László Szarka
A Protecting Power without Teeth
The Minorities Created by the Trianon Peace Treaty
[...]
Hungary was invited to send a delegation to the Peace Conference
in December 1919, one year after the War had ended. In the winter of 1918/19,
Czechoslovakia, Romania and the South Slavs had occupied two thirds of the
country. The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic followed and the occupation—and
eventual evacuation—by Romania of Budapest and much of the rest of the country.
Although there was every indication that the Peace Conference had no intention
of changing the new frontiers—of which Clemenceau had informed the Hungarian
Soviet Government in June 1919—the Hungarian delegation hoped that they could
convince the Great Powers that the principle of self-determination proclaimed
by President Wilson, as well as regional stability which was in the interests
of both victors and vanquished, conflicted with the exaggerated demands of
neighbouring countries. Even in its introductory note, the Hungarian delegation
pointed to this basic contradiction in the territorial decisions taken by
the Peace Conference.
The world peace about to be concluded is based on two ideas: the right
to self-determination and the manifest presence of ethnic cohesion. There
is no doubt that one principle applied without the other must produce injustices
that cry to the heavens.
[...]
The Hungarian notes to the Peace Conference repeatedly articulated
the right of Hungarians and non-Hungarians within the Carpathians to a plebiscite.
In an address to the Peace Conference on January 16th, Count Apponyi, referring
to Wilson’s principle of self-determination, demanded a plebiscite in all
those parts of pre-war Hungary which “they now wanted to detach” adding “I
declare that even in anticipation we will accept the results of such plebiscites,
whatever they may be.”3 Calling for plebiscites from the start throws doubts
on the sort of biassed interpretation of the arguments of the Hungarian delegation
which takes it to be anachronistically committed to the integrity of the country,
short-sightedly excluding the option of negotiating tactics. This becomes
all the more apparent if we bear in mind that the Hungarian notes to the Peace
Conference emphasized the formulation of minority rights. No doubt, the Hungarian
position in this respect was not free of contradictions. Taking the new frontiers
as outlined in Clemenceau’s June 1919 note as his starting point, Apponyi
pointed out that 'if the worst comes to the worst and territorial changes
will be forced on us, I ask that the defence of national minority rights be
more effectively and more concretely secured than planned in the peace proposals
handed to us.'
Of the minority agreements within the Versailles peace arrangements,
those that referred to Hungarians outside the Trianon frontiers were the minority
rights obligations included in the Peace Treaty with Austria as well as treaties
covering minority rights with Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes and Romania. As the extensive literature on international minority
rights protection published between the Wars shows, all that these minority
rights agreements concluded on the initiative of the US achieved was an absolute
minimum necessary for survival as a community and native language culture.
That was also the judgement of the delegation headed by Count
Albert Apponyi. Its position and proposals regarding national minority rights
are summed up in Note XXIII to the Peace Conference. Agreement is expressed
for the rights of minorities within Hungary, indicating that Hungarian legislation
and traditions were in accord with what the draft peace treaty expected of
the Hungarian government. At the same time, the note forcefully demanded that
the Peace Treaty with Hungary should include measures for the protection of
the rights of Hungarian and other (such as Slovak, Ruthenian or Saxon) minorities
in neighbouring countries.
Equity, humanity and the will to achieve a lasting peace demand that racial,
linguistic and religious minorities in territories taken from Hungary should
enjoy the most effective protection of the Great Powers, of the guardians
of world peace and culture, and that the peace treaty to be concluded with
Hungary should offer firm guarantees for the defence of national minority
interests, since such guarantees alone can guard them against the excesses
and violence of intolerant power, which would otherwise be unavoidable.
The note also made itemized and textual proposals. Considerable
emphasis was given to the autonomy of the churches and guarantees for the
continuity of their organizational, institutional and property-owning structures.
The absence of these was to have dire consequences for all minorities in the
region at a much later date. The proposal provided for the immediate incorporation
of minority communities, this being the only way in which the minorities could
establish charity, religious, social, cultural and educational institutions
at their own expense, which would have made it possible for them to nurture
their language, culture and faith in freedom. Wide minority autonomy referred
to the use of the native language in dealing with the authorities and in the
courts. It also aimed to secure proportionate participation in legislation,
in local government, in the government and in national authorities. That particular
Hungarian note was aimed to make it impossible to take any measures designed
to serve assimilation, the confiscation of minority property and any kind
of discrimination.
A note by the Hungarian delegation with reference to Transylvania
also severely criticized the inadequacy of the legal guarantees provided by
the minority rights treaties. It was pointed out that these were unable to
protect what was specific to Transylvania, since they narrowly confined themselves
to the specific interests of linguistic, racial and religious minorities.
