ABSTRACT
The Kingdom of Romania was one among those European states deeply affected by the October 1917 Revolution. After experiencing the reverberations of the October Revolution, the Romanian political elite were terrified by the prospect of the extension of the revolution in their country. This experience accompanied by the mass labour unrest in the period from 1918 to 1920 led to the emergence of the widespread belief in the existence of a concerted internal and external communist conspiracy to overthrow the “public order”. The obsessive fear of revolution and the official discourse about the communist conspiracies both motivated and legitimised the extensive resort to state-of-siege mechanisms in interwar Romania, which were broadly used to suppress labour unrest and trade union activity. Drawing on theoretical contributions of Giorgio Agamben and Mark Neocleous this study will deal with (1) the local reactions to the Russian Revolution of October 1917, (2) the relation between the widespread belief in the existence of a concerted internal and external communist conspiracy to overthrow the “public order” and the resort to state-of-siege mechanisms and (3) the extension of the state-of-siege mechanisms and their effects on Romanian politics and society. The study will argue that the abuse of the state-of-siege mechanisms during most of the interwar period led to routinisation of political violence. It also deeply affected the function of democracy in interwar Romania and laid the foundations for the emergence of the King Carol II’s dictatorship in the late 1930s.
