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CHAPTER THREE
Hungary
Between The Wars
THE STRUGGLE FOR INTERNAL POLITICAL STABILITY AND TERRITORIAL
INTEGRITY, 1918-20
From Károlyi's Baurgeois-Democratic Revolution to Kun's Soviet Republic
The Kádrolyi's
government's last-minute attempt to persuade the Entente Powers to conclude a
separate peace with an independent Hungary and make generous concessions to
persuade the non-Magyar peoples to remain within Hungary failed during the
first days of November 1918. Despite the agreement of the Allies to leave a
final settlement of the new east central European frontiers until after the
Paris Peace Conference the Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Rumanians, Croats,
Serbs and Slovenes, helped by the French military, now seized those parts of
Hungary to which they laid claim. Ignoring the armistice signed by the
commander of the French Balkan army, Franchet D'Esperey, and the Károlyi
government in Belgrade on 7 November 1918, the
Rumanian National Council in Arad
notified the Hungarian authorities on 10 November of the takeover of the
administration in twenty-three counties and parts of three other counties.
Rumanian troops advanced into Transylvania whose annexation was unilaterally
proclaimed by the Bucharest
government on 11 January 1919. The Serbs had already taken over the
administration of the Bácska, the Baranya and the western Banat
on 24 November 1918, presenting the Hungarians with a well-nigh irreversible fait accompli. Czech troops advanced into Slovakia,
or 'Upper Hungary' as it was formerly
called, and were poised to occupy the districts of Ung, Ugosca, Bereg and
Máramaros with their Ruthenian population, to which the Rumanians
also laid claim. On 3 and 23 December 1918, the Allied Supreme Command agreed
to the takeover of the civilian administration by the Czech authorities. On
29 October, the diet of the Kingdom
of Croatia and Slavonia had
announced an end to its ties with Hungary
and the Habsburg monarchy and joined Serbia. In view of the realities
of the situation the Hungarians were unable to take any effective measures to
prevent the break-up of their country.
Hungarian poster reflecting territorial
claims of Hungarys
neighbours after her voluntary disarmament
This dismemberment of the Monarchy, which
the Hungarians were powerless to resist, caused a growing sense of bitterness
among the Hungarian population and increasingly undermined the prime
minister's prestige. Károlyi was regarded as relatively pro-Entente and a
politician who enjoyed good relations with western statesmen. As early as
1914 in the USA and again
in neutral Switzerland in
the autumn of 1917 he had argued for his belief in the need for an
evolutionary change in Hungary's
socio-economic and political conditions. The tough actions taken by the
emerging nation states, tolerated, though not always approved of by the
allied governments, showed that, contrary to expectations, Hungary could not hope for more
considerate treatment. The Károlyi government was particularly disappointed
by the Entente Powers' growing readiness to depart from the principles set
out in Wilson's Fourteen Points, which those
groups willing to introduce reforms had been in the end prepared to use as a
basis for the necessary restructuring of an independent Hungary. The argument that Hungary's
premier, István Tisza, like the Hungarian population in general, had opposed
the unleashing of the First World War in the summer of 1914 failed to
persuade the Allies to grant more favourable peace terms.
With the growing willingness of the Allied
governments to allow a ring of territorially well-endowed successor states to
emerge, confining Hungary to a relatively narrow area of Magyar settlement,
the progressive idea of the new minister for nationalities, Oszkár Jászi, to
make Hungary a kind of 'eastern Switzerland', became untenable. As well as
analysing and condemning former policies towards the nationalities, Jászi
proposed working towards a new form of coexistence between the nations in the
Danube Basin on the basis of extensive
political and cultural autonomy. However, during the course of the
discussions with Slovak and Rumanian representatives it soon became clear
that even the most generous concessions could not overcome their desire to
join their conationals in the new or already existing nation states which had
been greatly enlarged by the acquisition of new territories. The I
ncreasingly obvious impossibility of breaking out of Hungary's foreign policy
isolation and preventing the country's territorial disintegration prior to
the terms of the Paris Peace Conference being made known also increasingly
limited Károlyi's room for manoeuvre in domestic politics.
The first new government measures were
infused with a progressive spirit and met with broad approval. A new
electoral law extended the franchise to all men and the majority of women
over 21 who had been Hungarian citizens for a period of at least six years.
Future elections were to be conducted by secret ballot. In a similar liberal
and generous spirit the government guaranteed by law freedom of the press,
assembly and speech. The Ruthenian population was granted autonomy and
preparations made to introduce a land reform. The workers won the acceptance of
their demand for an eight-hour working day, first raised a decade previously,
although there was still insufficient work available and food shortages. The
effects of the Allied blockade, the disruption to Hungary's
close economic ties with Austria,
together with the military occupation of major territories in the north,
south and east of the country, all contributed to a general situation which
brought factory production to a standstill. Shortages of raw materials and
fuel, together with the disruption to freight traffic, produced maximum
economic chaos. The unemployment figures rose daily. Returning prisoners of
war and demobilised soldiers swelled the flood of refugees from the occupied
territories who were often homeless and incapable of making ends meet. The
country's finances had been completely ruined by the war and could not be
used to alleviate the widespread distress. Appeals for voluntary donations
showed people's willingness to help, but donations of clothes and money were
inadequate to provide effective long-term relief. A feeling of growing
bitterness spread among people facing basic food shortages in the urban
areas, since they suspected landowners and wealthy peasants of deliberately
holding back deliveries to the starving towns. The refusal of many landowners
to cultivate their fields in view of the impending land reform and the
growing impatience of the rural proletariat, which saw no sign of the
promised redistribution of cultivable land, heightened tensions and created
an explosive atmosphere.
Because its proposals for a democratic
reform of society were increasingly criticised and condemned by the political
Right as too radical and partisan, the Károlyi government felt obliged to
take steps to prevent developments taking a more radical direction. The
minister of defence, Bartha, who had been behind the setting up of special
armed units to defend the government and the property of the state, was
forced to resign from his post as a result of public pressure. But the
minister of the interior, Count Tivadar Batthyány, also resigned on the
grounds that the measures taken against the threats from the Left were too
lax. Government officials were very hesitant about pushing through laws which
ran counter to their own political beliefs. Members of the army officer corps
founded secret organisations committed to the defence of the fatherland which
Gyula Gömbös, a general staff captain and future prime minister, tried to
unite in the Hungarian Militia Association.
The political Left was also in the process
of organising itself. A small nucleus of political activists had been formed
from among the half a million or so Hungarian soldiers who had ended up in
Russian captivity and had in many cases been influenced by Marxist-Leninist
ideology. After their release from captivity they had spread the message of
Socialist revolution and had made their mark as organisers and speakers at
mass demonstrations both before and after the revolution of 1918. Some, like
Béla Kun, had also taken an active part in the Russian revolution and had
fought in the ranks of the Red Guard. On his return to Budapest Kun, who
derived great authority from being one of Lenin's former colleagues, had
immediately made contact with the Social Democratic Party's left wing and the
Revolutionary Socialists. The latter had played a major part in the
preparation and execution of the 'Chrysanthemum revolution', but were
dissatisfied with the official line of their parties who were content with a
bourgeoisdemocratic revolution. The Soldiers' and Workers' Councils which had
appeared spontaneously in both the capital and the provinces, had not grown
as dynamically as had been hoped. It was felt that it would be impossible to
implement a political programme or gain a say in government without first developing
a strict party organisation. On 24 November 1918, therefore, the Communist
Party of Hungary (Kommunisták Magyarországi Pártja) was founded and
soon published its own newspaper theVörös Újság (Red News).
The new party, which at first concentrated
its activities on the big factories in Budapest
and the soldiers garrisoned in the capital, soon tried to whip up support for
its programme in the provinces too. Its aims were varied, Its propaganda
concentrated on crushing the 'counter-revolution', exposing the betrayal
perpetrated by the 'right-wing' leaders of the Social Democratic Party and
creating a system of Soviets on the Bolshevik model. It also put forward
concrete demands for a 'complete break with the remnants of feudalism', an
end to cooperation with the bourgeoisie and its corrupt politicians and a
change in Hungarian foreign policy away from the Entente and towards an
alliance with the new Soviet Russia. Although the nucleus of the Communist
Party remained relatively small in size, Communist slogans had an effective
appeal in a situation of growing social distress and widespread
dissatisfaction. They helped weaken popular support for the Social Democrats
and thus for the government coalition. Revolutionary Soldiers', Workers' and
Peasants' Councils were now also formed in the provincial towns and pursued
policies very close to the Communist Party programme. As early as late
December demonstrators organised by the Communist Party demanded the
proclamation of a Hungarian
Soviet Republic.
The entire country was engulfed by a wave of strikes as infuriated workers
took over their factories and seized transport and communications
installations. When the government sent in the army to restore order numerous
factories were occupied between the 1 and 5 January 1919 and control of
production passed to the Communist-dominated Soviets.
The government turned out to be no match for
this deeply motivated revolt. After lengthy discussions the internal argument
within the Social Democratic Party, whether, in view of the masses' action
and the Communists' growing influence, it would not make more sense to
withdraw from participation in the government in order to retain some of
their influence with the workers, or whether the Social Democrats could
better defend their positions in the crisis by assuming an even more
prominent role in government, was decided in favour of those who supported
continuing the policy of shared governmental responsibility. The party's
National Council hoped that Count Mihály Karolyi's appointment as President
of the Republic on 11 January 1919 and the entrusting of the former minister
of justice, DU +00E9nes Berinkey, with the formation of a new government
would bring about greater stability. The Social Democrats occupied five posts
in the new government, including Vilmos Böhm as minister of defence. The
Smallholders' Party nominated the popular István Nagyatádi Szábo for the new
government as a man who could be expected to speed up the land reform for
which the peasants were becoming more impatient. The Social Democrats tried
to tame the left wing of their own party at first. After an emergency party
conference had approved tough measures on 28 January 1919 the Budapest
Workers' Council expelled the Communists from its membership and that of the trade
unions. Following the dissolution of the spontaneously elected workers'
councils, which had proved impossible to control, workers' participation was
to be guaranteed by elected shop-floor committees in all factories with more
than 25 employees. The Law for the Protection of the Republic gave the
minister of the interior the power to order the internment of persons
considered dangerous to the state. However, it was members of the right-wing
opposition who proved to be the first victims of the preventive measure. The
government undertook a thorough purge of the bureaucracy, dismissing the
lord-lieutenants of the county administrations. The dissolved county
commissions were replaced by elected People's Councils. The Militia
Association was banned and measures carried out against the conservative
elements around the president's older brother, Count józsef Kádrolyi, and
Count István Bethlen, who tried to unite their supporters in the county
administrations in a new right-wing opposition party. By announcing the law
on land reform on 16 February 1919 the government hoped to calm the
revolutionary mood in the countryside. All estates of over 300 hectares were
to be expropriated and compensation paid to their owners. These were then to
be parcelled out with the aim of creating a new economic structure based on
small peasant farms allocated to the small and dwarf-holding peasantry. The
new president, Mihály Károlyi began personally to redistribute the land on
his great estates in Kálkápolna on 23 February.
However, this land reform sparked off a new
internal political conflict. The large-scale landowners showed little
inclination to support the passage of the proposed legislation and offered
stubborn resistance. The rural proletariat reacted bitterly at the government's
completely inadequate upper limit on the size of individual allocations. They
also criticised the lengthy and cumbersome process of redistribution which
prevented the transfer of ownership in time for the spring planting of crops
and complained at the amount of compensation they were expected to pay, sums
which the poor rural population could not in fact afford. When the government
refused to halt the work of the land distribution committees and satisfy the
calls for reform, voiced with increasing bitterness by the intended
beneficiaries, the number of land seizures by the peasants began to rise from
the beginning of March 1919 onwards as attempts were made to cultivate the
land collectively. Even the newly appointed government officials who were supposed
to take over the leading positions in the county administrations were not
always able to take up office and had to watch helplessly as makeshift
committees, dominated by landless peasants and workers, usurped the
administration's functions. In some provincial towns such as Szeged the town council
was controlled by workers' committees set up by the left-wing Social
Democrats and the Communists.
Even the arrest of the Communist Party's
leaders on 21 February 1919, which the Social Democrats also agreed to after
considerable hesitation, failed to dampen the mood of revolution. The arrests
had come about as a result of a demonstration organised by the Communists
outside the editorial building of the Social Democratic daily newspaper Népszava(The Voice of the
People), where several policemen had been killed the previous day. Since, at
Károlyi's request, the fifty or so defendants were granted the status of
political prisoners, they were also able to lead the Communists from inside
prison and create more difficulties for the government whose image was
completely tarnished, not least because of its lack of success in foreign
policy.
As early as November 1918 the Károlyi
government had tried to establish closer contacts with Italy in the hope of acquiring a
spokesman at the Paris Peace Conference. The government's willingness to
settle the problem of Hungary's
disputed territories and develop economic relations with its neighbours was
communicated to the new South Slav kingdom
of Yugoslavia. In Vienna and Berne, where
the Hungarian diplomats had been accredited without further ado, the
opportunity presented itself of establishing the first direct contacts with
the western Allies and putting the Hungarian case. An economic mission led by
A.E. Taylor, followed by a political mission headed by A.C. Coolidge on 15
January 1919, renewed Hungarian hopes of being included in America's financial aid programme
under the direction of Herbert Hoover. It was clear that the country's
national economic recovery was bound to have an affect on the government's
ability to stabilise the internal political situation. With the Allied
military intervention against Bolshevik Russia fully underway, the Hungarians
felt they could expect an acceptable settlement of the frontier problem from
the Paris Peace Conference, since this appeared to be the only way of
avoiding revolution and a takeover of power by the radical Left in Hungary.
Thus, the measures taken to curb the influence of the Communists also stemmed
from foreign policy considerations.
However, the Peace Conference decision of 26
February 1919, first intimated to the Hungarian government in Budapest on 20 March,
effectively swept the Kádrolyi government from office. It proposed creating a
neutral zone in the south-east of the country in order to separate the
opposing Hungarian and Rumanian forces, which stood ready for battle on the
demarcation line, and envisaged sending in more Allied troops. Acceptance of
these proposals would have exacerbated Hungary's internal political
crisis which had already reached a dangerous level after the Communist Party
announced its intention of liberating its imprisoned leaders by holding a
mass demonstration on 23 March. The Social Democrats, pressed by Károlyi to
take over sole responsibility for the government, intensified their ongoing
negotiations with the imprisoned Communist leaders. In view of the external
political threat faced by Hungary,
the Social Democrats announced their willingness on 21 March to unite with
the Hungarian Communist Party to form the United Workers' Party of Hungary ( Magyarországi Szocialista Párt)
and to form a new government of both parties pledged to implementing
important points in the Communist Party programme. After Károlyi had rejected
the Allies' demands as unacceptable he transferred power 'on behalf of the
proletarian class' to this new government, the Revolutionary Governing
Council ( Forradalmi
Kormányzótanćs). Although its chairman was the Social Democratic
Centralist, Sándor Garbai, it was effectively led by Béla Kun who had secured
his position as head of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
On the 22 March 1919, the new government
proclaimed Hungary
a republic and announced its declared aim of establishing the dictatorship of
the proletariat. Proclaiming its desire to live in peace with all peoples, to
maintain relations with the western powers and arrive at a just compromise
with the country's nationalities, it announced that the most important tasks
facing the new Soviet Republic were the construction of a Socialist
society and the forging of an alliance with the Soviet
Union. Kun, who soon claimed and received dictatorial powers,
placed his faith in the prospect of military help from the Red Army to defend
Hungarian territory, interpreted as a struggle against the imperialism of the
capitalist powers. The vast majority of the population was at first persuaded
by this view and prepared to take up arms to defend Hungary's territorial unity,
although most thought little of the Communists' utopian doctrinaire measures
in internal politics. There was no opposition, nor protests, at first, since
only a completely new political departure appeared to offer Hungary the chance to break out
of its foreign policy isolation and take the heat out of the confused internal
political situation. Although the number of organised Communists remained
few, the majority of Social Democrats, many bourgeois radicals and even
reformist liberals supported the change introduced by the new Soviet
government. There followed a rapid succession of decrees which in the course
of time revealed the dominant influence of the Communists.
On 25 March 1919, the government officially
announced a reorganisation of the armed forces and the creation of the
Hungarian Red Army. This was to be recruited from the organised workers with
political commissars attached to each unit in order to counteract the
influence of the old officer corps and ensure that the troops were
successfully re-educated ideologically. The Red Guard, in which Communist
supporters occupied all the key positions, was charged with maintaining
internal law and order instead of the police and the gendarmerie. The courts
were replaced by revolutionary tribunals on which lay-judges, loyal to the
party line, were given the final say. On 26 March, mining and transport were
nationalised along with industrial concerns with more than twenty employees.
These were to be managed in future by production commissars and controlled by
elected workers' councils. Banks, insurance companies and home ownership were
likewise placed under state control. By placing accommodation under public
ownership an attempt was made to overcome the housing shortage caused by the
flood of refugees. Social policy measures -- wage increases, sexual equality,
the prohibition of child labour, improved educational opportunities -- met
with widespread approval, as did the nationalisation of major commercial
concerns, the introduction of food and consumer goods rationing and the
supervised distribution of food by the trade unions. On 29 March 1919, it was
announced that schools and educational institutions were also now the
property of the state. Up to 80 per cent of elementary schools and 65 per
cent of middle-schools had previously been run by the Church. It was
envisaged that members of the Church's teaching orders would continue to be
employed on condition that they were prepared to enter the state service.
György Lukács, People's Commissar for Education, also proposed a progressive
reform of the universities and the entire range of cultural activities, and
began a campaign against illiteracy.
The government's most radical measure was
the land reform decrees of 3 April. Middle and large-sized estates together
with their inventories were expropriated without compensation and taken into
state ownership. The Church's landed properties were also subsequently
nationalised, although some land was spared in order to support the clergy.
The division of land into individual plots was forbidden. Estates were to be
collectively managed by agricultural cooperatives, whereby the previous
owners, tenants and managers had to take charge as 'production commissars',
who would be subject to control by the People's Soviets, comprising former
rural labourers and farmhands, i.e. the so-called 'collective farm workers'.
In the belief that large-scale enterprises would effectively produce more to
cover food requirements than small peasant farms lacking capital, machinery
and seed stocks, the rural poor's spontaneous land seizures, hitherto
encouraged by the Communists, were now reversed. However, dissatisfaction
with this measure was so great in some districts that the government was soon
obliged to allow the creation of small plots or allotments.
In order to acquire political legitimacy and
popular support for their far-reaching measures, which resulted in
considerable social change and unforeseeable changes in the production and
administrative apparatus, Soviet elections were held between 7 and 10 April
on the basis of the extended suffrage granted by the provisional constitution
of 2 April 1919. Since there was only a single list of candidates, the
Revolutionary Governing Council could be sure of winning a majority for its
programme which was increasingly modelled on Soviet-Russian organisational
principles. But in both the Socialist Party and the Revolutionary Governing
Council the former Social Democrats, who harboured growing reservations
regarding Kun's new direction in foreign policy, began to raise objections to
the flagrant violation of existing legal norms and ruthless persecution of
both actual or potential opponents.
To increase pressure on the Hungarian Soviet
government to change its policies or even resign, the Peace Conference, which
perceived the Soviet
Republic as a threat,
had decided on 28 March to maintain its economic blockade of the country. Hungary could, therefore, cultivate diplomatic
and economic contracts only with Austria. Soviet Russia, itself imperilled by
civil war and Allied intervention, had immediately recognised the Hungarian
Soviet régime, but could not provide effective help. On 24 March, Kun had
asked the Peace Conference to help settle the points at issue by sending a
diplomatic mission to Hungary
and entering into direct negotiations with Soviet government. Since America's President Wilson and Britain's prime minister, Lloyd George,
interpreted the radical turn of events in Hungary as primarily a result of
protest against the violation of Hungarian national interests and excessive
French demands, they argued for the acceptance of Kun's proposal. Afraid that
the Hungarian Communist virus might also spread to Austria
and Germany,
they thought it desirable to show a readiness to make some form of
compromise. But Clemenceau's already mooted idea of establishing a cordon sanitaire in east central Europe appeared a
better guarantee for holding feared German revanchist designs in check, while
at the same time preventing the export of the Russian revolution and
isolating Hungary
internationally. The decision to withdraw the French interventionist troops
from the Ukraine and the
Crimea and hand over their weapons to the Rumanian army was motivated by the
idea of using Czechoslovakia
and Rumania, as directly
affected neighbours, to exorcise the red spectre in Hungary. After long discussions
the 'Big Four' finally agreed to send General Smuts to Budapest to sound out the Hungarians'
willingness to negotiate. The talks, which began on 4 April, failed to
produce any concrete results, since the Allies insisted on the creation of a
neutral zone, albeit reduced, in south-east Hungary
and Kun failed to have his proposal accepted of holding a conference of the
powers directly involved to settle the problems of the Danube
region.
Map from Hungarian Historical Atlas showing
pre-Trianon Hungary, Entente-established demarcation lines, limits of the
territory controlled by Hungarian Soviet government as well as Rumanian and Czechoslovakian military expansion of
1918-19.
Click on the map for higher resolution
The Rumanian Crown Council, in a decree of
10 April 1919, decided, therefore, to insist on a military solution of its
territorial claims against Hungary.
Although the newly formed Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes refused
to join in any common action, Czechoslovakia
also made military preparations. At first the Hungarian Red Army failed to
halt the Rumanian advance which began on 16 April, with the result that Hungary had to surrender its territories east
of the river Tisza. Earnest appeals and a
wave of patriotism did, however, result in a rush of volunteers, especially
after Czech units joined the campaign. A Committee of Public Safety,
organised by Tibor Szamuely, increased the pressure on the civilian
population and soon practised open terror against all suspected sympathisers
of the Society for the Liberation of Hungary, founded by Count István Bethlen
in Vienna on
13 April 1919. Against the background of a steadily deteriorating military
situation and the failure of Hungary's increasingly anxious appeals to the
Peace Conference and neighbouring governments, the Social Democratic People's
Commissars showed at an emergency sitting of 1 and 2 May 1919 that they were
prepared to create the conditions to end the military intervention through
the resignation of the Revolutionary Governing Council and the appointment of
a transitional government. With the help of the Budapest Soviet, however, Kun
was able to drum up a majority in favour of continuing the fighting. The Red
Army, which was quickly doubled in strength, began its offensive against the
Czech units in Slovakia and
Ruthenia in the middle of May. Hoping to
create a direct land corridor to Soviet Russia and greatly improve the Soviet Republic's military and political
situation, it managed to achieve a series of quick successes and by the
beginning of June had already succeeded in driving a wedge between the rather
ineffective Czech and Rumanian forces. A short-lived Soviet
Republic was even proclaimed in the
Slovak town of Kassa.
This unexpected recovery by the Hungarians led
to various forms of intensified activity which eventually contributed to the
fall of the Hungarian Soviet régime. In Szeged,
which was under the control of French occupation forces, an anti-Bolshevik
Committee was formed in which bourgeois politicians and members of the
bureaucracy, together with some aristocrats and ex-servicemen, prepared to
set up a rival government on 3 June 1919 under Count Gyula Károlyi's
chairmanship. This counter-revolutionary government was to include Count Pál
Teleki as foreign minister and the last commander-in-chief of the
Austro-Hungarian navy and former aide-de-camp to the Emperor Francis Joseph,
Rear Admiral Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya as minister of war. At the same time,
Horthy took over the command of the National Army which had been mainly
organised by Gyula Gömbös. Dissatisfaction with the Communists expressed
itself in revolts in the countryside and refusals to cooperate. In the towns
also, tensions were again heightened by the crisis caused by basic fuel and
food shortages. The Revolutionary Governing Council tried to blame the
peasants for the lack of food, thus exacerbating the already strained
relationship between town and country, and increasingly resorted to coercion
in order to maintain discipline and keep work going in the unpopular
agricultural collectives. A Central Economic Council was eventually put in
charge of the country's entire economic life with the task of overcoming the
supply situation. However, the discontented rural population increasingly
refused to cooperate. Resistance spread and was merely fuelled further by the
government's counter-measures. In the western counties, in particular, riots
and strikes, organised by ex-army officers and civil servants, flared up
repeatedly, especially since the brutality with which the Red Guard units,
charged with the maintenance of internal order, tried to crush the
disturbances, led to a continual increase in the numbers of those opposing
the government.
At the first party congress of the Hungarian
Socialist Party, held on 12-13 June 1919, a head-on clash took place between
groups who opposed the government's handling of domestic and foreign policy.
Many Social Democrats obviously no longer agreed with the partisan direction
of the Communists' policies and sharply condemned the radical measures
against the population. As a result the party changed its name to the
Socialist-Communist Party of Hungarian Workers (Szocialista-Kommunista
Munkások Magyarországi) At the opening session of a new kind of
parliament, the National Congress of Councils (Soviets) which lasted from 14
to 23 June, the Communists succeeded in passing a draft constitution which
was entirely dominated by their ideas. They also demonstrated their
controlling influence on the elections to the Central Executive Committee,
whose task was to control the work of the Revolutionary Governing Council
between the sittings of the National Congress. The deliberations were
interrupted by the news that a major uprising involving the rival Szeged government had broken out between the Danube and
the Tisza. The unrest spilled over to Budapest on 24 June as
ex-servicemen gave their support to the government's opponents. By deploying
Red Guard units, the government once more succeeded in crushing the
disturbances, not least because the industrial workers refused to join the
ranks of insurgents. But, since the workers were also not prepared to
continue supporting the Soviet régime, the position of the Revolutionary
Governing Council became increasingly precarious.
The actions of the Entente Powers also
contributed to the crisis, True, the hastily conceived plan for an Allied
military intervention was soon dropped in favour of diplomatic and economic
pressure, but this made little impression on the Governing Council. The demand,
communicated to the Budapest government on 7
June 1919, to stop the further advance of the Red Army to the north-east in
order to begin peace negotiations in Paris
with the participation of Hungarian delegates was ignored. On 13 June, an
offer arrived from Paris that if the Hungarian
troops retreated to the former demarcation line, the Rumanian army would be
pulled back from the Tisza to its original
positions. In view of the Hungarian army's logistical problems and growing
internal resistance this proposal was accepted, though with some
reservations. The Red Army began to pull back. Many of its generals and
officers, who up until now had fought in order to fulfil their patriotic duty
and defend their country, protested at this climb-down. The commander-in-chief,
Vilmos Bőhm, and the chief of the general staff, Aurél Stromfeld, joined
others in resigning their commissions in protest. It was also announced on 2
July that the Rumanians were refusing to withdraw their troops from the line
of the Tisza until the Hungarian army had
been completely disarmed.
When Kun wanted to force the evacuation of
the territories beyond the Tisza by
launching a surprise attack on 20 July 1919, the Red Army managed to achieve
some initial victories, but was forced to fall back in disorderly flight when
the Rumanians launched their counter-attack. In the final days of July
Rumanian troops crossed the Tisza along a
broad front. By 31 July, only 100 kilometres separated them from Budapest. Trade
unionists and former Social Democrats had already expressed their view more
openly that the occupation of the entire country by foreign troops could be
prevented only by expelling the Communists from the Governing Council and
forming a new government which the Entente Powers would recognise as a
negotiating partner. This view was reinforced by reports from Vienna where Entente
diplomats had presented the Hungarian negotiator, Vilmos Bőhm, with a
list of eight points setting out their conditions for ending the Rumanian
advance and beginning peace negotiations. The first condition demanded the
voluntary resignation of the Governing Council and the creation of a
caretaker government under the leadership of the trade unions. Although the
Communists still refused to open the way for a negotiated settlement on 31
July, they had to accept the resignation of the Governing Council which was
forced by the Budapest Central Workers' Council on 1 August 1919. After a
period of 133 days Hungary's
experiment in Soviet dictatorship had collapsed. It had ended, not only
because of its total rejection by the Allies and the military superiority of
its enemies, but because of internal opposition which had derived its
strength from the government's errors of political judgement, economic
problems and blind terror. Its leaders fled to Austria where they and their
families were granted political asylum. A transitional government, headed by
Gyula Peidl, had to try to minimise the damage caused to Hungary by Soviet rule.
The 'White Terror' and the Trianon Peace Treaty
In the weeks following the collapse of the
Soviet dictatorship Hungary
faced complete chaos. On 3 August 1919, Rumanian troops marched unopposed
into Budapest
where a succession of helpless and impotent governments rapidly wore
themselves out.
Peidl's 'government of the trade unions',
which was supported only by the Social Democrats, immediately began to repeal
and annul the unpopular decrees and measures of Soviet rule. Private property
was restored, a functioning state apparatus was re-established and what
remained of the 'Red Terror', i.e. the revolutionary tribunals and the Red
Guard, was eliminated. On 6 August, however, Peidl's government was
overthrown in an armed coup. A new government led by the factory owner,
István Friedrich, took over the running of the country. Although the rival
Szeged government aknowledged the authority of the new government, the
former's war minister and commander of the small counter-revolutionary
'National Army', Miklós Horthy, refused to carry out its instructions. Since the
Entente Powers also refused to recognise the new government, its orders
carried no weight and could not put an end to the killing and the looting. In
the meantime, Horthy's troops had advanced into the areas between the Tisza
and the Danube which were not under Rumanian occupation and soon extended
their control over areas west of the Danube
which were now free of foreign military occupation. Real and alleged
Communists were ruthlessly persecuted along with workers and peasants who had
played an active part in implementing the Soviet government's programme. The
same fate was shared by the Jews who suffered considerable loss of life in
punitive actions reminiscent of mediaeval pogroms. The officer detachments
responsible for the 'White Terror' were actively supported by such newly
formed paramilitary organisations as the Hungarian National Defence Force
Association and the Association of Vigilant Hungarians, whose members were
drawn mainly from the ranks of the reserve officers, students, civil servants
and those Magyars who had been socially and economically uprooted following
their expulsion from the former nationality territories now lost to Hungary's
new neighbours. This 'White Terror', which raged throughout the countryside
until the autumn of 1919 and died away only slowly in the spring of 1920,
bore no semblance of legality. It claimed around 5,000 lives, put 70,000
citizens behind bars or crowded them into hastily erected internment camps
and forced many suspects to flee abroad.
A mission of the Entente Powers, which
arrived in Budapest
on 5 August 1919, did little to stop the unbridled persecution and chaos.
Whereas the various Hungarian governments tried in vain to maintain internal
order and political stability, most of the government commissars in the
counties, who were appointed from among the wealthy landowners, had
sufficient power and means at heir disposal to
restore traditional authority and property relations while at the same time
reversing the principles of democratic liberal reform. They were fully
supported by those groups in the towns and countryside who were horrified at
the extent of the Soviet government's democratisation measures and the 'Red
Terror'. These were the aristocracy, civil servants, the military and middle
and small-ranking property owners in the towns who had no sympathy for the
appeals of the intelligentsia -- itself implicated in the failure of
democratic reforms -- not to let Hungary depart from the
principles of parliamentary democracy. The visit of the British diplomat Sir
George Clerk in October 1919 was evidence of the western Allies' interest in
seeing a liberal parliamentary democracy established in Hungary. The Allies also urgently
demanded that a general election, based on the secret ballot, should be held
for a national assembly, conceived as a single chamber parliament elected
bianually. The only reason that the Hungarians reluctantly agreed to these
proposals was that they were the only means by which they could secure the
withdrawal of the Rumanian troops from Budapest.
After 16 November 1919, when Horthy entered the capital at the head of his
National Army, now swollen to 25,000 men, a government of national
concentration led by the Christian Social leader, Károlyi Huszár, was formed
on 25 November. The post of social welfare minister was filled by Károly
Peyer, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, newly reorganised in
August. But the new government was unable to satisfy expectations that it
would bring stability to the woeful political and economic situation. It
could not and would not take vigorous action against the 'White Terror' at
large throughout the country. As a result, the Social Democrats left the
government on 15 January 1920 and decided to boycott the elections due to be
held on 25 January. The other political factions displayed a lack of unity
and instability. Many influential politicians of the pre-war period like
Gyula Andrássy, Albert Apponyi and István Bethlen initially held back from
joining any of the parties, but instead created independent dissenting
groups. Newly created parties like the National Civic Party, the National
Liberal Party or the Democratic Party lacked popular support and primarily
represented business interests and high finance. In contrast, the Christian
National Unity Party (Keresztény Nemzeti Egyesülgs Pdrtja) which was
the result of a merger on 25 October 1919 between the Christian National
Party, the Christian Social Economic Party and several smaller groups, was
able to rely on the support of both the petty bourgeoisie and the wealthy L
andowners who remained loyal to the Habsburgs and supported their
restoration. In the meantime the National Smallholders' Party, led by István
Nagyatádi Szabó, had become an important political factor. After its merger
with the Party of Arable Farmers and Rural Labourers (Országos Kisgazda és
Földmüves Párt), founded by Gyula Dann, it could count on the support of
the majority of the rural population. Despite the continuation of the 'White
Terror' the freest elections in Hungary's history -- free, because they were
mainly conducted by secret ballot -- produced a majority for the
Smallholders' Party which won 40 per cent of the vote and seventy-nine seats,
while the Christian National Union won 35.1 per cent of the vote and
seventy-four seats. Three further splinter groups returned ten deputies to
the new parliament. The workers, however, still had no represention in the
new National Assembly. When, on 15 June 1920, further elections were held in
the territories which had been under foreign occupation, the Smallholders'
Party succeeded in strengthening its leading position even further.
The Smallholders' demand to introduce land
reform legislation in the interests of its supporters and the problem of the
king were the key issues which the new parliament had to address. All the
parties acknowledged that Hungary's 'indivisible and indissoluble' connection
with the Habsburg crown lands had been severed; but all agreed that the
monarchy should continue to exist beyond the 13 November 1918, although the
Crown's prerogatives had been terminated as of that date. A quarrel now broke
out between the 'Legitimists', who, drawn mainly from among the ranks of the
wealthier magnates and the Catholic episcopacy, considered King Charles IV,
who had not yet abdicated, to be the country's legitimate ruler and those who
supported an elective monarchy based on popular support, i.e. the
middle-ranking landowning nobility and leaders of the Calvinist Church who
held that the monarch's claim to the throne had been forfeited and demanded
the nation's right to choose a new king on the basis of free elections. Since
both sides were unable to reach a compromise on the questions of whether King
Charles was still Hungary's rightful ruler or how they should otherwise determine
the succession, the government fell back on an institution of the late Middle
Ages which Lajos Kossuth had revived in 1849: they proposed appointing a
regent for the duration of the interregnum (Law I of 1920). On 1 March 1920,
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was elected Regent in a parliament building
occupied by the military at the time.
As commander-in-chief of the Szeged National
Army, which had grown to almost 50,000 men in Transdanubia after joining up
with Baron Antal Lehár's units at the beginning of 1920, Horthy, who was not
a particularly talented military commander or politician, exhibited an
exceptional desire to legitimise his authority. Thanks to his sincere manner
in dealing with others, his ability in several languages and the troops under
his command, he was able to win the support of the Entente representatives
stationed in Budapest.
His active tolerance of the 'White Terror' had made him acceptable to the
enemies of reform as well as those opposed to revolution. They hoped they
could install this reputedly malleable and arrogant professional soldier as a
figurehead to help them achieve their own aims. Horthy knew how to give both
the legitimists and those who supported an elective monarchy the impression
that he supported their respective positions. He also cultivated the image of
a leader who, on account of his good personal contacts with leading Entente
politicians, could obtain improved peace terms for Hungary. But as soon as he was
made Regent, Horthy increasingly pursued his own policy, primarily in the
interests of his own family. The result was that the suspicion soon grew that
he had his eyes on the crown for himself or his eldest son.
On 10 March 1920, the Huszár government made
way for a new cabinet led by Sándor Simonyi-Semadam, whose priority was to
seek an improvement in the harsh peace terms. On 25 November 1919, the
Hungarian government had been invited to send a delegation to Paris to receive the
terms. This delegation, headed by Apponyi, Bethlen and Pál Teleki tried to
have the draft of the peace treaty, which was handed to them on 20 January
1920, changed to more favourable terms on the basis of historical, economic
and legal arguments. They not only pointed to the geographical unity of the
Danube basin up to the natural frontier of the Carpathians in the north and
east and to the fact that the territories recently seized by Czechoslovakia
and Rumania had for a thousand years, since the beginning of the 11th
century, constantly formed part of the crown lands of St Stephen. They also
argued that, despite the intermingling of populations of different
nationalities it would be difficult, though not impossible, to draw a more
equitable frontier. They failed, however, to gain any concessions with their
arguments. The Hungarian government also tried in vain to prevent the
inclusion of a war-guilt clause by pointing out that the Hungarian population
and the prime minister, Tisza, had been opposed to war in the summer of 1914
and suggested changing the proposed terms stipulating a reduction in the size
of armed forces to allow a system of conscription for a standing army of
100,000 men in place of the permitted strength of 35,000. When this also was
rejected, broad sections of the Hungarian population were already bitterly
opposed to the proposed peace treaty even before it was signed in the Trianon
on 4 June 1920, believing that a major revision of its terms was inevitable.
The independent 'Kingdom
of Hungary', which emerged as a
result of the Trianon peace treaty comprised only 92,963 square kilometres
compared with the original 325,411 square kilometres of the old pre-war Kingdom of Hungary. According to the 1920 census,
its population now numbered 7.62 million inhabitants compared with the
earlier figure of 20.9 million. Under the terms of the Treaty the new Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later named Yugloslavia, received the Bácska,
the Baranya and the western Banat, amounting to 20,956 square kilometres,
i.e. 6.44 per cent of pre-war Hungary,
involving the loss of 1.5 million inhabitants. Hungary was obliged to cede
102,787 square kilometres, i.e. 31.59 per cent of its entire territory and
5,265,000 inhabitants to Rumania, the latter obtaining the whole of
Transylvania including the Szekler region, the eastern Banat, most of the
counties of Körös and Tisza and the southern part of Máramaros. Of the 62,937
square kilometres or 19.34 per cent of pre-war Hungary
ceded to the new Czechoslovakian Republic, Slovakia
received 48,994 square kilometres, Ruthenia
12,639. Of the 3,250,000 inhabitants affected by these changes, 2,950,000
were settled in Slovakia
and 571,000 in Ruthenia. More than three
million Magyars now lived under foreign rule: 1,063,000 in Czechoslovakia, 1,700,000 in Rumania and 558,000 in Yugoslavia.
Thanks to Italy's
support, Hungary was at
least able to push part of its claim through against the weak Austrian
government on the question of the Burgenland when a somewhat dubious
plebiscite held on 14 December 1921 resulted in the return to Hungary of the area around Sopron.
Although no exact figure was set, Hungary
had to agree to pay reparations. The armed forces permitted under the treaty,
comprising a professional army of 35,000 men on a long period of service, but
minus heavy artillery, armoured corps and an air force, was intended
exclusively to maintain internal order and the defence of Hungary's frontiers. An
Inter-Allied Control Commission was given the task of seeing that these
armament limitations were observed.
Every section of the Hungarian population
felt disappointment at the scale of losses demanded by the peace treaty,
which came to be regarded as a dictated settlement. The historic Kingdom of Hungary
had possessed a geographical unity without parallel in the rest of Europe. In the second half of the nineteenth century
the national economy had been a coordinated whole in which the different
parts of the country had been mutually dependent on each other and the
capital, Budapest.
This economic unit had been destroyed by the territorial terms of the peace. The
effects of the world economic crisis in 1931-32 made the problems resulting
from the destruction of the Habsburg Empire's unified economy very apparent
and these proved impossible to overcome satisfactorily in the period before
1938. As a semi-industrialised country with an inadequately developed
manufacturing industry Trianon Hungary began to fall behind
other countries economically. Since its bauxite and oil resources were yet to
be exploited, the government had to give priority to agricultural production.
The war and the period of Soviet rule had done little to reduce the social
tensions which resulted from the partisan redistribution of landed property,
and these played a crucial part in determining the direction taken by Hungary's
domestic and foreign policies during the inter-war period. The influx of
350,000 immigrants from the territories of the successor states, comprising
mainly civil servants, teachers and soldiers, also added to the problem of
achieving social cohesion, since they represented a politically aware group
which could not be so quickly and easily accommodated in a country that had
been reduced so much in size. The only problem solved by the imposition of
the Trianon peace treaty terms was that of the national minorities. According
to the 1920 census, only 833,475 people, i.e. 10.4 per cent of the
population, including 552,000 Germans (6.9 per cent) and 142,000 Slovaks (1.8
per cent), did not speak Hungarian as their mother tongue. According to the
same census, the number of Jews living in Hungary was 473,000.
Despite the sacrifices imposed by the
treaty, Hungary's
government and people continued to identify their dismembered state firmly
with pre-war Hungary.
Deliberately shunning any compromise with the new circumstances, they remained
absolutely inflexible, rejecting even the possibility of any constructive
developments within the new frontiers. They carefully nurtured the Magyars'
sense of an historically based national identity, looking back to the
founding of the state, the Hungarian
Kingdom's thousand
years of history and their belief in the Magyar cultural mission of spreading
their superior civilisation. They kept alive the sense of humiliation at Hungary's
defeat, the experience of economic privation and despair at the injustices of
the peace settlement. In an eruption of national patriotism which permeated
all social classes they argued for a revision of the peace treaty, invoking
the symbol of the crown of St Stephen to argue for the restoration of the
territories lost to their despised neighbours. Although differences of
opinion soon emerged regarding the extent of the desired revision, the
treaty's failings were pilloried. Its unrealistically high reparations
demands, war-guilt clause, territorial and military terms and unjust
treatment of the Magyar minorities in Hungary's neighbour states all
became a focus of resentment. The slogan, 'Nem, nem, soha!' (no, no,
never!) summed up the attitude of every Magyar to the peace treaty.
Diplomatic, artistic and economic contracts with other countries were
cultivated with renewed intensity with a view to revising the treaty's terms
eventually. 'The world's conscience' was not to be allowed to rest 'in view
of the injustices done to Hungary
at the Trianon and the consequent danger to peace'. Whereas at first demands
were made to restore to Hungary its pre-war territories, implying a total
revision of the treaty, which could not be achieved peacefully but only by a
victorious war, from 1930 onwards more enlightened circles worked for a revision
of the treaty's territorial terms within the framework of national
self-determination: ' Hungary will recover those citizens seized from her
whose first language is Magyar, although plebiscites will be held in
territories whose inhabitants' native language is not Hungarian'.
Hungary's revisionist
policy was, however, primarily intended to divert attention away from the
country's internal social and economic problems. The traditional upper
classes, the aristocratic representatives of the governments and parties of
the period before the Soviet republic, which quickly regained their
prominence, were interested only in preserving what remained of feudal rule,
in resisting any genuine land reform and in obtaining compensation for their
extensive holdings which now lay in the territories seized from Hungary.
It was thanks to their influence that a subtle combination of democratic
elements was incorporated into the new constitution of 28 February 1920 which
did much to perpetuate social injustices. The traditional middle class,
recruited mainly from members of declining middle nobility, who had been
gentrified and earned their living as civil servants or professional
soldiers, tried increasingly to curb the influence of the upper nobility and
secure their politicial and economic position. They were able especially I n their unbridled campaign against the Jews -- to
count on the complete support of a petty bourgeoisie which was also imbued
with the conviction that it was ordained to rule politically and economically.
Despite a large influx of Jewish immigration before the First World War, Hungary's
Jews, in fact, formed only 6 per cent of the country's population, but
controlled major areas of industry, banking and commerce as well as
dominating several liberal professions like medicine, the law and journalism.
Although the Jews had not posed a threat to any social class and had created
many positions for the first time in their role as a substitute bourgeoisie,
they were used as a scapegoat in order to release the pent-up dissatisfaction
of the middle classes. Even in the officer corps, which was initially the
only stabilising factor in the state and which exerted considerable influence
on Horthy during his period as Regent, a groundswell of antisemitism combined
with anti-liberal ideals. Above all, it was Hungary's professional soldiers
who rejected democratic institutions and a liberal state based on the rule of
law. Their growing chauvinism and demands for a complete revision of the
peace treaty were accompanied by the call to establish naked authoritarian
rule in the form of an overt military dictatorship. Hungary's governments and
political parties had to resist these tendencies before they could even begin
the long overdue process of consolidation.
THE HORTHY ERA
The successes and failures of the Bethlen government
With Count Pál
Teleki's appointment as prime minister at the head of a cabinet of notables
on 19 July 1920, the new government could no longer simply be seen as a transitional
government in the style of its short-lived predecessors. Lóránd Hegedüs,
director of the Commercial Bank, one of Hungary's largest financial
institutions, and director of the Association of Savings Banks and Banking
Companies, was appointed finance minister. His task was to put the national
budget in order and halt the depreciation of the currency whose value had
fallen to less than a six-thousandth of its pre-war level as a result of
galloping inflation. The government's main priorities were, however, finally
to carry out a more just distribution of land for the peasants, end the
lawlessness and brutality of the 'White Terror' and resist the virulent
spread of antisemitism. The 'White Terror' and antisemitism had become linked
in the minds of many Hungarians, since Bolshevism and the Jews were to some
extent identified with each other. Béla Kun and many of the Soviet régime's
prominent personalities came from Jewish families and were equated with the
Bolsheviks. Right-wing military execution squads had sworn to eliminate the
last traces of Communism and, since the industrial workers and their
organisations were held partly responsible for the Soviet dictatorship, they,
too, became objects of persecution and repression.
However, Teleki's government had no interest
in seeing the law continuously weakened; nor did it have anything to gain
from the uncontrollable and arbitrary retribution of the army and sympathetic
right-wing circles which spread paramilitary, quasifascist ideas, especially
since the mood of the population was still potentially explosive. Around a
third of Hungary's
workers were unemployed. Industrial production reached only 30 per cent of
its pre-war level. The yield for the wheat harvest of 1920 was half that for
1913 and the entire country was suffering from acute food shortages. Despite
major attempts to cut government spending, the number of state-employed
officials almost trebled. While the Teleki government gradually achieved a
situation in which constitutional principles were observed, it did not shy
away from reintroducing corporal punishment on 26 September 1920 (Law XVI of
1920) or placing a ceiling on the number of university admissions in order to
reduce the proportion of Jews entering the universities (Law XXV of 1920). This
law, which did not mention Jews explicitly, helped bring about a situation in
which the proportion of Jewish students fell from 34 per cent in 1917-18 to
only 8 per cent in 1935-36. Deliberate measures were also introduced to
eliminate the Jews completely from the state bureaucracy and there was
widespread discrimination against practising Jews, who were eventually no
longer allowed to conduct businesses in which the state had a monopoly, like
tobacconists, the alcohol retail trade and cinemas. Their land was also
frequently expropriated by the state. The policy of land redistribution had
been stepped up following the territorial losses incurred under the treaty of
the Trianon, with the result that the relatively small number of estates of
more than 50 hectares of arable land made up 44 per cent of all land under
cultivation. The family of the Princess Esterházy still controlled 110,000
hectares of landed property, the Counts of Festetics 48,000 hectares and the
Cathedral Chapter of Eger 45,000 hectares. As was the case with all other
decrees passed under the Károlyi and Kun governments, the radical land reform
laws of 1919 were repealed, although the lesser peasantry and landless
peasants were promised a 'more equitable distribution of the land' in return.
Count István Bethlen, who, at Horthy's
behest, was negotiating with the leadership of the Smallholders' Party, has
to be credited with having won over István Nagyatádi Szabó, leader of the
strongest party, to join Teleki's government and support a very modest land
reform. In view of the danger that the lesser peasants, comprising 95.6 per
cent of the rural population, and the rural proletariat, who owned less than
3 hectares and often no arable land, might resort to land seizures, the
large-scale landowners eventually agreed to offer for distribution 450,000
hectares of mainly inferior land out of the remaining total area of 8.5
million hectares. Included in the 411,000 people who benefited from this
reform were some 300,000 landless peasants, who were given on average one
hold (i.e. 0.5754 hectares) of arable land subject to paying compensation.
100,000 smallholders were also included in the redistribution (Law XXX IV of
1920).
