The Danube is the second largest river in Europe after the Volga, but, as the scholar Grigore Antipa noticed in 1921, the importance of the Danube lies in the geographical position of its course, because, by "crossing almost the whole of Europe from the West to the East" it is "the most straight forward natural path which links the industrial countries in Central and Western Europe with the agricultural countries, rich in raw materials, in eastern Europe and Southwestern Asia and even in the remote southern and eastern Asia "(G. Antipa, Danube and its Scientific, Economic and Political Issues, Bucharest, 1921, p.10). To highlight its maximum potential, however, the great Romanian geographer Simion Mehedinţi argued in 1938 that "whoever mentions the Danube must immediately mention the Black Sea, as well. And that is not all, the Bosphorus (which is but a prolongation of the Danube) and the Dardanelles - a continuation of the Bosphorus, should also be mentioned "(S. Mehedinti, Our Links with the Danube and the Sea, Bucharest, 1938, p.7). So the Danube became important when both its ends were free - especially the mouths of the Danube - and when the Black Sea - through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles - was connected to the Mediterranean Sea and the international trade circuit.
Reference may be made to other relevant points of view with respect to this river. Napoleon Bonaparte characterized the Danube as the King of the European rivers, and Karl Marx continued to say that whoever holds in his hands the mouths of the Danube is the master of the Danube [K. Marx, F. Engels, Opere, IX, Bucharest, 1959, p. 418). The economic advantages and the geopolitical position of the Danube mouths justify the fact that this area was successively under the control of the Greeks in the polis, of the Romans (including the Byzantines), of the Italians (Venetian and Genoese), of the Turks, of the Russians and, implicitly, of the other Great Powers of modern Europe.
In the course of history the mouths of the Danube have had two major periods of flowering, inevitably linked to the opening of the Black Sea and to the effervescence of trade through the Mediterranean. The first period reached a peak of development during the 13th and 14th centuries, when the Bas lack Sea was, as Gheorghe I. Bratianu stated in the famous study The Black Sea. From Origins to the Ottoman Conquest (2 vol., Ed. Meridiane, Bucharest, 1988). “the turn of the international trade". In fact, the existence of some commercial roads which crossed the Romanian space seems to have played an important role in the political coagulation of the two medieval states: Wallachia and Moldova. The Ottoman conquest of the Black Sea - officially completed in 1484 by occupying the last two free shopping centers: Chilia and the White Fortress - led to the closure of this sea and, obviously, to the collapse of international trade. Until the beginning of the 19th century, the Black Sea remained virtually closed to the Western powers, and the role of the Danube and of its mouths was to provide supplies for Constantinople and the Ottoman market.
The second flowering period of the Danube mouths began after the treaty of Adrianople (1829). The excavation and opening of the Suez Canal made people rediscover the ancient trade route through the Mediterranean, and with it, the great modern powers reevaluated the status of the Danube. The special interest in the Lower Danube - a term which has been limited only to the maritime sector of the river (Brăila - vărsare) since the nineteenth century, unlike its medieval acceptance (Iron Gates - Sheds) – shown by the European diplomatic cabinets was linked to two factors. The former factor, which was an economic one, was determined by what Andrei Otetea called "the introduction of the Romanian trade in the international circuit", i.e. the moment when the Danube reached its economic value by opening our grain exports to the western markets and when the steam navigation started [A. Viteza, The Intrusion of Romanian Commerce into the International Circuit (in the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism), Bucharest, 1977]. Essentially, the area of the mouths of the Danube was seen by Western merchants and ship owners as a new grain market, a reality which was more obvious at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The latter factor, of a political nature, was determined by the reaction of the European diplomatic cabinets to the permanent land and sea pressure on the Straits and on the Pontic basin exercised by Tsarist Russia. The growing commercial interest of the West in the Danube region hit the hegemonic plans of Petersburg, for which the Lower Danube sector was only a mandatory transit area to the Straits and, at the same time, a rival of its own southern Russian ports, with special reference to Odessa. Since Russia completely controlled the mouths of the Danube between the Peace of Adrianople (1829) and the Treaty of Paris (1856), it should not be surprising that the Danube issue became an important component of the great Eastern Problem.
The solution found by the Great European Powers to block the Russian actions on the mouths of the Danube implied the establishment of the European Commission of the Danube after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War (1853-1856). The new international body, from the outset, aimed at achieving two purposes: 1) the technical and economic one – which envisaged the desiltation of a Danube arm so as to connect the river to the maritime trade routes and to ensure, through the established international control, the freedom and equality of navigation of all pavilions; 2) the political one – considered removing the Russian hegemony claims in the Danube and the Black Sea. From this moment, 1856, until the Belgrade Agreement (1948), the history of the Marine Danube is interwoven with that of the European Commission. We are thus able to grasp the geostrategic importance of the Danube mouths in maintaining the European balance until the outbreak of the Second World War.
The entry, after the second world conflagration, of the largest part of the Danube basin in the control area of the Soviet Union created the favourable conditions for restoring the hegemony of the East Power over the mouths of the Danube. The Soviet Union had no scruples in implementing its expansionist objectives in the Danube. Guided by the generous slogan "The Danube belongs to the riparian", the Soviet diplomacy carried out a fierce diplomatic war immediately after the Second World War with the former allies (The United States, France and the United Kingdom) to impose its monopoly on the entire Danube basin. At the same time, the small riparians were economically strangled by the Soviet Union when their own vessels were confiscated and they were forced to adopt a foreign political regime (except for Austria and the future Federal Republic of Germany), characterized by obedience and servility towards the Kremlin.
The new Danube Convention in Belgrade (August 18, 1948) accomplished de jure what the Soviet Union imposed de facto by force on the Danube basin after 1944-1945. To be more specific, the Kremlin now succeeded in getting rid of any form of oversight by other (Western) powers of navigational freedom and equal treatment for all pavilions by supporting the riverine law over its own territory - a masked form of imposing its own hegemony. The European Commission of the Danube was abolished, its place being taken by the Danube Commission, the new body - headquartered in Galaţi until 1954, and later that year in Budapest - being formed only from rivers and where the decision-making power belonged to Moscow. It turned out that the abusive policy of the communists in the post-war regulation of the Danube excluded this route from the great international trade, the mouths of the Danube having now only the role of route for transporting goods to the Soviet Union.
Towards the end of the 1950s, on the background of Romania's alienation from the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, the Communist Romanian authorities tried to reshuffle Danube navigation through a forced industrialization policy of the Romanian economy, in which the construction of a large steel mill in the east of the country with access to the Danube and the Black Sea had an important role. The project was suggested by the Romanian Communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in the 1958 Plenum of the Romanian Workers' Party, was approved to be built in Galaţi in 1960 at the Party's VIIIth Congress and was finally inaugurated in September 1966 by Nicolae Ceausescu, Gheorghiu-Dej' s successor since 1965. At the same time, all Romanian communist authorities were responsible for digging the Danube-Black Sea Canal, a project inaugurated by Nicolae Ceausescu in 1984.
The collapse of the communism in Europe and, in particular, of the Soviet Union in 1991, reactivated the Danube issues. The integration of some former communist countries into the Euro-Atlantic structures has led to a series of geographic, geostrategic and geopolitical changes, which effectively turned the mouths of the Danube into the new frontier of the European Union and NATO. From an economic point of view, the existence of the two canals - Danube - Black Sea on the Romanian territory and Main - Danube on the German territory – favoured the use of the Danube - Rhine Navigable Artery as an open dynamic system. Defined as the Pan - European Transport Corridor VII (Rhine - Main - Danube), this transport route links the North Sea, Rotterdam Harbor and the Black Sea, being the main European river infrastructure. Last but not least, the tourist potential of the Lower Danube should not be neglected, because it represents a way of access to the delightful Danube Delta, which is unique in Europe.