Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation

The Hungarian minority in prewar Czechoslovakia had indeed been disloyal to that state in its resentment of the Trianon settlement. It was too large a minority, too close to the mother country, to be satisfied with even generous legal protection. A millennium of Hungarian history, they felt, represented a greater legitimacy than twenty years of Trianon. Many Czechs and Slovaks would, however, charge that the German and Hungarian minorities had stabbed their young

and relatively enlightened state in the back, and therefore deserved to be branded with collective guilt. The government's Kosice program, proclaimed on April 5, 1945, provided for the confiscation of property of Germans and Hungarians who had "actively helped" the enemy. The decree of June 22 imposed the confiscation of movable and real property of all Germans and Hungarians. On August 2, a presidential decree deprived all members of the two minorities (except those who had assisted in the Allied war effort) of their citizenship. In practice this meant loss of employment and all social benefits and services, including education. Hungarians were summarily expelled to Hungary. Large numbers were deported to the newly depopulated Sudetenland.35 The initial inclination of the Hungarian government, and notably of Foreign Minister Gyongyosi, was to seek good relations with Czechoslovakia.36 However, the discriminatory measures against the Hungarian minority soon set off a stream of diplomatic protests to the three members of the Allied Control Commission. Washington advised both Prague and Budapest of its opposition to collective punishment and unilateral transfers of population.37 In October, Secretary of State Byrnes reminded the Czechoslovak government that the Potsdam Agreement did not provide for the expulsion of Hungarians.38 When the persecution did not abate, the Budapest regime requested in September and again in November that the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France set up an international commission to investigate the problem. The U.S. ambassador in Prague, Laurence Steinhardt, deplored what was "in effect a request that an international body be created at the instance of a defeated nation to investigate the conduct of one of the victorious nations" and noted that this would "create deep resentment throughout Czechoslovakia and might well raise the cry that Czechoslovakia was again 'being sold down the river by the Western democracies.'"39 The United States, which among the Allies remained the most sympathetic to Hungary, ruled out such a commission along with another Hungarian proposal for international control of the disputed area. Instead, it joined its partners on the Allied Control Commission in urging Hungary to resolve the problem bilaterally.

Finally, on December 2 negotiations were begun between the Czechoslovaks and Hungarians in Prague. Inauspiciously, Benes told Gyongyosi that good relations depended on the elimination of mi-

norities.40 The Czech proposals, presented by the Communist deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Clementis, envisaged an organized and balanced exchange of Hungarians for Slovaks who wished to leave Hungary and the eviction of the remaining Hungarians. Budapest's delegation, in turn, pressed for the abolition of discriminatory measures and would only consider an equal exchange. The remaining minority, they argued, could only be transferred along with its territory (a theoretically defensible proposition given the solid Hungarian majorities in certain areas along the border). Three days of negotiations ended in deadlock.41

The Hungarian government thereupon came under strong pressure from the Soviet Union. Ambassador Georgi M. Pushkin made it clear that Czechoslovakia enjoyed Moscow's full support, and even observed to Gyongyosi that the Czechs would have been smarter to expel all Hungarians promptly.42 Public opinion in Hungary was much aroused by the trials of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia. Even the Communist leaders felt impelled to intercede with their Czech and Slovak counterparts, only to be rebuffed with the report of Stalin's support.43 The Western powers urged further negotiations, and talks were resumed on February 6, 1946. An agreement was finally signed on February 27 providing for a limited (up to 100,000 persons) and balanced exchange, voluntary as far as Slovaks in Hungary were concerned, compulsory for the selected Hungarians of Slovakia. In a separate provision, major war criminals and up to one thousand minor criminals were also to be transferred to Hungary. In a protocol to the agreement the Czechoslovaks promised to suspend temporarily the discriminatory measures.

Notwithstanding this agreement, the Czechoslovak government reserved the right to discuss the "total liquidation" of the Hungarian minority, and the ink had hardly dried on the document when Clementis proposed the transfer of an additional 150,000 to 200,000 Hungarians over and above the numbers to be exchanged.44 There would remain, he claimed, only Hungarians of Slovak ancestry, and these would be "re-Slovakized." Behind the Population Exchange Agreement there lay inflated Czechoslovak estimates of the Slovak minority in Hungary.45 As for Clementis's proposal for "re-Slovakization," it affected anywhere from 200,000 to 350,000 people. A Czechoslovak Resettlement Commission was dispatched to Hungary to urge Slovaks to volunteer, but the number of valid applications (and therefore the

equal number of Hungarians to be transferred from Czechoslovakia to Hungary) fell woefully short of the Czechoslovak target and became the subject of a protracted dispute between the two governments. Initially Prague also claimed to have identified 23,192 Hungarian war criminals, proposing in effect to expel, without their property, as many as 100,000 men, women, and children.46) The Hungarian government, meanwhile, rejected Clementis's proposals and called for full minority rights while suggesting the cession by Czechoslovakia of territory amounting to 8,000 square kilometers and inhabited largely by Hungarians.

