ferdinand used the authoritarian system he inherited from his predecessor, the king Carol I,[57] and maybe even "enhanced" the king`s grip on the political life of the country,[58] in order to cancel the effects of the post-war democratic reforms,[59][60][61] the dismissal in 1920 of the pro-reform peasantist cabinet amounting in some historians’ view to nothing short of "a royal coup d’état"[62] that aborted a genuine democratic evolution.[63][64] These authoritarian[65][66] political practices,[67] as bad[68] as they already were immediately after the war,[69] will be still further worsened, democratically speaking, under Ferdinand’s reign, when in 1926 the Liberal party changed the election act.[70]

in "Before the war" section: "It is still unclear though, whom he was finally "loyal" to, as long as after the World War One and the collapse of Austria-Hungary empire (which made possible that the province of Transylvania joins Romania to form the unitary Romanian national state), he was prevented to accept the crown of the Hungarian kingdom from the hands of Magyar aristocracy only by the stubborn opposition of the Romanian political parties, which refused to admit that the Romanian people live again into a multinational state, even one reigned by their Hohenzollern king.[64]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ pp. 24-26 in Istoria Gărzii de Fier 1919-1941 - Mistica Ultranaţionalismului. Francisco Veiga. 2nd Ed. Humanitas, Bucureşti 1995. ISBN 9789732803929.
  2. ^ "The New Rumanian Constitution". D. Mitrany. Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, Third Series, Vol. 6, No. 1. (1924), pp. 110-119. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of "the British Institute of International and Comparative Law". Accessed: 02/09/2013. ("There are in the statement (hereinafter referred to as the Report) submitted to the Chamber by its Rapporteur some suggestive comments bearing on that restriction. As an apology for the many vague clauses of the new Constitution the Report says that "If the old constituent had left the ordinary legislator free to consider other cases that may have arisen, instead of laying it down that expropriation was permissible only in three defined cases, we should have had neither 1907 [which saw the most serious peasant rising in Rumania] nor another revolution, which would fatally have followed but for the outbreak of the war of 1913. ... Similarly, if the Constitution of 1917, under Conservative pressure, instead of fixing the number of hectares, had left the ordinary legislator free to study and determine the exact surface available, we should not have had to face at a certain moment the question: Constitution or revolution?")
  3. ^ "The Market, Tradition and Peasant Rebellion: The Case of Romania in 1907". Author(s): Daniel Chirot and Charles Ragin. Source: "American Sociological Review", Vol. 40, No. 4 (Aug., 1975), pp. 428-444. Published by: American Sociological Association. - "In a few weeks some 11,000 peasants were killed by the army (two of every 1,000 rural inhabitants."
  4. ^ The issue burst to the forefront of national affairs once again in 1907 when Carol suppressed a peasant rebellion at the cost of 10,000 lives.” - MLA Citation: "Carol I.", World History: The Modern Era, ABC-CLIO, 2010
  5. ^ „Romanian peasants revolt in Moldavia beginning in March to protest their inability to buy land; they also protest their exploitation by the crown and by grain merchants such as Leopold Louis-Dreyfus. Some 10,000 die before Carol I can regain control of the country in April.” - James Trager, "1907" The People's Chronology, James Trager, 3rd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Gale Virtual Reference Library. GALE CX3460601907). http://www.amazon.com/The-Peoples-Chronology-Year-By-Year-Prehistory/dp/0805031340
  6. ^ „When peace was restored at the end of April, aided by a force of 120,000 troops, an estimated 10,000 peasants had been killed.” - Markus Bauer, „Rascoala: the last peasants' revolt”, History Today, Sep. 2010, Vol. 60, Issue 9, p.47.
  7. ^ "Romania: A Country Study". Federal Research Division. Library of Congress. Edited by Ronald D. Bachman. Research Completed July 1989. 2002 Blackmask Online. - "Beside limited ownership, peasants also had little representation in government. Their discontent exploded in 1888 and prompted an ineffective land reform. In 1907 peasants revolted even more violently in Moldavia, where they attacked Jewish middlemen, pillaged large estates, battled the army, and attempted to march on Bucharest. The government called out the army to quell the disorder, in which at least 10,000 peasants died.")
  8. ^ Taking our coding scheme into account, the lowest possible number of deaths would have been on the order of about 2,500. The highest possible number (assuming 4,000 deaths in each of the four principal centers of rebellion, 500 in the two other counties with intense rebellion, 75 in the county labelled "2," and 25 each in the other 25 counties) of deaths would have been a bit under 18,000 deaths. A more reasonable estimate, using the mid-points offered in the coding scheme, estimating about 2,000 deaths in each of the four main counties, yields about 9,000 deaths. Since greater precision is impossible and since this procedure yields reasonable results, we used it. In defense of our procedure, we might point out that these estimates are based on the best judgment of 16 historians, not on the basis of a single author. They also correspond very closely to the subjective evaluation of the seriousness of the rebellion on a county by county basis in the other leading accounts (Eidelberg, 1974; Tucker, 1972; Seton-Watson, 1963:385-8; Hurezeanu,1962:355-73; Rosetti, 1907:611-23). - Daniel Chirot and Charles Ragin, „The Market, Tradition and Peasant Rebellion: The Case of Romania in 1907”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 40, No. 4 , Aug., 1975, pp. 428-444.
  9. ^ p. 105 in "A History of Eastern Europe - Crisis and change" (Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries. Routledge 1998. ISBN 0-203-00725-5.): "Ownership of the land they cultivated gave peasant farmers a powerful incentive to become more productive. Moreover, except in Romania, this tended to defuse the violent potential of class conflict. ‘Only Romania had a large—and parasitic—landlord class and a very deprived peasantry, in spite of the agrarian reform law of 1864.’ Thus the rapacious exploitation and oppression of vulnerable peasants by exceptionally corrupt and ruthless landlords and intermediaries (‘arendasi’) is widely judged to have been the main underlying cause of the great Romanian peasant revolt of 1907. But in this respect Romania is seen as the exception that proved the rule."
  10. ^ p. 94 in "Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789-1989 - From.Ottomans.to.Milosevic". Tom Gallagher. Routledge 2001. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. ISBN 0-203-64654-1. ("Except for rare moments, most political strategies involved narrow elite groups and were fought over the heads of the peasant majority. Land reform occurred nearly everywhere, but it was carried out unenthusiastically, mainly to prevent the contagion of Bolshevism infecting the Balkans. […] In Romania the aim behind land reform was often as much to cut down to size minority interests which held large estates as it was to improve the condition of the peasantry (Roberts 1951:39).")
  11. ^ "Alexandru Averescu." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 29 Nov. 2010. ("Later, as head of the newly created People’s Party, he again served as premier (March 1920–December 1921), introducing a much diluted measure of the long-awaited land redistribution. Between March 1926 and June 1927, Averescu again formed a government. His domestic policies were generally conservative and authoritarian.")
  12. ^ "Eastern Europe 1740–1985. Feudalism to Communism". Second edition. Robin Okey (Senior Lecturer in History, University of Warwick). First published 1982 by HarperCollins Academic. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. ISBN 0-203-16846-1. ("This new situation frightened inherited ruling circles. In 1920 King Ferdinand arbitrarily dismissed the opening government of peasantists and Transylvanian nationalists because of its decentralist tendencies and the Croatian Peasant Party suffered administrative harrassment in the early years of the Yugoslav state. Thereafter, in conjunction with Bratianu, the liberal strong man, Ferdinand resumed the pre-war royal practice of manipulating elections; the liberals won 260 seats in 1922, sixteen when they chose to retire temporarily in 1926 and 298 when they resumed office in 1927. In comparison the Yugoslav estimate, that the party organizing the elections could expect to benefit by some twenty-five seats, makes the system in that country appear positively sporting.")
  13. ^ p. 94 in "Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789-1989 - From.Ottomans.to.Milosevic". Tom Gallagher. Routledge 2001. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. ISBN 0-203-64654-1. ("In 1919, one of the few clean elections held in interwar Romania gave the PNR and its allies a governing majority. In the first election held under universal suffrage, the demand for change was deeply felt. The government formed by Vaida-Voeivod showed its radical intentions. It wished to pass a radical land reform and open contacts with Bolshevik Russia in order to regularise the frontier between them. But in 1920 the crown dismissed the first government of reformers from outside the oligarchy. Elections were held ‘in the old spirit’ and by 1922 the Liberals were back in charge (Macartney and Palmer 1962:213).")
  14. ^ "Le Passage Du Socialisme Aux Capitalismes - Déterminants Socio-Historiques De La Trajectoire Polonaise Et Roumaine" (Thèse de Doctorat, Université de Montréal, 2002). Elena-Anca Mot. Publié dans la revue Transitions, Vol. 43-1 (2/2004) : "La Roumanie et l'intégration européenne", édité par Sorina SOARE. La revue Transitions est editée par l'Institut de Sociologie de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles et par l'Institut Européen de l'Université de Genève. ("L’Etat roumain renforcé par les acquis territoriaux exerce pleinement ses fonctions économiques et sociales. Les progrès accomplis pendant cette période sont essentiellement le résultat de la politique d’industrialisation et de l’application des politiques protectionnistes. Ce type de modernisation a été rendu possible par le modèle dictatorial bonapartiste fondé sur une bureaucratie centralisatrice et une alliance entre les élites industrielles et financières, de sorte que la démarche modernisatrice a gardé son caractère conservateur et réactionnaire.")
  15. ^ p. 112 in "Native Fascism in the Successor States 1918-1945". Edited by Peter F. Sugar. American Bibliographical Center Clio Press ("ABC-Clio") Inc. 1971. Santa Barbara California 1971. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 71-149636. ISBN 0-87436-074-9. ("Unquestionably Carol lacked confidence in and had little respect for the democratic process. In this regard his attitude was similar to that of his father Ferdinand, and, for that matter, of the entire crowned dynasty of the Hohenzollern and the uncrowned of the Bratianus. His political philosophy, if he had one, was that of dynastic authoritarianism: the King was the ultimate source of political decision and the initiator of meaningful political action.")
  16. ^ "Area Handbook for Romania. Authors: Eugene K. Keefe, Donald W. Bernier, Lyle E. Brenneman, William Giloane, James M. Moore, and Neda A. Walpole. Release Date: June 8, 2010. Research and writing were completed in February 1972. Published 1972. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-600095. This volume is one of a series of handbooks prepared by Foreign Area Studies (FAS) of The American University, designed to be useful to military and other personnel who need a convenient compilation of basic facts about the social, economic, political, and military institutions and practices of various countries. ("Economic and formal political progress, however, was not matched by similar advancement of democratic processes in the social field. The liberal provisions of the 1866 Constitution were circumvented under the authoritarian governmental system, leaving much actual power in the hands of the landed aristocracy. The slowly rising middle class and small number of industrial entrepreneurs were granted some rights, but the increasing number of industrial workers and the great peasant majority shared very little in the political life of the country.")
  17. ^ pp. 370-371 in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938", by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987. ("Without the climate created by the Russian Revolution, which broke out in March and October of the same year, the agricultural reform would certainly not have been of the magnitude that it was. Moreover, the government promised to recast the political culture: "During 40 years, our political parties, without exception, have practiced corruption. … We are all responsible for this situation, for not having done anything to stop this monstrous tyranny and the corruption of our public life. By the methods we used, we have created, sustained and developed the all-encompassing power of the oligarchy." This statement was not made by an isolated politician at an electoral meeting, but was solemnly declared in the Chamber of Deputies two months after the first Russian Revolution (on March 27, 1917).")
