black sea

Turkish state was therefore recognized, while its
borders in Europe were established according to
the situation from 1913, like they were after the
end of the Second Balkan War. The public debt of
the former Ottoman Empire was divided among
the states which took over territories, the regime
of capitulations and the financial control over the
Turkish state were abolished and a population exchange
took place between Greece and Turkey.
The free circulation in the Straits of all ships
and aircraft (civilian and military) was proclaimed,
in accordance to several cases – in peacetime, in
wartime, with Turkey as a belligerent power, with
Turkey neutral, etc. The Bosporus and Dardanelles
Straits were demilitarized on a length of 15 to 20
km, with the exception of Constantinople (Istanbul),
which could keep a garrison of 15 000 soldiers. The
Commission of the Straits was established, which
was presided by the representative of Turkey and
having one delegate from each of the littoral states.
The treaty transformed the Black Sea in a free
and open sea to navigation for all countries, regardless
whether the ships belonged to the littoral
or non-littoral states or whether they were trade
ships or war ships. 6
The Conference of Lausanne, in spite of all
the tensions, played an important role in stabilizing
the relations among the states from South-
Eastern Europe and in diminishing the strong contradictions
that plagued this geographic area for a
long time. The agreement was the first act which
revised the system built on the Paris Peace Conference,
abolishing the Treaty of Sèvres. At the
same time, it officially confirmed the disappearance
of the Ottoman Empire, the great power that
had dominated the region for five centuries.
The positive collaboration between the Romanian
and Greek delegations during the Conference
of Lausanne contributed to the development of bilateral
relations, which became closer. For instance,
on July 1925, the Romanian government
agreed to the proposal of the Greek Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Constantin Rentis, concerning the
signing of some treaties of arbitration by Greece,
Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes (Yugoslavia since 1929), as a fist step towards
the signing of a security pact or even the
constituting of an alliance of the three countries.
The talks that followed did not lead to the materialization
of the project, but did soothe the tensions
in the Balkans.
����� Review of Military History �����
The initiative of the Turkish and Greek governments
concerning the setting up of a Balkan
Pact illustrates this new atmosphere. The Romanian
government considered that several conditions
must be met in order to make this formula
successful: things should not be rushed; no mentioning
of any state; no outside hegemony in the
Balkans; all the Balkan states should take part.
The Balkan Pact project was eventually abandoned
because of the opposition of France, which favored
a formula similar to the Little Entente, the alliance
created in 1920-1921 by Romania, Czechoslovakia
and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes. 7
An important moment in the evolution of bilateral
relations was the signing, in March 12, 1928
in Geneva, of the Pact of nonaggression and arbitrage.
Through this document, the parties committed
themselves not to attack each other, not to
invade their territories and not to declare war
against each other. The use of force was allowed
only in the cases of self-defense stipulated in the
Covenant of the League of Nations. The Covenant
also provisioned methods of solving the disputes in
the spirit of the norms established by the forum in
Geneva. The exchange of the instruments of ratification
took place on July 5, 1929.
In the same year, during the reunion of the
International Labor Organization in Athens, the
former Greek prime-minister, Alexandros Papanastassiou,
proposed the convocation of an informal
conference of the Balkan states. The latter gave
their consent, thus laying the grounds of a period
of political effervescence in the region, the first
such reunion taking place in Athens on October 5-
12, 1930. The statute of the conference stipulated
that the fundamental goal of the reunion was the
rapprochement among the Balkan states from all
points of view. Three such reunions followed –
Istanbul (October 1931), Bucharest (October 1932)
and Thessaloniki (November 1933), while the fifth,
initially planned to take place in Belgrade and later
moved to Istanbul, never took place. As they were
nongovernmental bodies, they could not have possibly
solved the numerous problems in the region,
some of them decades or centuries old, but the
topics of discussions and the proposed solutions
did contribute to a significant rapprochement of
the countries from this geographic area.
Regarding naval collaboration, we must mention
another revealing fact. At the end of August
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