A Case Study on Trianon

Two generations after the Treaty of Trianon, Hungarian society continues to be haunted by its provisions. In a very real sense, Hungary has yet to come to terms with the loss of empire. The establishment of an independent state of Hungary, achieved at the Paris Peace Settlement, has not proved sufficient compensation for the loss of people and territory at Trianon. The loss of empire was the first of the three caesuras of 20th century Hungarian history and despite the enormous changes resulting from all three-the other two having been the collapse of 1944-45 and the revolution of 1956-the effects of Trianon continue to influence Hungarian perceptions in a variety of ways, above all where Hungary's neighbors are concerned.

The specificity of the Hungarian problem lies in the fact that it was not merely territory that was lost, but a substantial proportion of the ethnically Hungarian population. Territorial losses, where the territory concerned does not involve the loss of co-nationals, can be comparatively easily absorbed, but where the territory in question remains inhabited by co-nationals, the problem lives on the consciousness of the nation that has suffered. In the case of Hungarian national consciousness, the matter has been exacerbated by the loss of Transylvania, because Transylvania has been perceived as having made the vital contribution to the continuity of Hungarian statehood and the survival of the Hungarian nation. Thus at some level, Transylvania has come to form an integral part of the area perceived by the nation as its ideal homeland, without which the nation state is felt to be truncated. This complex of factors has weighed heavily on Hungarian political consciousness and on political behavior. It has contributed significantly to what Istvan Bibo diagnosed as the 'cul-de-sac of Hungarian history.'¹

The second caesura brought with it one major change. The myth of the Crownlands of St. Stephen² was effectively destroyed with the destruction of the political class that had deployed it as an

instrument of legitimization in the interwar period. The experience of 1938-45, the reannexation of Hungarian-inhabited territories from the successor states, was regarded after the end of World War II as closing this particular chapter. The reannexations had been purchased at too high a price-the involvement of Hungary in the Second World War and the physical and human losses that resulted. This change in perceptions did not, however, mean that the sense of community with the Hungarian minorities had evaporated; rather, the concept of integral revisionism was jettisoned, especially after the vain attempts to salvage a minimum at the 1947 peace negotiations had failed.³

The second caesura brought with it another important political innovation-a strengthening of the Danubian component in Hungarian national consciousness.⁴ The impulse towards the establishment of a Danubian confederation, which, its protagonists hoped, would resolve most or all of the intertwined question of minorities and irredenta, had had some antecedents in Hungarian thinking. Indeed, Kossuth had favored it, albeit only after he had lost political power. But after 1945, an influential section of the intelligentsia hoped to be able to create new bonds with Hungary's neighbors, to effect a nation-to-nation reconciliation, and in this way, to outflank the provisions of Trianon. Ideally, a Danubian confederation would have provided a framework within which the minorities in the successor states could retain sufficient links with the Hungarian state to unite them into a relatively heterogeneous cultural community, while safeguarding their separate political loyalties, i.e., to the successor states.

The Danubian idea resurfaced in 1956, at the next caesura when it was put forward as a means of reassuring the successor states that Hungary had no irredentist demands to make. There was a fairly clear undercurrent of thought in Czechoslovakia and Romania that the Hungarian revolution would rapidly turn to nationalism and that demands for territorial revision would not be far away thereafter;⁵ even the Yugoslavs were influenced by this equation. It was to settle this complex of doubts, presumably, that the radio station controlled by the Borsod county workers' council proclaimed: 'Our country should be a member of the Danubian confederation as planned by Lajos Kossuth,' an idea Imre Nagy advocated prior to the revolution.⁶ The general mood in 1956, according to the various

statements made at the time, was that Hungary sought friendly relations with its neighbours and that territorial revision was not on the agenda.

The Danubian idea made another appearance in the 1960's, when Kadar's government began to float the idea of Danubian cooperation.⁷ Four states would be involved-Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria and Czechoslovakia-and the Hungarians envisaged a very loose form of cooperation, not much more than regular consultation on matters of mutual interest, but under the symbolic umbrella of the Danubian idea. The plan came to nothing. The Austrians were enthusiastic, the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak governments ignored it. But as far as Hungary was concerned, the project was intended to serve two longer term purposes. First, it would help to place Hungary on the international map and might even produce solid economic benefits. Over and above that one could sense in the proposal the reactivation of the circumventing of Trianon, of finding a way to establish links with the minorities without offending the sensibilities of the successor states. The plan suffered from defects-neither of the two relevant successor states (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) had any interest in it and it sought patently to isolate Romania, which by this stage was already embarked on its strategy of substituting Romanian nationalism for Marxism as the ideology of the state.

In the 1970's, the Hungarian government tried another tack. If multilateral cooperation was a non-starter, then bilateral means might work. This was the principle behind the series of agreements signed between Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, respectively, to the effect that the minorities in Hungary and the Hungarian minorities in the other states formed bridges.⁸ By creating an internationally recognized framework, the Hungarian state presumably hoped to establish a locus standi for itself vis-a-vis the minorities. It was not a great success, though it did represent a step forward. As far as Yugoslavia was concerned, the agreement worked adequately but then the position of the Hungarian minority there was incomparably better than in the other two countries. Romania had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the conference table and in practice, there is precious little reality to the minorities forming a bridge between the two states. Indeed, on closer examination, the idea that a Romanian minority of 25,000 in Hungary was in

any way comparable to a Hungarian minority of 2 million in Romania was absurd.

At the popular level, perceptions of the successor states in Hungary were very largely dependent on how they were thought to be treating their Hungarian minority. This resulted in one of the most remarkable distortions of political evaluation that Eastern Europe had witnessed since 1945. Whereas for world opinion, the Dubcek reform program in Czechoslovakia was viewed in terms of democratization, institutional change, ideological renewal and the like, Hungarian opinion concentrated exclusively-though obviously there were some individual exceptions to this-on how the minority in Slovakia would fare.⁹ Hungarian history had once again gone down a cul-de-sac. It is fair to say, however, that the equipment taken there was lighter. Despite the legacy of Trianon, there was no particular enthusiasm in Hungary that Hungarian military units had participated in the occupation of Slovakia and were for the most part stationed in the areas inhabited by Hungarians. Rather, the response was to ignore the entire event.

Perceptions of Romania, however, did not rest quite so lightly on Hungarian consciousness. Even in the 1960's, there was mounting concern at every level of Hungarian opinion at what it suspected was happening to the Hungarians of Transylvania. For a variety of reasons, it would seem, the loss of Transylvania left much deeper scars than the loss of the Hungarian-inhabited parts of Slovakia or Yugoslavia. The myth value of Transylvania, its symbolic function as the ideal homeland, has already been mentioned. The purely demographic factor of there being two million Hungarians in Romania as against 600,000 in Slovakia was another. The Czechoslovak government likewise contributed to this complex of perceptions, in that access to Slovakia was generally open to Hungarians, and there was no attempt made to prevent Hungarians traveling there. The Romanian authorities, on the other hand, made it evident that they greatly disliked the attention paid by Hungarians to Transylvania and the decision to ban foreign travelers from staying in private houses was widely seen by Hungarians as directed specifically at them.¹⁰ That view was only reinforced by the requirement imposed in the summer of 1979 that foreign tourists would have to pay for petrol in hard currency.

The popular attitude towards Romanians was further demonstrated by two attitude surveys. The first of these was carried out

by Radio Free Europe's Audience Research Department and was devoted to a measurement of Hungarian autostereotypes and heterostereotypes; Romanians were included among the latter.¹¹ This survey suggested the existence of very deep-seated feelings of antagonism and cultural superiority vis-a-vis Romanians. The Romanians scored next to nothing on attributes like 'courage,' generosity,' 'love of peace' and 'hard work,' while they scored high on 'cruelty,' 'conceit,' 'laziness,' 'backwardness' and 'a tendency to dominate.' This remarkably negative heterostereotype was directly attributable to the failure of Hungarian society to come to terms with the loss of Transylvania, a process made much more difficult by the policies of the Romanian government and, equally, of the Hungarian government.

This last refers to the policy of the Hungarian authorities for much of the 1960's and 1970's, of pretending that Transylvania was not an issue as far as Hungarian opinion was concerned.¹² It led to the state of affairs where over one-fifth of secondary pupils could fail to give an adequate answer to the question, 'What language is spoken by the Szekelys?' As Gyula Illyes pointed out, that answer should have been automatic. In essence, because of the tergiversations of official policy-for example, on whether the capital of Transylvania should be referred to as 'Cluj' or 'Kolozsvar'-a sense of uneasiness has arisen on this topic, with the result that distorted perceptions continue to be reproduced in each generation. In the late 1970's, there was an appreciable change in this connection, and Transylvania ceased to be quite the taboo topic that it had been. This was partly attributable to the bilateral declaration of 1977; it also derived from the official policy of increasing reliance on an unstated Hungarian nationalism as a source of legitimacy. The speech made at the Helsinki summit by Janos Kadar was an important milestone here, for he referred in overtly rhetorical terms to the losses of people and territory suffered by the Hungarian nation after 1918, something which was automatically interpreted as a hint about Transylvania.¹³ In the second half of the decade, the silence about Transylvania ended, although this did not signify an open debate. Rather it was the customary method of allusive, tangential debates and articles, in which the polemics with Romanian historians about Daco-Roman continuity were probably the most pointed. Confusion in this area was demonstrated by an audience survey in Hungary carried out under the aegis of the Mass Communications Institute.¹⁴ This survey

returned a fairly high number of respondents who believed that Romania had been on the victorious side in the Second World War (which was technically correct, of course, as far as the end of the war was concerned). The results of this survey were made all the more remarkable by the fact that it had been carried out immediately after Hungarian television had shown a documentary series on World War II. To be sure, some of the confusion must be attributed to ignorance, but the deeper perceptions about the Transylvanian question must also have played a role.