  18. ^ p.262 in "Ten Years of Greater Roumania". Alexander Vaida-Voevod. The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 7, No. 20 (Jan., 1929), pp. 261-267. Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Accessed: 19/11/2013. (p. 261: "Ten years of anxiety, disillusionment and experience followed. The first Government, the outcome of the free election which took place in October, I9I9, was quickly set aside. It was a Coalition Government representing five parties, the regional parties of the three united provinces and two parties from the old kingdom-that of Mr. Nicholas Iorga and the newly-born Peasant Party. They were in turn superseded by the majority elected in May, I920, in accordance with the "traditional methods" of the new Premier, General Averescu. His was a camouflage Government intended to hold the place for the omnipotent Liberal Party under Ion I. C. Bratianu. Brought into power as a result of the pressure and unlimited influence exercised by Bratianu upon King Ferdinand, it was forced in its turn to resign after holding office for less than eighteen months. Mr. Bratianu then remained in power till I926, when a second Averescu Cabinet was appointed, to be followed a year later by Bratianu once more. After the death of King Ferdinand and of Ion Bratianu himself in I927, the latter's brother Vintila remained at the head of the Government. p. 266: One encouraging symptom is that the antagonism artificially provoked by the Liberals while in office, and also by their substitutes in the Averescu party, between the new provinces and the old kingdom, between the various social classes, between the Roumanians and the minorities, even between different religious creeds, has disappeared as if by magic.")
  19. ^ p. 92 în Istoria Gărzii de Fier 1919-1941, Mistica Ultranaţionalismului. Francisco Veiga. Ediţia a II-a, Humanitas, Bucureşti, 1995, ISBN 9789732803929. ("Averescu s-a menţinut la putere din martie 1926 pînă în iunie 1927. În decursul acestei scurte perioade, generalul a încercat o apropiere politică de Italia fascistă, dar, în realitate, nimeni nu l-a prea luat în serios, nici măcar italienii. Era un secret cunoscut de toată lumea că acest guvern avea să dureze atîta timp cît voiau liberalii să-l menţină. Cu toate acestea, şi avînd în vedere capacitatea sa politică limitată, Averescu a făcut tot ce trebuia pentru a se transforma într-un monstru ca cel al lui Frankenstein şi a se întoarce împotriva creatorilor săi. A încercat o serie de asalturi asupra monopolurilor financiare liberale, crearea unui sistem de credite agricole şi contractarea unui împrumut din Italia; de asemenea, s-a încercat o scurtă conspiraţie dinastică. Pe punctul de a fi demis de rege, la stăruinţele liberalilor, Averescu a ameninţat chiar cu lovitura de stat. În continuare, liberalii au luat din nou puterea, cîteva zile înainte de înfiinţarea Ligii Arhanghelului Mihail. Totuşi, traiectoria urmată din 1922 arăta că manevrele liberalilor nu mai erau simple reacţii conjuncturale. Aviditatea şi oportunismul lor lăsau să se întrevadă în ce măsură le era erodată puterea. În realitate, România trăia amurgul unei întregi ere politice. Marile stele ale oligarhicei familii Brătianu erau pe cale de a se stinge: Ion I. C. Brătianu - fiul lui I. C. Brătianu şi patriarh al familiei din 1909 - avea să moară chiar în 1927, la puţine luni după moartea regelui Ferdinand, cel mai important sprijin al guvernului său.")
  20. ^ "King Ferdinand I of Romania" in "World at War: Understanding Conflict and Society". Margaret Sankey. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 28 Aug. 2013. ("In 1922, Ferdinand held a coronation ceremony to recognize his place as king of a "Greater Romania." Indeed, Romania had doubled in size, but Ferdinand's promises of reform after the war went unfulfilled. Ferdinand died at Sinaia on July 20, 1927. He was succeeded by his grandson, Michael I.")
  21. ^ "Alexandru Averescu." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 29 Nov. 2010. ("Later, as head of the newly created People’s Party, he again served as premier (March 1920–December 1921), introducing a much-diluted measure of the long-awaited land redistribution. Between March 1926 and June 1927, Averescu again formed a government. His domestic policies were generally conservative and authoritarian.")
  22. ^ "Faschismus als Reflex und Voraussetzung autoritärer Herrschaft in Rumänien." Author(s): Armin Heinen. Source: Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 12. Jahrg., H. 2, Faschismus in autoritären Systemen (1986), pp. 139-162. Published by: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (GmbH & Co. KG). - "The Constitution of 1923 left the executive power in the hands of the king (art. 88) and the political parties were not even mentioned." ("Die rumänische Konstitution von 1923 legte die Leitung der Exekutive in die Hand des Königs (Art. 88), die Parteien wurden nicht erwähnt.")
  23. ^ p. 134 in "A History of Fascism, 1914–1945". Stanley G.Payne. Routledge 2005. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. ("Romania: […] Yet Romanian society was one of the poorest and most underdeveloped in eastern Europe, with nearly 50 percent illiteracy. Its political system had been dominated by two elitist parties (the Liberals and Conservatives). Its elections had been manipulated, and its politics and government were perhaps the most corrupt in Europe.")
  24. ^ p. 29 in "Hitler’s Forgotten Ally - Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–44". Dennis Deletant. Palgrave Macmillan 2006. ISBN 1–4039–9341–6. "The greatest discrepancy, from a western point of view, lay in the gulf between word and deed. Behind the façade of political institutions copied from the West the practice of government was subject to patronage and narrow sectional interests. Under the constitution of 1923 the king had the power to dissolve parliament and appoint a new government."
  25. ^ "Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919-39". Systematic Case Studies. Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England) in association with International Political Science Association. First published in Great Britain 2000 by Macmillan Press Ltd. (ISBN 0–333–64828–5). First published in the United States of America 2000 by St. Martin’s Press, Inc. (ISBN 0–312–22843–0). - "Thus, it is quite apparent that the regimes in Hungary or Romania, for example, must be qualified, even before the final breakdown, as largely ‘façade’ democracies."
  26. ^ "Le Passage Du Socialisme Aux Capitalismes - Déterminants Socio-Historiques De La Trajectoire Polonaise Et Roumaine" (Thèse de Doctorat, Université de Montréal, 2002). Elena-Anca Mot. Publié dans la revue Transitions, Vol. 43-1 (2/2004) : "La Roumanie et l'Intégration Européenne", édité par Sorina SOARE. La revue Transitions est editée par l'Institut de Sociologie de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles et par l'Institut Européen de l'Université de Genève. ("Pour ce qui est du régime politique, la Constitution de 1866 introduit le modèle de la démocratie occidentale (selon la Constitution belge de 1831). Alors que la loi fondamentale était un document de la classe moyenne préparé pour une société capitaliste, en Roumanie, la société à caractère largement paysan gardait ses assises traditionnelles et le pouvoir économique était encore détenu par la grande aristocratie, de sorte que le système de démocratie parlementaire n’était que simulé et mimé.")
  27. ^ p. 99 in "Liberalism, Fascism or Social Democracy - Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe". Gregory M. Luebbert. Oxford University Press 1991. - "Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the level of modernization was greater, but still a handicap for liberals. In the cities, in the place of an economically independent middle class a kind of ersatz middle class appeared, dependent on state employment and foreign capital. In the countryside, a landed elite often continued to lord over an impoverished and illiterate peasantry. Under these circumstances, such liberal institutions as appeared—written constitutions, manhood suffrage, and parliaments, for example—were merely epigonic."
  28. ^ "Eastern Europe 1740–1985. Feudalism to Communism". Second edition. Robin Okey (Senior Lecturer in History, University of Warwick). First published 1982 by HarperCollins Academic. ISBN 0-415-08489-X. p. 136: "In Romania, where politics remained confined to the landlord class, this alternation became virtually formalized after 1869, with elections not so much inaugurating changes of government as ratifying those which the king had already made, by obliging his new ministers with the necessary parliamentary majority." p. 165: "Disturbing signs, however, were the refusal to make German a second state language in Czechoslovakia and the prerogatives preserved to royalty in Yugoslavia and Romania." p. 136: "In the Balkan states, with their revolutionary origins, sovereigns had to adapt to the elections, parties and ministerial responsibility of constitutional life. This did not come easily to German princes like Charles of Romania (1866–1914), and Alexander von Battenburg (1879–86) and Ferdinand von Coburg of Bulgaria (1887–1918), or to King Milan of Serbia (1868–89) who, though of the native Obrenovic dynasty, had been educated abroad and preferred the life-style of Biarritz to that of Belgrade. Yet unsophisticated societies accorded a charismatic role to their sovereigns—Ferdinand, for one, took care to cultivate an ostentatious etiquette—and this helped rulers to exploit the prerogatives of constitutional monarchy, notably rights of appointment of ministers and dissolution of parliament, in a way unthinkable for a Queen Victoria."
  29. ^ "The Little Dictators: The History of Eastern Europe Since 1918". Antony Polonsky. Routledge & Kegan Paul Books 1975. ISBN 978-0710080950. p. 82: "[…] the persistent political malaise in Rumania was the contrast between the ostensibly western-style constitutional character of the regime, and its actual practices. This contrast soon became glaringly evident."
  30. ^ p. 102 in "Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789-1989 - From.Ottomans.to.Milosevic". Tom Gallagher. Routledge 2001. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. ISBN 0-15-27089-8. ("The low political standards exhibited by many of the post-1918 political leaders had produced a backlash against a façade democracy based on arranged elections and special privileges for narrow financial interests presided over by a monarchy increasingly distancing itself from the people.")
  31. ^ p. 117 in "Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789-1989 - From.Ottomans.to.Milosevic". Tom Gallagher. Routledge 2001. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. ISBN 0-15-27089-8. ("The anti-Western backlash the Iron Guard had orchestrated in the 1930s bears some comparison with the religious and nationalist revolt that swept Iran in the 1970s. A corrupt and isolated dynasty, which preferred to see wealth reside in a few hands and orientated itself towards the West, drew the wrath of intellectuals and young people who felt excluded from the system. Orthodox fundamentalism pervaded the Guard just as radical Islam was the driving force behind the Iranian revolution.")
  32. ^ "Social Background of Roumanian Politics". Joseph S. Roucek. "Social Forces", Vol. 10, No. 3 (Mar., 1932), pp. 419-425. Published by: Oxford University Press. ("As there was hardly any democracy in pre-war Roumania, the sudden transition after the War was at least a mixed blessing to her hard-pressed leaders.")
  33. ^ "The Politics of Backwardness in Continental Europe, 1780-1945". Andrew C. Janos. World Politics, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Apr., 1989), pp. 325-358. Published by Cambridge University Press. Accessed: 11/03/2014. ("The experience of neighboring Romania was similar. In 1876, Premier Ion "I.C." Bratianu set up a political machine to the benefit of his Liberal Party. Within the machine, the prefects of the counties (judete) were turned by Bratianu into "petty satraps," whose activities made it "exceedingly difficult to agitate against the government ... even for members of the boyar class." Thus, according to another historian, "as the power of the salaried bureaucracy increased, so did in proportion the power of the landed class decrease." In Hungary, the rigging of elections was confined to constituencies inhabited by minorities (and later, to the countryside), but in Romania, the system of "engineering" results by pressure or fraud was universal. In consequence, parliament was usually dominated by a single party, faced only by the token opposition of a handful of deputies.")