These measures did nothing, however, to
ameliorate the basic conditions of poverty in the villages. The peasant's
economic distress was barely reduced, since the repayment rates were so high
that some 80 per cent of the peasants who had benefited from the reallocation
had been forced to surrender their new land again within three years of the
reform. At the same time, some of the applicants -- army officers, civil
servants, notaries, etc. all pillars of the Horthy régime -- were, as members
of the newly created Order of Heroes (Vitézi Rend), awarded farms of
up to 50 hectares. Any interested applicant who had served at the front and
been decorated in the First World War, and who could prove their genuine
patriotism, could be admitted to this order. By 1940 its 18,000 members,
including 4,000 army officers, had at their disposal some 450,000 hectares of
land. The government's promise to implement a radical land reform following
the return of political stability and to make available cheap agricultural
loans once the economy had stabilised consoled the smallholding peasant who
had been initially disappointed by the first round of redistribution.
However, the large-scale landowners knew how to fend off every future new
initiative on land reform by arguing that any further division of land would
reduce Hungary's
agricultural competitiveness even further and result in a serious economic
crisis. Owing to the collapse of the Monarchy, Hungary had lost its most
important markets for agricultural produce which still accounted for 62 per
cent of the national income. Protectionist policies in the rest of Europe, high agricultural tariff barriers and
competition from foreign overseas grain imports made it more difficult to
find a market for its agricultural produce. Although the use of artificial
fertilisers and machinery slowly increased, production remained relatively
low compared with pre-war levels. Livestock figures stayed static; the number
of cattle and sheep declined. The Smallholders' Party, which was coordinated
and brought into line by the future prime minister, Count István Bethlen,
continued to look after the interests of its former electoral support
inadequately. After 1925, the newly-formed Hungarian Socialist Workers'
Party, founded as a Communist cover-organisation, tried to fill the vacuum.
It developed a 'new land reform' programme based on Hungarian conditions,
which aimed to expropriate all holdings of more than 50 hectares and
reallocate the land to the rural proletariat free of compensation. Concrete
measures to improve the unsatisfactory property and income distribution in
the countryside, were not, however, introduced at this juncture.
Hungary's workers suffered
particularly badly from the policy of turning the clock back to the political
situation of pre-war Hungary.
The Soviet dictatorship's achievements in the field of social policy were
entirely eliminated at a stroke, and, despite growing unemployment -- in Budapest alone, 150,000
people were jobless -unemployment benefit was stopped, wages were held down
despite rising inflation and the working day increased to 10 hours (12 hours
in the mines). Since supplies of fuel and raw materials were exhausted,
foreign trade with neighbouring countries was stagnating and the rapid
depreciation of the currency was discouraging investment, it proved extremely
difficult in the period before 1921 to switch production, previously geared
to military needs, to peacetime commodities and the needs of the smaller
domestic market. In 1922, production output reached only 52 per cent of its
pre-war levels and in 1924 stood at about 60 per cent.
The scope for action by the political
parties and workers' organisations, compromised by their part in the Soviet Republic, was systematically
eliminated. The Communist Party was banned (Law III of 1921). Its exiled
leaders, initially in Vienna and later in Moscow, did not succeed in creating
a properly functioning underground organisation, although small clandestine
groups did establish contact with each other after 1921 in Budapest's main
factories, in the mining area of Tatabánya and the industrial region of Borsod.
The authorities obstructed the work of the Social Democratic Party, which had
been reorganised in August 1919, and restricted the public gatherings of the
trade unions. The Christian Social trade unions, encouraged as a
counterweight to their Socialist counterparts, together with state-funded
'substitute' parties, like the Hungarian National Workers' Party and the
Hungarian Socialist Party failed to mobilise much support. The 'White
Terror', wage reductions and government discrimination led to a massive
decline in the membership of the more traditional workers' organisations.
Nevertheless, it was still clear that the workers and their representative
organisations could not be left out of any attempt to stabilise the system.
It was not the terrible economic situation,
nor Hungary's
unresolved and widespread social tensions that led the prime minister, Count
Teleki, who belonged to the Legitimist camp, to resign on 13 April 1921, but
the attempt by traditional conservative circles to force the restoration of
King Charles IV. Encouraged by the Legitimists under the leadership of Count
Gyula Andrássy Jnr., King Charles had returned from his Swiss exile to Szombathely in western Hungary on 26 March, subsequently
entering into negotiations with Horthy, who up until this point had been keen
to stress his loyalty to the king with the aim of reclaiming his vacant
throne. When Horthy, however, proved unwilling to relinquish his power, for
which he had in the meantime acquired a taste, and Hungary's neighbours threatened
military intervention if a restoration took place, Charles, who was reputedly
prepared to carry out radical social reforms, returned to exile. Count István
Bethlen who had previously sympathised with the Legitimists, now crossed over
to those who supported a freely elected monarch and formed a new government
on 14 April 1921.
Bethlen, who was to play a prominent part in
deciding Hungary's
fate over the next decade, had been born into a wealthy family of
Transylvanian landowners in 1874. As a member of the Upper House of
Parliament in the period before the First World War, he had maintained an
attitude of critical distance both from the policies of the Independence
Party and, subsequently, those of Count István Tisza's Party of National
Work. After 1919 he had formed the Anti-Bolshevik Committee in Vienna which contributed
to the overthrow of the Soviet dictatorship. He was one of the personalities,
who, on account of their considerable personal prestige, had been able to
exert considerable influence on political life from a position outside the
existing parties and who, as early as the summer of 1920, had tried to create
a united bloc of government supporters by bringing about a merger of the
Christian conservative parties, i.e. the Smallholders' Party and the
Christian National Unity Party. He was able to rely not only on the complete
confidence of the great landowners and capitalists, but also on the
sympathies of the middle class, which, still dominated by the gentry ethos,
looked to him for help in reducing the power of the magnates so that they
could take control of the levers of power. His general adroitness, broad
vision, diplomatic skill and sense of tactics predestined him for the post of
prime minister at a time when Hungary
had to continue with a policy of achieving internal stability while at the
same time breaking through its foreign policy isolation by achieving a
revision of the post-war peace treaty. The entire character of the 'Horthy
Era' was strongly influenced by his personality and politics.
Bethlen soon faced his first major test as
prime minister in October 1921. On 20 October, King Charles IV returned to Hungary
for a second time. After the troops stationed in the western half of the
country had sworn a personal oath of allegiance to him, he announced the
formation of a new government and marched on Budapest. Relying on the Great Powers to
protest against his actions and on the threatened military sanctions of Hungary's neighbours, Horthy and Bethlen
mobilised the army which had the good fortune to win a minor victory against
a royalist battalion on 23 October 1921 at Budaörs, west of Budapest. During the fighting the former
army captain and secretary of state in Horthy's Szeged War Ministry, G yula
Gömbös de jáfka, distinguished himself as the commander of a paramilitary
force of right-wing radical organisations which turned the scales in the
government's favour. Against his own sense of honour -- after all, Charles
had been crowned King of Hungary with the crown of St Stephen and Horthy had
been among those who had sworn an oath of loyalty -- the Regent had the
defeated king taken prisoner to the castle at Taba-Tavaros and arranged for
him to be exiled to the Portuguese island of Madeira where he died not long
after on 1 April 1922. Bethlen lost no time in submitting new legislation to
parliament which proclaimed the dethronement of the House of Habsburg on 6
November 1921 (Law XLVII of 1921).
The deposition of the Habsburgs was a
serious defeat for the Legitimists. Their political arm, the Christian
National Unity Party, never recovered and rapidly disintegrated into several
insignificant splinter groups. Also, the fact that the legitimists recognised
Otto von Habsburg, born in 1912, as the rightful king after his father's
death, and that the debate on the legitimacy of the HabsburgLorraine family's
claims to the throne continued to grow in Hungary, gave Horthy and Hungary's
governments no cause for concern. The anti-Habsburg elements among those who
supported a freely elected king, consisting mainly of the gentry and the
petty bourgeoisie, interpreted their success as having also broken the
influence of the magnates and the plutocracy, and sought to exploit the
opportunity of stabilising the régime to broaden their own power base.
Bethlen continued to act vigorously against
the excesses of the 'White Terror' which still broke out occasionally and
greatly surpassed in cruelty and numbers of victims the 'Red Terror' of the
Soviet régime. The outrages perpetrated by right-wing extremist groups, who
enjoyed Horthy's protection and were never brought to justice, no longer
suited the times and were a barrier to establishing and improving diplomatic
relations with the outside world. The return to constitutional and legal
norms was accompanied by an expansion of the police force, the gendarmerie
and the courts, whereby measures to 'ensure the political and social order
more effectively' were in future not only carried out against the remnants of
the extreme Left like the Communists, but against the political Right,
especially those groups of demobilised officers and ex-civil servants
propagating fascism. Bethlen, who felt more attached to the
conservative-aristocratic political views of the large landowners and grande
bourgeoisie, and who would have welcomed a return to the established
tradition-bound institutions of the Dual Monarchy, restored public order and
put an end to the privileged position previously enjoyed by the armed forces.
He removed the control they had usurped over the state apparatus and the
military intelligence service, established the government's command of the
army and the general staff and divested the paramilitary forces of their
power in favour of the police force and gendarmerie. Since extreme
nationalist military circles began to use great tactical skill in defying the
implementation of these measures, Bethlen, with Horthy's support, had to try
to begin creating his own party-political support.
On 22 December 1921, negotiations with the
leaders of the Social Democratic Party, who were eager to reach a compromise,
led to the government securing an extremely favourable secret agreement in
the shape of the Bethlen Peyer Pact. The Bethlen government undertook to
release imprisoned workers and trade unionists, legalise their political
activities and allow them to stand for parliament, although this had a
limited effect because of the franchise system and the restriction of secret
ballot to elections in the towns. In return, the Social Democrats, led by
Károly Peyer, announced their willingness to support the government's
attempts at consolidating its power. They agreed to help prevent politically
motivated strikes, cease campaigning for a republic, stop canvassing
agricultural labourers, railway workers and civil servants and use their
international contacts to overcome the country's diplomatic isolation. The
difficult economic situation, high unemployment and inflation, combined with
the strict policing of political meetings, resulted in pacifying and
politically taming the disheartened workers. After the collapse of the
Legitimist Christian National Unity Party, only the Smallholder's Party,
which had by now split into two wings, remained a political factor beyond
Bethlen's control.
With the active parliamentary support of the
great landowners in the Agricultural Party and the Hungarian National
Economic Association, led by the agricultural minister, Gyula Rubinek,
Bethlen succeeded in outmanoeuvring its wing of smallholders and
middle-ranking farmers led by István Nagyatádi Szábo. He infiltrated the
party with his own supporters and, after officially joining the party himself
on 5 January 1922, a group of former non-party sympathisers emerged and soon
took over the key posts at the party headquarters, displacing Szábo's
supporters who fought against being forcibly deprived of power and subjected
to threats of exposure. A change in the electoral law, which still restricted
the franchise to only 27.3 per cent of the adult population (39.2 per cent in
1920) and the reintroduction of the open ballot -- except in the major towns
-- ensured that the Christian Social majority bloc, now renamed the Unity
Party (Égységes Párt) received 45.4 per cent of the vote and 143 out
of 245 seats in the May and June elections of 1922. Of the new government
party only 19 deputies were former Smallholders. Thus the old ruling class,
the impoverished gentry and nationalist non-Jewish middle class had created a
political grouping which could assert itself comfortably against the Social
Democrats, the bourgeois-democratic parties, the new opposition Smallholders'
Party and National Socialist group which later experienced a marked upsurge
of support in the 1930s. The Social Democrats, in the first ever election
they contested, succeeded in gaining 39.1 per cent of the vote in Budapest
and 15.3 per cent in the country as a whole, giving them 25 seats in
parliament. On the strength of the Budapest
vote several representatives of the liberal-bourgeois opposition were also
returned. The government, however, made sure that the new parliament remained
powerless and reduced it to a forum for approving government policy.
The programme of the Unity Party, which was
supported by the influential daily newspapers, Pesti Hirlap and the German
language newspaper Pester Lloyd, called for the reshaping of Hungary on the
basis of national and Christian values and the creation of religious and
social harmony for the sake of the policy of revisionism. It also promised a
new electoral law and press law, the continued and speedier implementation of
land reform, improved insurance protection for the workers, new legislation
to enable the trade unions to play a greater role, the reintroduction of the
magnatedominated Upper House and a regressive municipal reform. Under
Bethlen's unchallenged leadership, the reappointed agriculture minister,
István Nagyatádi Szabó (d. 1924), took over as chairman of the new party,
while the actual running of its affairs fell to its vice-chairman, Gyula
Gömbös.
Some of the military and right-wing
extremist organisations had influential sympathisers among the new government
party's leaders in Gömbös, Tibor Eckhardt and Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, but no
way of preventing the undermining of their previous bastions of power. These
groups began to show their dissatisfaction with the government's attempts to
consolidate its power, imposed by Bethlen from his position of strength.
Their attempt to revive the controversy on continuing the land reform, which
had been stifled by the great landowners, in order to win mass support from
among the disillusioned rural proletariat, misfired, as did the strike of
civil servants and white-collar workers which they initiated. Bethlen was
able to forestall preparations for coups against him at an early stage with
the help of the loyal police force. Since Horthy, who was slowly gaining in
prestige, also distanced himself from his former supporters and close
colleagues, Gömbös and his right-wing associates left the Unity Party on 2
August 1923 and founded a right-wing opposition Party of Racial Defence (Fajvédő
Párt) which never succeeded in becoming an important political factor. It
became intoxicated with 'Turanianism' (the fact that the ancestors of the
Magyars had come from Asia) and established contacts
very early on with other European fascist and National Socialist parties.
Since, however, racism and a narrow-minded nationalism were also cultivated
in the government camp, the right-wing opposition's ties with the Unity
Party, which Gömbös rejoined in 1928, were never completely ruptured. The
breakaway by the Party of Racial Defence resulted in a strengthening of the
Unity Party's liberal-conservative wing. Even the left-wing opposition felt
obliged to support the government party in its fight -- or rather shadow
boxing -- against the radical Right.
During these years the political contours of
Horthy's rule, which did not conceal its anti-liberal, authoritarian and
dictatorial character, became increasingly apparent. Hungary's parliament, which had
been substantially stripped of power and influence, was elected mainly by the
members of a small upper class. The relatively small opposition could, it is
true, voice its criticisms and demands and disseminate them through its own
party newspapers; but it could not achieve their redress, since the
government party had virtually gained absolute power over the legislature,
executive and the judiciary. Bureaucratic practices and arbitrary police
methods ran roughshod over a number of constitutional principles and
democratic freedoms. The rapidly expanding state bureaucracy was a
particularly important influence in its own right on government and
represented a real power factor. Racist and chauvinistic slogans, which were
closely bound up with aggressive revisionist and irredentist thinking, not
only contributed to an overestimation of all things Hungarian and an
unwarranted cultural arrogance, but resulted in a militant rejection of
liberalism, democracy and socialism, all of which were viewed as 'alien to the
Hungarian spirit'.
The Jewish population, in particular, but
soon also the national minorities left within Hungary's new frontiers, had to
suffer this Magyar intolerance. Although the fringe groups inspired by
fascism lacked political influence, they were able to propagate their ideas
openly and rely on the support of broad sections of the population,
especially for introducing of antisemitic measures. It would be wrong,
however, to describe Horthy's stable régime which came to power by means of
the 'White Terror' as fascist, for, despite its anti-liberal,
conservative-authoritarian political system, it never attempted to employ
demagogic methods to mobilise the masses or, under the cloak of revolution,
to overthrow the system which was still strongly feudal and aristocratic in
character. The social and political order under Horthy could more readily be
compared with that of Hungary's
neighbours -- with the exception, of course, of the democratic Czechoslovak Republic.
Only the slowness of the economic recovery
threatened the successful consolidation of political power. The government
raised the expenditure necessary to expand the state, police and military
apparatus by issuing unguaranteed banknotes, a measure which caused even
greater inflation and ruined the country's finances.
Since the inflation helped the large-scale
landowners pay off their mortgage debts more easily, they, like the
industrialists, had little to say against the rapid increase in the money
supply which hit the workers especially hard. The demand for manufactured
goods combined with a ban on imports encouraged an inflationary boomperiod.
