Géza Jeszenszky
The Afterlife
of the Treaty of Trianon
...
Miklós Zeidler, one of the best of the
younger Hungarian historians, has
already written a masterful summary of the
pre-war efforts to revise the territorial
clauses contained in Trianon;4 as an editor
he returns to the theme within the impressive
series of collections of documents,
Nemzet és emlékezet (Nation and Memory).
This contains 132 documents, gathered
under three headings: primary sources,
political essays and commentaries and
scholarly writings. Some have never been
published or have long been forgotten. In
order to illustrate the richness of the
collection, I shall describe some of the most
interesting, though little known, items.
In November 1918, Count Mihály Károlyi
formed a government composed of leftist
liberal and radical politicians. On 12
November 1918, he sent a well-argued
cable responding to U.S. Secretary of State
Robert Lansing's pledge of support for the
Romanian claims to Transylvania. There are
several documents pertaining to the newly
formed Ministry for Nationalities, headed
by Oszkár Jászi (who eventually was to have
a distinguished career at Oberlin College,
Ohio). The Ministry's plan was to transform
Hungary into autonomous regions along
ethnic/linguistic lines so that the country
would become a sort of "Eastern Switzerland".
The text, which Zeidler publishes,
shows that Jászi's was a sincere attempt:
the "People's Laws" were to create
autonomous territories or legal bodies for
the Rusyns (Ruthenians), the Germans and
the Slovaks. (Following the failure of the
Arad negotiations in November 1918 the
Romanians were not included in the draft.)
The future of those national groups,
however, was not left to the peoples
concerned, but was decided by the armies
of the neighbouring states after the
victorious Great Powers authorised them to
occupy the territories claimed by their
representatives in Paris, at the Preliminary
Peace Conference. While Károlyi and his
government hoped that the non-Hungarian
nationalities would opt to retain the
unity of the historic kingdom, the following
government (and regime), the Hungarian
Soviet Republic ("The Republic of
Councils") officially renounced the territorial
integrity of Hungary. This
government, led by Béla Kun and composed
of Bolsheviks and left-wing Social Democrats,
hoped to see (or rather to create)
similar Bolshevik republics around and in
alliance with Hungary- just as had
happened in Russia. When Romania and
Czechoslovakia attacked Béla Kun's
Hungary the Hungarian counter attack was
successful and, in what is today the eastern
half of Slovakia, a "Slovak Republic of
Councils" was proclaimed. Following this,
Georges Clemenceau, the Chairman of the
Peace Conference, prevailed upon Kun to
cease hostilities and to evacuate the
territories occupied. That decision
contributed to the fall of the Hungarian
Bolsheviks, who were eventually replaced
by a conservative national government,
which was summoned to Paris and
presented with the terms of peace in
January 1920. Despite an eloquent speech
by Count Albert Apponyi, head of the
Hungarian delegation, in defence of the
territorial integrity of the ancient kingdom,
the new borders reduced Hungary to one
third of its former territory and population.
Hungary ceded territories predominantly
inhabited by Slavs and Romanians but also
by three and a half million Hungarians to
the new or greatly enlarged neighbours-
including Austria, the former partner in the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. To sweeten
the bitter pill, Hungary was given a vague
promise that the new borders might be
revised upon the recommendation of the
Committees for the Delimitation of the
Border, and that the interests of the
Hungarian minorities assigned to Hungary's
neighbours would be safeguarded by
special treaties for the protection of
minorities, to be signed by all those
neighbours. The merit of this collection is
that all of this can be followed in the
documents printed here.
After the treaty was signed on 4 June
1920, there appeared a vast literature for
and against its revision. Some telling items
are presented by Zeidler. Extracts from the
various party programmes and platforms
show the remarkable unity Hungarians
demonstrated concerning border change.
Even the outlawed Hungarian Communist
Party called for "the revolutionary crushing
of Trianon"- at least before Stalin's change
of course in the mid-1930s. It is also worth
noting that quite a few of those addressing the issue were ready to admit that the
mistakes committed by Hungarians in the
past had contributed to the eventual dismemberment
of the country. Few, however,
went so as far to say, as did Ede Ormos,
that Hungary had deserved to be punished.