  34. ^ a b p. 384 in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938", by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987. ("Interwar Romania is a more dubious or, more correctly, a borderline case. The crucial role played by the monarch in electoral politics rightly leads Dogan to call it a mimic democracy.")
  35. ^ «L'Effondrement de la Démocratie, Autoritarisme et Totalitarisme dans l'Europe de l'Entre-Deux-Guerre». Juan J. Linz. Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée, 2004/4 Vol. 11, p. 531-586. DOI : 10.3917/ripc.114.0531. - "The Royal Dictatorships: Having a king as the head of the state was one of the peculiarities of the authoritarian régimes in Balkan (Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece). It is worth to stress the fact that these monarchs doesn’t tried to challenge the liberal parliamentarism as long as constitutionally or in practice they kept a decisive role. They named and dismissed cabinets, granted power to prime ministers and parties and organized elections they cheerfully manipulated." («Les dictatures royales: La présence d’un roi à la tête de l’État était une des particularités des régimes autoritaires dans les Balkans (Roumanie, Bulgarie, Yougoslavie, Grèce). Il est important de relever que ces monarques ne cherchèrent pas à remettre en question le parlementarisme libéral dans la mesure où, constitutionnellement ou en pratique, ils gardaient un rôle décisif. Ils contribuèrent à faire et défaire les cabinets, accordaient pouvoir aux premiers ministres et partis et organisaient des élections qu’ils manipulaient allégrement.»)
  36. ^ p. 8 in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987. ("Mattei Dogan, in his study of the electoral process in prewar Romania prepared for this volume, suggested that a political system may have all the institutions associated with democracy – political parties, elections and legislatures – but still not be democratic because power is exercised behind the scenes. In prewar Romania, he wrote, monarchical power was not always apparent because elected governments were free to do as they wanted so long as what they wanted was also in accordance with the wishes of the monarch; but when a government failed to conform to those wishes and interests, it was replaced by a new government, which submitted itself to the electorate for what proved to be automatic confirmation. Dogan thus reminded us that the presence of parties, elections and parliaments is not in itself sufficient proof that a democratic system exists. Prewar Eastern Europe, several Latin American countries in the 1920s and 1930s, prewar Japan, and several contemporary countries in Africa and South and Southeast Asia have had and now have similar "democratic systems" – what Dogan called "mimic democracies" – with elections that do little more than provide the appearance of popular sovereignty and popular legitimation for governments ruled by monarchs, the military and oligarchs. Like the king in the Allice in Wonderland, who says "sentence first, judgment latter", these are countries guided by the principle "government first, electionsa latter".")
  37. ^ pp. 380-381 in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938"), by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987. ("In Romania, the alternation in power was operated by the crown, which constituted the center of gravity of the political regime. […] One of the basic principles of any parliamentary democracy is that the government emanates from the parliament, which represents the electoral body. In appearance this principle was respected in Romania. But the king reversed the normal order in which the chief of a democratic state exercises his prerogatives, elections first, then formation of the government. This reversal can be explained by the profound social, cultural and political realities of the country. The king was obliged to reverse the order to save the façade of the democratic game. This reversal created what I call mimic democracy. This is how mimic democracy functioned. The king would revoke the government without a vote of no confidence by parliament. A new government would be appointed, which would immediately ask the king to dissolve parliament, where it lacked a majority. After a maximum interval of two months, as formally specified by the constitution, new elections were held. As we have seen, the new party in power until 1937 always succeeded in obtaining at least 40 percent of the national vote and thus was able to benefit from the majority premium, which gave it more than 60 percent of the parliamentary seats. […] a conservative leader and prime minister before World War I, Petru Carp, addressed to the king: "Give me the power and I shall make a Parliament in my image." The chronological order of the political process was as follows: revocation of the government, appointment of a new government, dissolution of parliament, new "elections", parliamentary majority for the new government. But one might observe that the population was consulted and that it could ratify or reject the new government. Here is the core of the matter: the electorate never put the party holding power in the minority until 1937. The fresh government knew how to manage the elections. It was not the king who exercised pressure on the electorate.")
  38. ^ "The Political Evolution of Roumania". Author: Joseph S. Rouček. Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 10, No. 30 (Apr., 1932), pp. 602-615. Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. ("The personal basis of Roumanian politics must not obscure the fact that the most important single factor in Roumanian political life has been, with the exception of the brief period of the Regency, the Crown. Carol, Ferdinand, and now the second Carol, as recent events point out, have been in varying degrees arbiters between the parties. The power of absolute veto and the right of dissolution, in addition to the power to nominate and dismiss its Ministers, often enabled the Crown to determine the electoral result beforehand by appointing its chosen favourites to office as the Government in charge of the elections. The Government managing the elections has never met defeat in Roumania.")
  39. ^ p. 24 in "War and National Consolidation, 1887-1941 (History of the Balkans – Twentieth Century)". Barbara Jelavich. Cambridge University Press 1999. First published 1983. ISBN 0-521-27459-1 (Vol. 2) paperback. ("In 1884, under Liberal sponsorship, a bill on electoral reform was passed. Although the franchise was made broader, the system of voting by electoral colleges, which served to exclude the majority of the population from real political influence, was retained. Moreover, as previously, the government in power was able to control the elections through patronage and the police. The king could appoint a new ministry of his choice and then dissolve parliament and hold a new election. The government in office could assure itself of a victory in the voting by use of the centralized administrative system, and thus win sufficient support in the chamber. This procedure gave the king a pivotal role between the two parties.")
  40. ^ "Popular Front in the Balkans: (4. Failure in Hungary and Rumania)". Bela Vago. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 5, No. 3, Popular Fronts (1970), pp. 95-117, Published by Sage Publications, Ltd. ("In Rumania the right-wing National Liberal Party (NLP) had been at the helm since I933. Up to the end of 1937 the extreme anti-communist and anti-Soviet Tatarescu served as Prime Minister.2 He had to cope with a stronger agrarian opposition than Goemboes, and in 1935 the Rumanian extreme right also carried more weight than the Hungarian. The democratic National Peasant Party (NPP) of Iuliu Maniu, I. Mihalache, and N. Lupu managed to maintain its mass base in spite of electoral chicanery and police terror;")
  41. ^ pp. 38-40 în "The Sword of the Archangel – Fascist Ideology in Romania". Radu Ioanid (translated by Peter Heinegg). East European Monographs No. CCXXII, Boulder. Distributed By Columbia University Press, New York, 1990. ISBN 0-88033-189-5. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-83775. Printed in the United States of America. - "[…]; meanwhile, in Rumania “government by rotation” prevailed. This system, however, was marked by peculiar features, justifying the statement of Matei Dogan that in Rumania at that time there was no authentic democracy. […] The mechanism for assuming power in Rumania did not follow the classic scheme of elections that declare as winner one party, which then takes over the government. Instead, the sovereign dismissed the prime minister—the leader of the party previously in power—and named a new prime minister, chosen from among the heads of the opposition party. Several months later the new party in power organized the elections, thereby inevitably gaining an overwhelming majority, while the newly defined opposition went crashing to spectacular defeat. Thus the party in power was never demoted to minority status by elections taking place under its aegis. Government was not the expression of the parliamentary majority; quite the contrary, the majority came about from the will of the government, thanks to the intense dernagoguery of the politicians, the immaturity of the electorate, and the trafficking in votes. […] The peasantry, which made up 80% of the population of the country was represented by 1% of members of Parliament. Despite the fact that the Rumanian Parliament was, practically speaking, the expression of the government’s domination (at bottom, the will of the monarch), some energetic personalities in Parliament tried to make the most of the possibilities for action that the Parliament theoretically provided. […] This was how things stood at the moment when living conditions among the peasantry were the shame of the nation, and when illiteracy was widespread: in 1930 44.2% of the popuation of Wallachia and Moldavia, 61.3% of Bessarabia, 34.3% of Bukovina, and 33% of Transylvania could not read or write. Futile debates in Parliament kept up a noisy superficial disturbance, while Rumania, despite its rich natural resources, continued to be “the European country with the greatest number of illiterates, the highest mortality rates for both children and adults, the highest rate of sufferers from pellagra and malaria, the lowest productivity per hectare.” Electoral fraud is eloquently illustrated by comparing the results obtained at the polls by the large bourgeois parties between the two World Wars.")
  42. ^ p. 79 in "Romania - World Bibliographical Series, Revised Edition Vol. 59". Author: Peter Siani-Davies; Mary Siani-Davies; Andrea Deletant. Publisher: ABC-CLIO 1998. Printed in Great Britain. ISBN 185109244-7. "World Bibliographical Series" General Editors: Robert G. Neville (Executive Editor). John J. Horton. Robert A. Myers. Hans H. Wellisch. Ian Wallace. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr. ("The author argues that Romania between the two World Wars can best be characterized as a 'mimic democracy', that is, a democracy where the political process was reversed since the parliament was not elected by a free ballot but, instead, the party in power manipulated elections in order to have the necessary majority.)
  43. ^ pp. 377-378 in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938", by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987. ("[…], violation of the ballot box, restriction of opposition condidates' freedom and punishment of voters suspected of having voted "badly" were the most frequent techniques. […] Electoral participation was higher than one would expect, considering the preponderance of peasants. It was very high in some poor rural areas and relatively low in some cities. This indicated that many "governmental voters" were in fact fictious, as claimed in a series of pamphlets published between 1932 and 1937 by the National Peasant party – in French, to alert French politicians and journalists.")
  44. ^ "Rumanian Nationalism". Robert Strausz-Hupé. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 232, "A Challenge to Peacemakers" (Mar., 1944), pp. 86-93. Published by Sage Publications, Inc. in association with "the American Academy of Political and Social Science" Accessed: 11/03/2014. ("POLITICAL CORRUPTION: The towering fact of Rumanian public life is graft. Its beneficiaries are a horde of jobholders and fixers. Its victims are the peasant and the Jewish moneylender alike. The economic servitude of the Rumanian peasant renders meaningless his constitutional liberties, even were these not annulled by a staggering political spoils system, buttressed by rigged elections and administrative chicanery. In view of the chronic crisis of Rumanian agriculture, it is surprising that communism has found comparatively few adherents in Rumania. Undoubtedly this is due to the non-Slavic culture of the people and their fear of Russian imperialist designs.")
