ed, however, and as the defeat of the Central Powers was becoming
apparent, the Romanian army, which had not been demobilized, reentered
the war, liberated Bucharest from the Germans, and occupied much of
Bessarabia and Transylvania. After the war, in response to the expressed
will of the popular assemblies in Transylvania, Bessarabia, and
Bukovina, those provinces were united with the Kingdom of Romania--often
called the Old Kingdom. Formal treaties in 1919 and 1920 confirmed these
decisions, and virtually all Romanians were finally reunited within the
historic homeland.

INTERWAR YEARS, 1918-40

With the annexation of Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina, postwar
Romania, sometimes referred to as Greater Romania, doubled in size, as
well as in population. Included among the newly acquired population were
large ethnic minorities--principally Hungarians, Germans, and
Jews--whose diverse backgrounds and development presented complex
social, political, economic, and administrative problems for the
Romanian government. The various traditions of the people within the
acquired lands could not easily be transformed into new patterns,
largely because of the government's reluctance to share power with any
political leaders except those representing the Transylvanian Romanians.
As a result, minority elements were largely excluded from national
affairs, and discriminatory policies developed that bred resentment and
increased political instability (see ch. 4).

The immediate postwar years were dominated by the Liberal Party of the
Old Kingdom. The party instituted a series of land reforms, fostered
increased industrialization, and sponsored a broadly democratic
constitution in 1923, which made the new state a centralized
constitutional monarchy. The Transylvanian Romanians, long accustomed to
considerable autonomy and self-government under Hungarian rule, resented
the imposition of central control, especially under the administration
of officials from Bucharest. In protest, a new party, the National
Peasant Party, was formed in 1926 by a fusion of the Transylvanian
National Party with the Peasant Party in the Old Kingdom.

Other parties were active during this early period, but all were
overshadowed by the Liberal Party and the National Peasant Party. The
Social Democratic Party had been organized at the beginning of the
twentieth century but, lacking any sizable number of industrial workers,
the socialist movement remaine