The Coffee House

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52903721


(Click to enlarge)
(Source: CoolKoon; View licence terms)

Exactly 100 years ago, in the Trianon palace at Versailles, two medium-ranking Hungarian officials signed away two thirds of their country, and 3.3 million of their compatriots.

A new monument has appeared in the past weeks in front of parliament in Budapest, among many already erected by Viktor Orban's government to Hungary's past glories.

For Hungary the 1920 treaty was a national wound that still festers to this day. Mr Orban's message to the world is that Hungary must now be respected. For his critics, he has dug deeper into that wound.

As the Austro-Hungarian empire fell apart at the end of World War One, historic Hungary was forced to cede what is now Slovakia, Vojvodina, Croatia, part of Slovenia, Ruthenia, the Burgenland and Transylvania to the new states of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, to a much-enlarged Romania, and even to Austria, a fellow loser in the war.

US President Woodrow Wilson's proposal for the self-determination of all national minorities was valid for everyone except Hungary, claim the Hungarians.

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Yeah, this would've been a major blow to Hungary: the country lost 71% of its territory, and 13.3 million of its people (dropping from a population of 20.9 million to 7.6 million). The areas it lost were majority non-Hungarian; however, they did include 3.3 million ethnic Hungarians. The map at the top of the thread does a pretty good job of illustrating the situation (and, to this day, many of the surrounding countries have pretty substantial Hungarian minorities).

Looking at that map, it seems like the treaty was a real half-measure: it carved Hungary up into ethnicity-based nation-states, but without the population exchanges that would have made those nation-states ethnically homogeneous. Of course, those population exchanges would have created plenty of problems of their own (so I'm not making any argument either way on whether they should have happened) - but, looking at that map, it's hardly surprising that there are plenty of irredentist and nationalist movements in that part of Europe today ...

Oh, the issue of Transylvania is a very thorny issue in Romania. Not quite as much in Slovakia, where Hungarian is official in some districts.

However, the notion that it was only Hungarians that were affected is lunacy. The Germans and the Austrians (and I think the Turks as well) were treated similarly, and the Germans and Austrians were forbidden from unifying as a single state as well. Not sure if Bulgaria was, since they only lost Western Thrace (via the Treaty of Neuilly).