John Lukacs

A Minor Classic

András D. Bán: Hungarian-British Diplomacy 1938-1941: The attempt to maintain relations. London, Frank Cass (Routledge), 2004, 223 pp.

 

In the evening of 2 March, 2004, a somewhat extraordinary reception took place at the Hungarian Embassy in London. It was arranged in honour of the English translation and publication of András D. Bán's Illuziók és csalódások. Nagy-Britannia és Magyarország 1928-1941, that had been published in Budapest in 1998. The gathering in London was remarkable. It included a few eminent British historians, officials of the Foreign Office, the Lady Soames, Winston Churchill's surviving daughter, and of course members of the Hungarian colony. It was an appropriate encomium for a fine work and the memory of its author. For Bán, perhaps one of the most promising of young Hungarian historians, did not live to witness this: he died, tragically, in 2001, at the age of thirty-nine in Budapest, three years after the publication of his book that had received very respectable but, alas, not enough attention at the time. One of the men who was stunned by its merits then was a Hungarian architect living in London, Sándor Váci. He (and his wife) took it upon themselves to bring about an English translation and eventual publication.
This was not easy; it involved hard work, but they succeeded. At their and their publisher's request I wrote an Introduction to the British edition, and spoke briefly about the unusual scope and quality of the book at the above-mentioned reception in London.

The very topic of this book is important beyond the standard monographic framework of diplomatic relations. The three years from 1938 to 1941 were the most important ones in the long, though fragmentary, history of British-Hungarian relations. But they were also the most critical years in the history of Europe, indeed of Western civilization, during the twentieth century. Few people recognized then, and not very many recognize even now, how close Hitler and his Great German Reich had come to winning the Second World War-with incalculable consequences, perhaps needless to say. Or perhaps not so needless at all: because the consequences of Hitler's victory then would have been immeasurably greater, more profound, more disastrous and more enduring than a German victory in the West in 1914 or 1918, or than a (necessarily ephemeral) Russian victory during the so-called Cold War. And during the three years 1938-1941 there was only one Power that stood athwart Hitler's astonishing march. This was Britain; and within Britain, Winston Churchill. Eventually Churchill and Britain would not be the winners of the Second World War: but he was the man who did not lose it. It is remarkable how few people saw this at that time (and not many people even now).
In his original Introduction, written in Hungarian for Hungarians, András D. Bán quoted Johan Huizinga:

A historian must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors still seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win.

Bán added:

If a historian wishes to avoid the many slips and traps that will arise in the course of his study, he cannot take the "end result" as his point of departure. He must attempt to adhere to Huizinga's dictum.

Remarkable is this young (and, alas, prematurely deceased) Hungarian historian's knowledge and understanding of the British people and of the Britain of that period. In 1938 and thereafter Britain no longer had human and material and military resources comparable to those of the British Empire half a century before. Yet the confidence and the steadiness of the English public and of the men of the Foreign Office are impressive in retrospect. They appear in the language of their communications to the representatives of a small faraway country, in the middle of a German-ruled Europe. Their statements illustrate many things: their understanding of that country's geographical situation and of its constraints (an understanding that amounts to careful consideration rather than to outright sympathy) and their admonitions, of course always subordinated to what these officials saw as Britain's principal interests. Their confidence is noteworthy, to say the least. While for us the prospect of a British victory and British considerations for a restoration of a European order in 1940-1941 alone makes this book worth while reading for specialists in British diplomatic history.
And now to its specific topic: Hungarian-British relations during those, so very critical, years. From 1920 to 1930 the principal aim of Hungarian foreign policy was "revisionist": to regain (at least some of) the lands that Hungary lost to her surrounding neighbours in 1919-20, specifically through the Treaty of Trianon, lands that for many centuries had belonged to Hungary, and where millions of Hungarians still lived. Hungary could count on no serious support for this from foreign Powers, except here and there from Mussolini's Italy. British opinion was relatively well disposed towards Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s but this had no practical or political weight or significance at that time.
Then, in 1938, Hitler's Germany occupied annexed Austria-and soon after that, Czechoslovakia. The might and the repute and the influence of the German Reich were now enormous; and that Reich had become a close neighbour, leaning on Hungary. There were Hungarian patriots who recognized that this was a situation entirely new. The main problem was no longer how to reclaim and regain this or that from Hungary's smaller neighbour states; it was to preserve the very independence of Hungary. It is necessary to record that these men were a minority. The majority of Hungarians, and of their governing class, did not quite see things in that way. It was not only that the prospect of overturning the Treaty of Trianon, of recovering at least some of the territories lost in 1918-1920, remained their main preoccupation. It was their inclination to follow, or even to admire, the new Germany, including its ideology of National Socialism. An evidence of this was the result of the May 1939 election (the first with an inhibited and secret ballot) when outright National Socialist parties gained nearly one-fourth of all votes, and even more in the formerly Socialist working-class districts of Budapest. Against them stood diverse elements of the Hungarian people and society, ranging from Jews, Liberals, the remnants of Social Democrats, to committed conservatives, men close to the Regent Horthy, the remaining aristocracy, other men found within the top layers of the government, very much so in the case of the Foreign Ministry, and the (since February 1939) Prime Minister Count Pál Teleki. These men knew that their main duty from now on was to preserve the-relative-independence and sovereignty of Hungary. They knew, too, that they had to struggle not only against German power but also against waves of domestic public opinion and popular sentiment.
They also recognized, surely at the latest by 1939, that the only counterweight against Hitler's domination of Europe was Great Britain. It is therefore that the history of the relationship of Hungary within Great Britain, until December 1941, is especially telling and interesting.
Much, though not all of this, existed on the level of governmental, that is, diplomatic relations. Their record, precisely and carefully presented in this book, is significant enough. We must keep in mind that this existed on a high, and in many ways confidential level. The staff of the Hungarian Foregin Ministry was conservative, old-fashioned, semi-aristocratic-not at all typical of the majority of the Hungarian official bureaucracy. A newer, populist, nationalist (as distinct from patriotic) and, by and large, Germanophile presence among that staff existed only here and there. Contemplating this more than sixty years later we have the sense and the climate of a vanished world-which should deserve at least some of our respect. Of course it was not quite as simple as that. Prime Minister Teleki understood, even more profoundly than Barcza, his envoy in London, the constraints of Hungary's situation; and also the fact that, even in the best of instances, Hungary could not expect much from Britain, indeed, from the English-speaking Powers. On the night of 2-3 April 1941 Teleki shot himself. This was a desperate act to demonstrate his and his nation's honour, a silent protest against accepting Hitler's demand that Hungary join in his invasion of Yugoslavia (a state with which Hungary had signed an accord of "eternal friendship" but a few months before).

Three men played a more than customary role in the relations of Hungary and Britain during those years. One was György Barcza, the Hungarian Minister to London, a man of great intelligence and insights and of old-fashioned standards, deeply opposed to what Hitler's Germany (and its supporters in Hungary) stood for, and consequently a European Anglophile de vielle souche. The other was Owen O'Malley, British Minister to Budapest, who was much more sympathetically inclined to Hungary than his predecessor G. Knox; so was his wife, who later wrote novels under the pen-name Ann Bridge. (The Germans who followed O'Malley's every move, did not know that many years before he had been an assistant to Churchill.) The latter knew much about Hungary and its history (evident, among many other things, in pages of his Marlborough). Churchill's relative sympathy for Hungary was the source of his decision not to declare war on Hungary but only to terminate diplomatic relations in April 1941, after Teleki's suicide, despite Hungary's joining with Germany by invading what was left of Yugoslavia. (The British declaration of war, summarily requested by Stalin, came only in December 1941.)
From May 1938 to February 1942 the course of the Hungarian ship of state was largely set by three Prime Ministers, Imrédy, Teleki, Bárdossy. One of the most valuable portions of this book is Bán's special description and analysis of these three Prime Ministers, including their inclinations but also the dualities of their characters. This alone amounts to a departure from the habitual practices of mundane diplomatic history. To an other unique feature of this book I must now turn.
There is a difference between the history of diplomatic and the history of international relations. The former, largely restricted to the relations and communications of courts to courts, of governments to other governments, had its origins in the city-states of 15th-century Italy, when the rulers of Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Rome, etc. established, for the first time, permanent missions (legations; embassies) in each others' courts. Such permanent representations then spread across Europe after the Thirty Years' War. The primary sources of diplomatic history were, accordingly, ambassadorial reports. This remained largely so as late as the early 20th century. Yet international, as distinct from diplomatic, history has been something else. It involves more than relations through the instruments and institutions of governmental foreign policy. (The very word "international" first appeared in English as late as around 1800; in Hungarian not before 1854). At that time international relations, including travel, trade, finance, affected only a tiny fraction of peoples. A Hungarian workingman or peasant was not likely to have ever seen an Englishman, while Englishmen had but a few notions or images of Hungarians. But then came a change. With the spread of literacy, with newspapers, photography, travel, still and moving pictures, etc. nations began to build up images of other nations. These images were often superficial, they could be manipulated, but their existence was real, and they affected the very policies of respective governments.
The French historian Pierre Renouvin was one of the first to comprehend and represent the difference between diplomatic history and the broader (and sometimes deeper) scope of a history of international relations. One generation later another French historian, René Rémond, exemplified this in two volumes of his
Les Etats-Unis devant l'opinion française 1815-1852 (1962), including research on and description of matters such as emigration, travel, foreign trade, translation and reception of literary works, the evolution of the press, of the reading public, etc. etc. Thus the breadth (and sometimes the depth) of matters involving international relations renders the historian's work more difficult: his main problem is no longer that of the relative rarity but that of a veritable profusion of sources.
This is what this excellent young Hungarian historian, András D. Bán (1962-2001) achieved in this book. In additon to the diplomatic and governmental records, his studies and reconstruction of relations of trade, of travel, of the press, of literary productions and of their influences of emigrés etc.-all of these more or less reciprocal-are included in his work. This is unusual and, in more than one sense, novel and pathbreaking. It illustrates the great maxim of Jacob Burckhardt, who said that history really has no "method" of its own, save for the overall condition: Bisogna saper leggere-one must know how to read. And we might add: how to write. These are absolute conditions of a craft that Bán has observed and fulfilled. (Independent of the merits of this English translation, the style of Bán's writing alone demonstrates a broad and deep literary culture-alas, not too frequent among professional historians). And then, added to his mastery of a wide range of sources there is his understanding that the relations of entire nations-especially before and during the Second World War-are not only influenced but at times even governed by images of each other that involve more than superficial impressions or even political preferences; they involve sympathies and antipathies that are even more cultural than political. Such were, for instance, Anglophilia or Anglophobia, or Germanophilia and Germanophobia, and not only in Hungary but in very many instances throughout Europe and acrossthe world. It is my opinion that this is but one element of the outstanding qualities of Bán's accomplishment. It may merit the designation of this book as a Minor Classic.

 

John Lukacs
is a Budapest-born historian, living and teaching in the U.S. since 1946. His books
include Budapest 1900 (1988), Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), The Duel (1990), The End of the Twentieth Century-The End of the Modern Age (1993) and A Thread of Years (1999).