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Romanian Nicolae Bălcescu's Proposals of (Con)federations in East Central Europe (1848-1851)

In this paper, the author dealt with Nicolae Bălcescu's attempts made in 1850-1851 and aiming at the creation of a political confederation in Central-Eastern Europe. An important historian and a remarkable figure of the 1848 Romanian Revolution, as well as an admirer of Giuseppe Mazzini, Bălcescu worked on three such federative plans. He presented them to Romanian, Hungarian, South Slavic, Polish and Czech revolutionaries, whose nations were at that time part of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bălcescu's proposals were considered in the broader historical context of the mid nineteenth-century Europe, marked by the heritage of the 1848 Revolution, and, as a consequence, by the idea of confederating the whole continent or parts of it. The content of Bălcescu's federative plans, his political goals in making them and the political support he was given by European revolutionaries, as well as the reasons of their failure were analysed in this paper. Finally, by including Bălcescu's proposals of confederating a large part of Europe in a more general approach, the paper tried to asses their historical significance then and now, in the context of the (re-)creation of European Union. The research is based on published sources (mainly on Bălcescu's correspondence) and available literature.

Nicolae Bălcescu; Romanian history; European history; proposals of confederation; Central-Eastern Europe; nineteenth century

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