On the occasion of the Nagy visit to Moscow, Stalin was as deceitful on this issue as on the Transylvanian question, for he professed to support equal rights for the Hungarians of Czechoslovakia.47 When it counted, however, the Soviet Union consistently supported Prague's proposals,48 whereas the Americans and the British avoided the appearance of favoring Hungary or endorsing Hungarian initiatives. Not surprisingly, in these circumstances the Czechs were not disposed to make concessions in bilateral negotiations with the Hungarians.

As with the Transylvanian case, the two protagonists came to Paris armed with historical grievances and irreconcilable demands. The Czechs charged that the Hungarians had been disloyal and revisionist and therefore the Czechoslovak delegation proposed an amendment to the Hungarian Peace Treaty which would provide for the expulsion of 200,000 Hungarians from Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian minority was being persecuted, retorted the Hungarians. If Czechoslovakia wished to keep the ancestral land of Hungarian peasants, said Gyongyösi in an impassioned address before the plenary session on August 14, let her keep the inhabitants and give them full rights; if the people were undesirable, Hungary would receive them but with their land.49 The United States opposed the proposed population transfer, and at the concurrent meetings of deputies of the Big Four tried without success to win support for a token territorial concession in favor of Hungary.50 In addition to the expulsion of the Hungarian minority Czechoslovakia also demanded five Hungarian villages situated on the right bank of the Danube across from Bratislava which were allegedly of vital importance to that city's economic life. The Americans joined the Hungarians in noting the strange juxtaposition of proposals for transferring Hungarians both from and to Czechoslovakia.

At New Zealand's suggestion, the Czechoslovak amendments were referred to a subcommittee. New Zealand also proposed the two final compromises. The "Bratislava bridgehead" to be awarded to Czechoslovakia was reduced to three villages from the five originally demanded. As for the population transfer, the two countries were instructed by way of the treaty to enter into bilateral negotiations on the fate of those Hungarians left after implementation of the earlier exchange agreement. If agreement was not reached within six months, Czechoslovakia had the right to request the assistance of the Council of Foreign Ministers. The American delegate on the Political and Territorial Commission for Hungary, General Bedell Smith, offered the penultimate wish that "voluntary transfer should be stressed to the utmost and every effort including minor territorial adjustments made to the end that a minimum number of people be uprooted."51

As John Campbell, the secretary of the U.S. delegation, conceded, it had been an evasion of responsibility to "turn over the tough problems to the parties least likely to agree on solutions." The Americans recognized that Hungary's government, not yet Communist-dominated, desperately needed some satisfaction on the territorial and minority issues, but they were unwilling to challenge Allied nations in seeking fair terms. Many of the Hungarians' arguments were valid, but coming from a defeated nation they carried little weight.52 Not surprisingly, Stephen Kertesz judged Allied attitudes toward the mistreatment of the Hungarian minority to be the "greatest disappointment of Hungarian foreign policy in the armistice period."53 A State Department postmortem (dated January 30, 1947) found that "the attitude of the Czechoslovak Government and certain actions of a unilateral nature which it has taken in regard to the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia have contributed materially to the difficulties being encountered."54 As the non-Communist majority in the Nagy government was being progressively decimated and incapacitated by Communist and Soviet harassment in the early months of 1947, vague expressions of Western sympathy brought only cold comfort.

The deadlock over the implementation of the Population Exchange Agreement lasted a few months longer, until in March 1947 the two sides reached an understanding. Under the agreement, over 60,000 of each nationality were actually exchanged. With the seizure of power by the Communists in Hungary in the summer of 1947 and the Prague coup of February 1948, the complexion of the minority prob-

lem changed. The exchange program was terminated, the expulsion and assimilation threats were dropped and the discriminatory legislation rescinded.55 The officially cordial relations between the two Communist states suppressed the dispute and alleviated the worst hardships of the minority while introducing new ones.

