Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation

Between March and August of 1919, the Hungarian question had also figured on the Peace Conference's agenda in a different context from that of debates on boundaries. The establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in protest against the conditions of peace, had brought a Soviet-type regime into Central Europe. The Great Powers were worried lest the Hungarian example was to be followed by defeated Austria and Germany. Even victorious Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia might not escape the consequences of such a turn of events.49 If proletarian revolutions were to sweep across Europe, as predicted by Lenin, the whole peace plan of the victors would be ruined.

It was this concern with spreading Bolshevism that singled out Hungary for the particular attention of the Great Powers. Actually, only after the Hungarian Communist success did the Entente begin to pay serious attention to the situation in Hungary. Some Entente diplomats and experts proposed instant armed intervention to overthrow Bela Kun's government. But the idea was discarded, mainly because of the adverse experience with a policy of intervention in Soviet Russia.50 Instead, in the early days of April, the Entente sent the South African General Jan Christian Smuts to Budapest to study the Hungarian situation. The aim of the Smuts mission was to negotiate with Bela Kun in order to reach an agreement on a new demarcation line more favorable to Hungary than the one outlined in the Vyx note of March 20, 1919, which toppled the Karolyi government.51

This was a significant peace move, at a time when the French Balkan Army Command had planned a campaign against Hungary in concurrence with Prague and Bucharest and had even set a date for the attack. The Smuts mission in fact delayed Romania's and Czechoslovakia's troop movements against the Hungarian Soviet Republic.52 The anti-Bolshevism of both countries was motivated mainly by their

eagerness to obtain more Hungarian territory than had been awarded to them so far at the Peace Conference.

There are many facts that contradict the view, often advanced between the two world wars, that Hungary's becoming a Soviet republic led the Peace Conference to make decisions detrimental to Hungary's interests. Had that been the case, the victors would have satisfied all the claims of their small allies in Central Europe, then and there, in line with the promises of wartime agreements and other propositions. But the Peace Conference did not do that. Prague was not awarded the notorious corridor, nor the Salgotarjan-Miskolc industrial area; Bucharest failed to obtain the area beyond the Tisza River as far as Debrecen; Belgrade was not allowed to have Pecs and the adjacent coalfields.

Nor was there any connection, as claimed, between the territorial decisions and the refusal of the Peace Conference to invite the Kun government. The issue of invitation had come up several times in the Supreme Council: April 25, April 30, and May 1. President Wilson, in particular, was in favor of it. The invitations to the German and Austrian governments had not been questioned, and Wilson believed that every defeated country should be treated equally. However, the French government thought of using the invitation issue as a means of hastening the collapse of the Communist Kun regime.

Contrary to expectations, in May 1919, when Czechoslovak and Romanian troops began military operations against the Hungarians, the Kun government did not collapse. Meanwhile, since the Peace Conference in Paris was busy with disagreements over Italian claims, and since the head of the French mission in Vienna, Henri Allize, was in charge of delivering the invitation to the Hungarian government, the French were able to withhold the invitation without any difficulty.53 The whole matter of inviting the Hungarians did not resurface on the agenda of the Peace Conference until the end of 1919. By that time, the Soviet Republic had indeed collapsed. In May, however, the Kun government not only survived the crisis precipitated by the Czechoslovak and Romanian attacks, but - after the Hungarian arrny had been reorganized - a counterattack was launched on the Czechoslovak front. In northeastern Slovakia, advancing through Kassa (Kosice), Eperjes (Presov), and Bartfa (Bardejov), the Hungarian Red Army reached Hungary's historic frontiers. The aim of the Hungarian counterattack was to establish contact with Soviet Rus-

sia and then turn against the Romanian army which had advanced deep into Hungary as far as the Tisza River.54

The Hungarian military successes caused considerable anxiety in Paris. The Great Powers had reckoned with a rapid defeat of the Soviet Republic following the Czechoslovak and Romanian attacks. In a heated debate and mutual recriminations over the Hungarian issue, the British and the Americans blamed French importunity, while the diplomats blamed the narrow-minded aggressiveness of the military. At this point, an ultimatum by French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau concerning territorial decisions prompted the Hungarian Red Army to withdraw.55 In fact, on June 13, 1919, all interested parties received a note from the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference defining Hungary's new boundaries and calling on the governments in Budapest, Prague, and Bucharest to withdraw their troops behind those borders.56

