The Lower Danube and Romanian Nation-Making

Abstract

On 17 September 1883, Friedrich Martens, an Estonian-born diplomat and law professor, better known as the editor of a large collection of Russian diplomatic documents and as an active supporter of international arbitration and conciliation, sent a letter to Alphonse Rivier, the Swiss scholar who at the time served as secretary general of the Institute of International Law (IIL). The organisation had been founded a decade earlier in Ghent (Belgium) by several dozen legal scholars who aimed ‘to contribute to the progress of international law and become the legal conscience of the civilised world’.1 Martens’ missive, published in the Institute’s journal, Revue de droit international et de législation comparée, was an appeal for the IIL to get involved, according to its status, in settling the juridical principles ‘upon which the international regulation of navigable rivers accessible to all nations should be based’. Such a normative work would render ‘a great service both to the practice and to the science of international law’, given the ‘exceptional importance’ that the navigation of international rivers enjoyed at the time.2 Martens bolstered his intellectual endeavour with references to the deviations from the legal principles proclaimed in 1815 as part of the ‘public law