  45. ^ p.262 in "Ten Years of Greater Roumania". Alexander Vaida-Voevod. The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 7, No. 20 (Jan., 1929), pp. 261-267. Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Accessed: 19/11/2013. ("The elections held under the successive governments of Averescu and Bratianu have remained memorable for their electoral frauds, by the aid of which the nominees of those in power were able to defy the will of the electors and assure to themselves a majority. The use of the gendarmerie - which had been raised to the number of 40,000 - to prevent citizens from reaching the poll, the arbitrary transference of votes to the Government Party, the falsification of returns by dishonest officials, the rejection by Parliament of all electoral petitions and the ratification of all the mandates of majorities which owed their election to "fraud, violence and the theft of ballot boxes" -such were the methods employed in Roumania during the past ten years. […] Led by men who had grown old in the antiquated methods of oligarchic government, ignoring the masses and anxious to curb their aspirations, the Liberal Government, in order to assure itself of a sufficient number of adherents, introduced without any proper selection many doubtful elements into all branches of the administration. These in their turn, knowing themselves to enjoy a privileged position, lent themselves to all the abuses which arbitrary and uncontrolled government invariably engenders, while the authorities, in order to save the situation, were forced not only to shut their eyes in the face of boundless corruption, but also to resort to excessive censorship of the press, supplemented by a state of siege.")
  46. ^ p. 375 in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938", by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987. ("In contrast, the Romanian political regime was characterized by severe electoral instability, one of the sharpest in Europe between the two wars. […] The other governmental votes were simply due to corruption and falsification. Trickery over votes was practiced much more by the Liberal party than by the National Peasant party (see figures 10.2 and 10.3)")
  47. ^ p. 394 in "Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919-39". Systematic Case Studies. Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England) in association with International Political Science Association. First published in Great Britain 2000 by Macmillan Press Ltd. (ISBN 0–333–64828–5). First published in the United States of America 2000 by St. Martin’s Press, Inc. (ISBN 0–312–22843–0). ("8 Conclusions: The definition of crisis in the case of interwar Romania is a very relative one. If we were to assume that Greater Romania had been committed to compromise and the modification of traditional political practices and mentalities by accepting the democratic conditions imposed by the post-First World War peace treaties and embodied in the Constitution of 1923, then the entire inter-war period would constitute a record of political crises. However, as the acceptance of the conditions imposed upon Romania was largely pro forma, they were ignored de facto, being considered incompatible with the principles of Romanian nationalism and Romania’s political experience. Thus, the exclusion of political opponents from power by means of fraudulent elections, the discrimination against Jews, Hungarians and other minorities, the abolition of political pluralism and the parliamentary system by the royal dictatorship of 1938, and the coming to power of the Antonescu regime, were not considered as major political crises by the vast majority of the Romanian population.")
  48. ^ p. 94 in Title: "Rumania, 1866-1947. (Oxford History of Modern Europe)". Keith Hitchins. Oxford University Press 1994. ISBN 0-19-822126-6. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Ipswich Book Company Ltd., Suffolk. ("The king played a key role in determining the outcome of elections through his constitutional authority to appoint the incoming Prime Minister. By the final decades of the century the procedures for changing governments had been perfected. The process began with the resignation of the sitting government, consultations between the king and leading politicians, and the selection of one among the latter to form a new government. The first task of the newly designated Prime Minister after he had chosen his cabinet was to organize elections for a new Chamber and Senate. That was the responsibility of the Minister of the Interior, who mobilized the prefects of the judeţe and the rest of the state administrative apparatus, whose loyalty had been verified, to make certain that the opposition would be overwhelmed in the coming elections. Between 1881 and 1914, as the result of their zeal, no government designated by the king was ever disappointed at the polls.")
  49. ^ p. 31 in Istoria Gărzii de Fier 1919-1941 - Mistica Ultranaţionalismului. Francisco Veiga. 2nd Ed. Humanitas, Bucureşti 1995. ISBN 9789732803929."
  50. ^ p. 104 in "Romania – Borderland of Europe". Lucian Boia (translated by James Christian Brown). Reaktion Books Ltd. 2001. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd. ISBN 1 86189 103 2. ("Carol returned and proclaimed himself King. A strong-willed and authoritarian figure, he saw the ruling of the country as his personal prerogative, and eroded the power of the political parties as much as he could. In the elections of 1937, the Liberal government lost (the first time a Romanian government had been voted out of office!), while the Legionary movement - or Iron Guard, a nationalist party of Orthodoxist and anti-Semitic character - won a disturbing 15 percent of the vote.")
  51. ^ p. 372 in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938", by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987. ("The majority premium simply reinforced the winning party. To benefit from it, a party first had to obtain 40 percent of the national vote. Here is the keystone of the system: the party holding power on the day of the election always attained at least 40 percent of the vote until 1937. But – and this is of essential importance – the same party was never in power for two successive legislative elections. The alternation in power was regularly ensured. […] It was characterized by the alternation of two parties in power: the Liberal party and the People's party between 1920 and 1927; the Liberal party and the National Peasant party between 1927 and 1937."
  52. ^ pp. 95-96 in "Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789-1989 - From.Ottomans.to.Milosevic". Tom Gallagher. Routledge 2001. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. ISBN 0-15-27089-8. ("However, the Liberals discreetly exploited anti-Semitism in towns with many Jewish inhabitants (Nagy-Talavera 1999:227). To put the blame on others for the obvious failures and injustices of the Romanian oligarchy enabled student discontent to be channelled in safe directions (Weber 1974: 511). […] In Romania, the deaths in quick succession of King Ferdinand and his imperious chief minister, Ion I.C.Brătianu, in 1927 enabled the reform-minded PNT to come to the fore. Its newspaper triumphantly proclaimed in 1928 that ‘[T]he country has decided through a true plebiscite against dictatorship and for the rule of law… Romania for the first time is becoming a civilized parliamentary state deserving to pass from East to West’.")
  53. ^ "An Eyewitness Note: Reflections on the Rumanian Iron Guard ". Zvi Yavetz. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 26, No. 3/4, "The Impact of Western Nationalisms: Essays Dedicated to Walter Z. Laqueur on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday" (Sep., 1991), pp. 597-610. Published by Sage Publications, Ltd. (Zvi Yovetz is Fred Lessing Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University and Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York (Queens). He is the author of "Plebs and Princeps" (Oxford 1969), "Caesar's Public Image" (London 1979) and "Slaves and Slavery" (New Brunswick 1987; Augustus, Tel Aviv 1988). He is currently working on a book on Czernowitz between the world wars). ("The elections held on 20 December 1937 were unique for three main reasons. Firstly, not since 1918 had the ruling party lost an election. As a matter of fact, no one in the West respected the Romanian parliamentary democracy that was established in 1918. It was an open secret that governments rigged elections, that voters were easily corrupted, and the entire issue of electoral ethics produced more questions than answers.")
  54. ^ "The Movement for Reform in Rumania after World War I: The Parliamentary Bloc Government of 1919-1920". Victoria F. Brown. Slavic Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 456-472. ("Himself a large landowner and in any case always more at ease with Regat politicians and aristocrats than with rough populists and upstart provincials, King Ferdinand did as little as possible to help his government. Toward the end he seemed merely to be marking time until he could safely dispose of the coalition cabinet. With the encouragement of the king, the Liberals recovered their aplomb shortly after the 1919 elections and expended much energy and ingenuity on slandering the cabinet and its parliamentary supporters and consolidating their own position for regaining power when the time was ripe.")
  55. ^ The Movement for Reform in Rumania after World War I: The Parliamentary Bloc Government of 1919-1920. Victoria F. Brown. Slavic Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 456-472. - "The fate of all Rumanian political parties rested to an unusual degree in the hands of the king. One key to royal power was the peculiar Rumanian system of having the king appoint a new prime minister before parliamentary elections were held. Because the party just given power was then allowed to "make the elections" in its own interests, the king's choice of minister effectively determined the complexion of the new parliament. […] Even when his mediating role became unnecessary at the end of World War I, because of the eclipse of the Conservatives and the rightward drift of the Liberals, the king was able to maintain and perhaps even increase his grip on Rumanian political life by using his constitutional and traditional powers to define the interests of the ruling class.
  56. ^ pp. 381-383 (Chapter 16: "Romania: Crisis without Compromise", Stephen Fischer-Galati) in "Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919-39". Systematic Case Studies. Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England) in association with International Political Science Association. First published in Great Britain 2000 by Macmillan Press Ltd. (ISBN 0–333–64828–5). First published in the United States of America 2000 by St. Martin’s Press, Inc. (ISBN 0–312–22843–0). ("Preservation of the monopoly of power in the hands of the Romanian aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, of the old Romanian military leaders and the Orthodox hierarchy precluded acceptance of diversity – social, political, ethnic, or economic. […] At the end of the First World War, the Old Romanian kingdom was what the socialist leader Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea called a ‘neo-feudal’ society. Some 90 per cent of the population consisted of peasants, most of whom were illiterate and nearly all of whom were of the Romanian Orthodox faith. The industrial working class, almost entirely the sons and daughters of peasants, amounted to about 6 per cent of the population. It too was almost entirely Romanian Orthodox. The landed aristocracy, totally Romanian and Orthodox, was generally educated, versed in French culture, and contemptuous of the peasantry, working class, and commercial bourgeoisie. The state bureaucracy, comprising mostly intellectuals and members of the free professions, shared the prejudices of the aristocracy toward the lower social classes.")
  57. ^ "Le Passage Du Socialisme Aux Capitalismes - Déterminants Socio-Historiques De La Trajectoire Polonaise Et Roumaine" (Thèse de Doctorat, Université de Montréal, 2002). Elena-Anca Mot. Publié dans la revue Transitions, Vol. 43-1 (2/2004) : "La Roumanie et l'intégration européenne", édité par Sorina SOARE. La revue Transitions est editée par l'Institut de Sociologie de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles et par l'Institut Européen de l'Université de Genève. ("La Roumanie a été le seul exemple authentique de deuxième servage en Europe orientale, le changement du système agraire étant le résultat du capitalisme industriel (développé en Occident) et non pas marchand comme dans les trajectoires endogènes de modernisation des structures féodales. […] En se dotant de structures institutionnelles fortement bureaucratisées, dans la tradition de l’autocratie et du despotisme féodal, la Roumanie a amorcé la transformation capitaliste sans la modernisation des structures sociales existantes qui restaient traditionnelles et arriérées : la loi agraire de 1864 proclame la fin formelle de l’ordre féodal (la fin du servage), qui se trouve à l’origine des transformations des structures économiques, mais les rapports agraires ont gardé, même après cette date, des résidus féodaux, qui ne seront réellement abolis qu’après 1945. […] À l’instar des autres pays qui ont réalisé la modernisation selon une démarche réactionnaire (la Prusse, le Japon, l’Italie), la Roumanie offre plutôt l’exemple d’un régime semi-parlementaire fondé sur un Etat avec un haut degré d’autonomie par rapport aux forces qui structurent la société. Les deux classes dominantes (la bourgeoisie et l’aristocratie foncière) formaient, de par leur origine et intérêts communs, une coalition réactionnaire, propre, selon les thèses de Moore, aux systèmes agraires en voie de modernisation “par le haut”18. Malgré le fait qu’on était loin du fascisme, on décèle, dès cette époque, quelques prérequis de cette forme politique : le maintien des structures paysannes à l’aide de la répression politique (les révoltes paysannes de 1888, 1907), une configuration conservatrice mettant en évidence l’alliance de la classe terrienne et de la bourgeoisie avec, dans les conditions d’un faible développement de cette dernière, une dominance de l’aristocratie et, enfin, le rôle moteur de l’Etat dans l’industrialisation permettant la modernisation sans le changement radical des structures. […] Pour l’instant, on a constaté que la Roumanie, bien que se dotant des institutions propres à la démocratie libérale, n’expérimentait au fond qu’une formule autoritaire semi-parlementaire.")