In the interwar period, Hungary had based its claims for revision of the Trianon territorial settlement on the very Wilsonian principles of national self-determination which ostensibly inspired the peacemakers at Versailles. The peacemakers cynically misapplied the principles, wholly to the detriment of Hungarians, but the latter nevertheless seized on Wilsonianism to seek redress. The two Vienna awards were justified by Hungary in terms of national self-determination. Although the awards were invalidated by the war, the Allies gave the Hungarians cause for hope that Wilsonianism would guide postwar peacemaking.

That the Atlantic Charter and the Yalta Declaration turned out to be inoperative was a function more of the distribution of power in Europe in 1945 than of deals among the victorious Allies. The Soviet Union resorted to the time-tested divide-and-rule tactic to entrench its influence in Eastern Europe. Thus it favored Romania's territorial claim and Czechoslovakia's expulsion policy against Hungary - in the first case to strengthen the Groza regime, in the second because Czechoslovakia was a friendly ally. Stalin could of course have lent his weight to an Allied-inspired compromise settlement, particularly in the second case, but evidently he preferred to incite the still largely non-Communist Prague and Budapest regimes to self-defeating, nationalistic excess. The western allies, and particularly the United States, recognized the imperfections in the frontiers drawn in 1919, but the decisive voice, at least in the Hungarian case, was that of Moscow. As John Campbell observed, "east of the dividing line the United States showed little inclination to tilt at windmills by pressing for 'ethnic lines' and 'fair solutions."'56 The division of Europe into spheres of influence had left Hungary at the mercy of the least sympathetic judge.

Hungary's postwar leaders may have been a more democratic and progressive lot than their predecessors of the Horthy era, but they found no better grounds on which to defend territorial and minority interests than the principle of national self-determination expounded

by Wilson. Benes's argument that national minorities materially contributed to the collapse of the interwar order and deserved to be extirpated aroused more sympathy than agreement among the Allies. Thus the impassioned but ultimately sterile debates regarding historical legitimacy were played out once again: Was a thousand years of Hungarian settlement and rule in Slovakia outweighed by the alleged injustices of that rule, by the legal sanctity of the Versailles settlement, and by the persistence of Hungarian nationalism? Did Romanians or Hungarians have first historical claim to Transylvania; which nationality oppressed the other more brutally; which could offer the better guarantee of tolerance and prosperity?

Meanwhile, the balance of power among the increasingly divided and hostile Allies determined a peace settlement that owed little to Wilsonian or any other pnnciples of justice. It is only too easy to speculate in retrospect on alternative policies and actions that could have had a less dismal outcome. A politically more calculated military strategy on the part of the western allies might have forestalled the Soviet occupation of some of Central and Eastern Europe. A less precipitous withdrawal of American power from the continent might have helped western interests in peacemaking. Western insistence on settling the Austrian case at the same time as those of the other enemy states might have ended that country's occupation, and therefore the presence of Soviet troops in Hungary, before the Communists, with Soviet assistance, seized power in Budapest. The reality was Soviet will and power unmatched on the part of the West. In these circumstances, reflects Kertesz, the best Hungarian foreign policy was doomed to failure.57 The idealism that suffused Wilson's principles and the aims of the United States in World War II had aroused the hopes of the small and the weak. Once again, for many the hopes would remain unfulfilled.

Notes

1. Quoted in John C. Campbell, "The European Territorial Settlement," Foreign Affairs 26/1 (October 1947): 213-14.

2. Stephen D. Kertesz, Diplomacy in a Whirlpool (Notre Dame, Ind., 1953), 67-69.

3. Ibid., 74.

4. See Bennett Kovrig, The Myth of Liberation (Baltimore, 1973), chap. 1.

5. United States, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (henceforth cited as FRUS) 1944 (Washington, D.C., 1965), 3:886.

6. Ibid., 851.

7. FRUS, The Conference at Quebec, 1944 (Washington, D.C., 1972), 215.

8. Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin (Pnnceton, 1957), 548.

9. World Peace Foundation, Documents on American Foreign Relations, 1944-1945 (Princeton, 1957), 244-50.

10. FRUS 1944, 3:907.

11. Ibid., 946, 951, 953-54.

12. See Alexander Cretzianu, "The Rumanian Armistice Negotiations: Cairo 1944," Journal of Central European Affairs 11/3 (October 1951): 24358.

13. See Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York, 1948), 711.

14. FRUS 1944 (Washington, D.C., 1966), 4:170.

15. Ibid., 172-73.

16. Robert R. King, Minorities under Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 36.

17. Campbell, "The European Territorial Settlement," 200.

18. See Daniel Csatari, Dans la tourmente (Budapest, 1974), 349-51.

19. See ibid., 366-75.

20. Kertesz, Diplomacy in a Whirlpool, 164-67.

21. Ibid., 262-66.

22. Ibid., 177.

23. Ibid., 178-79. Cf. Sandor Balogh, A nepi demokratikus Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, 1945-1947 (Budapest, 1982), 144, 318.