Even so, industrial production figures for 1924 were still only 60 per cent
of their pre-war level. The holding down of wages, the unavoidable lowering of
living standards -- which made the workers even more discontented -- and the
insurmountable problems of developing international economic relations made
it imperative for the government ' to halt the inflation. When, in the spring
of 1924, the conversion rate of paper crowns to one gold crown reached
16,300, Bethlen's government decided to act. The League
of Nations was the only organisation prepared to make the
necessary funds available for this financial operation.
Bethlen had already applied for Hungary to join the League
of Nations in September 1922, and it formally joined on 31
January 1923. After some hesitation the government in Budapest
was granted a credit on 2 July 1924 conditional on Hungary promising to fulfil the
terms of the Trianon peace treaty. The loan, which amounted to 250 million
gold crowns at a 7.5 per cent rate of interest on receipt of 88 per cent of
the sum, was intended to bring about a rapid stabilisation of the currency
and economy under the financial supervision of the League. At the same time, Hungary
had committed itself eventually to paying back its share of the
AustroHungarian Empire's debts to the tune of one thousand million gold
crowns. Despite the high rates of interest and heavy burden of capital
repayments, the following years witnessed a steady economic upturn which the
government supported with a currency reform introduced on 1 January 1927. A
new currency unit, the Pengö, was issued, equivalent to 12,500 paper crowns.
The customs tariff already in force since 1 January imposed an import duty of
30 per cent, thus offering some protection for home industry which underwent
particularly rapid growth in the textile, paper and leather industries while
the important area of food production continued to stagnate. The value of production
output in 1929 showed an increase of about 12 per cent over the figures for
1913. Compared with the USA's
economic growth rate of 70 per cent and France's
40 per cent, Hungary
made only very modest economic progress during the 1920s.
About 10 to 15 per cent of the workers, i.e.
about 100,000 people, continued to be unemployed, even during the economic
boom. The workers, who still worked a nine-hour day, earned real wages which
still stood at only 80 per cent of their pre-war purchasing power. Their
protests against social hardship and the suppression of political rights were
clearly expressed in a wave of strikes which spread after 1926 and reached
its climax in 1928 with a hunger march by mine-workers from Sálgótarján and
Pilisvörösvár. The Communists, who were active underground, attempted to
operate legally again by joining the defecting left-wing Social Democrats in
the new Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party ( Magyarországi Szocialista
Munkáspárt), founded on 24 April 1925 under the leadership of István
Vági. The attempt failed, however, because the new party did not attract
sufficient support from the workers despite its popular demands for a return
to pre-war wage levels, the introduction of an eight-hour day, unemployment
benefits, a system of progressive taxation and elections conducted by secret
ballot on the basis of universal suffrage. The tough police measures taken in
the autumn of 1925 and a show trial held in the summer of 1926, which
resulted in Mátyás Rákosi, who would later rise to prominence, being sent to
prison, meant an end to most Communist-influenced legal and illegal
working-class activity.
Hungary's slow and uphill
economic recovery continued to be financed by raising further loans. Only a
fifth of the total amount borrowed was used for investment in manufacturing
industry, about a half was allocated to capital and interest repayments and
the rest used to fuel consumption. When, in 1929, the amount of outstanding
payments exceeded that of the approved loans for the first time, the
Hungarian economy, which had become so dependent on foreign finance, revealed
the instability which was to render it incapable of surviving the turmoil of
the world economic crisis in 1931.
During these years of modest prosperity the
bourgeois liberal opposition hoped to put pressure on the Bethlen government
to introduce at least a modest democratisation and a more liberal application
of legal norms. The National Bourgeois-Democratic Party ( Polgári Demokrata Párt),
whose chairman was Vilmos Vázsonyi (d. 29 May 1926), became the mouthpiece of
the liberals, drawing its support from the liberal middle class and the
Jewish petty bourgeoisie in Budapest, and fighting latent antisemitism which
now employed racist arguments and economic discrimination against the Jews.
But even when legitimist groups and the Social Democrats joined forces with
the liberals to form a loose 'Democratic Bloc', Bethlen managed to hold his
political opponents in check without much difficulty. His decree of 11
November 1926, which revived the feudal house of magnates as an upper house
of the Hungarian parliament, helped him increase the government's majority in
the prematurely held December elections, in which his government party won
60.1 per cent of the vote and 170 seats, thus condemning the opposition in
future to political insignificance.
Equipped with wider legislative powers than
in the pre-war period, the Upper House, as a result of its composition,
helped guarantee the survival of Horthy's authoritarian reactionary régime.
Comprising hereditary members of the upper aristocracy. Habsburg archdukes,
delegates from the country's self-governing institutions, representatives of
major pressure groups, members of the church hierarchy and prominent people
from the upper bourgeoisie and the army nominated by Horthy, it also
signalled the growing political influence of Hungary's traditional ruling
class. The cult of the crown of St Stephen and the growing tendency to
indulge in traditional rituals and the display of splendid and sometimes
fantastic historical costume on ceremonial occasions testified to the Magyar
desire to escape the unpleasantness of the present and identify with the
historical greatness of the defunct Hungarian kingdom.
The realisation that the necessary
consolidation of political power and the socio-economic order could be
attained only with the aid of foreign capital persuaded Hungary's premier to
respect the terms of the Treaty of the Trianon, at least in his dealings with
other countries. He thought that the right time to pursue an active
revisionist policy would be when Hungary,
relying on a strong and modern army and on trustworthy allies, could overturn
the status quo in the Danube area imposed by the Paris peace treaties. The noticeable
restraint shown by the Hungarian government in supporting the vocal
revisionist demands of all sections of the population no doubt stemmed from
the belief that this was the only way to dispel the distrust of Hungary's
neighbours and exhaust every possibility for securing a revision of the
settlement as foreseen in Article XIX of the League of Nations' charter,
whose economic assistance Hungary also wished to secure. But while the
Bethlen government got to grips with measures to help the country's recovery,
secret preparations were also undertaken to increase the size of the army
beyond its manpower strength of 35,000 soldiers permitted under the treaty.
As Horthy's prestige rose the longer he remained in office, his views on
foreign policy increasingly influenced Hungarian diplomacy. These included
rejecting any edrawing of the border according to ethnic criteria, restoring Hungary's
pre-war frontiers and gaining a secure access to the sea. Horthy's offensive
arrogance, with which, like so many Hungarians, he dealt with the politicians
and peoples of Hungary's neighbouring states, viewing them as inferiors,
certainly did not increase the prospect of a thorough revision of the harsh
terms of the Trianon peace treaty.
Although Czechoslovakia
was Hungary's only neighbour
to make several vague offers in 1920-21 to redraw the disputed frontiers, and
although its Magyar minority of around 1.06 million was doing relatively well
economically, the Czechs and their foreign minister, Edvard Bene, the
architect of the Trianon treaty, were seen as the main obstacle to Hungary's
revisionism. Because of the widespread existence in the 1920s of suspected
pro-Magyar sympathies among the Slovaks and Ruthenes of what was formerly
Upper Hungary, it appeared only a matter of time before the territories up to
the Carpathian mountain range would be restored to Hungary and a common
frontier with Poland thus gained. Hence Bethlen put no special emphasis on
improving Hungary's
political and economic relations with Prague,
giving credence neither to Bene's speeches before the League
of Nations nor to President Masaryk's reconciliatory overtures.
After it became known by chance that Magyar propaganda activity among the
Slovaks and Ruthenes had been financed with excellently forged Czechoslovak
banknotes, plans for a much more far-reaching operation to finance Hungary's
entire revisionist policy abroad with forged French francs sanctioned by
Bethlen and ex-premier Teleki, were suddenly revealed in early December 1925.
Although the Czechoslovaks, Yugoslavs and especially the French were greatly
outraged and an anti-Magyar mood to some extent prevailed, the European Great
Powers had no interest in overthrowing Bethlen's government. The result was
that the Democratic Bloc's demands to replace the Regent, the prime minister
and senior police officials, as well as increasing parliamentary control over
government affairs, proved unsuccessful.
In the case of Rumania,
precise revisionist demands were not made at first, since there was initially
no prospect of an amicable settlement concerning the return of Transylvania, whose loss was especially painfully felt.
However, Bethlen still hoped to secure benevolent non-intervention by the Bucharest government, if a crisis over or within Czechoslovakia provided an opportunity of
re-annexing Upper Hungary without risk. The
blood-letting of land and people, which had benefited Yugoslavia -- so named
after 1929, was something to which the Hungarians easily reconciled
themselves, since Hungary's politicians hoped, with Belgrade's help, to break
the iron ring of Little Entente states around Hungary created by Beneg as a
result of King Charles IV's restoration attempts. This alliance, which posed
a constant military threat, virtually ruled out even loose cooperation
between Hungary
and its neighbours. Since the dispute over Burgenland caused relations with
Austria to remain tense for years and since contacts with Germany were
initially limited to a dialogue between the Hungarian Right and circles
around General Ludendorff on the prospects of overturning the status quo,
Hungary was only able to break out of its diplomatic isolation to some extent
when it joined the League of Nations on 18 September 1922 and took its seat
in the General Assembly on 31 January 1923. Hungary's
initially very close contacts with Poland
had fizzled out after the failure to achieve a common border in Ruthenia and the signing of the Polish-Rumanian
alliance treaty on 3 March 1921. It was not until May 1929, when the foreign
ministers of the Little Entente states met in Belgrade,
that the Polish foreign minister, Zaleski, visited Budapest and contributed to overcoming the
foreign policy constraints on the Hungarian government with the signing of a
friendship and arbitration treaty.
It was only the need to bring about the
orderly return of Hungarian citizens from Russian captivity that resulted in
the government in Budapest concluding three
reparations agreements with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
in 1920-21. These were followed on 15 July 1922 by an agreement on the
exchange of political prisoners. Despite the government's tough antiCommunist
line at home, an agreement establishing diplomatic and consular relations
with the government of the Soviet Union was signed in Berlin on 5 September 1924. In view of the
distrust felt by all of Hungary's
neighbours, prime minister Bethlen did not find the courage to have this
agreement ratified, nor to accept Soviet diplomatic representation in Hungary
in the face of widespread general opposition at home.
In contrast, the Hungarians hoped for active
Italian support for their revisionist demands following Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922. But as
long as the Duce still competed with France for the support of the Little Entente
states and hoped for eventual Italian domination of the Danube basin, he had
no wish to reduce Italy's
chances by openly siding with the Hungarians in their disputes. Only after
relations between Budapest and Belgrade had been sufficiently normalised in 1926 for
Bethlen to offer the Yugoslavian government a friendship and non-aggression
arbitration pact -- and the Yugoslavs after lengthy negotiations had rejected
closer relations with Hungary
-- did Mussolini come out into the open. By a 'Treaty of Friendship and
Cooperation', signed in Rome on 5 April 1927, Hungary acquired a valuable
ally, while Mussolini was able to strengthen the Italian position in the
Danube basin and further his Albanian policy, now directed against
Yugoslavia.
The press campaign in support of Hungary's
revisionist demands, launched in June 1927 by Lord Rothermere in the Daily Mail under the headline 'Justice for
Hungary', caused great enthusiasm in Hungary and encouraged the hope of
achieving at least partial success in obtaining the return of the lost territories
inhabited by Magyar majorities. Alongside the intensified activities of the
reorganised Hungarian Revisionist League ( Magyar
Revízíos Liga), at first supported by 101 economic and social
organisations, but soon by over 500 corporate bodies, county administrations
and towns, the government concentrated on cultivating foreign diplomatic,
artistic and academic contacts in the interests of achieving a revision of
the treaty. This enthusiasm, which Mussolini's encouraging declarations
aroused still further, caused the increasingly anxious foreign ministers of
the Little Entente states to agree on 21 October 1929 to renew automatically
every five years the mutual alliance treaties chiefly directed against
Hungary and to instruct their general staffs, who agreed on regular
consultations, to prepare all measures necessary for combined military
intervention in Hungary or Bulgaria. Although Hungary, which since 1927 had
violated more deliberately and frequently than ever the treaty's military
clauses, had signed a secret military agreement with Italy and come to an
arrangement with the opposition Croat leader, Maček, the Hungarian army
would not have been capable of resisting a combined operation by the troops
of the Little Entente states. Thus, a full ten years after the war, when the
world economic crisis which also affected Hungary began to undermine the
social and economic consolidation thus far achieved, the Bethlen government
had still failed to make any progress with its revisionist policy.
After the First World War the technical
innovations which had spread slowly but surely in Hungary ensured that most towns
were connected to 'a water supply and provided with a sewage system,
electricity supply and telephone system. The countryside, however, was almost
entirely bypassed by these developments. By 1939, two-thirds of Hungary's
villages still had no electricity. Thus, the cinema boom after the advent of
'talkies' and the expansion of national broadcasting for the country's
400,000 available radio sets were developments restricted to the towns. Hungary's highly developed newspaper industry,
concentrated mainly in Budapest,
figured little in the lives of the poor peasants and rural labourers, since
almost a million adults were still illiterate. After 1926, the long-serving
minister of education, Count Kunó Klebelsberg, was responsible for the fact
that some 5,000 classrooms were established in rural areas along with
accommodation for teachers. However, despite his orders that adherence to the
principle of six-years' compulsory elementary education should be more
strictly monitored, approximately 10 per cent of children of school age were
still able to avoid schooling. Also, most children from peasant and
working-class families left school after four or at most six years and could
only exceptionally enter and complete a secondary school education which
involved great material sacrifice and numerous difficulties. Legislation
belatedly passed in 1934 and 1938 tried to standardise the educational system
by merging the grammar schools with those secondary schools placing more
stress on technical and vocational subjects. During the school year of
1937-38 only 52,000 pupils were taught in grammar schools or in secondary
vocational schools. There was no properly developed system for vocational
training, with the result that apprentices were entirely subjected to the
conditions laid down by employers. Of the 11,700 students attending
universities and institutions of higher education, only 2.7 per cent came
from peasant and working-class families. In the 360 or so schools for
national minorities, subjects with a national bias like history, civic
studies and geography were taught in Hungarian. Other subjects were taught in
the vernacular, whether German, Slovak or Serbo-Croat.
Cultural activities encouraged by the state
also remained tied to the traditional conservative outlook of Hungarian
society. Literature was especially dominated by the superficial popular
novels of writers like Ferenc Herczeg or Zsolt Harsányi as well as reactionary
and nationalist writings which avoided tackling the subject of social
tensions. After the overthrow of the Soviet Republic
many committed writers and academics emigrated, although they stuck to the
problems of Hungarian society in their choice of themes. The literary circle
centred on the newspaper Nyugat ( The
West), which had already been influenced by bourgeois-democratic ideas at
the turn of the century and which included Gyula Juhász, Árpád Tóth, Mihály
Babits and Zsigmond Móricz, lost much of its fighting spirit in the Horthy
era, although it continued to attempt a critical, realistic portrayal of
Hungarian society and painted an unflattering picture of the social misery
and material distress of village life. Under this influence, the popular, or
so-called 'village writers', took up the peasants' demands for an extensive
programme of land reform and state aid. Their scholarly based and convincing
portrayals, like Imre Kovaćs "'The Silent Revolution'" or Géza
Feja "'Thunderstorms'", were banned and the authors imprisoned on
charges of inciting hatred of the great landowners, campaigning for social
revolution and damaging the prestige of the state and society. The works of
writers close to Communism, like the powerful poetry of Attila Jószef or academic
works such as those of György Lukács, were banned from publication in Hungary.
The composer, Béla Bártok, eventually chose to emigrate rather than suffer
the increasingly reactionary cultural climate.
In Trianon Hungary 62.8 per cent of the
population belonged to the Catholic Church, a fact which allowed its bishops
to exert considerable political influence. The leading politicians of the
interwar period, like Horthy and Bethlen, were, however, Calvinists, who,
together with members of the other protestant churches, accounted for only
27.8 per cent of the population. Of the remainder of the population 6.2 per
cent were professing Jews and 2.2 per cent were Catholics who observed the
rites of the Greek Uniate Church. One per cent of the population belonged to
other religious groups. Although Catholicism was no longer the established
religion, the Catholic Church and clergy, operating within the ethos of a
Christian and national state and society, stood solidly behind the policies
of the Horthy régime and had no reservations about supporting its revisionist
policies. The industrial workers, however, were largely alienated from
practising religion. The number of baptised Christians who did not attend
church regularly rose rapidly, although it was still the practice, even in
the towns, to attend church on major holidays and personal or family
occasions such as christenings, confirmations, first communions, weddings and
funerals. Thanks to its large press, which included 13 daily newspapers and
33 weeklies, its landed property of some 5,400 square kilometres and its
strong support in the countryside, the Catholic Church was able to resist the
process of secularisation more successfully than the other denominations.