The impact and consequences of the Supreme Council note differed from country to country. Czechoslovakia received it with satisfaction, since it halted the Hungarian army's advance into Slovakia. In Hungary, the Kun government complied with the note and evacuated the territories seized in May and June,57 but the note came as a catastrophic shock to the Hungarians for that was the moment when it became definitely known that Hungary was to lose not only territories inhabited by non-Magyar nationalities or mixed populations but also areas where the population was exclusively Magyar-speaking. Until then, Hungary's situation was seen to be in a state of postwar chaos. Now, it became clear that Hungary had to reckon with a radically reduced national territory which was considered insufficient even for the construction of an independent national economy.58 (Among the economists holding this view was Jeno Varga, who later became an intemationally respected economist as an exile in the Soviet Union.)

The withdrawal of its troops scuttled all the Hungarian efforts to consolidate the home front. Growing demoralization undermined the Soviet Republic and narrowed the basis of its initial popular support. To further aggravate the situation, the Romanian government and its peace delegation in Paris reacted to the Supreme Council's note with defiance. As if they were hearing of the Hungarian-Romanian border decision for the first time, the Romanians refused to accept it. In Paris, Bratianu protested dramatically and resigned as prime minister. The Romanian government crisis staged by Bratianu served to post-

pone Romanian fulfillment of the terms of the note. The Peace Conference was officially informed by Bucharest that Romania refused to withdraw her troops and would continue to occupy Hungarian territories east of the Tisza River.59

The Kun government decided to force Romania to comply with the decision of the Supreme Council, but the July Hungarian offensive collapsed in a matter of days.60 Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak army advanced again to the Salgotarjan-Miskolc line and kept the area under occupation for several months. The Romanian troops eventually occupied not only the entire area east of the Tisza River as far as Tokaj in the north but also Budapest, the Hungarian capital. These were the circumstances under which the Kun government resigned.

The Soviet Republic collapsed while the counterrevolutionary forces were waiting in the wings. They managed to establish themselves in power with the help of the armed forces of Admiral Miklos Horthy, who later was elected head of the Hungarian state.

Only in January 1920 was the Hungarian peace delegation able to set out to present the Hungarian case at the Paris Peace Conference. The counterrevolutionary regime under Horthy's regency had been legalized by the Allied Powers, with the assistance of Sir George Clerk, the British head of the Allied mission to Budapest.61 The Hungarian delegation was led by Count Albert Apponyi and one of its members was Count Istvan Bethlen, who later, as prime minister, consolidated the Horthy regime.62 Of course, there was no way in which the Hungarian peace delegation could reject the borders, which had already been fixed, even though they found them unjust and would have liked to keep historical Hungary intact Apponyi put forward ethnic, economic, and cultural arguments against the new borders and proposed that the status of certain territories should be decided by referendum, but fhe Peace Conference resorted to a referendum only in quite exceptional cases. A comprehensive referendum in Hungary's case was out of the question since it would certainly have challenged the Great Powers' decisions and upset the status quo.

By 1920, the main points of the territorial decisions taken a year earlier were fundamentally unalterable. Even minor changes made under the label of readjusting the frontiers were mostly at Hungary's expense. By this point the United States took no part in the dealings

of the Peace Conference, having withdrawn its delegation following the completion of the Treaty of Versailles dealing with Germany.

One of the last items on the agenda of the Peace Conference was the Budapest government's response to the draft of the peace treaty. Lloyd George favored some readjustments in Hungary's favor. He believed that the inclusion of three million Hungarians within the territories of the new or enlarged countries surrounding Hungary was indefensible. Lloyd George was supported by the new Italian prime minister, Francesco S. Nitti.63 However, Alexandre Millerand, the French prime minister, and his foreign minister, Philippe Berthelot, were firmly opposed to any change in Hungary's favor. Extremely heated debates ensued,64 yet to renegotiate the Hungarian issue and hold referendums, as the Hungarian delegation requested, was entirely out of the question. In any case, the British Foreign Office, as it had done before, turned against its own prime minister concerning the Hungarian question. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and, most vehemently of all, Romania protested in joint memorandum against any possible alterations and, in particular, against any referendum.65

On June 4, 1920, the Peace Treaty with Hungary was signed in the Trianon Palace at Versailles. Agost Benard, minister of welfare and labor relations, and Ambassador Alfred Drasche-Lazar were the Hungarian signatories. On July 31, 1921, the Hungarian National Assembly enacted the Trianon Treaty as Act 1921:XXXIII of Hungary's historic Corpus Iuris. The so-called Millerand cover letter, attached to the Peace Treaty as a result of British insistence,66 referred all further Hungarian complaints to the League of Nations. The Hungarian state had lost more than seventy percent of its former territory, while one-third of the Hungarian people were assigned to live outside Hungary's new borders as minorities.

