Михаил Маноилеску: Жизнь и политическая деятельность

Mihail Manoilescu (; December 9, 1891 – December 30, 1950) was a Romanian journalist, engineer, economist, politician and memoirist, who served as Foreign Minister of Romania during the summer of 1940. An active promoter of and contributor to fascist ideology and antisemitic sentiment, he was a financial backer of the Iron Guard in the late 1930s. His corporatist ideas influenced economic policy in several countries during the 1930s, particularly in Brazil.

Born to a political family in Tecuci, he was the nephew of Alexandru Bădărău, twice a minister in Conservative cabinets during the early 1900s, and a descendant of the Moldavian boyar known as Ioan Tăutu; his grandfather was strong unionist, a supporter of the Union of Moldova with Wallachia, while his father was a member of the Socialist Party. The Manoilescus moved to Iași when Mihail was a child. Having been the recipient of the Gazeta Matematică prize in 1910, he went on to study at the "Școala de Poduri și Șosele" (the School of Bridges and Roads) in Bucharest, completing his training as a valedictorian in 1915. Manoilescu was subsequently assigned to the Ministry of Public Works, and later moved to an artillery regiment in Roman. Upon Romania's entry into World War I, he was assigned to the Directorate of Ammunitions (led by Tancred Constantinescu), and designed an original type of 210 mm howitzer, which, after southern Romania was invaded by the Central Powers (see Romanian Campaign), was produced in Nicolina, Iași. After the conflict, in 1919, he had a minor role in the National Liberal Party (PNL) governments, assisting General Constantinescu as Head of the Industrial Recovery Directorate and later as General Director of Industry. He was responsible for measures such as organizing the Industrial Exhibition, carrying out industrial statistics, and unifying legislation related to the industry. he met the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and became his admirer (calling the Fascist regime "a truly constructive political revolution, one that can only compare itself with the great French revolution in scale and novelty"). Subsequently, he was active in collaboration with the Comitati d'azione per l'universalità di Roma and other Italian led projects of international cooperation.

He was then an advocate of the crowning of Carol Caraiman as King of Romania (in the place of his underage son Mihai). In the autumn of 1927, while distributing Carol's appeals to the leaders of various political parties and carrying his letter to Queen Marie, he was arrested (martial law was proclaimed by the Ion I. C. Brătianu government in the incident's wake). Manoilescu, who benefited from Averescu's vocal support, was acquitted when tried by a court subordinated to the Council of War in late November. His own testimony was indicated by Time as arguing that Carol was alarmed by an alleged growth in republicanism and only wished to be part of the Regency. He also stated:
"The Prince is too loyal and decent to think of dethroning his own son." While accusing the executive of having previously attempted to purchase his silence, Manoilescu stressed his belief that King Ferdinand had, just before his death, asked Brătianu for Carol to be allowed to return. The acquittal came as a shock, given rumors that Premier Brătianu had instructed the court to find Manoilescu guilty. In an unusual incident during the first day of trial, news correspondents from abroad were told that international phone connections had been severed—they resorted to crossing the Danube into Bulgaria at Giurgiu, using phones there to contact their employers, and repeated the trip several times over the following days. as well as under Nicolae Iorga (1931 1932). He was elected to the Assembly of Deputies for the PNȚ in 1930, representing Caraș County. In his memoirs, Manoilescu claimed that, at the time, he had played a hand in the release of Mihai Gheorghiu Bujor (imprisoned since 1918, due to his Bolshevik activism and designs for a communist revolution); Manoilescu authored a series of articles in his support, and allegedly intervened alongside King Carol The incident contributed to PNŢ inner conflict that caused Manoilescu to leave the grouping. Between 1932 and 1937, he was assigned a seat in the Senate, representing the Romanian Chamber of Commerce. the topic blended with his support for authoritarianism and the one party system, as Manoilescu rejected democracy (which, in his view, encouraged the majority forming peasantry to decide on matters that did not concern it). The role and destiny criticized the course of Romanian social development:
"[ ] an oversized bourgeoisie which mimicks the boyars of yesteryear and has an over bourgeois way of living, oversized in comparison with its means, creates a certain social instability and features a high percentage of individual failures. That is why the Romanian bourgeoisie is not in fact a bourgeoisie in one of its most essential features; whereas the Occident focuses on accumulation, security and the future, our bourgeoisie will focus on spending, satisfaction and the present. Whereas the Western bourgeois work for their children, the Romanian bourgeois will often only work for themselves." Among others, Manoilescu adopted some of the Poporanist ideas on capital and its international circulation, as present in the works of Constantin Stere (in turn influenced by the Marxist Werner Sombart). He argued that a national economy could develop only if it minimized its contacts with the world market and relied instead on cultivating internal demand for a local industry. At the same time, his magazine supported a nationalist and racist approach, viewing corporatism as "the guarantee of Romanianization", and proclaiming that "the racial basis of Romania is the same as that of Aryan Europe". Manoilescu himself welcomed the antisemitic policies of the Alexandru Vaida Voevod government. Manoilescu's corporatist and protectionist ideas began to be applied in Brazil, as the basis of that country's industrial development during its Estado Novo regime. His opinion that the engagement of productive forces in industry, seen as always more productive than agriculture and other raw materials, is a welcomed process constituted an influence on both Celso Furtado and Raúl Prebisch Mihail Manoilescu, together with the French economist François Perroux, prepared the way for the reception of corporatism in Brazil during the 1930s. Establishing corporatism in Brazil was partly achieved by translating and publishing into Portuguese some of Manoilescu's works. During the Interwar, Manoilescu's economic and political essays were published in Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Chile. His works also had some influence in Argentina, although not as much as in Brazil and Chile. On the other hand, Manoilescu's advocacy of autarkic measures has been compared to the measures enforced by later Stalinist regimes, including that of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, who on at least one occasion described his works as a major contribution to the theory of underdevelopment.

Despite the increasingly tense relations between Carol and the fascist Iron Guard, Manoilescu was viewed with interest by the latter. By the late 1930s, he was himself a supporter of the Guard (which he hoped to see turning into a corporatist movement—"an instrument to validate the goals of the [Guard's] national revolution"), and donated part of his land to one of the latter's enterprises. His new discourse was ridiculed by his former colleagues in the National Peasants' Party, as "desperate attempts to exit from the [old generation of politicians] and sit among the new men". In February 1937, he began discreetly financing the Guard's newly created paper, Buna Vestire (he was exposed as the man behind it by virtually all political commentators of the time). In the election of 1937, he ran for the Senate on the Everything for the Fatherland Party list (which served as a front for the Iron Guard). According to his political adversary Constantin Argetoianu, the party's unofficial leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu made similar proposals to philosopher Nae Ionescu and General Gheorghe Moruzi: Ionescu denied the request because, as a self proclaimed pillar of the Guard, he could not accept such a lowly position, while Moruzi called Manoilescu "a con artist" and alluded to his reported connection with Magda Lupescu.

In July 1940, at the moment of crisis when Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were ceded to the Soviet Union, Manoilescu was named foreign minister in the pro fascist government headed by Ion Gigurtu. The new executive was faced with eventually successful attempts by Hungary, backed by Italy and Nazi Germany, to revise its border with Romania by the Treaty of Trianon, in reality a dictate. Manoilescu, who was a supporter of the Axis alliance, attempted in vain to make use of his influence with Italian authorities. While German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, communicated the final decision, in the Gold Room of the Belvedere Palace, Manoilescu fainted, after seeing the map of the new borders, imposed by Germany and Italy, whilst the Hungarian side jubilated. In September, he was involved in negotiations with Soviet envoys regarding a détente between the two countries; at the time, examining the situation created by warm relations between the Axis and the Soviet Union (see Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact), the fall of France and the United Kingdom's isolation (which had deprived Romania of diplomatic alternatives), Manoilescu argued that Romania looked "with respect" towards Moscow, Berlin, and Rome. Asked by the Soviet delegation to account for alleged new border incidents, he stiffly denied that these had ever occurred.

The responsibility for the Transylvanian compromise weighed heavily on him later in the following year, when the Iron Guard, revived by the leadership of Horia Sima, came to government and proclaimed the National Legionary State; it refused to appoint Manoilescu to any leadership position. He did however continue to serve as Foreign Minister during the short lived First Antonescu cabinet, bringing the overall duration of his 1940 term to 70 days (July 4 to September 14). After the Iron Guard's 1941 Rebellion, he remained present on the political stage as a supporter of Ion Antonescu's dictatorship (see Romania during World War II). In autumn 1940, he represented his country to Rome, where he attempted to persuade Italian officials to look into information about Hungarian violence in Northern Transylvania, and, in July 1942, traveled to the Independent State of Croatia to meet with Otto Franges, his collaborator on an overview of Southeast European economy. Set free in December 1945, he resumed work on his unfinished writings, and became an advocate of harvesting geothermal power in Romania (his innovations in the field were patented on the name of his son, Alexandru Manoilescu). Manoilescu was ultimately brought to Sighet Prison, where he died at the end of 1950. Typhus had left him with heart problems, which were aggravated in detention; with no medical attention, this led to his death; His family was told of his death only in May 1958.

In the world of economics, Manoilescu is primarily remembered for the "Manoilescu argument", which states that when the marginal productivity of labor in agriculture is lower than that in other sectors, surplus labor should be redirected to higher productivity activities, such as manufacturing. and the Wiesel Institute, on the grounds of Manoilescu's advocacy of Fascist ideology and antisemitism before World War II. In spite of the criticism, the Bank did not withdraw the coin. In the city of Ploiești, a high school bears his name, while in Tecuci a street is named after him.