This was due not least to the efforts of Cardinal Archbishop Dr Justinián
Serédi who, as Primate of Hungary, also exercised certain state functions.
The son of a carpenter, co-author of the revised version of the book of Canon
Law, Codex Juris Canonici,
and reluctantly appointed head of the Hungarian clergy, he constantly kept
his distance from the Horthy régime and knew how to use his moderating
influence, especially during the Second World War and the persecution of the
Jews.
The period of political consolidation, which
was accompanied by a slow but steady rise in economic prosperity and the hope
of achieving a revision of the Trianon treaty by peaceful means in accordance
with Article XIX of the League of Nations or by agreement with Hungary's
Little Entente neighbours, was abruptly interrupted by the world economic
crisis and the ensuing internal conflicts and deteriorating international
situation. It soon became clear that Hungary
had to seek a closer relationship, both military and economically, with one
of the Great Powers with interests in the Danube
basin. Because of its strategic position Hungary was to assume an
exceptional importance for the expansionist foreign policy of the Third
Reich. Increasing economic, political and military contacts with Germany
brought the country more and more into the orbit of Nazi Germany and also led
to a far-reaching transformation of its socio-economic and political
structure.
The effects of the world economic crisis
Black Friday', the
day when the New York stock exchange crashed on 24 October 1929, had an immediate
effect on the system of international loans and ushered in a world economic
crisis of considerable proportions which resulted in all payments under the
system being stopped. Hungary
was, of course, affected by the recession and in 1931 was plunged fully into
the economic turmoil. The drastic fall in the price of agricultural produce
was bound to hit Hungary
particularly badly, given that the majority of its population still earned
its living from agriculture and agricultural produce remained its chief
export. Although the price of wheat dropped from 33 pengö per quintal to only
9, Hungarian wheat still found it difficult to find a foreign market. Small
farmers, in particular, who had taken on loans to modernise or enlarge their
holdings, could no longer find the money to repay their debts and shoulder
increased tax burdens. Many were ruined as a result of the forced sale of
land which now began to be auctioned. Some 60,000 farms of under 2 hectares
were affected. Over half a million rural labourers were made destitute and a
further half million forced to hire their labour for starvation wages which
were inadequate to feed their often large families. Despite an
unexportable surplus of agricultural products, many people in the countryside
starved and perished. The towns suffered equal hardship. Industrial
production fell on average by almost a quarter: 15 per cent of Hungary's
factories ceased production and 30 per cent of the labour force was laid off.
The unemployed found themselves in a miserable condition, since there was no
provision for unemployment benefit or public assistance. The rest were forced
to accept painful wage cuts and longer working hours. State employees had
similarly to accept salary reductions and dismissals. As a result, graduates
entering the job market were joined in suffering extreme hardship by 2,500
unemployed teachers and 2,000 engineers without work, despite
government-sponsored retraining schemes. From 1932 onwards, the general
decline in living standards also began to affect small tradesmen and
retailers, many of whom were forced to close down or sell their businesses.
At first the Bethlen government tried to
overcome the financial crisis by arranging further foreign loans. This was
only made possible by the scaling down of Hungary's reparations debts in
January 1930, which was intended to make 10.4 million gold crowns available
annually up to 1944 and, thereafter, 13.5 million annually up to 1966. Hungary's
foreign debt, which at that time had already reached the astronomical sum of
1 billion US dollars -- an amount which already exceeded the national income
of the economically buoyant year of 1928 and comprised mainly short-term
loans, could no longer be repaid owing to a shortage of foreign exchange and
rapid decline in export earnings. The situation grew worse when some of the
loans were prematurely recalled after the collapse of the German banks and
the payments moratorium by the Austrian Creditanstalt on 11 May 1931. The bankruptcy of
the country's largest bank, the Hungarian General Credit Bank, was only
narrowly averted. The National Bank, which had been rescued only a few years
previously with the aid of the British finance, now found itself on the verge
of collapse.
After accepting the Hague agreements in 1930
the government tried to divert people's attention from the deplorable
economic and financial situation by holding nationwide rallies and employing
nationalist appeals and revisionist slogans, but was helpless at preventing
demonstrations for work and bread which were held increasingly after 1
September and resulted in serious riots involving death and injury as a
result of tough police intervention. It also failed to re-establish political
stability, despite proclaiming martial law. The three major interest groups, the
great landowners, the upper bourgeoisie and the state bureaucracy, upon which
István Bethlen's government primarily depended for its support, also
increasingly pursued their members', sectional interests and advocated
changing the former economic and financial system at the expense of their
erstwhile partners. The representatives of the wealthy and middle-ranking
peasants left the government party and founded the Independent Party of
Smallholders (Független Kisgazdapárt), led by Bálint Szijj and Zoltán Tildy,
in Békés on 13 October 1930. Bethlen indeed managed to prevent any
fundamental change to the composition of parliament when he again called
elections for June 1931, winning 45.3 per cent of the vote and 158 of the 245
seats for his Unity Party. However, because the financial crisis, whose
effects became very apparent on 14 June, made it necessary to impose a
partial moratorium and pass an enabling law for financial cuts in July, the
premier felt obliged to tender his government's resignation to the Regent on
19 August 1931. In view of the deepening social divisions, the hopeless
economic situation and the threat to the whole political system. Bethlen
wished to 'withdraw from circulation' in order, as he put it, 'to be able to
maintain and ensure the survival of the system I have created'.
Horthy now appointed the conservative Count
Gyula Káirolyi as Bethlen's successor on 22 August 1931. Károlyi saw no
alternative but to appeal to the League of Nations for fresh help in putting Hungary's
finances in order. Thanks to French financial assistance the collapse of the
state finances was averted in return for Hungary calling a halt to its
revisionist propaganda and fulfilling its financial treaty obligations. A
repayments moratorium, approved in December 1931, offered a degree of
protection for the currency, although it failed to tackle the country's real
economic difficulties effectively. When the government hesitated in meeting
the demands of the great landowners and the new Independent Party of
Smallholders both of whom opposed radical land reform but wanted more
subsidies for the farming sector and agricultural exports, Károlyi, who
generally sought to follow the same policy as his predecessor, aroused the
enmity of the agricultural lobby. The strict financial retrenchment meant
that even state employees were forced to accept further salary cuts and
therefore felt impelled to maintain their distance from the new government,
especially since they were convinced that the haute bourgeoisie of mainly
Jewish origin would continue to enjoy its privileged position. Budapest's
rejection of the plan for a German-Austrian Customs Union ( Schober-Curtius
Agreement) -- which signalled France's growing influence in Hungary -- and
its promise to consider positively the Tardieu plan, proposed by the French
government on 1 March 1932 to help east central Europe's financial recovery,
aroused opposition from financial and commercial circles. The restrictions on
the Hungarian government's freedom of action, as demonstrated by its stifling
of revisionist propaganda, infuriated the nationalist pressure-groups, who
never tired of laying the sole blame for the effects of the world economic
crisis on the unjust peace treaty.
Hungary's political and
social tensions grew so acute in the summer of 1932 that a strong faction
within the government party turned against Károlyi. After the prime
minister's dismissal on 21 September Horthy had to bow to the pressure of
public opinion and appoint the former defence minister, Gyula Gömbös de Jáfka,
to take over the government on 1 October 1932. This old trusted colleague of
Horthy, who had been involved in Hungarian politics from the time of the
counter-revolutionary Szeged
government, held views that were both anti-Legitimist and hostile to the privileges
of the upper aristocracy. Since he also held openly antisemitic views, he
could be seen as a representative of the selfconfident new middle class which
was gaining ground at the expense of the old ruling élite and the Jewish
bourgeoisie. Gömbös, who thought in military categories and was the first
Hungarian politician to describe himself publicly as a 'Hungarian National
Socialist', had developed a foreign policy strategy which centred on German,
Italian and Hungarian cooperation in the framework of an 'axis of fascist
states'. Germany appeared
to be the only partner in such an alliance, which would be willing and able
to break Hungary's
encirclement by the Little Entente and France's
dominant influence in east central Europe.
He was well aware of the dangers involved in helping establish German
dominance in the Danube basin, but believed he could create a counterweight
to this by involving Italy
and, hence, lay the basis for a thorough revision of the post-war settlement.
With a certain amount of naiveté and political wishful thinking he was
convinced that Hungary
could regain its historic frontiers with the help of its powerful allies,
involving only very slight risks. For this reason he utterly rejected any
notion of compromise or agreement with the governments of the Little Entente,
as had been mooted in Hungary
at the beginning of the 1930s.
As the former organiser of the armed
counter-revolutionary squads and right-wing radical groups during the period
of the Soviet Republic, Gömbös was extremely popular
with the officer corps and many members of the bureaucracy. His extreme
patriotism, undisguised aversion to democratic liberal ideas, hostility
towards the workers and hatred of left-wing radicalism made him acceptable to
the aristocratic ruling élite, although he made no secret of the fact that
his ultimate aim of breaking open the anachronistic structure of Hungarian
society for the benefit of the new middle classes. The results of the 1930
census had revealed that of Hungary's
population of 8.7 million, the majority, i.e. about 4.5 million, still earned
their living from agriculture. Half of the country's land under cultivation
still belonged to the 7,500 owners of large estates. The vast majority of the
rural population, i.e. the 1.2 million holders of dwarf farms, 600,000 farm
labourers, employed mainly on large estates, and 1.2 million day-labourers --
in all, more than a third of the population -- scratched a bare living from
the soil and lived in constant uncertainty. While the number of industrial
workers and small tradesmen -- around 650,000 people in 1930 -- had been
drastically reduced as a result of the world economic crisis, they already
contributed substantially to the national income. When Gömbös announced his
'National Work Plan' of ninety-five points with an unusual energy for
Hungarian politics, skilfully manipulating the press and radio, he seemed to
be trying to accommodate the wishes and demands of all sections of the
population. He proposed land and tax reforms, generous loans and
concessionary arrangements for repaying agricultural debts, the stepping up
of agricultural exports and the creation of new jobs, the holding of secret
elections and the introduction of social legislation which might almost be
described as progressive. However, his recipe for the advent of the 'new
millennium' and the dawning of an 'age of reform' scarcely disguised his real
aim of establishing a fascist-style dictatorship in Hungary.
When Gömbös tried to implement his programme
for creating a fascist 'Greater Hungary', he was confronted by a country
which was utterly exhausted economically. The population was disappointed and
disheartened at the lack of success of the decade-long campaign for a
revision of the country's borders. The economic crisis, which had resulted in
mass unemployment, the loss of many civilian and government jobs and a bleak
future for the country's youth gave added impetus to a mood in favour of
genuine revolutionary change. At the same time, it forced Gömbös to steer a
cautious and restrained course in both domestic and foreign policy. New
members of the plebeian middle class, who shared his ideas and immediate
aims, were deliberately placed in key positions in politics, the
administration and the army. By creating an organisation of some 60,000
'vanguard fighters' he tried to create a mass basis of support for the
government camp, which had by now been renamed the Party of National Unity (Nemzeti
Egység Pártja). An attempt was even made to incorporate the workers by
creating a labour section in the party. New government newspapers like the Függetlenség (Independence) andUj Magyarság ( New Hungary), the creation of an
efficient propaganda machine, the merging of the state apparatus with the
party organisations and the establishment of strict controls over public
opinion ensured that Gömbös' policies found support, despite the growing
opposition of the old ruling élite, some sections of the middle class, some
workers and the rural proletariat. In particular, his vociferous attacks on the
aristocracy and the plutocracy, on Jews, foreigners, Social Democrats and
Communists, who were accused of either obstructing radical reforms at home or
promoting chaos and the collapse of national values, were widely shared and
attracted many new members into the Party of National Unity.
Hungary's various groups of
right-wing radicals, who had been previously very active but never
particularly united, and who suffered major fluctuations in membership, felt
that Gömbös's programme was an endorsement of their views. The National
Socialist Hungarian Workers' Party, founded in December 1931 by the
journalist Zoltán Böszönnényi, which later became known as the Scythe Cross
movement (Kaszdskeresztes Mozgalom), concealed its rabid antisemitism
and extreme nationalism behind its social aims. Its urgent demands included
the nationalisation of estates of more than 250 hectares, state-promoted
job-creation schemes, and, especially, the exclusion of all
'non-turanic-aryan elements' from important posts, together with the
restoration of the country's pre-1914 frontiers. It also demanded that the
country rid itself of Jewish profiteers' who were blamed for the misery which
had befallen the population. Other fascist groups like the Hungarian National
Socialist Party (Magyar Nemzeti Szocialista Pdrt) founded in 1932 by Count
Sándor Festetics, or the United National Socialist Party (Egyesiilt Nemzeti
Szocialista Párt), created by Count Fidél Pálffy in 1933, tried to gain the
support of the rural and urban middle classes, drawn from the gentry, who had
been -- especially hard hit by the economic crisis through the use of
Christian, agrarian, antisemitic and nationalist policies. The Party of the
National Will ( Nemzet Akaratdnak Pdrt), founded by Ferenc Szálasi on 1 March
1935, which eventually came to encompass a broad spectrum of the many
right-wing radical splinter groups, was to play a greater political role only
after 1937. Although the illegally active Hungarian Communist Party was still
barely capable of continuing its activities after the execution of its
underground leaders, Imre Sallai and Sandor Fürst, on 29 July 1932, and the
Social Democrats, despite their, by 1934, 85,000-strong membership, were
increasingly subjected to government pressure, Gömbös failed to emasculate
the trade unions, to set up a corporate state or effectively to ban strikes,
which kept breaking out as a result of adverse economic and social
conditions.
G ömbös's rigorous measures, which proved
only moderately successful, provoked the opposition of ex-premier Bethlen and
his conservative liberal supporters. When the economy began to revive after
1934, they recommended a return to traditional government principles and
wanted to place Gömbös, who was ruling with increasing self-glorification and
promoting the creation of a one-party state and dictatorship, once more under
their control. Personal disagreements which had already surfaced in the
'twenties between Gömbös and Bethlen now re-surfaced and further heightened
the tensions already present in the government party. On 5 March 1935, Gömbös
suddenly dissolved the Lower House in order to pre-empt opponents within his
own party who were preparing his overthrow with the help of the parliamentary
opposition. His opponents were deliberately passed over when candidates were
nominated for the coming elections which were called at short notice. The
election held on 11 April 1935, which witnessed a far greater degree of the
usual rigging, intimidation and influencing of voters, produced a distinct
swing to the Right. With 43.6 per cent of the vote and 170 seats Gömbös could
count on a majority of the deputies, who were drawn mainly from ex-officer
circles, the gentry, civil servants and middle-ranking landowners. Two
representatives of National Socialist groups also took their seats for the
first time in the Hungarian parliament. His promise, given on a visit to
Berlin in September 1935, that he would introduce to Hungary within two years
a one-party system and political order modelled on Germany came to nothing
after his unexpectedly premature death in Munich on 6 October.
Despite the grand aims of their political
programmes, Gömbös and his successors scored only very modest successes with
their agricultural and industrial policies. The
rural population which had been won over by promises of sweeping agrarian
reforms had its hopes of a generous land reform dashed. A three-year
moratorium on debt repayments benefited only a relatively small number of
peasants. A law on entailed estates, modelled on that introduced by the
National Socialists in Germany,
represented the Hungarian variant of legislation regulating land inheritance.
