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Home , Emil Isac, Transylvania

VASILE VESA (Cluj-Napoca, )

Wilsonian Principles in , 1918

The president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, profoundly influenced the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Transylvania during the autumn of 1918. Wilson's name and his principles concerning peace frequently appeared in Transylvanian documents, newspapers, manifestos, pamphlets, and fliers in the months prior to the Grand Assembly at on 1 December. Nor was his name confined to the printed word. Throughout the countryside he and his ideas were discussed by . Public meetings were often punc- tuated by the chanting of slogans. At Vidra, a village in the Apuseni Moun- tains, peasants interrupted a political rally with shouts of "Long Live Wilson! I Long Live Wilson! "1 Apparently the Transylvanians revered Wilson almost as an earthly god. He was referred to as "the great Wilson," "the greatest man of today," "the libera- tor of the world," "the great apostle of the people's liberty," "the great poli- tical reformer of Biblical format," "the divine man," "messenger of peace," "a new Messiah," "a new Christ." These accolades, as well as others, point to the indisputable popularity of the American president and his principles among the Romanian majority in Transylvania. The favorable reception of Wilsonian ideals in Transylvania and elsewhere in -especially in Eastern and Southeastern Europe-resulted from Wilson's advocacy of the people's right to self-determination, a formula for collective freedom which had en- joyed great popularity during the war years as well as at the peace conference. The right to self-determination was, however, not a Wilsonian invention. Wilson's advocacy of this principle was to a large extent determined by revolu- tionary realities in Central and during 1918. Moreover, Wilson understood early modem political theorists, such as John Locke, who con- cerned themselves with the issue of "self-disposition"; nationalistic ideas; and reformers, such as Thomas Jefferson, who put these concepts into practice in the West. The greatness of'wilsonian principles lay not in any startling novelty, but in the fact that they were presented at the right psychological moment. Wilson dramatically emphasized ideas which systematically and fervently chal- lenged oppression and the influence of political and ethical stan- dards..Wilson grafted his ideas on European realities at a time when Europe

1. Biblioteca Academia Republicii Socialiste Romania, Bucure§ti, Valeriu Brani§te MSS, VI, act 23, pp. 1-5; see also Gheorghe Iancu's article on the constitution of the na- tional councils and guard in the in November, 1918, in Tara Mofilor (Alba Iulia, 1977), pp. 123-27. 82

was exhausted by and when the United States had emerged as the omnipotent arbiter of peace. Wilson first proposed his Fourteen Points on 8 January 1918-although the idea of self-determination was not yet defined-and again in four para- graphs of a speech to Congress delivered on 11 February, as well as in his de- claration at Mount Vernon on 4 July. In each of these public expressions, Wil- son followed Jeffersonian tradition in presenting broad, general guidelines rather than precise legal terminology. Consequently, his principles were inter- preted in many different ways. East of the line between Lwow and Slonim in Poland, Poles constituted a minority of the population; but they were a ma- jority in cities. In this , Poles interpreted Wilson's principle of self-deter- mination as applying to individual enclaves rather than to the whole of Belo- russia or the Ukraine. Hence, the Polish minority could dominate elections in individual cities and towns. On the other hand, the Ukrainian and Belorussian majority, mostly peasants, interpreted Wilsonian principles as calling for a single vote. If this view were accepted, then all of Belorussia would conform to Belorussian wishes and all of the Ukraine would follow Ukrainian interests. For Transylvanian Romanians, Wilsonian ideology provided official sanc- tion to a principle which the Romanians had continuously claimed for two centuries. This principle was more precisely defined by the in the Declaration of 12 October. Read in the parliament six days later, this declaration stated in part:

The Executive Committee of the Romanian National Party, the national organ of the Romanian Nation in and Transylvania, holds that the results of the war justify the Romanians' centuries-old claim for complete national freedom. By virtue of the natural law which enables people to freely decide their future, a law which the Hungarian govern- ment itself admits to in its suit for peace, the Romanian nation in Hun- gary and Transylvania declares that it intends to make use of its right to freely determine the form of its political institutions and of its admit- tance among the free nations.2

Alexandru Vaida, a leader of the Romanian National Party, linked Wilsonian principles to Romanian demands in a speech delivered before the Hungarian parliament. He emphasized that the rights which the Romanians had sought for the past two centuries had now been confirmed on the world stage in Presi- dent Wilson's quest for a just peace. The Romanian poet also joined these ideas in his article entitled "Toward Liberty": "The people's right to

2. Georges Sofronie, "L'autoditermination des Roumains de Transylvanie en 1918 comme fondament juridique de l'unit6 nationale," Revue de Transylvanie,7-9 (1941-43), 50.