  58. ^ The Movement for Reform in Rumania after World War I: The Parliamentary Bloc Government of 1919-1920. Victoria F. Brown. Slavic Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 456-472. - "The fate of all Rumanian political parties rested to an unusual degree in the hands of the king. One key to royal power was the peculiar Rumanian system of having the king appoint a new prime minister before parliamentary elections were held. Because the party just given power was then allowed to "make the elections" in its own interests, the king's choice of minister effectively determined the complexion of the new parliament. The theoretical power of the Rumanian monarch was further enhanced by his constitutional rights of absolute veto and dissolution of parliament, and, in practice, the king had always played a very active political role, serving as arbiter between the warring Liberals and Conservatives. Even when his mediating role became unnecessary at the end of World War I, because of the eclipse of the Conservatives and the rightward drift of the Liberals, the king was able to maintain and perhaps even increase his grip on Rumanian political life by using his constitutional and traditional powers to define the interests of the ruling class.
  59. ^ "The Movement for Reform in Rumania after World War I: The Parliamentary Bloc Government of 1919-1920". Victoria F. Brown. Slavic Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 456-472. ("Certain of the necessity to stave off any further basic change in Rumanian society, King Ferdinand saw the reformers as subversive trouble-makers, particularly in the area of land reform. From the beginning, Ferdinand relied heavily on the advice of elements hostile to the Parliamentary Bloc and refused to support many of its programs. In the beginning of March 1920, a group of prominent landowners brought the king a petition, in which they complained that Mihalache's agrarian proposals were unconstitutional and urged him to beware of the pernicious influences gathering within the government. The king's most intimate confidants continually supplied him with alarming gossip about government members, especially Lupu. Police and army reports linked Peasant Party leaders and even Iorga with Bulgarian Bolshevists or radical workers. Ferdinand became increasingly hesitant to grant audiences to his own ministers, and he tightened the guard around the palace. Marghiloman claimed that "boyars not only had access to the palace and constantly denounced the cabinet for its 'Bolshevik' tendencies, but also prevented Mihalache from getting an audience to expound his views.")
  60. ^ p. 26 in "The Sword of the Archangel – Fascist Ideology in Romania". Radu Ioanid (translated by Peter Heinegg). East European Monographs No. CCXXII, Boulder. Distributed By Columbia University Press, New York, 1990. ISBN 0-88033-189-5. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-83775. Printed in the United States of America. ("In many countries the crisis was sharper on the level of political institutions, resulting from the absence of political traditions. In Poland, in Rumania, in Bulgaria, in Yugoslavia it (the liberal system) never really functioned, the fine post-war democratic constitutions remained purely formal entities.")
  61. ^ "Social Change in Romania — 1860-1940". Kenneth Jowitt (editor). Authors: Kenneth Jowitt. Daniel Chirot. Keith Hitchins. Andrew C. Janos. John Michael Montias. Virgil Nemoianu. Philippe C. Schimitter. Institute Of International Studies, University Of California Berkeley. Regents Of The University Of California 1978. Research Series No. 36. ISBN 0-87725-136-3. "During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Romanian social organization and political development were comparable in many respects to contemporary Third World patterns. As in the Third World today, three characteristics dominated Romanian social and political reality. First, there was a striking gap between the social elite and the peasantry - what the Romanian scholar C. Dobrogeanu-Gherea termed "the abyss between urban and rural Romania." One contemporary Western scholar has suggested that "in no other European country of the interwar era was the moral and psychological chasm between the oligarchic, bureaucratic elite and the lower classes as wide and as deep." Second, there was - what in the last several decades has been a common occurrence - the mechanical transfer of liberal institutional facades from the West. The transfer was accompanied by a quasi-magical view of the power and character of those institutions. Referring to the enthusiasts of Western mdernization in mid-nineteenth century Romania, Dobrogeanu-Gherea noted that "[Western] political and … social institutions appeared to them as a kind of civilized dress, which by replacing the oriental style transformed [Romania] ipso facto from oriental to civilized." He went on to observe that underneath the Western "top hat and tails" Balkan culture and social relations continued to thrive ("să trăiască bine şi frumos"). Almost all Romanian analysts were sensitive to the discrepancy between the definition and operation of the institutions "imported" from the West.")
  62. ^ "Authoritarianism and Democracy in Europe, 1919–39 (Comparative Analyses)". Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England). Palgrave MacMillan 2002. ISBN 0–333–96606–6. ("The 1920 royal coup d’état in Romania – which not only ended a brief period of democratic rule but also removed the only government in the interwar period that attempted to achieve reconciliation with the national minorities – was justified by the ‘treachery’ ethnic compromise supposedly constituted against Romanian interests (Fischer-Galati 1991: 34–5).")
  63. ^ "Authoritarianism and Democracy in Europe, 1919–39 (Comparative Analyses)". Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England). Palgrave MacMillan 2002. ISBN 0–333–96606–6. ("Stephen Fischer-Galati describes the background to the royal coup against the government in 1920. The peasant coalition government advocated first "a comprehensive program of land expropriation and social reform in the village; second it professed national reconciliation through observance of the incorporation agreements (of non-Romanians in ‘Greater’ Romania) and of the provisions of the so-called Minorities Treaty… These ‘treacherous’ acts were branded as incompatible with the national interest by Bratianu and his entourage and, perhaps even more significantly, by the monarchy. Acting in consort with conservatives and nationalists, King Ferdinand dismissed the Vaida government in March 1920 at the moment when parliamentary approval of a play for agrarian reform that would have indeed satisfied the demands of the peasantry and consolidated the rule of pro-peasant or peasant parties …" (Fischer-Galati 1991). The destruction of democracy in the name of the nation was precipitated by intense class conflict in Hungary and Romania.")
  64. ^ p. 65-66 in "Authoritarianism and Democracy in Europe, 1919–39 (Comparative Analyses)". Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England). Palgrave MacMillan 2002. ISBN 0–333–96606–6. ("p. 65: The attempt by the victorious allies to introduce 'western' democracy into Eastern Europe after the war by means of extension of political rights to all social classes, adoption of universal male suffrage, protection of the interests of national minorities, granting of citizenship to Jews, and introduction of 'western-type' constitutions proved singularly unsuccessful in all succession states save, in part, in Czechoslovakia. Just as in the nineteenth century, the mostly nationalist anti-democratic forces, reinforced by the threat of Bolshevism, made a mockery of the constitutional principles to which they had subscribed, volens nolens, at the end of 'the war that was to end all wars'.")
  65. ^ "Romania", Auteur(s): Roger E. Hartley. World Education Encyclopedia, Ed. Rebecca Marlow-Ferguson, Vol. 2, 2nd ed., Detroit: Gale, 2001, p. 1115-1130. Copyright 2006 Gale, Cengage Learning. - "Pre-World War II, Romania exhibited many of the qualities of a dictatorship although it had a constitutional monarchy."
  66. ^ "Postwar - A History of Europe Since 1945." Tony Judt. The Penguin Press 2005. Published by the Penguin Group. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 1-59420-065-3. ("It is easy, in retrospect, to see that hopes for a democratic Eastern Europe after 1945 were always forlorn. Central and Eastern Europe had few indigenous democratic or liberal traditions. The inter-war regimes in this part of Europe had been corrupt, authoritarian and in some cases murderous. The old ruling castes were frequently venal.")
  67. ^ "Reluctant Allies? Iuliu Maniu and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu against King Carol II of Romania". Rebecca Ann Haynes. The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jan., 2007), pp. 105-134. Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Accessed: 11/03/2014. ("National Liberal governments were noted for high levels of electoral manipulation and corruption and for economic 'clientism'. When the National Liberals were brought to power in 1922, Maniu contested the legality of the election and he remained an adversary of the party throughout the decade and beyond. It was largely as a result of the National Liberal government's increasingly authoritarian tendencies that the Romanian National Party fused with the Peasant Party, which had been founded in the Old Kingdom of Romania in I918 by Ion Mihalache. The National Peasant Party was thus created in 1926 with Maniu as party president.")
  68. ^ "Le Passage Du Socialisme Aux Capitalismes - Déterminants Socio-Historiques De La Trajectoire Polonaise Et Roumaine" (Thèse de Doctorat, Université de Montréal, 2002). Elena-Anca Mot. Publié dans la revue Transitions, Vol. 43-1 (2/2004) : "La Roumanie et l'intégration européenne", édité par Sorina SOARE. La revue Transitions est editée par l'Institut de Sociologie de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles et par l'Institut Européen de l'Université de Genève. ("Sur le plan politique, les structures institutionnelles libérales, sont, à l’instar du siècle passé, et cela malgré la démocratisation du système représentatif, en contradiction avec les structures sociales et économiques, arriérées et traditionnelles, d’une part, et avec les pratiques (autoritaires) de leur fonctionnement, d’autre part. […] Pour nous, les pulsions totalitaires trouvent essentiellement leur source dans les contradictions entre le caractère purement formel des arrangements institutionnels démocratiques et les structures socio-éconmiques encore largement traditionnelles, qui n’ont pas été éradiquées par les réformes agraire et électorale, la Roumanie développant, dans la continuité historique, la voie conservatrice de modernisation caractérisée par le contrôle, économique et social, “d’en haut”.")
  69. ^ "The New Rumanian Constitution". D. Mitrany. Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, Third Series, Vol. 6, No. 1. (1924), pp. 110-119. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of "the British Institute of International and Comparative Law". Accessed: 02/09/2013. ("We may now consider in brief how the Rumanian Act deals with those constitutional guarantees which are the bedrock of a fundamental law. Almost all the relevant clauses have suffered some change. The trend of these changes has recently been subjected to a searching analysis by Professor Constantin Stere in the Rumanian Chamber. He devoted his speech to those sections of the Constitution which concern individual liberty, and his closely argued conclusion was that with regard both to principle as well as to machinery the individual citizen is left more helpless in the face of any abuse of authority than he was before the reform."
  70. ^ p. 38 în "The Sword of the Archangel – Fascist Ideology in Romania". Radu Ioanid (translated by Peter Heinegg). East European Monographs No. CCXXII, Boulder. Distributed By Columbia University Press, New York, 1990. ISBN 0-88033-189-5. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-83775. Printed in the United States of America. "During World War I, when most of the country was under foreign occupation, in the state of mind encouraged by the Russian Revolution, reforms were instituted in two areas, agriculture and elections. The constitutional changes of 1917 and the electoral law of November 16, 1918 inaugurated an electoral system characterized by universal suffrage, a secret ballot, electoral wards, voting from electoral lists, and the adoption of proportional representation in the Chamber. Deriving originally from Belgium, this electoral law was abandoned in 1926 for another, replacing proportional representation with the principle of "minority representation". This principle stipulated that the party which won a majority of the votes (at least 40%) would enjoy a m ajority advantage of about 50% of the seats in Parliament, with the other fifty percent being distributed proportionally among the parties that had gotten at least 2% of the vote. The granting of the majority advantage—similar to the one employed by the Italian fascist law of 1923—aimed at forming a strong majority within the Parliament.")