Hungarian despair over the territorial decisions of the Peace Conference was boundless due to the harsh treatment meted out in Paris. Yet, some victors were still not satisfied. Despite achieving the dream of a Greater Romania, Bucharest gave the impression of being aggrieved and held the British responsible for not achieving more. Bratianu thought, as recorded by Sir Eyre Crowe, that the British delegation was moved by "the most intense hostility to Roumanian claims," and that British policy was mainly affected by "considerations of international and Jewish finance."67 Czechoslovakia's Benes had

his own grievances. He felt that "too much" had to be conceded in fixing the southern borders of Slovakia.68 Among the victors of the Danube region, only Yugoslavia voiced no official complaints about the borders with Hungary. But even Belgrade made several attempts at acquiring parts of Baranya county and the city of Pecs which the Yugoslav troops refused to evacuate until 1921.

The peacemakers, to be sure, did not create new states by force alone or out of thin air. Their creation reflected the meeting of two historical currents: emergence of modern nationalism among the intellectual elite of the minorities, on the one hand, and the wartime policy of the Western democracies, on the other. The Entente Powers thus gave their full support to the national aspirations of their small allies in the Danube region.69

Bourgeois capitalist development in the Danube region had been stepped up in the last third of the nineteenth century. Economic, social, and political modernization had taken place within the framework of the Habsburg Monarchy. Although the levels of development in various parts of the Empire prevented the various nationalities from enjoying the modernization in equal measure, each of them had shared in it to a greater or lesser extent. There had been a marked acceleration both in the social development of national minorities and in their awakening to national and political consciousness. But the general structure of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and, in particular, the dual system of government, were not capable of making the necessary adjustments to satisfy the demands for fundamental change. The Monarchy proved incapable of providing a flexible framework within which its peoplc might assert their national aspirations.

In Western Europe, the process toward bourgeois nationalism and the formation of independent nation-states was an accomplished fact before World War I. By 1918 the nation-state became the objective of the majority of the nations in the Danube region. A force for internal disruption of such strength had arisen within the Habsburg Monarchy that it became a prime cause of Austria-Hungary's dissolution. A federalist reorganization of the Danube region, such as Oszkar Jaszi and others had devised, was the program of a small opposition pitted against the ruling powers. It could only have been put into practice had the opposition in time won a victory over their adversaries. In the autumn of 1918, when the Habsburg Monarchy

collapsed, events had outstripped the reform plans of the democratic federalists.

National tensions in the Habsburg Monarchy were accompanied by social tensions that were unavoidable concomitants of a fast and dynamic capitalist development. Social and class contradictions were bound up with national contradictions and could easily be interpreted and explained as part of the latter. At any rate, the transformation of the Danube region within the framework of the Versailles peace system could lead only to further tensions and conflicts. The new order not only worsened interstate relations, but spoiled the political and intellectual climate of the entire region, thus engendering all kinds of vicious forms of nationalism. Ultimately, it paved the way to a situation in which Hitler's Germany was able to set the successor states of the defunct Habsburg Empire against one another and subdue them all.

The post-World War I Danubian transformation was not the product of an organic internal development. It occurred through the intervention of vast external forces. Between the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the breakup of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, a peculiar cycle of history was completed. Neither the birth of Austria-Hungary in 1867 nor its demise in 1918 had been the work of internal forces alone. In 1867, the Dual Monarchy was born in the wake of a Central European explosion precipitated by the Hohenzollern Prussian triumph over Habsburg Austria. In 1918, the Habsburg Monarchy was shattered to pieces by forces of an all-European explosion. A violent transformation had taken place from which eventually no one emerged unscathed.

Notes

1. Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918-1919 (New York, 1969), 183, 286, 343, 596-97; United States, State Department, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference (henceforth cited as FRUS PPC), 13 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1942-47), 3:581-83.

2. "A Munkas es Katonatanacs tortenelmi ulese," Nepszava, April 20, 1919.

3. Ivo J. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference (New Haven,

1963), 12ff.; David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties (London, 1938), 1:39.

4. H. W. V. Temperley, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (London, 1921), 4:516-17; Sherman David Spector, Rumania at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study of the Diplomacy of Ion I. C. Bratianu (New York, 1962), 35-37.

5. Piotr S. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies 1919-1925 (Minneapolis, 1962), 10, 14-15; Felix John Vondracek, The Foreign Policy of Czechoslovakia, 1918-1935 (New York, 1937), 24ff.

6. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 22-23; Spector, Rumania, 37; FRUS PPC, 2:376-77.

7. FRUS PPC, 1:34, 41, 85; B. H. Williams, The Economic Foreign Policy of the United States (New York, 1929), 159; Victor S. Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe, 1914-1918: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton, 1957).

8. J. Hugh Edwards, David Lloyd George (London, 1930), 2:564; Political and Strategic Interests of the United Kingdom: An Outline (Oxford, 1939), 9, 24, 73; Jacques Chastenet, Les annees d'illusions 1918-1931 (Paris, 1960), 41 .

9. Andre Tardieu, La Paix (Paris, 1921), 426-27; Chastenet, Les annees d'illusions, 40-41; Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies.

10. M. H. Macartney and P. Cremona, Italy's Foreign and Colonial Policy 1914-1937 (London, 1938), 121, 196, 198, 208-9. C. A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences, 1917-1937 (London, 1937), 316.

11. See Louis Fischer, The Soviets in World Affairs: A History of the Relations between the Soviet Union and the Rest of the World, 1917-1929 (Princeton, 1951), 1:157; Williams, The Economic Foreign Policy of the United States, 157.

12. Temperley, A History of the Peace Conference, 4:121ff.; Alfred D. Low, The Soviet Hungarian Republic and the Paris Peace Conference (Philadelphia, 1963), 13; Tibor Hajdu, Az 1918-as magyarorszagi polgari demokratikus forradalom (Budapest, 1968), 121-24.

13. Hajdu, Az 1918-as magyarorszagi polgari demokratikus forradalom, 125-28. Michael Karolyi, Faith without Illusions (London, 1956), 132-33; Low, The Soviet Hungarian Republic, 13-15.

14. Hungary, Kulugyminiszterium, The Hungarian Peace Negotiations (Budapest, 1920-22), 1:383-84; Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 62.

15. The Hungarian Peace Negotiations, 1:384; Hajdu, Az 1918-as magyarorszagi polgari demokratikus forradalom, 133-34, 161-62.

16. Jozsef Breit, A magyarorszagi 1918-1919. evi forradalmi mozgalmak es a voros haboru tortenete (Budapest, 1925), 1:133; Lederer, Yugoslavia, 97ff.

17. Hajdu, Az 1918-as magyarorszagi polgari demokratikus forradalom, 131, 161-63; Pal Schonwald, A magyarorszagi 191S1919-es polgari demokratikus forradalom allam es jogtorteneti kerdesei (Budapest, 1969), 62.

18. Oszkar Jaszi, Magyarorszag jovoje es a Dunai Egyesult Allamok (Budapest, 1918); Oszkar Jaszi, Magyar kalvaria, magyar feltamadas (Vienna, 1920).

19. Zsuzsa L. Nagy, A parizsi bekekonferencia es Magyarorszag, 1918-1919 (Budapest, 1965), 43-46; Suda Lorena Bane and Ralph Haswell Lutz, eds., Organization of American Relief in Europe 1918-1919 (Stanford, Calif., 1943), 12-13, 50-53, 177; Zsuzsa L. Nagy, "Az antant segelyprogramja es az 1918-1919. evi forradalmak," Parttorteneti Kozlemenyek 9 (1963): 48ff.

20. FRUS PPC, 12:232-35, 373-74.

21. Nagy, A parizsi bekekonferencia, 26.

22. Ibid., 74-77; FRUS PPC, 4:59-60, 145-47, 157-59.

23. Jules Laroche, (Ambassadeur de France: Au Quai d'Orsay avec Briand et Poincare 1913-1926 [Paris, 1967]) gives a full account about the activity of the territorial committee.

24. FRUS PPC, 3:840ff.

25. Ibid., 849.

26. Spector, Rumania, 103-8.

27. FRUS PPC, 3:877-83; Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 5657.

28. FRUS PPC, 3:883-87; 9:748ff; Francis Deak and Dezso Ujvary, eds., Papers and Documents Relating to the Foreign Relations of Hungary (Budapest, 1939), 1:165-66.

29. See Vondracek, The Foreign Policy of Czechoslovakia, 147-48, 18182.

30. Ibid., 31ff.; Llisabeth de Weiss, "Dispute for the Burgenland in 1919," Journal of Central European Affairs, 2 (1943); FRUS PPC, 3:877; 12:275.

