Politica “Ochilor la Răsărit”: Frontiera dintre România si Polonia in construirea sistemului “Cordon Sanitaire”
The “Eyes on the East” Policy: The Frontier between Romania and Poland in the Establishment of the “Cordon Sanitaire” System

Summary/Abstract: The “Eyes on the East” Policy: The Frontier between Romania and Poland in the Establishment of the “Cordon Sanitaire” System. The Romanian-Polish relations officially established shortly after the end of World War I (January 1919) were based on strategic and security interests: joint action against an unprovoked attack by Soviet Russia and the reopening of the road linking the Baltic to the Black Sea. During the conflict with the Red Army (1919- 1920), the Polish diplomacy focused the creation of a strategic North-South axis between the two seas, which would have enabled efficient communication between Romania and Poland. A program drawn up by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in April 1919 was putting forward the setting up of what Quai d’Orsay had termed a cordon sanitaire: “it is essential, in the interest of peace and of Europe, that a strong barrier should separate Europe from Russia and Russia from Germany”. Romanian-Polish common border, officially institutionalized just in 1935, can make real bilateral policies toward Kremlin and its Red Army, from the end of World War I to 1939, and became the most important element of the so-called “cordon sanitaire” international affairs system. Poland’s breakaway from the project of the Little Entente in 1923–1924 and the development of the trilateral alliance (Romania-Yugoslavia-Czechoslovakia) into an effective diplomatic community led, a few years after the end of World War I, to the creation of two blocs of victorious states in Central and Eastern Europe, centered on the Vistula (the Romanian-Polish alliance) and the Danube (the Little Entente). Although each of these blocs had as a main goal the preservation of the status-quo, this simple fact was not enough to make them unite. The Intermarium (creation of the ‘30’s Polish diplomacy) sought to capitalize as much as possible on the alliance between Bucharest and Warsaw, and to attract all the potential forces that may have been affected by the strategies and interferences of the neighboring totalitarian Powers, Germany and the USSR. The disintegration of Poland in September 1939 and the profound changes occurred in the geopolitical configuration of Central and Eastern Europe (as a result of a direct agreement between Berlin and Moscow in the case of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) canceled all these projects and forecasts.

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