Between Experimentalism and Anachronism – the Road to the Abolishment of the European Commission of the Danube

Abstract

Romania’s entry into the First World War in August 1916 put a stop to a long period of peace and prosperity for the Maritime Danube, along which shipping was governed by the European Commission of the Danube. With an extraordinary international legal status inscribed in the Peace Treaties of Paris (1856) and Berlin (1878) and in other documents agreed within Europe’s Concert of Powers in 1858, 1866, 1871 and 1883, the Commission had managed, as presented throughout this volume, to instil a security regime for international shipping along the Maritime Danube through its hydraulic works and rulemaking. In the early twentieth century this international organisation was the subject of much scholarly attention from the proponents of liberal internationalism. Some of them viewed the Commission as a noteworthy example of ‘successful international administration’,1 which could be replicated around the globe. The status of the Danube was thoroughly discussed at the Paris Peace Congress, where decision-makers preserved the Commission as the institutional organ that was to regulate shipping along the Maritime Danube. But the solutions reached in Paris in 1919–1921 were far from the expectations of institutional globalists and represented a step back when compared to the nineteenth-century status of the IO. This marked the beginnings of a long period in which the Commission became an object in the geopolitical realignment of the Lower Danube during the interwar period, in the Second World War and in the early post-war years.