Introduction

Abstract

An overview of British-Romanian relations after 1918 suggests that Britain and Romania were never able to regard each other squarely until December 1989. Until that date, from the British point of view, Romania was part of something broader — French policies in South-East Europe, German domination of the area in the late 1930s and during the Second World War, and then the Soviet Union’s postwar hegemony. Romania had an uncomfortable neighbour — Russia, against whom she sought a guarantor. France played that role after the First World War, to be replaced by Germany after the Anschluss with Austria of March 1938. As Maurice Pearton has pointed out, ‘Anglo-Romanian relations resolved themselves into successive attempts to establish a working rapprochment between two distinct sets of perceptions and aspirations which were slightly out of focus with each other’.¹