Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe by Owen Grey

Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe by Owen Grey

This is the first in-depth, English-language study of Romania’s role in the Little Entente—an alliance formed with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to defend the territorial status quo in Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War. While this alliance has often been dismissed in international historiography as peripheral, this book argues that the Little Entente was a critical, albeit fragile, experiment in regional security and interwar diplomacy. Anchored in Romania’s foreign policy, it reinterprets the alliance as a revealing case study in small-state agency, collective security, and the entropic pressures of the post-war order.

Whilst drawing on a wide range of Romanian diplomatic archives, press materials, and memoirs, many of which remain underutilized in anglophone scholarship, Grey also situates Romania’s actions within the larger European context, assessing how regional alliances engaged with the League of Nations and evolving relationships with France, Germany, Italy, and Soviet Russia. Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe moves beyond simplistic narratives of failure and instead presents a nuanced portrait of the Little Entente as a fragile, flawed, but earnest effort to secure peace in a precarious international order—one whose lessons resonate powerfully today.

Owen Grey’s new book helps explain how small states form alliances with one another and on how limited their choices are when faced with major geopolitical threatsHe shows how limited the options available to diplomats and statesmen were and gets inside the decision-making process to explain why they made the choices they did. Seeing the Little Entente as a mediating factor in Romanian diplomacy that both limited and enhanced the country’s options is a major contribution to the literature and makes for some stimulating analysis.

Owen Grey completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK and has over a decade of experience in government and international diplomacy, serving as a senior political adviser at NATO.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781350608221
ISBN 10	135060822X
Title	Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe
Author	Owen Grey
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2026-08-20
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.