A Case Study on Trianon

As the appearance of this volume attests, the Treaty of Trianon continues to fascinate scholars and writers in a wide variety of disciplines. Even after the passage of 69 years, unanswered, or inadequately answered, questions abound concerning the intellectual, diplomatic, and military background of the treaty, as well as its political, social, and economic consequences for East Central Europe in general and Hungary in particular. The extent and precise nature of the contribution of the treaty to inter-state and inter-ethnic rivalries and tensions, so important a factor in laying the groundwork for World War II, has been an especially attractive object of scholarly concern.

In particular, writers on the period have tended to focus attention on the character and significance of the revisionist foreign policy outlook adopted by successive interwar Hungarian regimes and the destabilizing impact of that policy on international relations in the East Central European area. The goal of integral, that is, complete, revision of the Treaty of Trianon and the devices developed and utilized by Hungarian governments to channel political and societal resources toward its ultimate achievement have furnished the standard framework on which analyses of Hungary in the interwar period have been hung. Few scholars have explored the impact of the Treaty of Trianon on Hungarian domestic politics or the complex interrelationship of Hungarian domestic politics and Hungarian revisionism in foreign policy, especially in the formative period of the 1920's.

This interrelationship cannot merely be deduced from a priori assumptions about the Treaty of Trianon and Hungarian foreign policy, but merits, indeed demands, separate investigation. The parameters of this investigation can be established by posing the following question for examination: was the Treaty of Trianon, as some believe, a necessary and sufficient condition for explaining the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character of the political

system erected in Hungary in the 1920's under the aegis of Count Istvan Bethlen, the architect of post-war consolidation? Or was obsession with treaty revision itself the product of the reactionary domestic political goals of the Hungarian political elite?

The thesis that I will develop in answer to these questions is that the Treaty of Trianon, however central a touchstone it may have been for Hungarian foreign policy during the interwar decades, in many respects played only a minimal, at best ancillary, role in domestic Hungarian political processes during the 1920's. It does not fully explain those processes nor shed much direct light on them. Other factors may have been more important, especially the commitment, independent of the question of Trianon, to the restoration as far as possible of the pre-war social and political system. It is the character of the political system erected and consolidated by Count Bethlen in the 1920's that provides a better perspective from which to examine the foreign policy outlook of his regime vis-a-vis the Treaty of Trianon.

Let us be clear about the precise character of the issue under consideration. It is one thing to suggest that "this dream of restoring Hungarian hegemony in Danubian Europe was fundamental to Bethlen's foreign policy in the 1920's," and that "the goal [of] restoration of a large and powerful Hungary remained constant."¹ It is scarcely possible to take issue with this judgment, supported as it is by the amply documented historical record.² It is quite another thing, however, to argue that the Hungarian counter-revolutionary political system "was itself conditioned and almost imposed by the policy of the World War victors, and by the consequent changes in Hungarian class-structure and outlook."³ A slightly different version of this point of view sees the counter-revolution as merely a means to the end of treaty revision: failure to achieve immediate revision of the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 led the Hungarian elite to decide that "domestic consolidation on constitutional, political, cultural, and economic levels would have to precede an eventual resumption of ... efforts to achieve revision. "⁴ This decision in turn is taken as evidence of an original commitment by the Hungarian regime "to subordinate every other consideration to the cause of revisionism."⁵

In contrast to these one-sided views, treaty revision must be seen as but one element, albeit a highly visible one, in a general program to turn back the political and social clock, as it were, to the pre-treaty, pre-revolutionary, pre-war period.⁶ The essential

dynamics of this process were underway well before the treaty was ratified or even signed, already during the liberal democratic regime of Count Mihaly Karolyi in 1918-1919. It was in this early post-war period that the main elements of the Hungarian counter-revolution were organized, primarily for domestic political and social purposes.

The separation of Hungary from Austria, implemented by Karolyi, but especially the proclamation of a Hungarian republic in November 1918, generated anxiety and then escalating opposition from several political quarters, of which those on the right are of prime concern to us here. On the one hand, segments of the erstwhile political and social elite, so suddenly and rudely displaced, embarked on a determined campaign of general obstructionism and anti-republican mass agitation in order to overthrow the regime of Karolyi, restore the monarchy, and thus preserve their own political and social status.⁷ On the other hand, the regime's mounting economic difficulties elicited an equally hostile, but even cruder, reaction from members of the "frayed white-collar" groups of the middle and lower-middle class, whose socio-economic fortunes had been the most corroded by World War I and its after-effects.⁸ Equally opposed to both the reactionary strivings of the propertied strata and the growing strength of proletarian elements, these middle-class groups constituted the bulk of what was to become the right-radical wing of the counter-revolution.⁹

From rather amorphous beginnings these two "tendencies" crystallized into a number of identifiable political parties and direct-action groups to oppose the Karolyi regime in more organized, if not more systematic, fashion. On the conservative right, the politicians created the National Agrarian Laborers' Party (Orszagos Foldmuves Part) and the Party of National Union (Nemzeti Egyesules Partja); on the radical right, military officers, civil servants, and intellectuals formed the ultra-nationalist Hungarian National Defense Force Union (Magyar Orszagos Vedero Egyesulet, or MOVE) and the Union of Awakening Hungarians (Ebredo Magyarok Egyesulete, or EME).¹⁰ These gradually coalesced into a loosely coordinated counter-revolutionary movement after Bela Kun's Communist-Socialist coalition succeeded Karolyi's regime in March 1919.

The counter-revolution found a rallying point in April, when, having removed to the safety of Vienna, Count Bethlen set up an Anti-Bolshevist Committee (ABC) with other aristocratic politicians to coordinate efforts to enlist Entente military help against the new

Soviet Republic in Budapest and to secure funds for a future contingent of counter-revolutionary troops.¹¹ In a move that was perhaps indicative of the rivalries and competition that were to bedevil the counter-revolutionaries, another Karolyi-Count Gyula-established a second center of anti-Red activity at Szeged in southern Hungary in May 1919, with Gyula Gombos-head of MOVE, prominent right-radical leader, and future Hungarian prime minister-as liaison with the Vienna group.¹²

Significantly, it was this Szeged government and its right-radical supporters that recruited Admiral Miklos Horthy, future Regent of Hungary, to head a National Army to prosecute the counterrevolutionary cause in the field. This force, however, studiously avoided military engagements with the Red, or indeed, any army, and confined its activities to the unleashing of pogroms against Jews and terroristic reprisals against suspected current or erstwhile supporters of the Reds. These activities, and the ineffectiveness of either of the two civilian groups, soon promoted this force to a position where it exercised what meaningful political power was to be had in Hungary, quite independently of the formal governmental authorities.¹³

Yet a third locus of anti-radical activity was secured in Budapest itself when the Hungarian Soviet government collapsed on August 1, 1919, and its Social Democratic successor was itself ousted in a coup d'etat led by the conservative politician Istvan Friedrich on August 6. Friedrich's coup marks the real beginning of the counterrevolutionary period in Hungarian political life, for although generally weak and without clear policy goals, the government formed by Friedrich ended the experiments with left-wing politics, laid the foundation for the re-establishment of traditional political life, and permitted the conservative political groups to resume legitimate political activity.¹⁴

Thus by the time Istvan Bethlen came to power a year and a half later, the counter-revolution had been a going concern for over two years. The division of the movement into a conservative and an extremist camp dominated by the anti-Semitism and crude demagogy of the latter-with which the Horthy-Bethlen system as a whole later became incorrectly identified-was already well established. Whatever impact the Treaty of Trianon came to have on Hungarian foreign policy under Bethlen, the anti-liberal, xenophobic, reactionary character of the movement long preceded it. Hostility to the

treaty, and the commitment to revisionism in foreign affairs, were not therefore causes of the Hungarian "retrograde revolution"; if anything, they were a logical outgrowth of and concomitant to it.¹⁵

This point will become clearer when we examine the ideology of the counter-revolution, especially under the Bethlen regime.

The Hungarian counter-revolution in general and Bethlen's regime in particular were not perhaps ideological in a strict sense of the term." Nonetheless, the counter-revolutionaries did develop an outlook, an orientation, that, if never formulated in a coherent, systematic body of doctrines and programs, did gradually assume the character of a unifying ideology.¹⁷ Dubbed the szegedi gondolat (Szeged idea), after the southern Hungarian town that was an early hotbed of right-radicalism, this ideology was initially a rather crude pastiche of ideas and affective phases that expressed chiefly the hates and fears of right-radicals like Gyula Gombos: anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and hostility to political modernism in any form.¹⁸

The ideology was at first directed largely at expunging all traces of revolution from the Hungarian body politic and at justifying its adherents' pretension to power. It was thus essentially a pragmatic domestic political work-horse that, already champing at the bit, was later harnessed to the cart of revisionism in foreign affairs. Demagogic and virulently anti-Semitic nationalism was primarily the province of the extreme right, politically useful, certainly, for the more conservative wing of the counter-revolution, but not in the style, nor to the taste, of its largely aristocratic contingent.¹⁹ Still, the extreme nationalism and rigid chauvinism of the szegedi gondolat were naturally exacerbated by and came to be focused on the Treaty of Trianon and all that it represented; not even the "gentlemanly" politicians of the old school were disposed to resist its blandishments entirely under those circumstances.

With the appointment of Istvan Bethlen to the premiership in April 1921, and the subsequent launching of the "consolidation period" of the counter-revolution, the szegedi gondolat was gradually muted into a less demagogic and less radical "Christian national" orientation. The right-radical component, prominent in the early years, was integrated into a conservative liberalism analogous, if not identical, to that characteristic of the pre-war regimes of the two Tiszas, Kalman and Istvan.²⁰ While advocating the goal of territorial revisionism so dear to the hearts of the right radicals, Bethlen and

other conservative leaders vigorously opposed the reckless military adventurism of Gombos and his ilk.²¹

It is vitally important to emphasize here that the "Christian national" orientation embodied notions that were quite independent of the impact of the Treaty of Trianon. Nationalism, anti-Semitism, religiosity, and antipathy to anything even vaguely revolutionary provided a more diffuse and more inclusive set of ideas than did the purely right-radical szegedi gondolat, and the central value of nationalism especially served as an indispensable tool of social integration in the interwar period, not only among all factions of the right, but even vis-a-vis the largely discredited left.²²

Thus the ideology of the Horthy-Bethlen system was developed in the period preceding the overthrow of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in August, 1919, and consequently derived less from the later professed foreign policy goals of the regime than from social and political conditions within Hungary. Toned down and purged of its socially radical elements by Count Bethlen, this ideology was manifestly as much of a reaction to the political and social revolutions effected by the liberal regime of Count Mihaly Karolyi and the Communist regime of Bela Kun as to the inequities of the Treaty of Trianon.

It need not be a surprise, however, that the ideology, with its stress on national unity and national interests, proved a most useful rallying point for opposition to foreign influence generally and to the treaty in particular. Indeed, it was precisely in hopes of currying favor with and demonstrating respectability towards the victorious Entente powers that the Bethlen regime suppressed the most demagogic aspects of the szegedi gondolat, turning the "Christian national" orientation into a defense for the political and social position of the privileged classes, especially the gentry and "gentroid" bureaucracy.²³ It also served to build and strengthen national consensus on the revisionist foreign policy goals of the Bethlen regime. But the creation of the ideology was occasioned chiefly by domestic political and social developments that were viewed as harmful in themselves by the former ruling groups, especially the gentry and lower-middle class strata.

The body of "Christian National" ideas has justly been called the ideology of the middle class in Hungary.²⁴ Reflecting at least symbolic recognition of middle class concerns on the part of the traditionalist regime, the ideology played an important role in

strengthening the legitimacy of the regime within this class. Since it was the gentry middle class and the lower-level civil Servants in the state bureaucracy that were the chief proponents of revisionist nationalism, stress on nationalist goals thus helped secure a strong loyalty to the regime on their part. Since, further, virtually all segments of the political elite also saw revision of the peace treaty, particularly in the direction of recovery of lost territories, as the solution to their economic woes and the balm for their wounded self-esteem, the regime could count on the support of non-right-radicals as well.

It is important, however, to note that the gentry and state bureaucracy saw the cause of their own misfortunes and of those of the entire Hungarian nation not exclusively in the Treaty of Trianon, although that was a highly visible symbol, but in the collapse of the entire system created by Count Istvan Tisza, prime minister from 1913 to 1917, of which system the gentry bureaucrats were the prime beneficiaries. They were more than a little inclined, therefore, to see in Bethlen a successor to Tisza, an identification that Bethlen did nothing to discourage.²⁵ Following in the footsteps of Tisza's father and model, Kalman Tisza, prime minister from 1875 to 1890, Bethlen again made the Hungarian state the bulwark of the gentry, via both the symbolically potent "Christian national" ideology and more tangible benefits to the gentry-bureaucrats. Ideologically, political control by the gentry was rationalized by emphasis on traditional concepts of authority, entailing frequent iteration of the importance of what might be termed the leading role of the middle class, of the need to place political direction of the state again into the hands of the "Christian intelligentsia," and so forth.²⁶

The tangible benefits, however, were perhaps of greater immediate interest to this group. Economic modernization and consequent social change had already under Kalman Tisza eroded the position of the landed gentry; the state bureaucracy then became its main professional outlet. The First World War and the social dislocation and economic penury that ensued, aggravated by the Treaty of Trianon, destroyed this new source of gentry security. Bethlen, like Tisza before him, came to the rescue, and vastly expanded the state bureaucracy to accommodate both its now-displaced former incumbents, including legions that had found themselves stranded in the Successor States, and large numbers from the non-gentry lower middle class. The maintenance of the social status and economic

security of the civil servants again became a top priority of the regime, and thus an important source of legitimacy for it. To give this group even more of a vested interest in the preservation of the regime, Bethlen gave substance to the ideological posturing by placing the political recruitment process firmly in the hands of the bureaucracy: the holders of top political positions were drawn largely from the major redoubt of the former gentry, the upper levels of the state bureaucracy.²⁷ The consequent identification of the ideals of the system with the perceived interests of the bulk of the political participants brought a handsome reward to the regime-the unswerving loyalty of its prime beneficiaries.²⁸