As I hope it’s obvious now, these fragments are amply sourced, in fact more methodical sourced than any other portion of the article’s text and many other articles here on Wikipedia, but Biruitorul defends his removal of this carefully sourced text by considering it "soapboxing"; now, that mean regularly to use "something that provides an outlet for delivering opinions" (Merriam Webster). As sourced text from reliable multiple academic sources though, that hardly makes any sense here, except if the opinions of many historians or political analysts are to be discarded only for not being to Biruitorul’s taste, and of others like him, fact which let me wonder what actually means here "use of reliable sources"; by any definition (as free dictionary’s "engage in impromptu or nonofficial public speaking, often flamboyantly" – what can be "unofficial" or "flamboyant" in dozens of historians’ or political scientists’ views? - or as "urban dictionary’s "to wax philosophical to promote your own agenda" – citing academic sources can’t be "waxing philosophical" or "promoting own agenda, except if one preposterously agree with Biruitorul that here "own agenda" means just the western historians’ and political scientists’ critical points of view, which of course I know that from an obsidional nationalistic mindset can make a lot of "sense". :) Having already some experience on Romanian-language Wikipedia as to what can or can’t be admitted as contributions by the administrators there, and by some groups of ultra-nationalist and idolatrous users, I can easily see that any critique of their idolized historical figures, the more so as such critiques are from Western academic sources and not simply just hagiographic domestic sources, is anathema. The question now it is only to which extent these eastern-European immature and naïve expectations according to which encyclopaedia articles ought to be just shallow hosannas of historical figures and not also cold-eyed and lucid analyses, are to be in the English language version too allowable or the usual metric by which one judges the critical contributions originating in the academic research. I already wonder how can be safe to allow someone to delete such a quantity of abundantly sourced text without sanctions or restrictions, as long as even in the worse scenario – that is if my contribution, although being as much as possible the expression of academic authors, still is miraculously a biased addition that infringe the "neutral point of view" rule - what the very rules of Wikipedia favour "as a general rule" to "do not remove sourced information from the encyclopedia solely on the grounds that it seems biased. Instead, try to rewrite the passage or section to achieve a more neutral tone. Biased information can usually be balanced with material cited to other sources to produce a more neutral perspective, so such problems should be fixed when possible through the normal editing process. Remove material only where you have a good reason to believe it misinforms or misleads readers in ways that cannot be addressed by rewriting the passage." The very fact that any conscientious and responsible contributor finds himself forced, as myself now, to plead in favour for such an obvious carefully sourced work as mine it is, and see at the starting point in the resolution of an "editing war" – in my opinion there is none, as long as the text is removed using such frivolous reasons - his additions still vandalized (deleted), can possibly be a bad omen for the future credibility of the project. Now my opinion and methodical conduct on Wikipedia was constantly, when found biased opinions even not sourced at all, to ADD sourced text that correct or complement what was already there, never to remove (that has really a lot to do with a genuine respect for the work of others), but actually that bad example of people like Biruitorul is inspiring: delete any assertions you don’t like no matter how decently sourced they are, if reversed delete them once more, and now let the other "prove" the obvious, that is he followed the rules you simply and contemptuously fool. Remus Octavian Mocanu (talk) 18:44, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Footnote sizing?[edit]

Remus Octavian Mocanu, I notice that you have been working to add a sizable amount to this article. It certainly seems well researched, and is an interesting insight on his approach to ruling. I am a little puzzled, though, that so much of the content of your addition is in the footnotes, significantly more than in the text of the article. Is there some way you can re-organize this and pull more of it up into the main article so that the reader does not have to go back and forth so much? 1bandsaw (talk) 23:08, 11 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I can and I will try to better the text as you suggest here as soon as possible, but unfortunately this section which I added recently (yesterday) is actually nothing new in the article, being an old contribution of mine that was deleted by someone not agreeing with the opinions of all those sources you noticed. So, the very section I have to improve now is potentially still threatened with new removals the first time a guy (and even the same user) feels he doesen`t like it. The very profusion of sourcing and quotations you noticed had the same reason to be there, that is to deter somehow those idolatrous Romanian nationalists that refuse any lucid and critical contribution on the subject in the Romanian version of the free encyclopedia, to delete it too in the English version! Otherwise, what I put in the text and arguably is confirmed repeatedly by many Western academic sources, doesen`t need to be so heavily supported in cumbersome footnotes... Fact is also that I ignore the extent to which remains healthy in an encyclopaedia, for a biographical article, to mention otherwise than shortly the political failures or contributions of the introduced figure. As a matter of fact Ferdinand inherited a political system and a host of political and cultural practices, his only failure being in maintaining it more than was useful and fair for the people and the country. Remus Octavian Mocanu (talk) 05:05, 12 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Justifying today’s revert[edit]

I have removed ROM's edits to this article on a formal ground, as his quotes are a clear infringement of copyrights. But copyvios aside, his edits are in violation of several Wikipedia principles. I've already had this debate with him on ro.wikipedia.org, so I'm summing up my arguments:

  • He's piecing together different bits and pieces with the aim of blaming Ferdinand for all the ills of interwar Romania. He falsely argues that he is trying to balance this article with negative criticism - nothing against that in principle - but whereas Ferdinand is widely considered a weak personality in Romanian and Anglo-Saxon historiography (having been frequently manipulated by Queen Mary and Ionel Brătianu), ROM is trying to make him look like some kind of an authoritarian ruler.
  • Some of the inferences he makes are absurd (questioning Ferdinand's loyalty towards Romania for considering the project of a multinational state!) and clearly original research.
  • Some of the sources he uses are rizible (e.g. using World Education Encyclopedia to write a biographical article)
  • Although I dread the word, he manipulates sources. Take "These authoritarian practices" for example; if you consult the source (World Education Encyclopedia), you'll see the sentence there refers to the whole Interbellum. While Ferdinand died in 1927 and can't be accused of authoritarianism, Carol II indeed established an authoritarian regime later (1938).

And so forth. --Mihai (talk) 10:24, 15 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I concur. The pattern of edits, selective quotes and citations from obscure non-English sources, lengthy POV commentaries in the notes, and overall anti-Ferdinand slant of the article contrary to prevailing historical consensus on the king's reputation is unmistakable, and very clearly violates our due weight standard (It's also very similar to the bias which has dominated Wikipedia's article on Ferdinand's as-yet-still-living grandson, Michael I of Romania, as I noted here.) FactStraight (talk) 04:28, 16 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]


"He's piecing together different bits and pieces with the aim of blaming Ferdinand for all the ills of interwar Romania."
First, it is worth to say that "those different bits and pieces" Mr. Pita mention are ALL from… different Western historians and political scientists works. He asserts that I am "blaming Ferdinand of ALL the ills of interwar Romania?" Not at all! I am just taking the very opinions of those academic sources I cite but disturb Mr. Pita so much as to attack them as "infringement of copyrights", and put them in the article. Nothing more. The footnotes are not, or at least they would not be "infringement of copyrights", if Mr. Pita and those like him would be honest enough to admit and let in the article those assertions without all this ample quotations: I am not against the practice to let the assertions with only the indication of an academic work and author, and with no verbatim citing.
In order to supress critical information against their idol, Mr. Pita and his friends generally adopt the unfair tactics of deleting critical contributions when not extensively sourced (remember please those "bits and pieces"!), but as now is obvious, deleting critical contribution also when heavily sourced goes too for them. So there is no escape from such vandals' tactics…
Mr. Pita disingenuously showed us actually the fact he fears the expert opinions I let speak in my contribution, by removing not only the text & footnotes in the article, but removing also all the footnotes I put with the my deleted addition in my first comment here, i.e. on the very page where content is to be though discussed…
So, he seems to agree to discuss, but not and never when proofs from the academic works are visible; it kind of intimidates him. :) Actually banning expert opinion facilitate a lot his slander against me, as those accusations of "manipulating sources". As a matter of fact, there is NO general blaming against Ferdinand in my addition, just those critical asseassements concerning his manipulation of the political system in order to protect his interests, AS THEY APPEAR MENTIONED IN WESTERN ACADEMIC LITERATURE. So, the "blaming for ALL the ills of interwar Romania" is just another ridiculous "straw man".
Mr. Pita : […] whereas Ferdinand is widely considered a weak personality in Romanian and Anglo-Saxon historiography (having been frequently manipulated by Queen Mary and Ionel Brătianu), ROM is trying to make him look like some kind of an authoritarian ruler.
Mr. Pita is trying here another straw man: the fact of being manipulated by his spouse and Mr. Bratianu, doesn't preclud the posibility of him being the supreme factor in matters of political power in Romania, as repeatedly the academic sources I quoted mention. So, finally, Mr. Pita is trying here to supress expert opinion with nothing more than his confusions.... As Victoria Brown tells us in her article, "One key to royal power was the peculiar Rumanian system of having the king appoint a new prime minister before parliamentary elections were held. Because the party just given power was then allowed to "make the elections" in its own interests, the king's choice of minister effectively determined the complexion of the new parliament. The theoretical power of the Rumanian monarch was further enhanced by his constitutional rights of absolute veto and dissolution of parliament […]" The same opinion expressed in "War and National Consolidation, 1887-1941 (History of the Balkans – Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press 1999. First published 1983. ISBN 0-521-27459-1 (Vol. 2) paperback.)" by Barbara Jelavich: "In 1884, under Liberal sponsorship, a bill on electoral reform was passed. Although the franchise was made broader, the system of voting by electoral colleges, which served to exclude the majority of the population from real political influence, was retained. Moreover, as previously, the government in power was able to control the elections through patronage and the police. The king could appoint a new ministry of his choice and then dissolve parliament and hold a new election. The government in office could assure itself of a victory in the voting by use of the centralized administrative system, and thus win sufficient support in the chamber. This procedure gave the king a pivotal role between the two parties."). Or as Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. write in "Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987: "Mattei Dogan, in his study of the electoral process in prewar Romania prepared for this volume, suggested that a political system may have all the institutions associated with democracy – political parties, elections and legislatures – but still not be democratic because power is exercised behind the scenes. In prewar Romania, he wrote, monarchical power was not always apparent because elected governments were free to do as they wanted so long as what they wanted was also in accordance with the wishes of the monarch; but when a government failed to conform to those wishes and interests, it was replaced by a new government, which submitted itself to the electorate for what proved to be automatic confirmation. Dogan thus reminded us that the presence of parties, elections and parliaments is not in itself sufficient proof that a democratic system exists. Prewar Eastern Europe, several Latin American countries in the 1920s and 1930s, prewar Japan, and several contemporary countries in Africa and South and Southeast Asia have had and now have similar "democratic systems" – what Dogan called "mimic democracies" – with elections that do little more than provide the appearance of popular sovereignty and popular legitimation for governments ruled by monarchs, the military and oligarchs. Like the king in the Allice in Wonderland, who says "sentence first, judgment latter", these are countries guided by the principle "government first, electionsa latter".


Mr Pita: "Although I dread the word, he manipulates sources. Take "These authoritarian practices" for example; if you consult the source (World Education Encyclopedia), you'll see the sentence there refers to the whole Interbellum. While Ferdinand died in 1927 and can't be accused of authoritarianism, Carol II indeed established an authoritarian regime later (1938)."
Unfortunately the whole interbellum is… the whole interbellum, no matter how much we wish not to be, and that’s including Ferdinand's years of ruling too. But let us leave aside that single source of expert opinion concerning the authoritarian nature of Ferdinand's regime for now, because in my contribution I also quoted other academic sources that mention the authoritarian character of our monarchs, Ferdinand included. Let us see some of them:
"Unquestionably Carol lacked confidence in and had little respect for the democratic process. In this regard his attitude was similar to that of his father Ferdinand, and, for that matter, of the entire crowned dynasty of the Hohenzollern and the uncrowned of the Bratianus. His political philosophy, if he had one, was that of dynastic authoritarianism: the King was the ultimate source of political decision and the initiator of meaningful political action." (p. 112 in "Native Fascism in the Successor States 1918-1945". Edited by Peter F. Sugar. American Bibliographical Center Clio Press ("ABC-Clio") Inc. 1971. Santa Barbara California 1971. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 71-149636. ISBN 0-87436-074-9.)
Well, now we have a whole authoritarian dynasty of Hohenzollern, King Ferdinand included. :) But if these already two sources still aren't enough to convince sceptics, take another one:
"The Royal Dictatorships: Having a king as the head of the state was one of the peculiarities of the authoritarian régimes in Balkan (Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece). It is worth to stress the fact that these monarchs doesn’t tried to challenge the liberal parliamentarism as long as constitutionally or in practice they kept a decisive role. They named and dismissed cabinets, granted power to prime ministers and parties and organized elections they cheerfully manipulated." («Les dictatures royales: La présence d’un roi à la tête de l’État était une des particularités des régimes autoritaires dans les Balkans (Roumanie, Bulgarie, Yougoslavie, Grèce). Il est important de relever que ces monarques ne cherchèrent pas à remettre en question le parlementarisme libéral dans la mesure où, constitutionnellement ou en pratique, ils gardaient un rôle décisif. Ils contribuèrent à faire et défaire les cabinets, accordaient pouvoir aux premiers ministres et partis et organisaient des élections qu’ils manipulaient allégrement.») (source : «L'Effondrement de la Démocratie, Autoritarisme et Totalitarisme dans l'Europe de l'Entre-Deux-Guerre». Juan J. Linz. Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée, 2004/4 Vol. 11, p. 531-586. DOI : 10.3917/ripc.114.0531.)
Here it is obvious that the author focused his attention NOT on the late period of the interwar years, when under royal dictatorship were held elections in the single-party political system (only with the party created by King Carol II as sole contender): it describes the very practice of Ferdinand manipulation of parlamentiarism which was extensively explained by the sources Mr Pita delete in the article and here in the "talk" section too, because he doesn’t like what they prove, i.e. the fact that there was then a façade democracy.
But let us use our brains a little: how can be called a political system and his leader that use rigged elections to put his men in office and keeps martial law for ALL his peace-time years of reign? For except the WWI years, in ALL the years King Ferdinand ruled, the country (Romania) lived continuously under martial law! I think, as the experts like Juan J. Linz and Peter F. Sugar do, that we deal here with an authoritarian regime. Other experts seem to agree with us, for take another proof from an academic work:
"From 1920 to 1928, Romania was dominated by the National Liberal Party (PNL) under Ionel Bratianu. This was the party of Romania’s rising urban bourgeoisie, brash nouveaux riches who were voraciously committed to self-enrichment, industrialization, economic nationalism (a combination of protectionism and ‘nostrification’, involving the transfer of company assets from foreign to native private ownership), embezzlement, nepotism and corruption. They introduced a new constitution in 1923, but perpetuated deeply corrupt, clientelistic and repressive modes of governing. Peasant and proletarian radicalism and discontent was not assuaged, and Romania remained under martial law from 1920 to 1928 and again from 1933 to 1945, while elections continued to be rigged by governments enjoying royal favour." […] This bold, attractive and potentially trail-blazing socio-economic experiment was tragically ill timed. The 1930s depression slashed export earnings, peasant incomes and state revenues, caused widespread bankruptcies, unemployment and labour unrest, exacerbated inter-ethnic tensions, increased support for fascist movements, scuppered plans for trade liberalization and increased public spending on social reforms and welfare provisions, and bitterly disappointed and divided the PNT and its initially enthusiastic supporters. Largely due to global conditions beyond its control, Romania lost its best chance in decades to break out of the vicious circles of poverty, ignorance, clientelism, corruption and authoritarianism in which it had been trapped by its rapacious ruling classes. Instead, the 1930s depression launched Romania on a course towards nationalist, fascist and ultimately Communist étatism, clientelism, corruption and authoritarianism. ("The Balkans: A Post-Communist History". Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries. 1st ed. Routledge 2007 (Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business)
So, to resume the historians` conclusion: under King Ferdinand I, Romania lived a continously martial law, when the elections were rigged by governments having the royal favor; and by finally electing, soon after Ferdinand`s death, a peasantist government exactly when the 1929 crisis wreaked havoc, "the country lost its best chance in decades to be freed of corruption and authoritarianism in which it had been trapped by its rapacious ruling classes."
Although Ferdinand regime is indeed considered authoritarian by experts as those quoted above, Mr Pita and other hagiographers think otherwise; the balanced truth about their idol seems to be unbearable. If his/their opinion, that Ferdinand didn’t use at that time an authoritarian political system, can be sourced, I have no problem of having it included in the article`s text alongside with the academic opinions expressed by those I cited: I am not a vandal, and the readers eventually can read and judge for themselves about the weight of each cited source and each point of view. But for now what we have is no source or contribution, but just insistent and repeated deleting of the text and sources Mr Pita and his friends doesn’t like because they are critical.
The choice now for those in power to enforce the rules here is quite ease one in my opinion: one option is to let the vandalism prevail. The other is to take the side of those that contribute decently to the project: "do not remove sourced information from the Encyclopedia solely on the grounds that it seems biased", was already blatantly and repeatedly infringed on this article page and, ridiculously!, also on the "talk" page (I will put my footnotes back after posting this reply). "Vandalism", for to delete A VAST BLOCK OF TEXT SOURCED BY NO LESS THAN 71 SOURCES and justify that with just a frivolous objection to an assertion about the "authoritarian" character of the dealt with historical figure, it is all-too-obvious just that, and a thinly veiled attempt to purge the article of anything doesn’t fit the vandals' opinion. They don’t just modify those assertions that seem to them biased, they remove the whole text, in order to hide the truth of the period and of the dealt-with historical figure, in all its complexity.
Let see now what thinks Mr. Factstraight: he thinks that I used "selective quotes and citations from obscure non-English sources".
What mean "obscure" to him need to be clarified by giving some examples. What means "selective quotes", that`s too to be explained yet: that almost any citation or quote IS unavoidably a selection, it seems he fails to realize. What are my quotes guilty of to be more "obscure" or "selective" than any others used in Wikipedia, where there still is a lot of text with NO source cited, it still remains to be clarified too, if he`s hoping to be taken seriously as anything than a biased kings- and monarchy-lover intolerant to any critical assessment of a king.
But let`s see the list of those "obscure" and "non-English sources":
"The Suicide of Europe – Memoirs of Prince Michel Sturdza, Former Foreign Minister of Rumania". Western Islands Publishers 1968. Belmont, Massachusetts. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-58284. Printed in the United States of America.
"The New Rumanian Constitution". D. Mitrany. Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, Third Series, Vol. 6, No. 1. (1924), pp. 110-119. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of "the British Institute of International and Comparative Law". Accessed: 02/09/2013.
"The Market, Tradition and Peasant Rebellion: The Case of Romania in 1907". Author(s): Daniel Chirot and Charles Ragin. Source: "American Sociological Review", Vol. 40, No. 4 (Aug., 1975), pp. 428-444. Published by: American Sociological Association.
„Romanian peasants revolt in Moldavia beginning in March to protest their inability to buy land; they also protest their exploitation by the crown and by grain merchants such as Leopold Louis-Dreyfus. Some 10,000 die before Carol I can regain control of the country in April.” - James Trager, "1907" The People's Chronology, James Trager, 3rd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Gale Virtual Reference Library. GALE CX3460601907).
„Rascoala: the last peasants' revolt”, Markus Bauer, History Today, Sep. 2010, Vol. 60, Issue 9, p.47.
"Romania: A Country Study". Federal Research Division. Library of Congress. Edited by Ronald D. Bachman. Research Completed July 1989. 2002 Blackmask Online
„The Market, Tradition and Peasant Rebellion: The Case of Romania in 1907”, Daniel Chirot and Charles Ragin, American Sociological Review, Vol. 40, No. 4 , Aug., 1975, pp. 428-444.
"A History of Eastern Europe - Crisis and change" (Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries. Routledge 1998. ISBN 0-203-00725-5.).
"Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789-1989 - From Ottomans to Milosevic". Tom Gallagher. Routledge 2001. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 29 Nov. 2010, article "Alexandru Averescu.".
"Eastern Europe 1740–1985. Feudalism to Communism". Second edition.Robin Okey (Senior Lecturer in History, University of Warwick). First published 1982 by HarperCollins Academic. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. ISBN 0-203-16846-1.
"Native Fascism in the Successor States 1918-1945". Edited by Peter F. Sugar. American Bibliographical Center Clio Press ("ABC-Clio") Inc. 1971. Santa Barbara California 1971. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 71-149636. ISBN 0-87436-074-9. (
"Area Handbook for Romania. Authors: Eugene K. Keefe, Donald W. Bernier, Lyle E. Brenneman, William Giloane, James M. Moore, and Neda A. Walpole. Release Date: June 8, 2010. Research and writing were completed in February 1972. Published 1972. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-600095. This volume is one of a series of handbooks prepared by Foreign Area Studies (FAS) of The American University, designed to be useful to military and other personnel who need a convenient compilation of basic facts about the social, economic, political, and military institutions and practices of various countries.
"Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938", by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987.
"Ten Years of Greater Roumania". Alexander Vaida-Voevod. The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 7, No. 20 (Jan., 1929), pp. 261-267. Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Accessed: 19/11/2013.
"King Ferdinand I of Romania" in "World at War: Understanding Conflict and Society". Margaret Sankey. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 28 Aug. 2013.
"Hitler’s Forgotten Ally - Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–44". Dennis Deletant. Palgrave Macmillan 2006. ISBN 1–4039–9341–6.
"Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919-39". Systematic Case Studies. Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England) in association with International Political Science Association. First published in Great Britain 2000 by Macmillan Press Ltd. (ISBN 0–333–64828–5). First published in the United States of America 2000 by St. Martin’s Press, Inc. (ISBN 0–312–22843–0).
"Liberalism, Fascism or Social Democracy - Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe". Gregory M. Luebbert. Oxford University Press 1991.
"The Little Dictators: The History of Eastern Europe Since 1918". Antony Polonsky. Routledge & Kegan Paul Books 1975. ISBN 978-0710080950.
"Social Background of Roumanian Politics". Joseph S. Roucek. "Social Forces", Vol. 10, No. 3 (Mar., 1932), pp. 419-425. Published by: Oxford University Press.
"The Politics of Backwardness in Continental Europe, 1780-1945". Andrew C. Janos. World Politics, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Apr., 1989), pp. 325-358. Published by Cambridge University Press. Accessed: 11/03/2014.
