June 4 is one that Hungarian extremists consider one of the most infamous, as in 1920, after the end of World War I, this time the Treaty of Trianon was signed between the victorious Allied Powers in World War I and Hungary, in as a successor state of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a state defeated in the First World War. The treaty was signed in the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles by 16 allied states (including Romania), on the one hand, and Hungary, on the other.
The treaty was signed to establish the borders of the new state of Hungary with its neighbors: Austria, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), Romania and Czechoslovakia. The Treaty of Trianon was part of the series of treaties concluded at the end of World War I, the others being the peace treaties concluded by the Allied Powers with Germany (at Versailles, June 28, 1919), Austria (at Saint Germain en Laye, September 10, 1919). ), Bulgaria (at Neuilly, 27 November 1919) and with Turkey (at Sèvres, signed on 4 June 1920 and then repudiated, being replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne).
The conditions of the alliance and Romania’s participation in the First World War aimed in the first time at carrying out a country project started with the Union of the Principalities, gaining state independence and achieving a state that would unite all the territories inhabited by Romanians. The historian Lucian Boia explains this difference between the state projections that formed the basis of the formation of nation states. He was talking about a French state projection in which the community of citizens is at the center, that’s why the language they speak and their ethnic origin don’t matter so much and the German state projection in which the state is made up of ethnics who speak the same language and they have the same blood-ethnicity.
Returning to the Trianon issue, World War I shattered the powerful Habsburg multinational empire, which became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867. The citizens of the empire regardless of their ethnicity, strongly imbued with German doctrine on language and blood, but also driven by Wodroow Wilson’s theses on the right of peoples to self-determination, chose the path to be taken by parts of the former empire. More precisely, the majority chose, and Trianon only sanctifies the choice. The Hungarian nationalist and extremist propaganda speaks of a territorial abduction, as in the image below, unjustly accusing the Romanian authorities of occupation. It is reported that 1,700,000 remained outside their country. Although it is wrong to assimilate the Double Monarchy with Hungary, the image above, often used, does not tell the whole demographic story of the area, which looks at 1910, so four years before the state of the great war as follows:
This shows that Hungarians, Saxons, Szeklers, but also other minorities were in Transylvania, Banat, Crișana and Maramureș about 43%. Although Hungarian historiography and some Hungarian politicians argued that the Double Monarchy was a more equitable solution for minorities and that Slovaks, Croats, Ruthenians, Romanians in Transylvania would have been more favored within the Double Monarchy than in successor states, no ethnic group in Transylvania. The Double Monarchy did not support a return to the pre-World War I state of affairs. Moreover, the Treaty of Trianon enshrined the existence of an independent Hungarian state, ideal of the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1848 and of Hungarian politicians during the end of the Double Monarchy, even if not within the borders they imagined.
From this moment we enter a realm that intertwines history with the political imagination of various periods. Why do we say this? Because Trianon enshrined on the national rules: language, ethnicity, blood, and even the choice of citizens (with which he was on December 1, 1918 in Alba Iulia), an existing situation. The imaginary, existing even today in the collective mind, presents the Treaty as a catastrophe because this act consecrated the end of the kingdom of St. Stephen. This kingdom, de facto, had disappeared in the 16th century, by the defeat of Mohács and had been divided between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire (later Austria and, in 1867, the Double Monarchy, Austria-Hungary), but which, formally , continued to exist, the emperors of Vienna carrying to the end the title of apostolic kings of Hungary. Otherwise, the collective imagination of some of the most vehement Hungarians believes that the true borders of Hungary should have been at least the borders of the Apostolic Kingdom at its height. So a medieval reality is projected, built both by conquering some areas or by voluntary accession, in a current map.
Let’s not imagine that only in Hungary there is this deformed projection, present even today through symbols right in the courtyard of the Parliament of Budapest (the existence of a Szekler flag that the guides present as the flag of Transylvania). Each nation-state has an extensive variant richly argued in historical discourse: Greater Bulgaria, Greater Serbia (hence the conflict for the Kosovo region), Greater Greece (which is a projection of the domination of ancient Greece), etc. There are also versions of a Romania even bigger than interwar Romania. These are based on the conquests of the Dacian king Burebista.
The Treaty of Trianon enshrined the transfer to the successor or neighboring states of 71% of the territory of Transleithania (the Hungarian part of the Double Monarchy) and 63% of the population, the latter, mostly of non-Hungarian ethnicity. However, the route of the new borders, in many cases, did not overlap with ethnic borders (for objective reasons, given the impossibility of exact delimitation of regions with mixed population), so that over or 2,535,000 ethnic Hungarians arrived outside Hungary, most living along the borders of the new successor states. For this reason The Treaty of Trianon is not a perfect act, however the current situation, extraordinarily happy for both states (EU members and NATO members), makes the element of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity to prosper with good long-term effects.
🖋️ Text via Historia România
📌 The Bunget Arts & Culture 2020
The Bunget Arts & Culture 