From 1928 onwards, students had pointed with growing emphasis to the
unavoidable need for further agrarian reforms in association with the
so-called 'Village Research Programme', an area in which the leading Catholic
student association, Emericana, and the protestant Christian student
federation, Pro Christo, had been active in Szeged on a non-denominational
basis. Despite the bishops' lack of interest, young priests also participated
in discussions on the situation of the impoverished rural population, the
majority of whom lived in simple mud and clay huts with stamped earthen
floors, shared with animals under one roof. In such circumstances
tuberculosis was rampant and claimed over 10,000 victims annually. After
demands were made for the expropriation and redistribution of estates of more
than 250 hectares during a demonstration outside the Hungarian National
Museum in Budapest on the national holiday of 15 March 1934, the government
felt obliged to act: Gömbös had the parliament pass a land settlement law
which earmarked the great landed estates of 200,000 hectares, i.e. around 8
per cent of the area of the latifundiae, for redistribution to 37,000
families over a period of 25 years. On payment of a quarter of the purchase
price the peasants were to be given 47 years to pay off the remaining debt.
Also, in cases of compulsory purchase the government wanted in future to be
able to acquire the land in advance and then lease it to its previous owners.
Although the nationalist Youth Federation,Turul (The
Eagle), which was given financial backing by the great landowners and tended
to belong to the right of the political spectrum, denigrated the populist
'village researchers', who were supported by the Left, as Communists and
Jewish hirelings', the bishops felt obliged to hold the National Catholic Day
of 1936 under the slogan 'Christ and the Hungarian Village'. The idea of land
reform was not supported in church circles, only improved social welfare for
the rural poor, of whom on average some 130,000 rural labourers had no
guaranteed income. The dwarfholding peasants, for their part, could not produce
a sufficient surplus to feed themselves. Even somewhat improved economic
conditions shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War could not prevent
the fact that average daily earnings in 1938 were between a third and a
quarter below their level prior to the world economic crisis.
Although the slow onset of economic recovery
after 1934 was accompanied by a rise in the number of people employed in
industry and the workers' situation began to improve, unemployed rural
workers willing to migrate to the towns rarely found a regular source of
income. Hungary
was the last European country to introduce the eight-hour day. The
introduction, very late on, of legislation on workmen's protection, the
guaranteeing of minimum wages and family allowances did at least provide
employees with more social security. But real wages in 1938 were still 10 per
cent below their level for 1929. Although governments in the latter half of
the 1930s tried hard to win the support of the rural population and the
workers by means of liberal-inspired social legislation, the economic, social
and cultural conditions of the lower classes in Hungarian society remained
behind the rest of east central Europe in
1939. The great landowners, in contrast, had known how to prevent the success
of any measures designed to reduce the size of their estates. In 1938, over
10,000 square kilometres of cultivable land was still owned by only 80
magnate families; a further 16,000 square kilometres was in the possession of
1,000 smaller estate-owners. The process of concentration in banking had
contributed to the fact that the Hungarian General Credit Bank and the
Hungarian Commercial Bank of Pest ultimately
controlled 60 per cent of Hungarian industry. The country's economy was, in
fact, controlled by a handful of families. The direct influence of foreign
capital did decline after 1934, but closer foreign relations with Germany greatly increased German economic
dominance and contributed greatly to the continuing growth of Hungary's dependence on Germany, especially after the annexation of Austria and the incorporation of Czechoslovakia
into the Reich.
The opening up of the German market to
Hungarian agricultural produce, which was having difficulty finding an
outlet, gave Hitler the opportunity to establish a stronger political
foothold in Hungary.
While only 11 per cent of Hungary's
exports had been sold to Germany
in 1930, the figure had already risen to 24 per cent by 1937. By spring 1939,
almost 50 per cent of Hungary's
total exports were sold to German customers. As regards Hungary's own imports, the
proportion of German goods rose from 20 per cent to 26 per cent. By the
summer of 1939 half of all the foreign capital invested in Hungary was controlled by German
interests, and German banks held about 14 per cent of the shares in Hungarian
industry. The prime minister at the time, Count Pál Teleki, was right when he
remarked that 'the German Reich has such a major and extensive stake in our
country that it is able to control, and to a certain degree influence, the
entire Hungarian economy'.
Hungary and the
Third Reich
Before Hitler came to power German-Hungarian
relations had been of secondary importance for both states. The idea that both
countries had a 'shared destiny' from the time of the First World War was
occasionally spoken of with a certain pride. Both had been involved in a
common struggle, both had rejected the terms of the Paris Peace Treaties and
both felt they had been encircled by victorious neighbours and barred from
revising what they perceived as unjust peace terms. But the Hungarians'
narrow-minded nationalities policy, which gave rise to latent tensions
between over half a million ethnic Germans and the Hungarian government,
soured relations between the two countries during the period of the Weimar
Republic. Further complications also inevitably arose after 1933, when the
leaders of Hungary's
German minority began to receive financial and political support from the Reich,
became increasingly self-confident and Hitler claimed to be the acknowledged
leader of all Germans. Gömbös's willingness to secure Hitler's friendship and
his efforts to realise his original concept of an international fascist axis
alongside the pursuit of Hungary's economic interests, was a stroke of good
fortune for Hitler at a time when Germany was isolated in foreign policy. In
March 1933, ex-premier Bethlen was able to explain Hungary's revisionist aims
in detail to the Führer and Reich Chancellor and other leading German
politicians, before Gömbös himself, in a surprise visit to Berlin on 16 and
17 June 1933, outlined to Hitler his vision of a cooperation pact between
Italy, Austria, Germany and Hungary aimed at achieving economic autarky and
serving as a counterweight to political domination by France and her alliance
partners in the Little Entente in the Danube Basin. But Hitler's basic
dislike of the Magyars and Germany's
stronger interest in forging closer ties with Rumania
and Yugoslavia
initially hampered the development of German-Hungarian relations. Even though
they both opposed revisionism, Rumania
and Yugoslavia
were more important potential allies because of the importance of their
natural resources for the German economy.
Hence, Gömbös and his foreign minister,
Kálmán Kánya, who became the driving force behind Hungary's revisionist
policies after his appointment on 3 February 1933, developed closer contacts
with Italy, especially since Mussolini was more than willing to promise his
help in achieving success for Hungary's revisionist campaign. It was largely
thanks to moves by Gömbös that Rome and Vienna agreed to closer cooperation in early 1933, an
agreement which clearly warned Hitler not to attempt the annexation of Austria.
The Hungarian general staff was, in fact, very pro-German in its sympathies,
since Germany's support was seen as indispensable for secretly rearming
Hungary and obtaining arms supplies on credit. However, the fear that
Germany, whose influence on Hungary's German minority was causing growing
anxiety, would become a powerful immediate neighbour if Austria were annexed,
led politicians of all shades of opinion to call on the government to
maintain a cautious, non-commital approach in foreign policy. There were also
a number of ideological stumbling blocks. Extreme reservations were felt
towards the adoption of National Socialist racialist ideology. The clergy and
intelligentsia advocated that, in the case of Jews, legal norms should be
strictly adhered to despite the revival of antisemitism. The programme of a
'Hungarian National Socialism', which Gömbös advocated with growing passion,
encountered opposition from the liberal wing of the government camp led by
the interior minister, Miklós Kozma. As a result of these objections Gömbös
had to adopt a cautious policy.
Although the Hungarian government tried to
avoid a head-on collision with the interests of the Entente Powers, and
demanded only a recognition of Hungary's equality of rights
instead of insisting on a minimal acceptable revision programme, the
increased activities of the Austrian National Socialists forced Gömbös to
adopt a clear position in the Rome Protocol, signed on 17 March 1934.
Although this consultative pact between Italy,
Austria and Hungary
-- to which economic clauses were added on 14 May 1934 -- was of no great
political significance, it was intended as a warning to Hitler. Following the
attempted National Socialist coup in Vienna
and the murder of the Austrian Chancellor, Dollfuss, on 25 July 1934, German-Hungarian
relations reached an all-time low. The new organisational statute of the
Little Entente states of 16 February 1933, encouraged by France to come
closer together as a result of increased German diplomatic activity in the
Danube area, the Balkan League of 4 February 1934 and the plans of the Czech
foreign minister, Bene, for a Danubian Confederation forced Hungary to look
for other partners willing to support its revisionist aims.
After a period of formal, though lukewarm
bilateral relations with Hungary, Poland, which under its dynamic foreign
minister, Beck, proposed the idea of a 'Third Europe' as a bulwark against
Bolshevism and a barrier against an expansionist National Socialist Germany,
expressed an interest in establishing closer cooperation. Neither Warsaw nor Budapest
greeted the idea of an Eastern Pact, proposed by the French foreign minister
on 27 June 1934, with undivided enthusiasm. Although Hungary had established full diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union on 4 February 1934, the USSR's entry to the League of Nations on 19
September caused anxiety in both Budapest and Warsaw. The
assassination of the French foreign minister, Barthou, and King Alexander of
Yugoslavia in Marseilles on 9 October, which provoked the unfounded accusation
that Hungary had been involved in the murders and strained Hungary's
relations with its South Slav neighbour to breaking-point, illustrated the
importance of finding a new ally for the Gömbös government, especially since
discussions in Austria concerning a Habsburg restoration also encouraged
Hungarian royalists and aroused fears of foreign policy complications. For
this reason, Gömbös proposed an alliance to the ageing Marshall Pilsudski on
a visit to Warsaw between the 19 and 22 October 1934 in return for no more
than a promise that Poland would never take up arms against Hungary but
instead use its best endeavours to prevent Rumania from participating in any
punitive action by the Little Entente against Hungary.
When after the visit of the new French
foreign minister, Pierre Laval, to Rome
on 7 January 1935 Franco-Italian differences could be regarded as settled,
and Mussolini joined the anti-revisionist powers for a time, the Hungarian
government felt obliged to make a concession to the successor states.
Acknowledging the improved treatment of the Magyar minorities it offered to
conclude non-aggression pacts with its neighbours. However, the members of
the Little Entente were not prepared in the slightest to change their
position towards Hungary.
The signing of mutual assistance pacts between France and Russia and
Czechoslovakia on 2 and 16 May 1935 respectively worried the Budapest
government so much, that more feelers were again sent out to Berlin --
despite the fact that signs of closer cooperation between Germany and
Yugoslavia in November 1934 had caused serious concern in Hungary. Since the
foreign ministers of the Little Entente states had completely rejected Hungary's claim for military parity, a
peaceful revision of the post-war settlement and improved protection for
minorities at their conference in Bled on 29-30 August, the idea of creating
a Danubian Confederation which would include Hungary had also become remote.
Thus, after the legal position of Hungary's German minority had
been improved, Gömbös met Hitler for a second time on 29 September 1935 to
decide the future course of Hungarian foreign policy.
German opinion felt that Budapest
should drop its revisionist demands towards Rumania
and Yugoslavia in favour
of concentrating exclusively on Czechoslovakia. A German loan of
100 million Reichsmark was granted on condition that the Hungarians order
German artillery, anti-tank weapons and heavy Mörser artillery to supply the
Hungarian army. Gömbös was also given the prospect of the return of the
Burgenland if Germany
annexed Austria.
After Italy invaded
Abyssinia on 3 October 1935, he was also able to depend once more on
Mussolini's support of Hungary's
revisionist aims.
During the hectic year of 1936, when
Germany's reoccupation of the demilitarised Rhineland and the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War heightened European tensions and the signing of the
German-Italian treaty on 25 October strengthened the claim of the
'Rome-Berlin Axis' to dominate east central Europe, Gömbös, on Hitler's instructions,
attempted a rapprochement with Yugoslavia. However, the latter was still so
closely bound to the Little Entente that it had no wish to pursue its own
independent policy. On Horthy's first visit to Germany on 22 August 1936,
Hitler again suggested that he should secure Rumanian and Yugoslavian
goodwill, for once Germany had rearmed the Führer would force an agreement
with Czechoslovakia by means of massive threatening gestures. However, the
unexpected death of Gömbös on 6 October, who had not enjoyed Horthy's full
confidence during his last months in power, and the appointment of the dull
and undistinguished civil servant, Kálmán Darányi, as his successor on 10
October 1936, advised restraint in Hungary's foreign policy. A series of
domestic political issues, such as electoral reform, extending the Regent's
powers, measures to deal with unemployment, the implementation of land reform
and anti-Jewish legislation demanded urgent attention. Also, the mistrustful
Kálmán Kánya was increasingly less prepared to tolerate interference in the
conduct of foreign policy. Dissatisfied with Hungary's
growing dependence on the Reich and the danger of war, deliberately
cultivated by Hitler, he had no desire to place all his bets on Germany.
While Darányi, backed by the conservative
magnates and economic interests, reverted to Bethen's methods in trying to
promote consensus within the government and cooperating more closely with the
Smallholders and even the Social Democratic Party, foreign minister Kánya,
faced with the consolidation of fascist and national socialist forces, again
sounded out the Little Entente states on their willingness to reach an
understanding. However, since the successor states rejected his proposal to
link a non-aggression pact, which the government in Budapest keenly desired,
with the complicated minorities problem and a complete acknowledgement of
Hungarian military parity, plans for a Danubian Federation -now pursued
especially by the Czechoslovak prime minister, Milan Hoda -- had no chance of
being realised because of their complete rejection by the Magyars. German
gestures, such as the -- hardly seriously intended -- offer to the Czechs of
a non-aggression treaty or a guarantee of Rumania's territorial integrity,
caused as much annoyance in Budapest as the direct Hungarian-Czechoslovak
talks in the early summer of 1937, discreetly promoted by the Austrian
government, caused in Berlin. Sensing that Hungary was being manoeuvred into
a dangerous collision course against Czechoslovakia without sufficient moral
and diplomatic support from Germany and Italy, Kánya went all out for an
agreement with the member states of the Little Entente in the autumn of 1937.
However, by October the optimistic negotiations which began in late August
had failed to produce any concrete result. For Kánya and the forces around
Count Pál Teleki and Béla Imrédy, Gömbös's former finance minister and
current president of the National Bank, this also meant the failure of the
stratagem of arousing the British government's interest in the Danube area in
order to stem Germany's
constantly growing influence.
Although Darányi's government, which made
little progress in solving the nation's urgent internal political problems,
felt alienated by Hitler's methods and the risks he took in his power
politics, and would rather have seen Hungary's revisionist demands settled at
a conference guaranteed by the Great Powers, it had to follow Germany's
course completely in November 1937 in view of its own past lack of success.
Hitler, who told his small circle of associates on 5 November of his
'unalterable decision' to smash Austria and Czechoslovakia, 'at any time,
even as early as 1938' and even at the risk of a possible war on two fronts,
went on later that same month - on 25 November -- to reveal to a government
delegation led by Darányi the role to be allocated to Hungary. Although the
Hungarians were prepared to come to terms with Germany's
possible annexation of Austria
in the hope of regaining the Burgenland as far as the river Leitha, Austria's
invasion by German troops on 11 and 12 March 1938 took the Darányi government
completely by surprise. Disappointment at the invasion was all the greater
when, despite messages of congratulation and gentle persuasion, Hitler showed
no desire to part with the Burgenland as a gesture towards providing Hungary
with its first concrete revisionist success. German reluctance to agree to
cooperation between the two general staffs and guarantee Yugoslavia's noninvolvement in the event of a
conflict with Czechoslovakia
increased Hungarian uncertainty. However much they desired the return of
Upper Hungary, Slovakia and Ruthenia, the majority of Hungary's politicians,
including Horthy, who was intervening increasingly in everyday policy,
perceived a threat to Hungary, if, following Bohemia's incorporation into the
Reich as a German protectorate. Hitler would exploit fully his increased
opportunities to influence events in the Danube
region. The upright conservative, Darányi, was not regarded as the right
politician to be capable of maintaining unity between the existing factions
in the government camp in the event of an external threat or of stemming the
danger from the forces of the extreme Right which now began to group around
Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the Party of the National Will. Szálasi, a
staff officer, who had retired from active service with the general staff,
set out as his party programme the aims formulated in his book Cél és követelések (Goal and Demands).
Characterised by a militant antisemitism, their only originality lay in the
suggestion of creating a federal state to bring all the peoples of the Carpathian Basin together under Hungarian
leadership (a solution he termed 'conationalism'). After visiting Germany
in the autumn of 1936 Szálasi stepped up his campaign among the urban
population, in particular the industrial workers. He was consequently
arrested in April 1937 and his party dissolved. In the following summer
László Endre founded the Racial Defence-Socialist Party, which was intended to
be a broadly based right-wing party. Eight other right-wing radical and
nationalist groups joined it in Budapest
on 24 October 1937 to form the hungarian National Socialist Party (Magyar
Nemzeti Szocialista Párt) which subscribed ideologically to the principle
of 'Hungarianism', as officially proclaimed by Szálasi. Its aim of developing
an advanced agrarian state with a sound industrial base was to be guaranteed
by the three pillars of 'Hungarianism', i.e. moral (Christian), spiritual and
material (national economic) values. Again sentenced to ten months'
imprisonment at the end of November 1937, Szálasi could not prevent his new
party being banned on 21 February 1938. However, Germany's
annexation of Austria
strengthened Hungary's
National Socialists, who adopted the slogan ' 1938 is our year', to the
extent that a new National Socialist Hungarian Party-Hungarist Movement (Nemzeti
Szocialista Magyar Párt-Hungarista Mozgalom) superseded the earlier party
as early as 27 March 1938. Darányi's failure to take a sufficiently tough
line with the extremists, who refused to be discouraged by public order laws,
bans and Szálasi's imprisonment for three years, eventually contributed to
the premier's fall from power. The Arrow Cross Party-Hungarist movement (Nyilaskerezstes
Párt-Hungarista Mozgalom), founded on 9 March 1939, tried to ensure its
continued existence by adopting an emphatically moderate programme whose only
radical feature was its antisemitism. It achieved substantial success in the
elections of May 1939. With a quarter of the vote and 31 deputies supported
by a further 17 deputies from other National Socialist groups, it exerted a
steadily growing influence on the course of Hungarian policy.
Darányi now tried to avoid his downfall
which seemed imminent in the spring of 1938. He announced a rearmament
programme in Győr
on 5 March which would make 1,000 million pengé available for the
modernisation and expansion of the armed forces within the next five years.
Four days later, on 9 March, he announced a cabinet reshuffle of key
ministerial posts. A draft of new anti-Jewish legislation, which was laid
before parliament on 8 April, was intended to secure him German sympathies
and the support of their Hungarian sympathisers who could hope to step into
positions vacated by Jews dismissed from their posts. However, after a series
of intrigues, in which ex-premier Count Bethlen had the guiding hand, Darányi
was dismissed on 13 May 1938 and Horthy appointed Béla Imrédy, the capable,
ambitious and devout catholic President of the National Bank, as his
successor. As well as his reputation as a first-class financial expert, he
owed his appointment above all to his liberal, pro-western and outright
Anglophile views, which he demonstrated by giving the ex-prime minister, Count
Pál Teleki, the post of education minister in his cabinet. Although this
seemed to strengthen those elements critical of National Socialist Germany,
after a brief and unsuccessful attempt to win Britain's
support in September 1938, it was Imrédy's influence which was eventually
responsible for Hungary
completely siding with Germany.
While Imrédy vigorously opposed the
Hungarist movement, but at the same time eventually secured the passage of
anti-Jewish legislation and the new military budget through parliament, in
the field of foreign policy he attempted to use his good personal contacts
with Great Britain in order to win the support of the British government for
a peaceful return of the Magyar-populated districts of Czechoslovakia and at
the same time boost the sale of Hungarian agricultural produce. At the same
time, he established closer contacts with Poland with a view to defining
mutual spheres of interest and achieving the coordination of diplomatic
activities and, if necessary, military operations. Since Hungary could not rely on armed
forces of any appreciable strength, and greatly overestimated the strength of
its potential enemies, Imrédy's cabinet tried once more to achieve a maximum
possible revisionist success by peaceful means through negotiations with the
Little Entente. On 22 August 1938, the foreign ministers of the Entente
meeting in Bled announced that they were prepared to recognise Hungary's
desire for armaments parity and were willing to consider a more conciliatory
stance on the question of national minorities.
This first modest attempt at a settlement
was immediately undermined by Hitler's remarks during Horthy's state visit to
Germany at the end of August when Hitler expressed his annoyance at what he
called the 'sloppy attitude' of Hungary's politicians and pointed out that
those who wanted to 'join the party in destroying Czechoslovakia' had 'to do
some of the cooking as well'. But during the talks held in Berlin
and Kiel it
became clear that even the keenest Hungarian revisionists were not prepared
to rush head over heels into an uncertain adventure on Hitler's side.
However, when in September 1938 the Führer set the Czechoslovakian crisis in
motion and refused to relax the pressure, Hungary could not remain on the
sidelines. On 20 September, Imrédy and Kánya were summoned to Berchtesgaden where they
were confronted by a Hitler who was determined on world war. In a fit of
generosity he informed them that he had no claims on Slovakia or Ruthenia, provided the Hungarian
government -- after a short interval in order to avoid intervention by Rumania and Yugoslavia
-- took an active part in destroying Czechoslovakia. Although some
200,000 inadequately trained and poorly equipped soldiers had been mobilised
in Hungary
in the meantime, their field strength was limited, since available munitions
were adequate for only some 36 hours of fighting. The news, which was
eventually announced on 28 September, that a meeting of government leaders
would take place at a Four Power Conference in Munich,
was greeted with relief in Budapest,
since there was now the prospect of avoiding armed conflict. It was entirely
thanks to Mussolini's intervention that Hungary's claims were dealt with
satisfactorily in the Munich agreement to the point that 'the problem of the
Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia, insofar as this would not be settled
within three months by an agreement between the governments concerned, would
be the subject of a further meeting of the government leaders of the Four
Powers present'.
But the sudden euphoria felt in Hungary at this first major revisionist
success was soon dampened by the tough negotiations with the autonomous
regional governments of Slovakia
and Ruthenia (now called the
Carpatho-Ukraine) in Komárom in October 1938. The opposing parties were so
entrenched in their views that on 2 November 1938 the German foreign
minister, von Ribbentrop, and his Italian counterpart, Ciano, were forced to
give an arbitration judgement in Vienna's Belvedere Palace
which restored to Hungary
12,009 square kilometres of land with 1.04 million inhabitants, including
592,000 Magyars, 290,000 Slovaks, 37,000 Ruthenes and 14,000 Germans. This
increased Hungary's
territory and population to 105,000 square kilometres and 10.11 million
inhabitants. Magnificent celebrations to mark the 'return of the occupied
territories' scarcely concealed the disappointment felt at the partition of
Ruthenia and the failure to secure a common frontier with Poland. Kánya, who was blamed for
these failures and had to fight for his survival in the cabinet, thought he
could take a gamble and, without a complete assurance of Poland's backing,
ordered preparations for the military occupation of Ruthenia's remaining
territory, planned for the night of 19 and 20 November 1938. Because of
Hitler's firm objections, the attack had to be cancelled at the last minute.
As a result of public pressure the Imrédy government was forced to resign on
23 November. Since both Teleki and the chief of the Hungarian general staff,
Lajos Kerezstes-Fischer, refused to accept the post of premier, Horthy once
more entrusted Imrédy with the formation of a new government on 28 November.
With the appointment of pro-German politicians acceptable to the German
government to the key ministerial posts in the cabinet the entire political
system took a distinct shift to the right. After several candidates had
turned down the post, Kánya's arrogant, ambitious and scheming secretary of
state, Count István Csáky, was appointed, the new foreign minister. He
believed that Hungary
could secure its independence and gain further revisionist successes, which
as a Hungarian nationalist he thought vital to its survival, only if it
followed Berlin's
advice.
Csáky's belief that the 'Rome-Berlin Axis'
would dominate Europe for the next quarter century and that under its
protection Hungary would be restored to its former greatness within its
historical frontiers led him to seek an even closer relationship with
Hitler's Germany in the hope of being able to occupy the strategically important
province of the Carpatho-Ukraine before the regional elections due to be held
there on 12 February 1939. Because of his anxieties about holding on to his
office, Imrédy may well have been the driving force behind the attempt to win
Hitler's approval. Despite his new government's shift to the right and
attempts to conceal the disappointing result of the Vienna Award through
increased internal political activities such as a new land reform law and
discriminatory anti-Jewish legislation modelled on Germany's example. Imrédy
lost the Regent's confidence. The premier had failed overall in fulfilling
the high hopes placed in him. Having failed to achieve success, he had
brought about a situation where -- against his own wishes, not least because
of Britain's lack of
interest -- Hungary had
grown substantially more dependent on Germany. However, after Hitler
had adamantly refused to tolerate any further Hungarian actions in the
Carpatho-Ukraine, Horthy summoned Imrédy on 13 February 1939 and used the
'discovery' of his Jewish great grandmother as the excuse for his dismissal.
For the second time in his career Count Pál Teleki was appointed prime
minister on 16 February 1939.
The new premier, a professor of geography,
had been a former delegate to the Paris Peace Conference and, since May 1938,
education minister. He was neither a narrow-minded revisionist nor a
cloistered academic, but a responsible full-blooded politician, conscious of
the responsibilities of his office. He did not shirk from the effort involved
in pursuing an independent Hungarian nationalist course in domestic and
foreign policy and secretly hoped that in a conflict between the fascist
dictatorships and the western democracies -- which he thought inevitable --
the latter would eventually gain the upper hand. Nevertheless, he was enough
of a political realist to recognise Hitler's current domination of east
central Europe and, since the recovery of the Carpatho-Ukraine was at stake,
to support Germany in its
expected elimination of the rump of Czechoslovakia
after Munich.
In the following six weeks, during which Hungary
came closer to achieving this revisionist aim, the country became even more
dependent on Germany
in an irreversible development which gave rise to the long-term danger of
completely losing its political sovereignty. Hungary's joining of the
Anti-Comintern Pact on 24 February 1939, its breaking off of diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union on 2 February and its subsequent withdrawal
from the League of Nations on 11 April were all signs of a willingness to
subordinate the country to Germany's leadership.
When Hitler informed the Hungarian government
on the evening of 12 March 1939 that it had 24 hours to settle the Ruthenian
problem its own way, Horthy and Teleki's government did not hesitate to join
obediently in Hitler's illegal action. Like the vast majority of their
countrymen, the politicians thought only in historical-geographical terms and
were convinced of the need to restore Hungary to its historical
frontiers or else suffer national decline. Disquieted by Germany's
announcement that a protectorate had been established over Slovakia, to which
Hungary also laid claim, the government ordered military operations to begin
after 16 March in eastern Slovakia with a veiw to extending Hungary's common
frontier with Poland. It also hoped that it could in time persuade the Slovak
state, which was barely capable of an independent economic existence, to
enter into closer cooperation or even union with Hungary. The campaign resulted in
the acquisition of an area of 11,085 square kilometres with 552,000
inhabitants in the Carpatho-Ukraine, of whom 70.6 per cent were Ukrainians,
12.5 per cent Magyars and 12 per cent ethnic Germans. A further 1,700 square
kilometres with 70,000 mainly Ukrainian and Slovak inhabitants were wrested
from Slovakia.
After Poland's refusal to give in to his demands over the question of Danzig
and the Polish Corridor, Hitler, who had earlier considered partitioning
Slovakia to compensate its neighbours, at first showed no inclination to
accommodate Hungary's revisionist demands any further. In the months that
followed tensions between Hungary and Slovakia, Hitler's pseudo-sovereign
vassal state which served as a model for his 'New Order' in Europe, reached
the point where the threat of a military clash was only avoided as a result
of major German intervention.
Although the Vienna Award satisfied an
essential part of Hungary's
claims and the overestimated asset of a common frontier with Poland had been achieved after the occupation
of the densely forested but economically still undeveloped Carpatho-Ukraine,
Teleki's government, while breaking the encircling grip of the Little
Entente, had allowed itself to become chained to Berlin. This meant in fact that its
freedom of action was even more limited. Had Horthy and the various Hungarian
governments opposed Hitler's wishes after March 1939, Hungary would have certainly suffered a
similar fate to Poland.
The impatient and uncompromising revisionist claims which Hungary raised against Rumania in an increasingly tense
international situation from the spring of 1939 onwards aroused little sympathy.
Not only did they paralyse the British and French guarantee to Greece and Rumania,
announced on 13 April 1939, but by constantly stirring up trouble in the
crisis-ridden area of south-eastern Europe gave Hitler the opportunity to put
himself forward in the role of arbitrator and consolidate Germany's position in the Danube
region. This exceptionally blinkered and dangerous foreign policy of the
Teleki government, which measured progress entirely in terms of achieving
revisionist aims and eventually made every move ultimately dependent on this
goal, speeded up the process whereby Hungary became increasingly dependent on
Germany in its foreign, military and economic policy. Its unhesitating
alignment with Germany,
which Hitler and Ribbentrop suggested to Hungary's
compliant foreign minister, Count István Csáky, at Berchtesgaden
on 8 August 1939, paid off a year later when the Second Vienna Award restored
Northern Transylvania to Hungary.
However, it involved renouncing Teleki's original policy of 'armed neutrality',
forsaking genuine Hungarian independence, and eventually culminated in the
catastrophe of war. Thus, Hungary's revisionist policy, which failed in its
extent and method, also set in motion the downfall of Horthy's quasi-feudal
state which was plunged by Germany's ultimate defeat into the maelstrom of
social revolutions and into being once more forced to accept the frontiers
laid down in the Trianon peace treaty.
Above: French map showing Trianon
revisions prior and during Worle War II
Below:detailed Hungarian map showing Hungary, as
of late April/1941
Click on the map for better
resolution
In domestic politics, Hungary was unsettled by the
debate which lasted from December 1938 to 3 May 1939 on the second anti-Jewish
law. The application of racial criteria led to the vast majority of Hungary's
Jews losing their positions, especially in the educated and white-collar
professions, but also in major business concerns. A law of 27 January 1939
introducing universal conscription and the decision to build up the army
reserves made it compulsory for all men and women between the ages of 14 and
70 to join the Labour Service for the sake of national defence. Yet it also
served as a pretext for further restrictions on freedom of assembly and
organisation, together with the introduction of summary courts and the
erection of internment camps. After the Party of National Unity, led by
ex-premier Imrédy, ceased its political activities and joined the modern
Hungarian Life Movement on 5 January 1939, Teleki founded his own Party of
Hungarian Life (Magyar Élet Pártja) on 7 March 1939 in preparation for
the elections due to be held in March. Although representatives of the Arrow
Cross-Hungarist movement continued to be persecuted, Teleki had no objections
to their participating in the elections of 28-30 May 1939 which were
conducted mainly by secret ballot. Together with the other National Socialist
right-wing radical groups they won almost a million votes and 48 seats, of
which 17 went to the splinter parties. Winning 181 of the 260 contested
seats, the Party of Hungarian Life was able to rely on a comfortable
majority, especially since it could count on support on national issues from
the Christian Economic and Social Party (8 seats) and the National Liberal
Party (5 seats). The middle ground and the left of politics, led by the
Independent Party of Smallholders, did particularly badly in the election
campaign which was dominated by right-wing slogans and the chicanery of the authorities.
The Smallholders had only 14 seats compared with the 22 they had previously
held. The Social Democratic Party, despite polling 13.3 per cent of the vote,
won only 5 seats. The Hungarian Communists, whose Central Committee, which
had been active underground, had been dissolved by the Comintern in 1936 and
replaced by a provisional secretariat set up in Prague, tried to increase their contacts
with the more left-wing elements among the extreme nationalists. But, despite
attempts at reorganisation by Ferenc Rózsa in the spring of 1939, the
Communists were far too weak to be able to influence political events or the
majority of workers who had been won over by the National Socialists'
slogans. Following internal squabbles in the ' Hungarian-German National
Popular Education Association', Franz Basch founded the ' National League of
Germans in Hungary'
in November 1938. As a result of the financial and moral support it received
from the German Nazi Party's own Department of Foreign Affairs and the SS Liaison
Office for Ethnic Germans, it became the forerunner of a single party
representing Hungary's
ethnic Germans, who were becoming increasingly influenced by the spirit of
National Socialism.
Despite the growing threat of war in the summer of 1939, the slow
economic recovery, helped along by increased exports to Germany, an intensive armaments programme, initial
revisionist successes and growing hopes of recovering Transylvania,
gave broad sections of the population the impression of standing on the threshold
of a major political and economic recovery. The government attempted to play
down the increasingly obvious pressures from Germany and, by staging incidents
on the Rumanian border, tired to divert attention from tensions within the
government and the country's growing political polarisation. However, the
Hitler-Stalin Pact of 23 August and the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the
outbreak of the Second World War, shook the Magyars out of their illusory
complacency and forced Hungary
and its politicians to come off the fence.
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