‘Hungary before all else’
History often forgets it was the Austro-Hungarian empire that struck the initial blow in the First World War. A century after its demise the scars are still felt, writes Mick O’Hare
The innate belief, certainly in Britain, that world wars are fought solely against Germany is a persistent one. It’s a narrow sentiment that frequently seems to ignore the roles of, say, Japan, Bulgaria or Finland in the Second World War. Likewise, it rarely takes into account the part played by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War. The popular narrative presupposes that the latter ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany in November 1918 and – if pushed to read further into the history books – the signing of the Treaty of Versailles drawn up by the victorious Allies in 1919. Which is odd, because the conflict began with the assassination by Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to what was then central Europe’s greatest dynasty – the Habsburgs, rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Germany had no particular reason to get involved.
But its opportunistic kaiser, Wilhelm II, took a gamble, effectively hitching his nation to the coattails of the
empire’s beef with Serbia and condemning his continent – and others – to four long years of war. And although in the English-speaking world Germany is still considered, perhaps with justification, the principal antagonist, this disregards the role of Austria-Hungary. And that is a crucial oversight because in central Europe, that role is still having repercussions today.
The Treaty of Versailles attempted – and in the main failed – to piece together the disparate post-war political desires and ethnic imperatives of Europe’s numerous peoples and nations in a new political accord while simultaneously inflicting war reparations on the defeated. Hungary, however, was not a signatory.
After the surrender and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the termination of its union with Austria, Hungary had been engulfed by violent internal chaos as political factions – communists, nationalists, liberals, social democrats and monarchists among them – fought for control. Consequently, the government was not in a position to sign at Versailles. The delay meant that when a semblance of stability emerged under de facto leader Miklós Horthy, Hungary – under intense protest – was party to a separate treaty the following year; a century ago.
Signed at the Grand Trianon Palace in Versailles on 4 June 1920, it is known in Hungary as the Trianon Treaty. It was principally designed by French negotiators with a view to strengthening French links with states surrounding Hungary – indeed it was known as the “Little Entente” – and intended as a bulwark against future German and Russian expansion. There appeared to be little regard to the ethnic, cultural or historical aspects of the region. But at a swoop it reduced the size and population of Hungary by about twothirds, leaving substantial minorities of Hungarian speakers inside the newly drawn boundaries of the nation states confirmed by Versailles. Large populations of Hungarians suddenly found themselves inside the entirely new states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia (then known as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) plus Romania and, to a minor extent, the new Austrian republic. While the Allies had attempted to give autonomy to ethnic groups who had felt oppressed under Austro-Hungarian rule, more than three million Hungarians found themselves living in a different country. The oppressors had, some felt, become the oppressed.
And although Trianon may be 100 years old, it’s not something from a dusty history book. In Hungary, the memory lingers, a slightly arthritic joint in the body politic of the Magyar nation. However, even though that joint has been left untreated it had, until recently, remained little more than a minor inconvenience, a niggly elbow, often ignored. It was always at the back of people’s minds but superseded by more pressing issues, political and mundane. The treaty was reviled – justifiably in some aspects – but, after all, a century had passed.
But then up stepped prime minister Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s populist-in-chief – a man who employs an amalgam of nativist tactics – whether it’s the best of the Putin-cum-Trump playbook or the worst probably depends on your viewpoint – and an admirer of Brexit despite Hungary being a member of the European Union. Orbán is a man who believes Europe has been “invaded” by migrants and that Hungarian culture is in danger of being subsumed, with Muslims particularly high on his list of culprits, a stance that has led to him being censured by the European Parliament. But when the centenary of Trianon loomed in early June, Orbán, for whom Hungarian ethnicity is a central rallying point, chose to weaponise the anniversary, exploiting for political ends the chauvinism that plays so well to his Fidesz Party base.
Like Trump, it’s possible he embraced religion because it was politically expedient. Indeed he was once also considered a liberal
With the posturing sub-Trumpian motto “Hungary before all else”, he proclaimed in his state of the nation address in February that 100 years after Hungary’s “death sentence we are alive, and have freed ourselves from a hostile ring of alliances”.
And with his words came a new “Monument of National Solidarity” near the Hungarian parliament. On it in steel lettering is listed the name of every settlement in what is termed the “Greater Hungary” of 1910 – the majority now in surrounding countries. At its centre is an eternal flame. It descends below street level into what some describe as “a tomb”. “If you want to piss off your neighbours, this is the way to do it,” says István Gazdag, a humanities student at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest who opposes Orbán. But Orbán knows only too well how to harness the residual bitterness over Trianon in his attempts to fashion an aggressive Hungarian nationalism and with it the twin benefits (to his supporters) of keeping minorities in Hungary in check and would-be migrants, especially Muslims, out. “We will never allow Hungary to become a target country for immigrants,” he has declared. “We do not want to see significantly sized minorities with different cultural characteristics and backgrounds among us. We want to keep Hungary as Hungary.”
His is a Christian nation, Orbán frequently declares, despite him once being an atheist who opposed the visit of Pope John Paul II to Budapest in 1991. Like Trump, it’s possible he embraced religion because it was politically expedient. Indeed he was once also considered a liberal, prepared to demand the withdrawal from Hungary of Soviet troops in 1989, but opportunist is perhaps his most apt descriptor. He enjoys comparing himself with István Dobo, who captained his tiny garrison against the invading Ottoman army, sending them packing from Eger in northern Hungary in the 16th century.
Former UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein has called him a xenophobic racist, which led to an outcry from the Hungarian government but equally likely acted as a rallying call to many of his voters. “Orbán likes the sound of his own voice,” says Gábor Egry a Fidesz voter, “but for years Hungary has been a soft touch. They say he’s racist but all he does is stand up for ordinary Hungarians.” It’s the same simplistic stance that swept the likes of Brazilian right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro into power.
His decade as leader, Orbán insists, has been Hungary’s most successful of the last 100 years. And although, through the Visegrad grouping of the sometimes similarly minded nations of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, he has made his peace with some surrounding nations with large Hungarian minorities, he is used to ratcheting up tensions where it benefits him. He accuses Romania of discrimination against its Hungarian minority, another policy that plays well with supporters, some of whom show antipathy towards Romanians, often simplistically equating them to the minority Roma population in Hungary. Hungary’s Roma are frequently the butt of prejudice as the recent scapegoating over the stabbing of two children – a crime with no evidential link to the Roma community – has shown once again. While Orbán himself has said that crime has no ethnicity, his rhetoric elsewhere seems to have led some of his supporters to believe otherwise. Mária Pusoma from the Roma community near Pecs says: “We have always suffered discrimination but since Fidesz came to power, believe me it’s worse still. I don’t even want my young kids to go to school anymore.” In May the Hungarian supreme court ruled that segregation of Roma children in some Hungarian schools was illegal. Orbán had argued, rather disturbingly, that segregation was helping Roma children to “change their way of life”.
Nine out of 10 Hungarians consider Trianon a national tragedy while two-thirds think parts of neighbouring countries should belong to them
As part of his spat with Romania, Orbán flew the banned flag of the Szeklers – the Hungarian minority in Romania – over parliament. “The problem is,” says Marius Albescu, a Romanian student studying in
Budapest, “it works for both sides to talk tough,” referring to Orbán and Romanian president Klaus Iohannis. “They need each other in order to maintain their positions.” It has not gone unnoticed in Romania that what started as a localised dispute by the Hungarian minority in the city of Timisoara triggered the fall of communism in Romania leading, within weeks, to the execution of the nation’s long-time leader, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day 1989.
Orbán is also in dispute with Ukraine over laws which he says discriminate against Hungarian language speakers, and he has built a fence to stop migrants along the border with Serbia. Only recently he posted a map of pre-Trianon Hungary online, ostensibly to wish history students luck in their exams, but prompting Slovenia’s president, Borut Pahor, to express “concern”.
Orban’s constant scapegoating of “outsiders” and “globalist influences” – migrants especially, but also the EU, the United States and the International Monetary Fund – includes his long-running feud with the liberal, Jewish Hungarian-born US financier George Soros. His gripe, replete with antisemitic tropes, with Soros, who has backed philanthropic and educational programmes in Hungary since the fall of communism (some now under threat from new laws), might play well with his voters but it risks the opprobrium of western liberal nations who now look askance where once they saw Hungary as a burgeoning progressive democracy. Orbán is unmoved. “A liberal is a communist with a degree,” he states. “If we had heeded their advice, Hungary would be lying in a hospital room with the tubes of IMF and Brussels loans sticking out of its limbs and George Soros holding the loan faucet. I have seen Soros attempt to rob Hungary on three occasions with my own eyes. It won’t happen again.” This is despite Orbán himself benefiting from a Soros Scholarship to Oxford University in 1989. His supporters in the media agree. “Soros is one of the most dangerous people in the world,” says András Bencsik, editor-in-chief of weekly Magyar Demokrata. For his part, Soros has decried the Fidesz government as a “mafia state”.
Orban’s supporters say that irredentism – the term given to demands for reunification of the Hungarian peoples – is not his wish but decades of Magyarisation, where once the country had sizeable minorities of German, Slovak and other Slav nationalities (many deported in population exchanges after the Second World War), to say nothing of the large Jewish population exterminated in Nazi concentration camps, has created a relatively homogenous population. Less than 2 per cent of citizens were born outside Hungary and, of those that were, many are Hungarian speakers. Orbán’s foreign policy of offering passports to Hungarian speakers elsewhere who want one has ensured that many thousands of foreign-minority Hungarians have chosen to “return home”. And at the last election 95 per cent of “returnees” voted for Orbán and Fidesz. He knows his core well – nine out of 10 Hungarians consider Trianon a national tragedy while two-thirds think parts of neighbouring countries should belong to them. “We are burdened by it even today,” says Zsófia Baráth, 53, a tourism manager. “Whatever you think of Orbán – and I do not vote for him – he knows how to pick at the wounds of injustice, or perceived injustice.”
Baráth votes for the Demokratikus Koalíció, a social-liberal party with very few MPs which, while acknowledging the “dictated peace” of the treaty, has suggested the nation moves on. “Mourning about Trianon can no longer be the focus of Hungarian politics, because, apart from the fact it leads nowhere, it paralyses and consumes the moral and political power of the homeland,” it stated at the time of the anniversary. But opposition parties are equally aware that what is known as “Trianon trauma” is real. The non-partisan Green Party (or LMP) leader László Lóránt Keresztes agreed that Hungarian minorities in other countries have shown that they “want to be and can remain Hungarian”.
Of course, the question is hardly ever raised of whether the non-Hungarian populations granted their autonomy by Trianon preferred their newly granted nationhood. Most, of course, did. Michaela Horváthova is a Slovak from Bratislava whose grandfather grew up in the newly created state of Czechoslovakia, free to speak Slovak rather than Hungarian or German at school. “He declared Trianon to be liberating,” she says. “For the first time in living memory his people were free.”
So can Hungary ever escape the shackles – both mental and political – of Trianon? Does it want to or should it even have to? Does being a member of supranational bodies such as the EU water down the imperative for irredentism? LMP MP Péter Ungár, says: “Trianon is with us every day,” adding that Hungary’s EU membership does not “relieve us from the trauma”. The message seems to be that Hungary stands alone over Trianon and cannot rely on the international world order to empathise. “It was 100 years ago,” says Viktoria Tóth, who campaigns for minorities rights in Eger. “I’m Hungarian, I would prefer to move on. But Orbán keeps raising it. Like he has no actual policies, just a sense of injustice. And then the local hooligans take it out on anybody who looks different and talks different. Words have consequences. It’s a cliché but a true one,” she adds.
“We need to move on from Trianon,” says Tóth. “Orbán might not be a fascist, but he uses some of the tactics. It was our obsession with Trianon that forced us to make terrible choices in the Second World War.” Hungary under Horthy (at governmental level at least) aligned itself with Nazi Germany during the war because Hitler promised to restore Hungary’s historical boundaries. It was a grave misjudgement. When the Nazis were defeated the Trianon borders were reinstated and the treaty even more firmly locked into the political and geographical map of Europe.
It was an imperfect solution to an imperfect peace – a jigsaw of nationalities and ethnicities thrown into the air and scattered across central Europe
While it is fair to say some aspects of Trianon seemed designed simply to punish Hungary – in hindsight, there seems little sense in handing over territories to Slovakia and Romania overwhelmingly populated by Hungarians living close to the border with the post-1920 Hungarian state – other ethnicities such as Czechs and Serbs gained autonomy for the first time. Certainly, little heed was paid to the economics of the boundary redrawing – Hungary and others suffered a deep recession as trade between nations was stymied by borders and protectionism. Maybe a more nuanced compromise could have been reached, one that would have left Trianon more of a footnote in Hungarian history.
That it was not has variously been blamed on the French position; a desire by the victors in 1918 to free once-oppressed peoples; an indifference to or a misunderstanding by the allies of the politics of central Europe; a desire to repay the moral debt suffered by Romania in the war (its casualty rate was higher than that of France or Britain) or simple anti-Hungarian revenge. It is rarely suggested that the end of the war brought about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and without Versailles and Trianon the fallout could have been far greater. While Versailles and Trianon were flawed – the former leading pretty much directly to the rise of Hitler and European fascism in the 1930s – they were the first attempts to stop the constant warring that had scarred Europe. It is easier, say opponents, for Fidesz to play the “innocent victim”, despite Hungary’s role in the First World War and the largely oppressive Hapsburg dynasty that preceded it. But Orbán finds the role of aggrieved party useful. “The west raped the thousand-year-old borders and history of central Europe. They deprived us of our natural treasures, separated us from our resources, and made a death row out of our country,” he pronounced. “We will never forget.”
Unsurprisingly his obsession with Trianon does not always sit well with the neighbours. Romania (which marked the treaty with its own celebration – muted thanks to the coronavirus crisis – for the first time this year) and Ukraine are obvious critics but Austria, previously broadly supportive of Orbán’s anti-immigrant stance, is watching with increasing concern. Austria’s minister for the European Union Karoline Edtstadler has condemned emergency powers granted to Orbán during the coronavirus crisis, saying that while they wanted to avoid “direct conflict” she holds a “very critical view” of them.
Yet, even during lockdown, bells rang out across Hungary on 4 June and public transport came to a halt as a minute’s silence was observed to mark the signing of the treaty. Nationalist group Our Homeland distributed black armbands. Sovereignty has been the leitmotif of Orbán’s 10-year reign. Hungary’s antiTrianon treaty slogans “Nem, nem, soha!” (”No, no, never!“) and “Mindent vissza! (”Return everything!“) are still heard today and are indicative of the perceived humiliation of the immediate post-Trianon and inter-war era. But they also assert the freedoms gained after the fall of eastern European communism in 1989 when the nationalities of Eastern bloc nations were promulgated once again. In many ways Orban
himself is a product of that post-1989 eruption of freedom and anti-Soviet nationalism, deducing that neither communism nor post-communist liberalism worked for his nation. “Hungary was bankrupted by both,” he says, adding with a Trumpian flourish “with due modesty, I figured out what to do and did it”. Even so, he is happy to embrace his nation’s former tormentors from Russia who are providing Hungary with fossil fuels and a new nuclear power plant, much to the chagrin of the west, especially major trading partner Germany and its chancellor Angela Merkel who, it is widely reported, cannot even bring herself to speak to Orbán. But whether he can manipulate Vladimir Putin in the way he attempts to manipulate other putative allies remains moot.
For the moment “Nem Nem Soha!” is useful rhetoric for Orbán to hide behind. It is ambiguous enough for him to stop short of demanding a return of the territories lost in 1920, a demand that could and would never be met by the international community, yet as a propaganda slogan it allows him to show his supporters that he will never be prepared to accept it. It is unspoken acceptance dressed up as belligerent defiance, a pragmatism belied by the speech László Kövér, parliament speaker and ally of Orbán, made earlier this year. “Engrave in [your] hearts the lessons of Trianon. We Hungarians can’t change the past, we can only change its most painful consequences,” he said.
In the meantime, this triangulation helps Fidesz maintain a level of support many EU leaders would dream of. Yet the forces of Hungarian liberalism are not totally in retreat. Budapest’s mayor, Gergely Karácsony – elected in 2019 and a fierce opponent of Orbán – has said this: “Orbán can only scapegoat Trianon, migrants and overseas financiers for so long. At some point, especially post Covid-19, he will have to engage in real politics, the stuff of real people’s lives.” Jobs created by state schemes will be under pressure as lockdown lifts, as will wages. EU funding for infrastructure projects will almost certainly be less generous while Orbán’s critics purged from the civil service, schools and state companies will have long memories. Allegations of corruption and diverting public funds into individuals’ pockets will still need to be addressed. “At that point progressives need to be ready with some answers,” says Karácsony.
Meanwhile, the century-old Treaty of Trianon will maintain its place in Hungary’s political discourse. It was an imperfect solution to an imperfect peace – a jigsaw of nationalities and ethnicities thrown into the air and scattered across the landscape of central Europe – beneficial for some, far less so for others. So imperfect, in fact, that it is still being argued over today. It is said that the victors get to write history – something that would suit this Viktor just fine. But will he be allowed to?
Some names in this article have been changed