Abstract:
| | Turkiye and Romania two coastal countries of the Black Sea had a long history filled with challenges, conflicts, cooperation, and mutual understanding. After WWI, Romania, the largest country in the Balkans, close to the Soviet sphere area focused on preserving its post-war borders, fostering its domestic structure, and building a strong economy. After the foundation of the new Turkish Republic in October 1923, the relations between the two countries, soon after the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, of which Romania was also one of the signatories, had a sharp rise. The period between 1923 and 1942 could be called the Ataturk Era Turkish-Romanian relations (almost one year before WWII, the founder of the Modern Turkish Republic Ataturk passed away in November 1938) faced challenges such as rising revisionism, Soviet desires over both countries’ soils and over Turkish Straits, migration tendencies of objective Turkish origin people especially living in the northeast Romania both Musselman and Orthodox to Turkiye, migration and destination of Romanian Jews due to rising human rights abuses addressing Jews living in Romania. When WWII broke out in September 1939 although Turkiye was a country had an alliance treaty with UK and France so that Romania also had similar guarantees after the Nazi advance towards Soviet lands in 1941 Romania joined Axis. Despite that date Turkiye and Romania were in opposite alliance camps during WWII and after the war friendly relations between the two countries continued. The relations between both countries during the above-mentioned period have been studied by several researchers from Romania and Turkiye. In this paper, newly opened Turkish archival documents will be analyzed to shed light on uncovered parts of both countries’ relations on the eve of WWII.
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Keywords:
| | Alliance, Archival Documents, Balkan Pact, Conflict Resolution, Constructivism, Geopolitics, Immigration, Minority Rights, Trade Relations, World War II.
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