Treaty of Trianon
Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory and about sixty per cent of its population at Trianon in June 1920. The kingdom that was dismembered had been the eastern half of Austria-Hungary and was itself an empire in miniature: Hungarians were under half its population, with Romanians, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Germans and Ruthenes making up the rest, and a policy of Magyarisation had been applied to all of them for fifty years. The successor states were already in possession when the conference met. Romania held Transylvania, Czechoslovakia held Slovakia and Ruthenia, and the new Yugoslav kingdom held Croatia and the Vojvodina; Hungary had also had a communist government under Béla Kun for 133 days and had been invaded by Romania, which occupied Budapest. The treaty confirmed the facts on the ground with adjustments made for railways and rivers rather than for populations. That is the grievance. Some 3.3 million Hungarians were left outside the borders, about a third of them in compact blocks adjoining them — the Székely of eastern Transylvania, the southern Slovak strip, the Vojvodina — and self-determination was applied to everyone else and not to them. Plebiscites were held in one district only. The army was capped at 35,000 and reparations imposed. Interwar Hungary was organised around revision, its flags at half mast for twenty years, and it entered the Second World War on the German side to recover the territory. Hungarian politics still runs on it. The name is the one the treaty is known by in Hungary and almost nowhere else, and 4 June has been an official day of national cohesion since 2010. The other successor states regard the same document as their founding charter, which is the difficulty in a sentence.
- Year: 1920 CE
- Category: Political
