The President of the Romanian Academy, Ioan-Aurel Pop said on the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Trianon that any nostalgic discussion about bygone empires and multi-national states "becomes obsolete", especially since the states and peoples of the former communist "Eastern Europe" are campaigning for full integration into the European Union.
"For a century to date, other decisions with international legal power have confirmed - broadly speaking - the treaties of 1919-1920 and the existence of national states in the region, so any nostalgic discussion about bygone empires and multi-national states is obsolete. Especially today, the states and peoples of the former communist 'Eastern Europe' are campaigning for full integration into the European Union. Or, more precisely, in Romania's view, that's what they should do," Pop said in a lecture delivered on Thursday at the meeting of the Presidium of the Romanian Academy and posted on Facebook on Friday.
"Romania sees the new political-territorial map of Central Europe as part of a process set up by the peoples (1918) and legitimized by the great powers (1919-1920), while Hungary sees only legitimacy and only the moment 1920, completely neglecting the role of the peoples," said Ioan-Aurel Pop.
The President of the Academy emphasized that "the peoples which had their historical justice recognized through the Treaty of Trianon have good reason to defend it and to uphold its righteousness, since all the international treaties that followed it have confirmed it".
"In other words, with the exception of the Russian empire (which has always been restored in different forms), only a historical memory has been left of all the other empires broken up by peoples in 1918. In contrast, the states of the Poles, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, etc., created, recreated, reunited or reborn after the First World War, remained and endured to this day," Pop said.
"Consequently, our first goal is to carry forward the legacy left by those great state men and 'fathers of the homeland' who built the decisions of Chisinau, Cernauti and Alba Iulia and who made the Trianon possible. It is good to meditate from time to time on this inheritance and not ask ourselves so much - to paraphrase a great conscience of the world - what the new country has given us, but rather what we have given the country," the President of the Romanian Academy, Ioan-Aurel Pop, concluded.