In all, Trianon and its results continue to haunt Hungarian opinion, both the intelligentsia and through the mediation of the intelligentsia, the broader public too. The most obvious explanation for this is the continued existence of a very significant number of Hungarians in the successor states and the perception in Hungary that these co-nationals, by reason of having been detached from the Hungarian state, suffer various disabilities in consequence. Thus in this way, the romantic integralist view of Hungarian nationhood has become fused with questions of minority rights and it has become next to impossible for the two to be disentangled. By the same token, Hungarian society has been unable to adjust to the 'loss of empire' suffered after 1918 and the sense of loss has changed but not diminished over time. Here again this is self-evidently attributable to the continued existence of an ethnically, culturally and, in the eyes of the Hungarians of Hungary, politically Hungarian population in the successor states. Short of radical changes in the policies of the latter, there seemed little likelihood of Hungarian perceptions being modified in this respect.

Notes

1. Istvan Bibo, 'Eltorzult magyar alkat, zsakutcas magyar tortenelem,' Harmadik Ut, (London: Magyar Konyves Ceh, 1960).

2. A clear assessment of the myth of the Crownlands of St. Stephen may be found in Walter Kolarz, Myths and Realities in Eastern Europe (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1946), pp. 86-98.

3. On Hungary's experience at the Paris Peace negotiations, see Stephen Borsody, The Triumph of Tyranny (New York: 1960).

4. Among other works produced in this vein and which were clearly didactic in purpose were EIemer Radisics, A Dunataj, 3 vols. (Budapest: Gergely R.R.-T., 1946-47); Istvan Borsody, Magyar-Szlovak kiegyezes

(Budapest: Officina, n.d.); Laszlo Szenczei, Magyar-Roman kerdes (Budapest: Officina, n.d.).

5. Evidence for Czechoslovakia comes from the interview given by Gyula Lorinc in Uj Szo, 28 March 1968; in Romania, the Hungarian events had even more direct repercussions, in the form of demonstrations in several Transylvanian towns, Magyar Hirado (Vienna), January 1, 1978.

6. Borsod radio is quoted by Vilmos Juhasz, 'A forradalom kovetelesei,' in Gyula Borbandi and Jozsef Molnar, eds., Tanulmanyok a magyar forradalomrol (Munich: Aurora, 1966), p. 492; Imre Nagy, On Communism: In Defence of the New Course (London: Thames & Hudson, 1957), pp. 239-244.

7. A very detailed analysis of the question of Hungary and the Danube Valley, with a lengthy assessment of the cooperation project of the 1960's, is by Charles Andras, "Neighbors on the Danube: New Variations of an old Theme of Regional Cooperation," Radio Free Europe Research (Munich: RFE, 1967).

8. The agreements with Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were apparently reached without too much difficulty and the Hungarian-Yugoslav agreement is regularly held up as a model of good relations. Romania was much more difficult to persuade to attend at the negotiating table and Ceausescu's reluctance was hardly disguised. Hence it cannot be excluded that some Soviet pressure was involved, especially as the signing of the agreement (1977) coincided with a period of Romanian accommodation to Soviet pressures in other areas.

9. Rudolf L. Tokes, 'Hungarian Intellectuals' Reaction to the Invasion of Czechoslovakia,' in (eds.) F. J. Czerwinski and Jaroslaw Piekalkiewicz, The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia: Its Effects on Eastern Europe (London, New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 139-157 at p. 148.

10. George Schopflin, The Hungarians of Rumania, Minority Rights Group Report no.37 (London: 1978), p. 15, for details.

11. APOR, The Hungarian Self-Image and the Hungarian Image of Americans, Russians, Germans, Rumanians and Chinese (Munich: Radio Free Europe, 1970).

12. Gyula Illyes, 'A Magyar Nyelvor unnepere,' Nepszabadsag, 16 January 1972 and Lajos Fur, 'Milyen nyelven beszelnek a szekelyek?,' Tiszataj, 26:8 (August 1972), pp. 57-66 contain powerful indictments of the shortsightedness of official Hungarian information policy on Transylvania, the crux of which is that the absence of information on what is an integral part of the Hungarian identity, i.e., Transylvania, has created confusion and distortions of perceptions of national identity.

13. Nepszabadsag, August 1, 1975. Kadar had already begun to prepare Hungarian opinion for changes in this area by his comments at the 11th

Congress of the Hungarian party, where he expressed the hope that Hungarians outside Hungary would enjoy rights as far-reaching as the non-Hungarians in Hungary; he reiterated this at the 12th Congress in 1980.

Nepszabadsag, December 10, 1980, carried a report summarizing the views of the Hungarian delegate to the Madrid follow-up conference on European security. This contained possibly the harshest attack made by an official Hungarian spokesman on Romania since the communist takeover and as good as accused the Romanian authorities of oppression of the Hungarian minority.

14. Maria Dankanics, 'Kulonbozo koru munkasok tudati kepe a II. vilaghaborurol,' Szociologia, 3-4 (1076), pp. 494-501.

A Case Study on Trianon