31. Lederer, Yugoslavia, 107; FRUS PPC, 12:275.

32. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1933), 273.

33. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 65, 69, 72.

34. FRUS PPC, 12:403-4.

35. FRUS PPC, 4:286-87.

36. Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 92-93.

37. FRUS PPC, 3:822ff; Lederer, Yugoslavia, 117ff.

38. Mrs. Sandor Gabor, Ausztria es a Magyarorszagi Tanacskoztarsasag (Budapest, 1969), 46ff., 131ff.; Katalin G. Soos, A nyugat-magyarorszagi kerdes, 1918-1919 (Budapest, 1959).

39. Deak and Ujvary, eds., Papers and Documents, 1:165-66; Wandycz, France and Her Eastern Allies, 53.

40. FRUS PPC, 4:505-7, 814-17.

41. Gyula Juhasz, Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, 1919-1945, 2d ed. (Budapest, 1975),

C. A. Macartney and Allan Palmer, Independent Eastern Europe: A History (New York, 1966), 4; Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars 1918-1941 (Cambridge, 1946), chap. 7.

42. FRUS PPC, 4:363, 414-15; David Hunter Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris (New York, 1924-26), 15:367ff.

43. Lederer, Yugoslavia, 239; Spector, Rumania, 206; Laszlo Rehak, A kisebbsegek Jugoszlaviaban (Novi Sad, 1967), part 1.

44. FRUS PPC, 3:391ff.; Spector, Rumania, 140ff.; Lederer, Yugoslavia, 242ff.; Great Britain, Foreign Office, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1910-1939, 1st ser. (London, 1947-60), 6:74-75, 323.

45. FRUS PPC, 8:552; 9:330-31, 537-40, 915-17.

46. FRUS PPC 9:351ff., 537-40.

47. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy, 566, 578, 584-86; Ellis A. Bartlett, The Tragedy of Central Europe (London, 1923), 65. Chastenet, Les annees d'illusions, 13.

48. FRUS PPC, 12:282, 285, 287-88, 291; Low, The Soviet Hungarian Republic, 174; Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy, 577f.

49. Nagy, A parizsi bekekonferencia, chap. 4; Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy, 726ff.; Low, The Soviet Hungarian Republic, 50-56.

50. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy, 734-35; Tibor Hajdu, A Magyarorszagi Tanacskoztarsasag (Budapest, 1969), 76-80, 144ff.

51. FRUS PPC, 5:368-69, 392-93, 406; 12:455-56, 494.

52. See Ervin Liptai, A Magyar Voroshadsereg harcai, 1919 (Budapest, 1960).

53. Nagy, A parizsi bekekonferencia, chap. 7.

54. FRUS PPC, 6:284ff., 351-52, 399, 411-16.

55. FRUS PPC, 4:811.

56. See Kun's statement and the note of the Hungarian government to the Paris Peace Conference, in A magyar munkasmozgalom tortenetenek valogatott dokumentumai (Budapest, 1959), 6/B:151, 246.

57. FRUS PPC, 4:804ff., 814-15; Spector, Rumania, 152; Documents on British Foreign Policy, 6:82.

58. Hajdu, A Magyarorszdgi Tanacskoztarsasag, 322ff.

59. Gyorgy Ranki, "Adatok a Clerk-misszio tortenetehez," Tortenelmi Szemle 10 (1967): 156-87.

60. Juhasz, Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, chaps. 1 and 3; The Hungarian Peace Negotiations, 1:165ff., FRUS PPC, 9:872-84.

61. Documents on British Foreign Policy, 7:284, 384, 387-89. 52 ZSUZSA L NAGY

62. Ibid., 384-85.

63. Ibid., 440-44.

64. Ibid., 448-49.

65. Ibid., 6:371.

66. FRUS PPC, 3:10S-6.

67. Documents on British Foreign Policy, 6:371.

68. FRUS PPC, 3:105-106.

69. Jaszi's complaint of "the diplomatists of the Entente supporting Hungary's rivals was not unfounded. He wrote: "(had they) offered a tithe of this goodwill and support to the democratic and pacifist government of Karolyi, the disaster which befell our unfortunate country could have been avoided." Oscar Jaszi, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary (London, 1924), 155. For the culmination of that "disaster", see Eva S. Balogh, "Romanian and Allied Involvement in the Hungarian coup d'etat of 1919", East European Ouarterly, IX,

Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation