Demands and intentions to join the European Commission of the Danube during the Interwar Period

Abstract

During the interwar period, the new structure of the European Commission of the Danube, considered more and more as a selfish means to favour France, Great Britain and Italy, displeased both the democratic countries, supporting the Versailles system, and the revisionist ones. Referring to the provisional character of the number of members (art. 4 of the Definitive Statute of the Danube), several countries claimed repeatedly, during the period, to join it, on the basis of veritable or fictional reasons regarding the existence of important commercial and maritime interests at the mouths of the Danube: Greece, Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, Turkey, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. All these attempts, except the one made by the Reich, were rejected by the Romanian authorities, which considered that any new member state meant a diminishing of the Romanian sovereignty on the maritime Danube.