24. Ibid., 175-76, 178.

25. FRUS 1946 (Washington, D.C., 1969), 6:272-73. Cf. Balogh, Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, 149-50.

26. FRUS 1946, 6:579-80.

27. Kertesz, Diplomacy in a Whirlpool, 181.

28. See Ferenc Nagy, The Struggle behind the Iron Curtain (New York, 1948), 208-10. Cf. Balogh, Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, 167-69.

29. Hungary, Kulugyminiszterium, Le Hongrie et la Conference de Paris (Budapest, 1947), 1:108-11.

30. See Campbell, "The European Territorial Settlement," 211-12; Amelia C. Leiss and Raymond Dennett, eds., European Peace Treaties after World War 11 (Boston, 1954), 102; and FRUS 1946, 6:301-2.

Nagy, The Struggle, 225-37, and FRUS 1946, 6:316.

33. King, Minorities under Communism, 27-31. 34. Edvard Benes, Memoirs (London, 1954), 206-7. Cf. Balogh, Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, 18, 103-6, 311.

35. See Hungary, Kulugyminiszterium, Hungary and the Conference of Paris (Budapest, 1947), 2:150-52, and 4:178-86; and Joseph B. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers in Europe, 1945-19SS (Philadelphia, 1962), 13132. Cf. Balogh, Magyarorszag kiilpolitikaja, 107-8.

36. Stephen D. Kertesz, "Peacemaking on the Dark Side of the Moon: Hungary 1943-1947," Review of Politics 40/4 (October 1978): 490-91.

37. See FRUS 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1968), 4:928-52, and FRUS 1946, 6:361-73.

38. FRUS 1945, 4:937. The Potsdam Agreement provided for the transfer of German minorities to Germany from several Central and East European countries, including Hungary. The Hungarian government made no request for the expulsion of Germans. However, the Czechoslovak government submitted a plea for the expulsion of Hungary's German minority in order to make room for the Hungarians it was eager to expel from Czechoslovakia. With Soviet support, Hungary's Germans were thus included in the transfer provisions of Potsdam. The expulsion of Germans from Hungary proceeded at a desultory pace until the Communist Minister of Interior Laszlo Rajk accelerated the process. Ultimately, about two-thirds of the German minority in Hungary was expelled. See Stephen Borsody, "Potsdam and the Expulsion of Germans from Hungary" (in Hungarian), Uj Latohatar 32/1 (1981): 1036; Stephen D. Kertesz, "The Expulsion of the Germans from Hungary: A Study in Postwar Diplomacy," Review of Politics 15/2 (April 1953): 179-208; and Bennett Kovrig, Communism in Hungary (Stanford, 1979), 202. Cf. Balogh, Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, 77-102.

39. FRUS 1945, 4:947.

40. Ibid. , 945.

41. Kertesz, Diplomacy in a Whirlpool, 123-25; Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers, 134-35.

42. Kertesz, Diplomacy in a Whirlpool, 124.

43. Kovrig, Communism in Hungary, 200; King, Minorities under Communism, 54-55.

44. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers, 135.

45. Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution (New York, 1951), 344. See also the Editor's Note at the end of Chapter 5, below.

46. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers, 137-38. See also Balogh, Magyarorszdg kulpolitikaja, 120-21.

47. Nagy, The Struggle, 208.

48. See Annex II in chapter 5, below.

49. FRUS 1946: The Paris Peace Conference (Washington, D.C., 1970), 3:217.

50. Campbell, "The European Territorial Settlement," 213.

51. Quoted in Leiss and Dennett, European Peace Treaties, 96. The full text of the Hungarian Peace Treaty can be found in ibid., 273-97.

52. Campbell, "The European Territorial Settlement," 214.

53. Kertesz, Diplomacy in a Whirlpool, 122.

54. FRUS 1947 (Washington, D.C., 1947), 4:266. In the autumn of 1946, the Prague government forcibly resettled over 40,000 Hungarians in formerly German-inhabited Czech districts. This action precipitated the flight of many Hungarians from Slovakia across the border to Hungary, and Budapest resorted to the usual futile protest. See Balogh, Magyarorszag kulpolitikaja, 126-28.

55. Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfer, 14947.

56. Campbell, "The European Territorial Settlement," 201.

57. Kertesz, Diplomacy in a Whirlpool, 184.

Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation