Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation

Strict adherence to facts is not in the nature of propaganda, least of all wartime propaganda. In his early wartime memoranda written in 1915 for R. W. Seton-Watson who forwarded them to the British Foreign Office Masaryk referred to "independent Bohemia" and "Greater Serbia" instead of "Czechoslovakia" and "Yugoslavia." The Slovaks he declared to be "Bohemians," Czechs, that is, eager for union with their brethren outside of Hungary. This might have come as a surprise to the Slovaks had they known of Masaryk's doings abroad on their behalf. According to Masaryk the Slovaks were also "for centuries the victims of the most brutal Magyarization,"22 a notion which would have been news to the Magyars who themselves had been the victims of steady, and often brutal, oppression for centuries since the Mohacs disaster in 1526. The Hungarian state itself was treated by Masaryk as something already nonexistent. On his maps, accompanying his wartime memoranda, all that was reserved for the Magyars was an ethnic enclave smaller even than the future Trianon Hungary. While much of the success of Czech wartime propaganda was Masaryk's achievement, his junior partner, Edvard Benes, far outdid Masaryk in denouncing the Hungarians as the source of all things evil in both the past and the present. Yet Benes's eventual prominence in shaping Central European history was predicated on Masaryk's success. And Masaryk's success was also decisive in expediting the triumph of the Yugoslav and Romanian wartime plans.23 In the winter of 1917-1918, while the secret separate peace ne-

gotiations were going on between the Allies and Austria-Hungary, the "New Europe," plans were still in jeopardy. In his Fourteen Points address to Congress in January 1918, President Wilson still spoke only of the "freest opportunity of autonomous development" for the peoples of Austria-Hungary, to safeguard and assure their "place among the nations." This would have meant, in practical terms, federalization of Central Europe. But this was not what the Central European "New Europe" advocates had in mind. They wanted more than their ethnic due. They wanted nationstates built at the expense of their neighbors. They advocated territorial punishments for Germans and Hungarians, and territorial rewards for everybody else in Central Europe. The oppressed nationalities of Austria-Hungary, anticipating victory over their rivals in World War I, wished to do exactly what the Hun garians had been doing before the war: to build nationstates which would correct their real or presumed historical misfortunes.

Allied postwar plans merged with Masaryk's plans only in the last months of the war. It was a pragmatic move to serve Allied war interests without the historical-philosophical motivations that enthralled Masaryk's mind. The Allied decision to embrace officially the "New Europe" plan had a great deal to do with the loss of Russia as an ally following the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. The Slavic exiles from Austria-Hungary suddenly became more precious than ever before in the propaganda war against the Central Powers. They became, as Z. A. B. Zeman astutely observed, "a part of the great mobilization of forces that accompanied Russia's exit from the War."24

The "New Europe" plan became the peace settlement after World War I. By the time the victors of the war gathered in Paris to start the peace negotiations, sizeable Hungarian territories had been occupied by Hungary's neighbors in agreement with the Allied and Associated Powers. Some of these territories had been already promised to the smaller allies by the "gentlemen negotiators"25 during the course of the war. The Magyars, the "invaders" of the ninth century, were defeated and the oppressed people, victims of a "millennial" Magyar yoke, were liberated. The survival of these poor victims was called a "miracle" by wartime propaganda. And while reminiscing over Hungary's punishment at the Paris Peace Conference, the British diplomat Harold Nicolson noted: "I confess that I regarded, and still regard, that Turanian tribe with acute distaste. Like their cousins the Turks, they had destroyed much and created nothing."26

This Allied participant at the Paris Peace Conference did more than just express his unflattering opinion of the Hungarian people. He captured the biased political atmosphere of the international setting in which the historical Hungarian state met its death.

It would be far-fetched, of course, to suggest that Hungary and the "Asiatic" Hungarians were punished because of Western racist prejudice. But, as twentieth-century Europe knows only too well, racism and nationalism can engender similar emotions of hatred and prejudice.27 And there is no denying that the Hungarian problem as we know it today has its origins in the national hatreds and nationalist prejudices of the world wars of our century.

Notes

1. In their own language, the Hungarians call themselves "Magyar," a designation used now in all languages to distinguish the Magyar and non Magyar-speaking peoples of the historic kingdom of Hungary. In this volume, too, the term "Magyar" is being used for that particular purpose.