Furthermore, the absence of sanctions and of any protection for economic interests,
the opposed interests of Romania, a country on which one could not rely, threw
doubt on the value of the minority protection treaties in the eyes of the
Hungarian delegation.
It is our conviction that it is not the rights of the minority but only
the national neutrality of the state that could provide a satisfactory solution
for the Transylvanian question.
The constitutional solution would be the independence of
Transylvania and the national neutrality of the state, with the participation
of equal nations of equal constitutional status. The note suggested that Transylvania
be divided into four kinds of territories, preponderantly Hungarian, preponderantly
Romanian, preponderantly Saxon or Swabian, and of a lingustically mixed character.
These would enjoy far-reaching local autonomy, central power being based on
the equal representation of the three nations and on a trilingual administration.
As a basic principle the note referred to the right to self-determination
of Hungarians and Transylvanians. A stable arrangement in Transylvania could
not be based on the right to self-determination of one of the nations living
there to the exclusion of the self-determination of the others.
If the rights of two peoples cannot be simultaneously asserted in one area,
or if these two rights mutually exclude each other, then what becomes necessary
is either mutual agreement or other principles must be resorted to, principles
that must be considered when the question is decided.
[...]
But it is also a fact that there were clearly discernible linguistic borders between Hungarians and Slovaks, Hungarians and Ruthenians and, in certain areas, even between Hungarians and Romanians and Hungarians and Serbians. In addition the Hungarian–Slovak linguistic border was of the sharp type where a transitional mixed zone more than a village or two deep is rare.
But as Millerand himself points out, the Peace Conference itself, because of numerous other considerations, made no effort to give the objective ethnic data of the Carpathian basin any sort of real weight.
The synergism of a number of factors proved extraordinarily important for the future of these three million Hungarians. In the absence of pre-1918 ethno-regional traditions and inner dividing lines manifest in administrative arrangements, as it became apparent later, notes containing demands submitted to the Peace Conference, as well as notions of strategy proved the starting point when the frontiers were drawn. When negotiating the Czechoslovak, South Slav and Romanian territorial demands (largely based on war-time promises) when the actual frontier was drawn up, as a rule, Hungarians were faced with a choice between the bad and the worse.
The French, British, Italian and American delegations, asserting their own spheres of interests and ad hoc interests were, at most, prepared to renounce territorial demands that could be described as excessive, at points where there were disputes between them concerning the new frontiers of Hungary. Thus the ethnically purely Hungarian Grosse Schütt Danube island (Csallóköz) was allotted to Czechoslovakia because the French, giving way to the Americans and Italians, did not insist on Czechoslovakia being given the northern Hungarian coal basin and industrial area. In exchange the Americans no longer insisted that the Grosse Schütt stay with Hungary.
Millerand, openly acknowledging bias in his ominous letter, pointed to a fatally polarized choice between the integrity of Hungary in its pre-war frontiers and the demands of the new allied small powers. In fact plans and suggestions, paying closer attention to the ethnic realities of the region, were present both in the deliberations of the Peace Conference and in proposals by the Hungarian government suggesting alternative solutions.
At the conclusion of the Great War, the Hungarian political class was well aware that the territorial integrity of pre-War Hungary could only be preserved with the effective support of one or the other of the victorious Great Powers.
[...]
The minority rights protection treaties were signed by all three successor states. The results were favourable in Czechoslovakia and, to some degree, in Romania, primarily in rights of language use, the survival of a minimal network of Hungarian cultural and educational institutions, and the legal position of churches and other denominations whose members belonged to ethnic minorities. Czechoslovakia endeavoured to embody the basic principles of international minority treaties in domestic regulation, Romania and Yugoslavia on the other hand did their best to limit the validity of such treaties. This difference manifested itself particularly in the scope given to the political parties of the Hungarian minority.
It should not however be forgotten that the position of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia was eased by the fact that Masaryk and his successors were forced to make the greatest concessions in view of the three and a half million German minority which, particularly in the thirties, when instrumentalized by Hitler, caused them many headaches.
All the three Hungarian minorities did their best to exploit to the full all the opportunities offered by League of Nations minority rights protection. Interestingly enough submissions by Hungarians from Romania proved the most successful, forcing the Bucharest government into second thoughts regarding a number of measures directed against a minority. This applied in particular to land reforms which took place in all three successor states and was specially important in dealing with grievances arising from the subjection of schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction to supervision by the state.
Between the two wars the basic conditions for the autonomy of the Hungarian minority were provided by commerce organized on an ethnic basis and by schools that imbued education with a national spirit. A comprehensive regulation of minority rights was given high priority by the government in Budapest right from the start. True enough, between the wars, the hope of a revision of the frontiers was never abandoned. Hungary attempted to negotiate bilateral minority rights agreements with all three neighbours but, as the arguments used by Czechoslovakia when rejecting such feelers made clear, not one of the successor states considered their national minorities within Hungary to be of sufficient importance to warrant the granting of reciprocal rights, sanctioned by a treaty in supervising the implementation of minority rights. From then on the Hungarian government used the facilities of the League of Nations, the Interparliamentary Union and other international organizations to act in support of Hungarian minorities, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind, however, that a revision of the frontiers offered the only genuine solution. Hungarian historians will continue to argue over the true nature of Hungarian revisionist foreign policy. The present consensus appears to be that for most Hungarian governments integral revision was a bargaining ploy. It is certainly true that, at least after the unsuccessful 1921 to 1923 bilateral negotiations, Hungarian foreign policy was primarily concerned with the recovery of Hungarian-inhabited territories, concentrating on what was called ethnic revision.
The autonomous organization of the Hungarian minorities between the Wars did not imply integration in the new states. Numerous reasons could be listed, starting with long-standing conflicts going back to well before 1918, going on to the Trianon peace arrangements which the greater part of Hungarians in the successor states felt to be unjust, to neglecting to learn the language of the country of their new citizenship, discriminative practices by the executive, legislative and judicial authorities and the state of tension between Hungary and its neighbours which persisted throughout. The successor states defined themselves as nation-states from the start. Their constitutions, political institutions and legislation gave scant scope to minorities. In such circumstances the loyalty of minority citizens and communities was of a low intensity indeed. Not even Czechoslovakia, whose national policy was relatively liberal, was able to improve the situation significantly in this respect.
The oppositional stance taken to the new states proved an important community-building factor early on, but in time passive resistance became a source of important losses for the Hungarian minorities. Public servants who refused to take the oath of allegiance required by their employment were dismissed. Many resettled in Hungary swelling the number of refugees (around three hundred thousand).
In the case of all three Hungarian minorities, a new sort of regionalism that grew out of parochialism and provincialism expressed a higher stage of community identity. Within a very short time a sort of heroic sense of mission was born (a peculiar minority adaptation of Transylvanianism, the vox humana in Slovakia or the awakening of a consciousness of Danubian solidarity). Recognizing the need, community building thus produced a kind of social psychological tuning in the case of all three communities as a response to the challenge of an unprecedented new situation.
All this was made much more difficult by the initial prohibition and later hindering of contacts with the mother country, with Budapest of central importance. Such contacts were only well organized on the highest political level, but otherwise pretty ad hoc and awkward. The relationship between Hungary and the Hungarian minorities often changed, and considerably changed in the course of the past seventy-five years. Between the two wars a sensation of isolation and annihilation no doubt predominated. Putting an end to that was the principal aim. In Hungarian revisionist propaganda, in official Hungarian policy, and also in the arts Trianon was evil incarnate. It would therefore deserve special study why nevertheless a radical Hungarian irredentism, which many predicted, enjoyed such minimal support amongst Hungarians in the successor states.
The second major group of factors influencing the organization of minorities consists of the political, economic and cultural rights guaranteed by the new states, including the attitude of the majority to the minorities.
The fluctuations in the interwar position of the Hungarian minorities produced by Trianon manifested all the problems of the Peace Treaty. Trianon no doubt did not merely give its blessing to the right to self-determination of non-Hungarians in pre-war Hungary. The territorial arrangements of the Peace Treaty, primarily decisions refering to the frontiers of Hungary which closely affected the members of the Hungarian minorities, expressed the strategic and economic objectives of the victorious Great Powers and of the small nations in Eastern Central Europe allied to them, rather than serving to prepare the judgment of an impartial referee.
The attempts to provide solutions during the Second World War and the years that followed are evidence that the relations of the peoples of the Carpathian Basin cannot be mechanically arranged by re-drawing frontiers, in localised wars with exchanges of populations, deportations and ethnic cleansing without all the risks that go with a war. Every such violent experiment gives rise to new grievances and conflicts. In the last resort both victor and vanquished suffer the consequences of every kind of homogenization.
[...]
László Szarka
is on the staff of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He is the author of Csehország a Habsburg Monarchiában (Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy, Budapest, 1989) and A szlovákok története (A History of the Slovaks,
Budapest, 1993).