"Competitive Elections in Developing Countries". Edited by Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbundun. Chapter 10 ("Romania: 1919-1938", by Mattei Dogan). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987.
"The Political Evolution of Roumania". Author: Joseph S. Rouček. Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 10, No. 30 (Apr., 1932), pp. 602-615. Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
"War and National Consolidation, 1887-1941 (History of the Balkans – Twentieth Century)". Barbara Jelavich. Cambridge University Press 1999. First published 1983. ISBN 0-521-27459-1 (Vol. 2) paperback.
"Popular Front in the Balkans: (4. Failure in Hungary and Rumania)". Bela Vago. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 5, No. 3, Popular Fronts (1970), pp. 95-117, Published by Sage Publications, Ltd.
"The Sword of the Archangel – Fascist Ideology in Romania". Radu Ioanid (translated by Peter Heinegg). East European Monographs No. CCXXII, Boulder. Distributed By Columbia University Press, New York, 1990. ISBN 0-88033-189-5. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 90-83775. Printed in the United States of America.
"Romania - World Bibliographical Series, Revised Edition Vol. 59". Author: Peter Siani-Davies; Mary Siani-Davies; Andrea Deletant. Publisher: ABC-CLIO 1998. Printed in Great Britain. ISBN 185109244-7. "World Bibliographical Series" General Editors: Robert G. Neville (Executive Editor). John J. Horton. Robert A. Myers. Hans H. Wellisch. Ian Wallace. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.
"Rumanian Nationalism". Robert Strausz-Hupé. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 232, "A Challenge to Peacemakers" (Mar., 1944), pp. 86-93. Published by Sage Publications, Inc. in association with "the American Academy of Political and Social Science" Accessed: 11/03/2014.
"Ten Years of Greater Roumania". Alexander Vaida-Voevod. The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 7, No. 20 (Jan., 1929), pp. 261-267. Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Accessed: 19/11/2013.
"Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919-39". Systematic Case Studies. Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England) in association with International Political Science Association. First published in Great Britain 2000 by Macmillan Press Ltd. (ISBN 0–333–64828–5). First published in the United States of America 2000 by St. Martin’s Press, Inc. (ISBN 0–312–22843–0).
"Rumania, 1866-1947. (Oxford History of Modern Europe)". Keith Hitchins. Oxford University Press 1994. ISBN 0-19-822126-6. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Ipswich Book Company Ltd., Suffolk.
"Romania – Borderland of Europe". Lucian Boia (translated by James Christian Brown). Reaktion Books Ltd. 2001. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd. ISBN 1 86189 103 2.
"An Eyewitness Note: Reflections on the Rumanian Iron Guard ". Zvi Yavetz. Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 26, No. 3/4, "The Impact of Western Nationalisms: Essays Dedicated to Walter Z. Laqueur on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday" (Sep., 1991), pp. 597-610. Published by Sage Publications, Ltd. (Zvi Yovetz is Fred Lessing Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University and Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York (Queens).
"The Movement for Reform in Rumania after World War I: The Parliamentary Bloc Government of 1919-1920". Victoria F. Brown. Slavic Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1979), pp. 456-472.
"Social Change in Romania — 1860-1940". Kenneth Jowitt (editor). Authors: Kenneth Jowitt. Daniel Chirot. Keith Hitchins. Andrew C. Janos. John Michael Montias. Virgil Nemoianu. Philippe C. Schimitter. Institute Of International Studies, University Of California Berkeley. Regents Of The University Of California 1978. Research Series No. 36. ISBN 0-87725-136-3. "
Authoritarianism and Democracy in Europe, 1919–39 (Comparative Analyses)". Edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Professor of Political Science, Phillipps University, Marburg, Germany) and Jeremy Mitchell (Lecturer in Government, The Open University, Milton Keynes, England). Palgrave MacMillan 2002. ISBN 0–333–96606–6.
"Romania", Auteur(s): Roger E. Hartley. World Education Encyclopedia, Ed. Rebecca Marlow-Ferguson, Vol. 2, 2nd ed., Detroit: Gale, 2001, p. 1115-1130. Copyright 2006 Gale, Cengage Learning.
"Reluctant Allies? Iuliu Maniu and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu against King Carol II of Romania". Rebecca Ann Haynes. The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Jan., 2007), pp. 105-134.
Besides ALL THESE English sources listed above and extracted from my addition in the article, the text I wrote was supported also by other 2 sources in French (history or social science academic articles) and a Romanian translations of the PhD thesis of a Spanish historian. Well, considering the dozens of above sources in English, ALL of academic origin, the whole footnoting in my humble opinion makes not a lot of "obscure" and "non-English" sources. :) What`s still more ridiculous: he seems to be not disturbed at all by other sources mentioned in the reference section of the article, that are in Romanian language. Remus Octavian Mocanu (talk) 08:57, 16 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
None of which alters my fundamental point and that of the others who have challenged and/or reverted Remus Octavian Mocanu's recent edits, "...overall anti-Ferdinand slant of the article contrary to prevailing historical consensus on the king's reputation is unmistakable, and very clearly violates our due weight standard". Wikipedia is not a venue for publication of novel or alternative interpretations of history and fact: in bios on historical figures, we reflect the prevailing views. Interpretations of historical facts and figures are always evolving, but Wikipedia's due weight policy does not allow us to reflect them until they are perceived by scholars as the widely-accepted, mainstream view of the topic. So far, the notion that Ferdinand undermined Romania's independence through "authoritarianism", manipulated "the political system in order to protect his interests" and behaved in a way that casts into doubt his loyalty to Romania is not the way this man is characterized in mainstream historical literature that hasn't been selected to emphasize his authoritarianism, manipulativeness and disloyalty. Nor is it the responsibility of editors here to disprove Remus Octavian Mocanu's thesis: he must do the convincing because he seeks to modify this article to reflect a POV nearly opposite to that of prevailing opinion, as cited heretofore. So far, I'm not convinced. FactStraight (talk) 19:41, 16 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I`am afraid you cannot be convinced (and actually no one needs to convince you, as long as other's contributions are sourced and you are allowed to add YOUR points of view, and of course, their sources; for now though, you have showed us none), simply because you are biased. You invoke "DUE", but you showed nowhere with other sources that really the points of view of all those historians and political experts I cite are less prominent than yours (which one and where????????), and that as such deserve less space in article; and btw, "less space is not exactly "no-space-at-all", as you suggest by deleting sourced contributions, and infringing with that the rules which ask you "to not remove sourced information from the encyclopedia solely on the grounds that it seems biased; instead, try to rewrite the passage or section to achieve a more neutral tone. Biased information can usually be balanced with material cited to other sources to produce a more neutral perspective, so such problems should be fixed when possible through the normal editing process."
I know, your problem is that you (and your friends) simply are not able to show that your biased opinion is the prominent one. You don’t have any source to assert that! Nowhere you can find a source asserting that the point of view of all those academic sources I used is anyhow wrong or even in minority. Impossible! That`s unfortunately your problem... As for me, be sure that I tried to know what are the academic opinions about Ferdinand and his political regime, no matter what these opinions are: I sincerely try to avoid prejudices and I like to understand. So, I wait you to prove that really the statements of the authors I cited are in minority, and to show with larger number of sources that your point of view is in majority: "If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;" Good luck! :) Remus Octavian Mocanu (talk) 05:05, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Once again, the burden of proof for obtaining a consensus to retain your version rests with you -- we aren't obliged to convince you that your version should not remain once your additions have been challenged by more editors who disagree than agree with it. You may not edit against consensus and there have now been enough objections expressed to know that your preferred version does not have a consensus among those addressing this issue in this article. FactStraight (talk) 23:18, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Oh no my dear Factstright, you are wrong, my job is already done and even very decently done, once I cited numerous academic works asserting the same for each statement I put there in the article. First you wrongly accused me of "citing non-English sources", and of "citing obscure sources". After showing you the most obvious thing, i.e. you are wrong, you failed to excuse yourself, changing your mind that actually your objection is allegedly my sources are in minority. I challanged you - as the Wikipedia rules provides - to show us that your opinon is supported by sources proven to be in majority. Of course it is clear and obvious you know nothing about the subject Ferdinand I, and you possess no source that contradict what are stating the many historians and political scientists I cited, because in fact you have just prejudices and your grudge is just against any critical assessments of royals.
You talk about "many editors", but all these "editors" have no informed opinion sourced in academic works as mine… they have nothing except idolatrious prejudices. Fact is these type of editors are worth nothing for this project as long as their "contribution" remains to delete the sourced additions of those that really prove that basic respect for rules and the relative truth as mirrored by the expert opinion.
Unfortunately for you and for all those like you, after a bout of senseless destruction of the work of others you went hopeful to fish those staid sources that support your simple gut feeling ideea about what was and have done King Ferdinand, but after each laaaaaarge trawl of the literature you actually never read or possess on the subject, you come back exactly how you departed, that is emptyhanded. Finally vandalism it is all what you know and can for the poor King Ferdinand of our, the Romanians… Not worth to remember you what you can for the truth… It is already obvious for me that you don’t know really what mean this notion.
Now you wrongly think that the rules on Wikipedia are asking us to get a consensus between an informed and sourced opinion and… a mere prejudice SUPPORTED BY NOTHING. I surmise you are wrong and I’ll ask for help from administrators. I showed in my last reply that according to the DUE rule (NPV rule) you invoked, YOU HAVE TO PROVE that your puny opinion is really the majoritarian one HELD BY EXPERTS (and not by editors, as you think, my dear… :) ), by "substantiating it with references to commonly accepted reference texts". Otherwise you have no majority viewpoint, in contrast with mine who for each statement get support generally by many citations from different academic works.
And btw, once again I remind you that a sourced addition doesn’t have to be deleted just because some editors think it is biased, because these editors, if they really are editors and not vandals, have ALL the latitude to contribute and correct BY ADDING THEIR SOURCED ADDITIONS in order to prove their point of view. Only the vandals disregard this rule, because they have no sources to prove that what I put in the article is wrong or a minority opinion. That’s the very definition of vandalism, and by any rate and reading you are noxious to this project of Wikipedia and to its credibility as long as you act like that: here it’s just like some foible kids, not caring at all for the rules and for decency or their image, are playing insipid legerdemains. Remus Octavian Mocanu (talk) 05:37, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Those who have repeatedly disagreed with your undue edits haven't blanked the page -- we've reverted to the thoroughly cited version that reflected, on the whole, the prevalent view of Ferdinand before you began selectively editing and citing to distort that. So our preferences have been expressed -- and you lack the consensus to compel the article to reflect your POV. Wikilawyering and belittling those whose viewpoint differs from yours won't create the consensus you need to build. FactStraight (talk) 06:05, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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Ordinal[edit]

Shouldn't the title of this page be "Ferdinand, King of Romania"? He was the only king of Romania named Ferdinand. Like how Queen Victoria is known as "Victoria" as opposed to "Victoria I". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.44.0.57 (talk) 21:03, 8 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on commmon usage. For instance, King Carlos I of Portugal, who is the only Portuguese king named Carlos, but most contemporary sources and modern historiography almost always refer to the king with his ordinal. Depends completely on practice. I don't know about this case specifically, but there is no standard form, only common usage. Cristiano Tomás (talk) 01:39, 9 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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