2. An influential English-language book by a Czech medievalist advanced the theory that the "invasion of the Magyars" destroyed the "bridge" built by the Moravian Empire between East and West. Unable "to take over the task of intermediaries and to transmit to the rest of Europe the treasures of Constantinople," the Magyars supposedly "severed" Western Europe from "its intellectual roots," thus delaying the rediscovery of antiquity that came with the Renaissance. See Francis Dvornik, The Making of Central and Eastern Europe (London, 1949), 18384. Such views, smacking of twentieth-century nationalism, are similar to those advocated by Frantisek Palacky, Dvornik's nineteenth-century Czech compatriot. Palacky regarded the settlement of the Magyars in the Carpathian Basin as "the greatest misfortune" because it severed the Slavic North from the Slavic South. In addition, the Magyars separated the Czechs from the Slovaks who, supposedly, lived as "brethren" already at that time. Although sheer fantasy, these views, since World War I, have found wide acceptance in the West. See, for instance, R. N. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks (London, 1943), 15; Alfred Fichelle, "Le monde slave," in Encyclopedie de la Pleiade: histoire universelle (Paris, 1957), 2:1122. The Romanians have adjusted these anti-Hungarian Slav theories to their own nationalist fantasies, viewing the Hungarians as despoilers of "ancient Romanian soil of many millenia," in Ion Lancranjan's words, referring to Transylvania (see note 3 below). And some Soviet historians have become newcomers to interpretations of this sort by

inventing "ancient Slavic ties" between the Ukraine and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, following its Soviet annexation after World War II (see Annex II in Chapter 10, below).

3. Cf. Ion Lancranjan, Cuvint despre Transylvania (Bucharest, 1982). See more on Lancranjan's book in Chapter 14, below.

4. For a detailed parallel history of the three Central European kingdoms deploring their disunity, see Oscar Halecki, Borderlands of Western Civilization (New York, 1952), in particular pp. 56, 126, 139, 147, 155, 201, and 222ff.

5. Cf. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (Boulder, Colo., 1977), chap. 4, "Europe: Multi-National Empires and New Nations."

6. The phrase "unfinished part of Europe," is Oszkar Jaszi's; he used it in his pre-World War I writings in Hungarian.

7. Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples (New York, 1947), 9394.

8. Edward Hallett Carr, Nationalism and After (London, 1945), 9.

9. H. Butterfield, Napoleon (New York, 1962), 117.

10. Slovak and Romanian historiographies treat the northern and eastern parts of Hungary primarily as scenes of their own national histories, playing down or even omitting the Hungarian presence. The Romanians in particular are fond of drawing farfetched nationalistic conclusions from Michael the Brave's brief appearance in Transylvania's history. Hugh Seton-Watson put the incident in its right place (Nations and States, 176): "For one year (1600-1601) Michael the Brave became ruler of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania at once. This was a result of international diplomacy and war, not of any national programme to unite the Orthodox people of Latin speech in one kingdom."

11. Gyula Szekfu, Magyar tortenet (Budapest, 1938), 3:498.

12. Oszkar Jaszi, A nemzeti allamok kialakulasa es a nemzetisegi kerdes (Budapest, 1912), 367, 36970. In support of his view on the controversial issue of eighteenth-century Romanian migrations, Jaszi relies in part on a work by Jozsef Ajtay, A magyarsag fejlodese az utolso 200 ev alatt (Budapest, 1905). Ajtay's credibility, Jaszi points out, is enhanced by his use of Romanian sources (Ajtay, A magyarsag fejlodese, 15). Estimates of Romanians migrating from Moldavia and Wallachia to Hungary in the first half of the eighteenth century range between a total of 350,000 and 500,000. Transylvania's estimated population alone before these migrations was 800,000 to 865,000, while that of Hungary's as a whole, according to the 1715-1720 conscriptions, was 2.5 million. Cf. Laszlo Makkai and Zoltan Szabo, eds., Erdely tortenete (Budapest, 1986), 2:975-76. As for the estimates of the percentage of Magyars in Hungary toward the end of the eighteenth century: 29 percent is Jaszi's figure (in op. cit. above), while 36-43 percent is a more recent one by Istvan Szabo, A magyarsag eletrajza (Budapest, 1941), 230,

238. Today, Szabo's calculations are regarded as the more realistic ones. Cf. Gyorgy Litvan, Introduction to Jaszi's op. cit., an abridged edition (Budapest, 1986), 2529. In view of these estimates, my choice of 40 percent seems a fair compromise.

13. Cf. Stephen Borsody, "Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy: From Independence Struggle to Hegemony," in Steven B. Vardy and Agnes H. Vardy, eds., Society in Change (Boulder, Colo., 1983), 52338.

14. Cf. Gyula Szekfu, Etat et nation (Paris, 1945), 11117.

15. The figures on assimilation are quoted from Laszlo Katus, "Magyarok, nemzetisegek, a nepszaporulat tukreben (18501910)," Historia 4:4/ 5 (1982): 1821. It should be noted that the "Ruthenes" are called now "Transcarpathian Ukrainians." The name change occurred after World War II, when Czechoslovakia ceded to the Soviet Union the territory of "Sub carpathia," which she annexed from Hungary after World War I.

16. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 164.