The independence of the counter-revolutionary political system from the exigencies of the Treaty of Trianon is most clearly apparent in the realm of political processes and institutions. To be sure, these embodied a commitment to integral revision of the treaty;²⁹ but they also represented institutional continuity with the pre-war past and thus also served to legitimate the Bethlen regime among its subjects and participants. Independent of its commitment to revision, the Bethlen regime successfully sought to re-establish the major institutional props of the pre-war pays legal: the bureaucracy, the cabinet, and the "government party," all under the authority of a strong prime minister.³⁰

The state bureaucracy was again made a fief of the descendants of the gentry. But this in itself would have availed them little if the bureaucracy had not been restored to the pre-eminent position in which it had been ensconced by Kalman Tisza. Here one of the most signal advances of the Bethlen regime over its counter-revolutionary predecessors becomes manifest. From 1919 until Bethlen's accession to the premiership, the bureaucracy, along with the other institutions of government, were in thrall to the depredations of the paramilitary "detachments" and the various extreme rightist secret associations.³¹ The government was in fact no government at all, and the administration administered little. By curbing the interference of the military in administrative affairs and the influence of the political parties in the selection of people to the top administrative positions Bethlen not only restored respect for the authority of the bureaucracy, but also re-established the basic principle of the subordination of the administration to the prime minister, a situation to which the bureaucrats had earlier been quite happily accustomed.³²

As regards the cabinet, instability was the rule in the period

between the fall of Kun and consolidation of Bethlen's position. The prime ministers were, with the notable exception of Count Pal Teleki, prime minister from 1920 to 1921, generally colorless nonentities; Teleki himself was merely ineffectual.³³ In consequence partly of this, partly of other factors, governments tended to be short-lived, their composition highly unstable, and links with the other institutions of the political system feeble.³⁴ A chaotic and undisciplined multi-party system, whose component parties seemed inspired by no higher ideals than self-aggrandizement, added to the ill-repute of the governments, especially among the military.³⁵ Aided by the palpable anxiety generated among the political elite by ex-King Charles IV's attempted coup in April, 1921, Bethlen succeeded in dictating the composition of his first cabinet. The traditional pre-eminence of the Hungarian prime minister over his ministerial colleagues was thus reestablished, at least tentatively. This tentative superiority became permanent after 1922, with the re-birth of the third element of the pre-war pays legal, a voting-majority-based ruling party itself subservient to its leader, the prime minister-i.e., Bethlen.

The significance of the creation of this ruling party, called Egyseges Part (Unified Party), is frequently overlooked by Marxist and non-Marxist scholars alike.³⁶ In fact, it was central to Bethlen's plans for political consolidation, and its creation cannot be explained by reference to "tactical considerations" or the Treaty of Trianon. The party was not indeed even necessary to Bethlen by any ordinary political calculus.³⁷ Once having secured the enactment of a retrograde voting law in the spring of 1922, he was in a position to secure a perpetual parliamentary majority by electoral manipulation alone.³⁸ Yet his passionate and unremitting determination to see this party created seems to border on the obsessive. It strains credulity to imagine that this almost Herculean effort, repeatedly frustrated, repeatedly renewed-was aimed solely, or chiefly, or even largely at the Treaty of Trianon. Capping so many of Bethlen's designs, the Unified Party was the keystone to the arch of the reborn system of Tisza's pays legal, a sine qua non of Bethlen's consolidation and of the legitimacy and authority of his regime.³⁹

Constitutionalism and Parliamentarianism Under Bethlen

Although more or less passing mention is made of them in the literature on interwar Hungarian politics, Hungarian constitutional and parliamentary traditions deserve a more serious place in an

examination of Hungarian politics in the 1920's, and even beyond. However powerful the drive to revise the treaty, there were limits beyond which Bethlen, and a large proportion of the political elite, would not go. Some attempt to explain this, again, by reference to tactical or strategic considerations: desire to impress the Entente, curry favor with the League of Nations, win economic concessions from the neighboring states, or what have you.⁴⁰ That these considerations played some role in the foreign-directed propaganda-much of it unctuously self-righteous in tone-of the Bethlen regime is undeniable.⁴¹ That they were the most salient factor in the revival of Hungarian constitutionalism and parliamentarianism is at best unlikely.

A Case Study on Trianon