Jászi, in his self-imposed exile, maintained
that the Károlyi government had followed
the right course and blamed the victors for
treating it unfairly. Others, such as József
Körmendi Horváth, pinned the blame on
Károlyi and allied propaganda. Yet, neither
Count István Bethlen (prime minister
between 1921 and 1931), nor Jászi, nor the
writer László Németh, nor the radical
politician Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky believed
that the Trianon borders would endure. In a
reaction to a campaign conducted by the
British press baron Lord Rothermere to
achieve more equitable borders for
Hungary, the Hungarian Social Democratic
Party pointed out that only a changed and
genuinely democratic Hungary had a
chance to receive support for revision.
Meanwhile, those affected most
seriously, the Hungarians cut off by the new
borders, for whom Hungary became a
foreign country, adjusted to the new
situation better than the inhabitants in what
was then called "rump Hungary". Instead of
waiting for a miracle- that is, a benevolent
outside intervention- they adjusted their
thinking, their way of life, their ideals. They
understood that the Hungarian minorities
had to rely on themselves and on their own
hard work in order to create the basic
conditions for their future existence:
political autonomy within their new
countries. Their writers, artists and clergy
proposed better programmes than their
politicians- the texts here provide ample
evidence.
There were abundant plans for rectifying
the borders. Many people were dazzled by
the notion of the perfection of the
Carpathian Basin, the historic kingdom as a
geographical and economic unit. Various
federative and cantonal schemes were
drawn up for a restoration of this unit, of
which László Ottlik's "New Hungaria"
stands out. The more realistic schemes
were based on ethnic realities and claimed
only territories inhabited predominantly by
Hungarians. The return of some of those
territories to Hungary between 1938 and
1941 was greeted with tremendous
enthusiasm both in Hungary and by the reattached
ethnic Hungarian populations, as
the documents clearly show. The circumstances
of the long hoped-for change of
borders were, however, most unfortunate.
Hungary became more dependent on
Germany (Hitler's actual aim), relations
with the neighbouring nations deterioriated
further, and Hungary's claim for fairer
borders was compromised in the eyes of
the anti-Nazi alliance. Those affected most,
the returned Hungarians, did not realize
how precarious the future of the new
arrangement was, nor how high a price they
might pay for a few happy years.
At the end of the war, those gains were
annulled. Czechoslovakia attempted to
expel her 0.7 million Hungarians, engaging
in ethnic cleansing avant la lettre. In the
post-war political climate, all the blame for
"the second Trianon" was put on the
policies of the Horthy era. Understandably,
there was no mention of Stalin, who turned
down American proposals for minor border
rectifications in favour of Hungary.
Remarkably, both during the short-lived
democratic period (1945- 47) and the 1956
Revolution, there were no calls for border
changes. The Hungarian body politic
expressed hope for new, genuinely friendly
relations with its neighbours, frequently
referring to earlier plans for a "Danubian
Confederation".
Discussion of the deteriorating situation
of the Hungarian minorities was taboo
during the thirty years under János Kádár,
following the crushing of the 1956 Revolution. In typical Central European
fashion, it was the writers, "the intellectuals"
who first challenged the ban on speaking
out- not to advocate border revisions, but to
protest against the ill-treatment of Hungarians
across the borders. The unofficial
poet laureate, Gyula Illyés, broke the ground
(but not with the essay printed in this
collection), and István Bibó, in 1978, offered
guidance to the younger generation in a
letter to Pál Szalai, along the lines he had
argued thirty years earlier:
very likely the price of substantial improvement
in the situation of the Hungarian
minorities beyond the borders will be giving
up [the hope for] any change of territory [.]
but one can think about that only against
guarantees for very serious improvement.
By and large this attitude has prevailed
since the restoration of freedom of speech in
Hungary in 1990. Of all the programmes and
platforms formulated by parties that have
been returned to Parliament since, only one,
that of István Csurka's Hungarian Justice
and Life Party (no longer in Parliament), calls
for the peaceful, negotiated return of those
border zones where the majority of the
population are still Hungarian (despite the
many years of expulsions, intimidation and
colonisation).
...
The third volume's title, The Image of
Trianon in Present-Day Hungarian Society,
bodes well. Instead of a detached analysis
of contemporary public opinion based on
questionnaires, polls and surveys, we are
given twenty-one interviews (conducted by
the editor himself) with politicians,
historians, scholars, artists, writers,
teachers and journalists, as well as a
summary of the findings by the editor. Most
of those interviewed are prominent; they
are not representative of a Hungary where
the average citizen does not know much
about Trianon and cares even less about its
repercussions. It would be unfair to the
interviewees to try to summarize their
thoughts, which usually reflect a mixture of
sadness, nostalgia for pre-1914 Hungary,
exasperation and indignation over what
took place since the end of 1918, a concern
for the Hungarian minorities, and
comments on how their lot might be
improved or how the legacy of Trianon
might be overcome. While this survey is not
representative, the views expressed show that the change from dictatorship to
freedom removed the restrictions which for
almost forty years prevented learning and
talking about Trianon. It was only after the
political transformation that many younger
people discovered that millions of
Hungarians lived outside the country's
borders, and their logical question was
why? When the unity of Germany was
restored, and, soon after, three multinational
federations, the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia fell apart
(the latter two being the creations of the
peace settlements of 1919 and 1920), quite
a few Hungarians (especially in the
successor states) hoped that the unity of
the Hungarian nation could also be
restored. What even many educated
Hungarians did not realize was that it was
not the borders that had changed, but their
status: internal borders became international,
and the border between the two
Germanies became an internal one. Quite a
few interviewees think that it was the fault
(or the merit) of the Antall government that
Hungary did not come forward with
territorial claims, and most of them deplore
the treaties Hungary concluded with its
neighbours, in which territorial claims were
mutually renounced. Few realize why a
policy advocating border change would
have been senseless, leading to dire
consequences. It is the fault of the editor
that he did not confront his interlocutors
with this reality, nor did he draw attention
to it in his summing up.
All those questioned gave honest
answers to how they and their families were
affected by Trianon, how they witnessed the
unfair treatment of Hungarians in the
successor states, how they divide the
responsibility between the Great Powers
and Hungary's neighbours, and what
solutions they envisage for "the Hungarian
question" which exists more than eighty
years after the 1920 decision. No one
believes that force should have been used,
and only a few see the solution as lying in
border rectifications. But all, including
Francis Fejtô, the renowned Hungarian-
French author, agree that there is an urgent
need to induce Hungary's neighbours to
grant self-government, a form of autonomy
to their Hungarians. Only one, a retired
colonel (István Ugrai) believes that Hungary
should not raise this issue. There are telling
details (in the form of personal accounts by
Csaba Skultéty, István Garai, Endre Sipos
and Attila Csáji) about what has happened
since 1918, and particularly in the dramatic
1940s, in the territories inhabited mainly by
Hungarians but detached from Hungary. In
discussing the strength and deep roots of a
type of blind hatred towards the Hungarians
held by so many among the nations around
Hungary, emphasis is rightly placed on the
role of a distorted and falsified version of
history. Far less harmful, but also deplorable,
is the "little knowledge" some of the
interviewed persons show about the West,
about the role which Western Europe and
the United States played in the 1920 and
1947 peace treaties, and in the Sovietization
of Central and Eastern Europe. The most
typical example is Kornél Döbrentei, an
acclaimed, controversial poet, who thinks
that "the West" (and its unpatriotic Hungarian
agents) are directly responsible for
the break-up of Hungary, the imposition of
communism, the country's present political,
economic and military weakness, as well as
the deplorable mental state of the country.
There is more justification for the criticism
levelled at the West for its failure, since
1990, to promote the protection of the rights
of the Hungarian and other national
minorities, and particularly their demands
for autonomy. If all the post-Communist
Hungarian governments had been consistent
in explaining how much an autonomous
and satisfied national minority
contributes to stability, we might have less
tension and more genuine friendship
between the countries of Central Europe.
While some of the interviewees show
much common sense in addressing
complex and controversial issues (I would
single out Csaba Skultéty, Lajos Borda and
Attila Csáji), the two Socialist politicians
(Iván Vitányi and László Donáth, who is
also a Lutheran pastor) downplay the
relevance of Trianon for our days. The
editor's final essay is a fair summary of the
views expressed, and his conclusions are
largely logical, as on the importance of
discussing the past and knowing its
repercussions. I also agree that there is
much exaggeration in the fears about
Hungarians being "too much" interested in
their past, in their culture, being too proud
of their achievements. Such an attitude is
all to often a folly. It is a pity, however, that
Szidiropulosz himself nurtures some false
ideas about how and why Hungary was so
severely treated in 1920, and why the
Hungarian minorities have not received
more understanding for their grievances.
Géza Jeszenszky
was Minister of Foreign Affairs (1990- 94) and Ambassador to the U.S. (1998- 2002).
In September 2002 he resumed teaching history and international relations at the Budapest
University of Economics (Corvinus University). He is also a Visiting Professor- teaching
the history of Central Europe- at the College of Europe, Warsaw-Natolin, Poland and the
Babes¸- Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár), Romania.