17. Oscar Jaszi, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary (London, 1924), 38.

18. Ibid.

19. Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Making of a State (New York, 1927), 370. Great Bntain and the United States seem to have been aware of the advantages of a federalist solution in Central Europe but the conviction was not strong enough to resist the wartime propaganda of the nationstate advocates, successfully conducted by the exiles from Austria-Hungary and by their Western supporters. See, in particular, D. Perman, The Shaping of the Czechoslovak State (Leiden, 1962), and Harry Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary during the First World War (London, 1962). Also, see note 11 in Chapter 16, below.

20. Otakar Odlozilik, Masaryk's Idea of Democracy (New York, 1952), 12.

21. Cf. R. W. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England (London, 1943), 109. (After World War II, Russia indeed became the head of a "Slavic bulwark" against German power in Europe, but neither in the democratic way Masaryk had anticipated nor in the spirit of Slavic brotherhood envisaged by President Edvard Benes's wartime propaganda.)

22. Seton-Watson, Masaryk in England, 12529.

23. Cf. Stephen Borsody, "Hungary's Road to Trianon: Propaganda and Peacemaking," in Bela K. Kiraly et al., eds., Essays on World War 1: Total War and Peacemaking: A Case Study on Trianon (New York, 1982), 2328. For an exceptionally realistic recent view of Masaryk's and Benes's work, as founders and builders of post-World War I Central Europe, see F. Gregory Campbell, "Empty Pedestals?," Slavic Review 44 (1985): 119.

24. Z. A. B. Zeman, The Gentlemen Negotiators (New York, 1971), 360.

25. The term "gentlemen negotiators" is Zeman's. A native of Central Europe, Professor Zeman wisely remarked: "None of the experts on whose advice the British Foreign Office drew pointed out that the national profile of the inhabitants in many parts of the Habsburg Empire was not as sharply defined as, say, that of the English and the French, and that, for better or worse, viable communities arose in central and eastem Europe out of the simple fact of people living in one place at the same time rather than because they belonged to one particular nation." Zeman, The Gentlemen Negotiator, 361. Some of the territorial dispositions made by the "gentlemen negotiators" caused consternation, but few of them have been corrected. The wartime territorial promises to Romania in particular were subject to criticism. R. W. Seton-Watson was filled with "horror" when he learned about them in 1916, and later described them as "scandalously immoderate." See Hugh Seton Watson, "R. W. Seton-Watson and the Trianon Settlement," in Kiraly, Essays on World War 1, 7; and R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Roumanians (London, 1934), 490. After World War I, the Western democracies preferred to play down their own role in the creation of the successor states. They distanced themselves in particular from the shortcomings of the new order. The tone was set by Charles Seymour, regional specialist for Austria-Hungary in the "Inquiry," renamed the "Territorial Section of the Peace Conference," which provided President Wilson personally, and the American government in general, vith inforrnation on Central Europe's nationality affairs. In his account of what really happened, he wrote: "The United States and Great Britain would have been glad to create a federation of the Danubian nationalities," however, "by virtue of the principle of self-determination it was for the nationalities to determine their own destiny." Charles Seymour, "The End of an Empire: Remnants of Austria-Hungary, " in Edward Mandel House and Charles Seymour, eds., What Really Happened at Paris (New York, 1921), 89-90. The Bohemian-born British historian, Harry Hanak, saw the role of Western intervention during the birth of "New Europe" differently: "The help that [Henry Wickham] Steed, [Robert William] Seton-Watson, [Charles] Sarolea, [A. Frederick] White, [Ronald M.] Burrows, and others gave to the non-German and the non-Magyar nationalities of the Dual Monarchy and the similar help afforded by groups of like-minded men in France, Italy, and the United States was invaluable. The Monarchy might have collapsed in any case. Yet . . . without the help of these friends neither a Czechoslovak nor a Yugoslav state need have risen from the ruins." Harry Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, 279.

26. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1933), 34.

27. Since World War I, the Hungarians are often called "Magyars" in the English language without derogatory implications. During World War I, how ever, in addition to distinguishing Hungary's Magyars from non-Magyars, the

word was used intentionally as a derogatory reference to the Hungarians as "Asiatics." "New Europe" propagandists, including Masaryk, emphatically used it in that sense. Incidentally, Masaryk's low opinion of the "Magyars" predated World War I. Around the turn of the century he wrote: "The cultural standards of the Magyar people are lower than those of the Slovaks; even today the Magyars have no literature of any significance." His bias apart, Masaryk belies his ignorance; the late dualist era was the time of a golden age in modern Hungarian literature. T. G. Masaryk, Ceska otdzka (Prague, 1894 and 1908),

55. During World War I, he repeated the same allegation. See his wartime pamphlet written in 1918, Nova Evropa, (published in Prague 1920), maintaining that the Hungarians are "culturally weaker" than the Slovaks (p. 160). Also, he referred to Germany's allies, the Hungarians and the Turks, as "Asiatics," (p. 176).

Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation