The Treaty of Trianon, One Hundred Years Later

Posted on by


Suleiman

The Treaty of Trianon, which dismembered the state of Hungary after the Great War, came into force exactly one hundred years ago today. Hungary and the Western Allies signed the instrument at the Grand Trianon Palace in Versailles; hence its name.

Hungary ended up losing two-thirds of its territory under the terms of the treaty, which stranded more than 40% of its population outside the borders of Hungary without anyone having to move.

Our Hungarian correspondent CrossWare has translated the following essay about the Treaty of Trianon, which relates Trianon to the earlier Muslim invasion, from the conservative portal PestiSracok.hu:

Suleiman was also present at the Trianon execution attempt

by László Kovács Vésey
May 25, 2020

Like when a man is beaten down with bat, so was the Trianon peace dictatorship: he falls to his knees, the world spins around him, and he doesn’t even understand what happened to him. To date, we have not recovered from it, either as a country or as a people. Those who demand that we at last leave this Trianon problem behind us and deal instead with the future do not take note of reality, because the past cannot be left behind unfinished. Trianon itself is a good example of this, as it has not fallen into our head without antecedents. Even a hundred years ago, the unprocessed past, our own omissions, and the fruits of the trickery of our enemies ripened together.

In today’s eyes it is almost inconceivable that Hungary came to the end of the Middle Ages as a sparingly stable and unified country, one of the leading powers in Europe. Even if the nobles and lords intervened at times in the king’s affairs and were able to stir up internal strife, no one could question the existence of a unified royal power. The kingdom had serious reserves of power, and was rich in precious metals, ores, and salt, not to mention food. Hungary had one and a half times as many inhabitants as England or Poland, two and a half times as many as the Czech Republic, and we had a decisive influence on the life of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. There was no mention of a united Germany and Italy at that time; France was working on the creation of a centralized kingdom, just as a similar process took place in Spain after the success of the Reconquista. Besides ourselves, the latter two states were real military powers in that era.

It may even be considered a vagary of fate that in the immediate vicinity of this Hungary, which was a great power in all respects, the Ottoman Empire, which surpassed the strength of all European countries, had arisen. To this day there is no consensus among historians as to whether we would have been able to defend ourselves, but if we had, it would have required unparalleled self-discipline and conscious unity for two centuries from the king, nobles, and serfs. We lost the inevitable clash, but the Turks did not have enough strength to swallow our entire country. Thus, we did not sink into the Balkans (Transylvania, Partium and the South, after Trianon), but in terms of population, nothing worse could have happened to us. For two centuries our country became a battleground, with marches of the ever-increasing Ottoman, Habsburg, and Transylvanian armies regularly passing through our territory, requisitioning the peasantry that remained after taxation and double taxation. And if only they had just taken the taxes!

We Have Suffered a Disastrous Destruction

The Ottoman looting of the rural populations was accompanied by a significant extinction of the population and the destruction of the settlement structure. The whole countryside was depopulated, and many villages disappeared forever. If we look at the map of present-day Hungary, we can see that there are still only rare settlements in the Great Plain. During the uncertain period of occupation, instead of defenseless villages, people concentrated in a few swollen market towns and settled on large-scale animal husbandry, which was more sustainable in terms of possible escape, rather than farming. For this reason, there are settlements with a larger population and sparsely populated areas in the Great Plain, and the instances of single standalone farms are also rooted in this fact. But the Hungarian population remained at least partially here.


Hungary’s settlement density — the footprint of the Ottoman Turks is still visible today (source: terport.hu)

Muslim conquerors killed a large number of people and drove the enslaved Hungarians in endless columns to Istanbul and then sold them to various corners of the empire. During the Turkish conquest of 1521-1568, the Fifteen Years’ War of 1591-1606, the Austro-Turkish War of 1663-1664, and the expulsion of the Turks between 1683 and 1699, we suffered immeasurable horrors, probably the most brutal genocide in Europe in the last thousand years. At that time the Hungarians of Szerémség disappeared from the Hungarian majority of Temesköz, but by the end of the Turkish expulsion, the Hungarian population of Baranya, Tolna, Somogy counties and Partium had largely disappeared. These flat areas were the main terrain of the movements, so their populations became extinct, which in the vast majority of cases meant the Hungarian population.

Our Numbers Were Dwindling, While Everybody Else Was Thriving

The Turkish conquest caused catastrophic Hungarian loss of life in the 16th century, when the rest of the population of Europe increased significantly. Ottoman jihadists destroyed 4.5 million Hungarian souls, and 200 years later left a 3.5 million pile of rubble behind. Four-fifths of the population before Mohács was Hungarian, but only half of the population in the country liberated from the Turks, because Romanians who had survived the wars in the mountains had fled to the depopulated plains, and many Romanians and Serbs had migrated from the Balkans. The Rákóczi War of Independence, followed by a severe plague in its final years, completed the destruction.


During the Rákóczi War of Independence, a ruined, depopulated, bled-out country tried to become independent. (Painting by Endre Veszprémi about the meeting of Ferenc Rákóczi and Tamás Esze)

In the early 1700s the Habsburg dynasty, deep in dept, wanted to see a quickly taxable population in Hungary, which they “liberated” with costly wars. The ruler did not agree to the request of the Hungarian nobility to return the fleeing Hungarian remnant population to the territories liberated from the Turks — it would have needed a century to fill the space. Instead, millions of settlers invaded Hungary, bringing Romanians, Serbs, and Swabians (Germans) on imperial orders so that Vienna could gain a reliable force at the backs of the Hungarians. Moreover, even the remaining Hungarian population was deported from Temesköz at the behest of the emperor, and Swabians were moved into their houses to make it a German-majority territory.

During the 18th century, in a relatively peaceful period, there was serious population growth throughout Europe, including in Hungary, but this was no longer our growth. By 1800, the population of the country had approached the number that would have corresponded to population trends in Europe, but in the meantime we had also lost our own country in terms of population. At the time of the birth of István Széchenyi, we Hungarians were as many as at the death of King Matthias. The three hundred years that passed between those dates could not be recovered. If we had suffered only as much war and destruction during this time as the rest of Europe, a Hungary of 11 to 12 million people would have emerged in the 19th century, including about 10 million Hungarians. Instead, with a number of 9 million, Hungary entered the period with only 3.5 million true Hungarians. At the end of the Middle Ages, it was possible to go from Dévény to Kézdivásárhely travelling only through Hungarian villages, but at the dawn of the Reformation we were already a minority there.

The Immigrants Become Usurpers

The foreign masses who settled in Hungary soon awoke to their self-consciousness and began to see themselves not as welcomed guests, but as the legitimate owners of the territories they inhabited. From the beginning of the 19th century, referring to the Romanians, Serbs, Croats and even the Slovaks, the plan to divide Hungary lived even in Czech circles, while the imperial court had long hoped that with the settlement of Swabian masses, they would be able to Germanize the country. With the exception of the Swabians, the population of the nationalities was higher than that of the Hungarians, and the mass killings by the Romanians and Serbs during the War of Independence in 1848-49 further worsened our proportion.


The loss of population of the Hungarians during the Turkish era

The good two centuries that passed between the expulsion of the Turks and Trianon, despite all our apparent and intermittent successes, it is the story of how we lost our country. In some of our areas, this has happened before. The Pechen population of the Guardian region was destroyed by the Tatars and then settled with the Germans, and the Szekler border guards of the Moravian Valley (now the Slovak-Austrian border) crumbled in the Hussite wars of the 1400s, and then Moravians moved in to take their place. The central parts of the country were de-Hungarianized [forceful elimination of Hungarians in the occupied territories] by the Ottoman Turks, and then during the resettlement the Hungarians had to compete with the foreign masses, brought in at our backs. At this time, ethnic boundaries shifted so that they were already similar to the borders established in Trianon. In Transylvania there was a minor population destruction; typically the Hungarians living in the southern part, the Mureş Valley, became rarer in Turkish times, then in the 18th century and 19th century the Romanian genocides sealed its fate. The fact that Szeklerland separated from the Hungarian mass and became a language island was caused by the Romanization of the Mezoség. At the time of the expulsion of the Turks, the low birthrate of the protestant Hungarian population in the Hungarian-majority area resulted in a declining population, so within two hundred years, in peacetime, without resettlement, the ratio tipped in favor of the Romanians.

This is How a People Ends Up When It Desperately Tries to Leave the Past Behind

Under such circumstances, it was a fatal mistake not to face reality and desperately try to leave the past behind. The Hungarian nobility soothed themselves in the belief that the country that had shattered after Mohács had recovered, but this was not true. They did not take note of the Serbian, Romanian and Czech organizations, although the intentions of the nationalities were clearly visible: to separate the territories they inhabited from Hungary. Centuries of conscious work have been put into this, both domestically and internationally. A hundred years later they continue their work. The countries that invaded our territories are still doing their de-Hungarianization, and they have worries about a possible revision on a daily basis. They have not yet completed their program. Trianon is not the past for them, but the present.

The past cannot be left unresolved behind us, as I wrote at the beginning. One possible solution for Trianon would be the disappearance of the Hungarians, but very few people outside the DK [Democratic Coalition — Hungarian post-Communist party with strong EU globalist ties] would like it. Moreover, in this respect, the “Bright West” [sarcastic name for the Western societies, which was always depicted in a perfect light to the lowlife eastern yokels] did a partial job in 1920, as they left a small Hungary, and no matter how truncated it was, it retained the original Hungary with the population who created it. Then there are other possible solutions for Trianon, but they also include the Hungarians. And until this hundred-year-old case is resolved, neither we, nor those who have benefited from Hungarian territories, can close it and move on.

An afterword from the translator:

I can only speak from the point of view of an average citizen about what the loss of their original 1000-year-old country means to Hungarians. I base my understanding on what I learned in school, and more importantly, on what I have learned from my parents and grandparents. Our family has a fairly long history. The earliest written branch of the family tree is from the Battle of Belgrade (Nándorfehérvár) in 1456.

My ancestor was knighted after the battle and given a small plot of land for his heroism. This battle is why Catholic church bells ring every day at noon: the Pope ordered this to honor the Hungarians’ victory over the Turks.

My family always did its duty for the homeland. This includes my grandfather, who fought in the First then the Second World War. He received the Order of Vitéz for his performance (equivalent to something between the Silver Star and the Medal of Honor). In addition to these two ancestors, countless others fought and died for my country. The Baron is probably right: we are like Klingons, not only in our language, but in our stubbornness and our fearless fight for freedom. Despite the fact that we were betrayed by the West countless times, from the time we protected them from the Muslim invasions through the 1956 Revolution against the Soviets.

Austria dragged us into the First World War, but at the end even Austria received territories from Hungary. In 1920 at Trianon the Hungarian diplomats were not allowed to be present for the diplomatic discussions about the fate of our country, just as in 2020 the Hungarian representatives were not allowed to be present in the EU Parliament debate about how to punish Hungary.

So what has changed? NOTHING!

But I think I understand why they are so keen on destroying us: because we are witnesses to how the West betrayed us, robbed us. We were already fighting the Deep State of the time (the Fuggers and others) centuries before they become the Globalists of today. In the 1848 freedom fight, our Prime Minister Lajos Kossuth, who was himself a Freemason, but also a patriot, wanted to have an independent currency for the country. Soon Western Europe and the Russians both stood against us.

We saw in the Second World War how the members of the “national” socialists’ arrow-cross party changed clothes to become international socialists and later establish the infamous Hungarian Communist Gestapo, the ÁVH.

We have seen all their tricks. We have already experienced population replacement and cultural destruction. Under the leadership of the right-wing Fidesz party and Viktor Orbán, we are now also demonstrating an alternative to the rainbow colored liberal Islamo-Fascist and Neo-Marxist new world order, while we are also living proof that white people can build a civilization without the suppression and colonization of others, collapsing the narrative of the Cultural Marxists.

No wonder they want us gone. But we will “not go gentle into that good night.” This is not our first war against overwhelming odds, and we will fight, because life is not worth living if one is not free.

We have written numerous songs about the pain of having Hungarian brothers and sisters outside of the present borders, who are abused daily just for being born Hungarian. One of the best is here:

We are of one blood (by Familiar Faces).

22 thoughts on “The Treaty of Trianon, One Hundred Years Later”

  2. Thank you for this look into Hungarian history.

    [1] “Hungary came to the end of the Middle Ages as a sparingly stable and unified country”: What does “sparingly stable” mean? “very stable, with stability to spare”?
    [2] “Ottoman jihadists destroyed 4.5 million Hungarian souls, and 200 years later left a 3.5 million pile of rubble behind.”: 3.5 million *what*?
    [3] What do the colors represent in the map titled “The loss of population of the Hungarians during the Turkish era”?
    [4] “the Romanization of the Mezoség”: the Romanianization of the Mezoség region?
    [5] “we are like Klingons, not only in our language”: haha! When I tried to find the Hungarian corresponding to “sparingly stable”, I couldn’t find it. With other European languages, you can usually figure out the meaning of words from Latin, Greek, or Germanic roots, but not with Hungarian.
    [6] “the “national” socialists’ arrow-cross party”: had to look this up:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_Cross

    • [1] – Yes it was very stable and rich.
      [2] – 3.5 million Hungarian souls. Let’s not forget that at that moment a big part of the population was no longer “native” Hungarian, but a variety of immigrants, who landed there.
      [3] – The greenish color shows the remaining Hungarians, the white the replaced population.
      [4] – Yes, thanks!
      [6] – yes it was the “local department” of the Nazis. Nasty bunch and they really changed clothing… There is a museum in Budapest, if you ever visit, please go there: The House of Terror https://www.terrorhaza.hu/en

  3. Thank you for posting this excellent and informative essay, particularly the afterword. I have visited Hungary several times in the past and before visiting, I did the “due diligence that all travellers must do. More people should be aware of Hungarian history which explains the natural opposition of this small country to the corrupt and self serving entity in Brussels.

  4. The Hungarian National Anthem
    God Bless the Hungarians
    With good cheer and prosperity.
    Extend a protective arm
    If they fight the enemy.
    Torn by misfortune for long,
    Give them happy years.
    These people have expiated
    The past and the future.

    By Thy help our fathers gained
    Kárpát’s proud and sacred height;
    Here by Thee a home obtained
    Heirs of Bendegúz, the knight.
    Where’er Danube’s waters flow
    And the streams of Tisza swell
    Árpád’s children, Thou dost know,
    Flourished and did prosper well.

    For us let the golden grain
    Grow upon the fields of Kún,
    And let Nectar’s silver rain
    Ripen grapes of Tokay soon.
    Thou our flags hast planted o’er
    Forts where once wild Turks held sway;
    Proud Vienna suffered sore
    From King Mátyás’ dark array.

    But, alas! for our misdeed,
    Anger rose within Thy breast,
    And Thy lightnings Thou did’st speed
    From Thy thundering sky with zest.
    Now the Mongol arrow flew
    Over our devoted heads;
    Or the Turkish yoke we knew,
    Which a free-born nation dreads.

    O, how often has the voice
    Sounded of wild Osman’s hordes,
    When in songs they did rejoice
    O’er our heroes’ captured swords!
    Yea, how often rose Thy sons,
    My fair land, upon Thy sod,
    And Thou gavest to these sons,
    Tombs within the breast they trod!

    Though in caves pursued he lie,
    Even then he fears attacks.
    Coming forth the land to spy,
    Even a home he finds he lacks.
    Mountain, vale – go where he would,
    Grief and sorrow all the same –
    Underneath a sea of blood,
    While above a sea of flame.

    ‘Neath the fort, a ruin now,
    Joy and pleasure erst were found,
    Only groans and sighs, I trow,
    In its limits now abound.
    But no freedom’s flowers return
    From the spilt blood of the dead,
    And the tears of slavery burn,
    Which the eyes of orphans shed.

    Pity, God, the Magyar, then,
    Long by waves of danger tossed;
    Help him by Thy strong hand when
    He on grief’s sea may be lost.
    Fate, who for so long did’st frown,
    Bring him happy times and ways;
    Atoning sorrow hath weighed down
    All the sins of all his days.

      • Oh, yes you do! You both belong to the Finno-Ugric language group. Your languages have a not-so-distant common ancestor. They are probably as closely related as, say, Danish and Spanish.

        • Speaking of common ancestors, I have something to say about the Battle of Nándorfehérvár in 1456.

          I am a descendant through my mother of Wawrzęta Korwin, a Romanian from Hungary whose ethnic and geographical origin, name and heraldic emblem (a raven holding a gold ring) are identical to those of the Hunyadi family. John Hunyadi was the victor of the battle and is a Hungarian national hero.

          This strongly suggests that I have a common ancestor with John Hunyadi and with his son Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary 1458-1490.

  6. Of course, all other nations like especially Romanians with which you have a beef for hundred of years and stole TRANSILVANIA from, all where criminal and thieves.Only Hungarians where clean and dandy.Hungarians have no roots, they are Huns coming from Asia like predatory tribes and after they kill and burn all in their site, finally they found a plane where to situate their exhausted tribe.That happen at the end of the Roman Empire at the dwindling of the Roman Empire.
    The author cries for Austro Hungarian imperium mainly, cries because he lost TRANSILVANIA…for his information THEY WILL NEVER HAVE IT AGAIN so he can just die in peace thinking at his minuscule [deprecated] country surrounded by walls.
    Amen.

    • Ah a Romanian showed up… How unexpected. You guys are living in a lie and you know it, hence your frustration. That is why you are so eager to speak up, even for a historical essay, which talks about the effects of Muslim invasion on the population. You are all pitiful as you bark, whenever your ill-gotten land comes to mind.

  7. Hungarians are also Turks.
    You converted to christianity so now you must face blm & slave morality.

    Toodles.

  9. I’ve got issues with this historical viewpoint. Too many to go into here, but the idea that Moravians pushed out the Szekelys from the Moravian Valley is particularly silly and ignorant of the history of the region. It is true that the Magyars conquered Moravia in 907 and that the kingdom ceased to exist. But Moravia did not become part of the Hungarian kingdom and the Magyars were expulsed by the emperor Otto I. in the battle of Lechfeld in 955 then gave the region to his ally, the Premyslid king of Bohemia, Boleslav I. For most of the subsequent history until 1918, Moravia belonged to the Lands of the Czech Crown, except for a short period in the 15th century after Matthias Corvinus briefly claimed it after winning the war against George Podebrad. There was however never any landed Hungarian gentry in Moravia, and after a twenty-year Hungarian hegemony, the region became a part of Jagello kingdom that united Poland, Hungary and the Czech lands. When the Czech kingdom passed to Habsburgs after the Battle of Mohacz in 1526, Moravia was again recognized as a holding of the Czech king and remained that way until the kingdom was abolished in 1867, at which point it became a part of Austria.

  10. This is wishful thinking history. The Romanians and the Slavik Slovaks were indigenous there for many hundreds of of years, or thousands of years in the case of Romanians, before the Magyar hordes invaded from the East, following their Hun cousins. The native Romanians were oppressed by the invading Magyars, until their rightful independence and reunification with their brothers in what is now România.
    Baron, you need to be careful about stepping on Eastern European mines. Remember, a coin has two sides.

    • Yes. The awakening of national identity is an unpleasant thing. As a rule, it ends with great bloodshed. Since we live in a world with manual control, we can personally observe how some nations are allowed to “wake up”, others are forbidden.

      A few years ago, we observed this in Ukraine. Their mass appearances “Moskalyaku (neglectful nickname of Russians) – on a branch (hang)” Then they ran with portraits of the bloodsucker Bandera – who staged the genocide of the Poles. Now they have a devastated country and slavery on the agricultural fields of the Poles.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia47r_CEZJc

  11. “The Romanians and the Slavik Slovaks were indigenous there for many hundreds of of years, or thousands of years in the case of Romanians,”

    I know this is the Romanian “official” theory, but there are many problems with it:

    – The Roman province of Dacia existed for a relatively short time compared to the other romanized territories.
    – It was occupied mainly by troops from Asia whose native language was not Latin, so they could hardly romanize anyone.
    – It did not comprise the present Romanian language area, only parts of it. That means that the territory outside of the province would have received less Roman influence, causing a language continuum just like in Italy or the Iberian peninsula where there are multiple dialects/languages that sometimes aren’t event mutually intelligible. In contrast to that, the Romanian language area does not have significant differences in dialect, suggesting a fan-out migration from a core area.
    – It has no explanation for the lack of germanic influence in the romanian language that every other neolatin language received from the migratory people, compared to the huge slavic influence (in Romanian even basic words like “yes” or “love” are of slavic origin).
    – It cannot explain the integration of the Romanians into the Eastern Christian church without any written records, and the usage of Old Church Slavonic as the language of writing instead of some form of Latin. Which wouldn’t need any explanation if we accept that Romanians lived inside the Eastern Roman empire at that time, surrounded by a slavic mass.
    – There is hardly any toponymy of Romanian origin in the present Romanian territory before the 14th century. However we can find (a)romanian placenames in Macedonia before that. You can also take into account that the other 2 languages that have similar grammatical constructs (like the definite article as a postfix) are to the east and west of this region (Bulgarian and Albanian), and you have basically figured out Romanian ethnogenesis.

    Now I’m not saying that the Romanians arrived later than the Hungarians to their present homeland (a favorite thesis of Hungarian historiography, essentially flipping the indigenous vs. foreign narrative). The ruling dinasty of the 2nd Bulgarian empire (the Asen family) was of Romanian origin, and this empire extended far north into Transylvania, before being crushed by the invading Hungarian tribes who came in as allies of the Byzantine Empire. There could have remained Romanian elements in the mountains as the Hungarians occupied the lowlands. What is certain is that the ethnic structure of Transylvania as it started to get documented after its integration as a voivodship into the Hungarian kingdom was with the Romanians inhabiting the mountainous areas and the colonized Hungarians/Szeklers/Saxons the river valleys. After the collapse of the Cumanian empire due to the Mongolian invasion in 1242 out of these mountainous areas the Romanians started conquering and inhabiting the areas between the Southern Carpathians and the Danube, respectively the Eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river – creating the principalities of Wallachia and Moldova, the first Romanian statelets, initially under Hungarian suzeranity (as their founders were subjects of the Hungarian crown). Regarding Transylvania, as there were no ethnic censuses at that time, based on the toponymy and taxation records noting the settlement types, Hungarian historians judge the percentage of Romanians to be around 25% (I couldn’t find any Romanian methodology and corresponding estimates, as Romanian historiography seems to stick to the “we were always the majority here” narrative). One also has to take into account that before the arrival of potato and corn from the American continent (which have become staple foods since then), the mountainous areas could sustain far more less population that the lowlands.

    “The native Romanians were oppressed by the invading Magyars, until their rightful independence and reunification with their brothers in what is now România.”

    How was a Romanian serf opressed compared to a Hungarian serf? Since this was a society structured by the principles of feudalism, and not along ethnic lines, it is unhistorical to speak of such things until the advent of modern nationalism. It is true that because the elite of the kingdom was mainly ethnic Hungarians (Magyars), the aristocracy of the other nations became assimilated – although in Maramures or Fagaras many Romanian nobles remained. This had the effect of having a weak national elite at the start of the modern era, and consequently the Romanian ethnic community having little political representation, even though by the end of the 18th century it achieved absolute majority in Transylvania.
    This “thousand year old oppression” thesis, along with “reunification” – suggesting that there was a united Romanian state before the Hungarians arrived, and modern Romania is just the rightful reinstatement of that – is straight out of the nationalist Romanian narrative, which is – just like the other modern nationalisms – a leftist construct.

    You can see the ground prepared for a similar narrative by a BBC piece a while ago that claimed that blacks have already been present in Britain since Roman times. Over time, this could probably get augmented by the assertion that they are the indigenous population, whites came only at the time of the Norman invasion, and the reason we have no proof of mass PoC presence there is because they have been systematically oppressed and left out of the history books.

    Getting back to the original article, I think it’s a bit unclear (and too one-sided) for someone unfamiliar with the history of the region. I could sum it up by the following:

    – During the Turkish wars, the Hungarian Kingdom – although reconstituted by the beginning of the 18th century – had a huge population drop that mainly affected the lowlands/river valleys where the ethnic Hungarians lived.

    – The Slovaks, Carpatho-Ukrainians (Ruthenians) and Romanians who mainly lived in the mountains survived these times better, and could also repopulate some of the territory.

    – The Serbs had a population movement towards the north to escape Ottoman rule, populating southern Hungary, while demographically losing Kosovo, considered to be the cradle of their nation.

    – If you want some proper maps, look here: http://www.mtafki.hu/konyvtar/karpat-pannon2015/en/supplementary_maps.html . The first 2 maps (1495 vs. 1784) show the ethnic makeup before and after the Turkish wars.

    – The net effect was that the percentage of Hungarians dropped from 75% to below 50%. During the national awakening of the early 19th century, the Hungarian elite could not find any proper way to organise the country taking into account the national feelings of all the ethnic groups. Lajos Kossuth who led the 1848 revolution was not just a Freemason, but a stooge, who dutifully claimed Magyar supremacy, to which the Romanians and the Serbs started to massacre the local Hungarian population, igniting a bloody civil war.

    – Then came the peace treaty of Trianon at the end of WWI, which partitioned the kingdom more or less along ethnic lines. But the Hungarian delegation was only invited to sign the treaty, at the discussions over the new borders only the representatives of the enemy nations were present, who of course gave a distorted picture that benefited their interests. This resulted in the Czechoslovak border pushed way south of the pretty clear Slovak-Hungarian ethnic line, with 800.000 Hungarians in Czechoslovakia and 100.000 Slovaks remaining in Hungary. Transylvania and the neighbouring areas were awarded to Romania, with 1.5 million Hungarians ending up in Romania while only 50.000 Romanians remained in Hungary. There was no talk of an equitable partition, even though Romania agreed to split the Banat with Yugoslavia (having been promised the whole territory in the 1916 secret treaty based on which she entered the war), with an equal number of minorities on both sides. No such opportunity was given to Hungary – and this is where ideology comes in, because if one claims that supposedly indigenous people should have a privilege over everyone else, or supposedly oppressed people should have a privilege over their alleged opressors (presented as compensation for past wrongs), what you get is not justice but a (sometimes even more brutal) reversal of the earlier situation.

    What one can learn from Hungary’s plight a hundred years ago in my view:
    1. Demographic shifts can have serious consequences, sometimes only centuries after.
    2. Multicultural societies are hard to manage. Without a suitable elite and a common identity that can bind the people together, such a society will collapse sooner or later. And liberalism is particularly unsuitable for integrating different cultures, as it emphasizes individualism against collective identity.

Comments are closed.