AFnewsRESTITUTIONS
The new borders between Hungary and its neighboring states had been decided and published by the Paris Peace Conference as early as June 13, 1919. Due to internal unrest in Hungary, the country’s delegates did not appear for negotiations until the end of 1919, which also explains the late signing of the Treaty of Trianon, only on June 4, 1920. It officially entered into force on July 26, 1921, after being ratified by most signatory states.
The border between Romania and Hungary, outlined in Article 27 of the Treaty, was drawn on the ground by a joint commission, whose works were recorded in 126 map sheets at a scale of 1 / 5,000, in a global map at scale 1 / 375 000 and a description of the frontier and the work undertaken by the commission, including an introduction and 10 issues, in 1 327 pages.
We emphasize again, in conclusion, what emerged – we believe – and from the above presentation: that the Treaty of Trianon was not the “evil work” of Romania against its neighbor.
Dragged into the whirlwind of World War I, Hungary was defeated after reaching a declared conflict with more than 20 states in Europe and the rest of the world. Each of them used its position as a partner in victory to make specific claims against the loser. The Treaty of Trianon was the complete and detailed inventory of all of them.
A problem raised more than once in the past – and which may recur on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of its completion – would be whether it is still valid.
Before being scandalized by the hidden or suspected insolence in this question, the reader is invited to reflect on the lines that will follow.
Morally – and in fact – the Treaty of Trianon is, indisputably, a reality even today. From a strictly legal point of view, however, the answer is not easy to give, all of a sudden.
It was never formally and officially denounced, according to international practice. Many of its provisions have been extinguished by their very execution or by exceeding their term of validity.
The most important clauses – the territorial and military ones – were modified, so partially annulled, by the actions of the Hungarian governments from 1939-1941, supported by Germany and Italy. We refer to the invasion of Subcarpathian Ukraine on March 15, 1939, to the annexations based on the two dictates of Vienna (November 2, 1938 and August 30, 1940) and to the invasion and annexation, in April 1941, of the triangle between the Tisza, Danube and Sava, called by Serbs Vojvodina, and by Hungarians Bacska.
We immediately note that the unilateral violation of a treaty, especially when it was committed by dictation, by force or threat of force, does not mean its legal annulment.
Europe is not very close, but not too far from it. Multilateral international treaties have been cited very rarely lately. For some reason, they appear embarrassing. Many of those we would expect to defend them urge the conclusion of bilateral treaties. They, the bilateral treaties, seem to have become the favorites of significant diplomacy, as they represent commitments limited to two partners – rarely and sparingly guaranteed by a third – and can be easily denounced without causing chain reactions.
Thus, the peoples, according to the poet’s verse, “hold hands and detach”, waiting for the moment of sublime inspiration in which “they will embrace in front of the defeated tyrants, the consoled earth and the satisfied sky” (we quote the deputy Isnard, in the Legislative Assembly of France, November 29, 1791).
Until everyone believes this, however, the fear, fueled by the wisdom of reflection on what has happened in recent decades, that the questioning of the international legal order, its fragmentation between legally limited responsibilities, the hope of maintaining with Forcing such a new balance, necessarily unstable, are naiveties that could lead to consequences such as those that have developed catastrophically, in the spirit of concession to the authority of international treaties, manifested between 1933-1938.
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Dorin Suciu:
Finally, I propose to our readers an exercise in “post-factual history”. These days mark the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust of the Jews of northern Transylvania, the one “returned” to fascist Hungary by two demented dictators, we named Hitler and Mussolini, through the Vienna Dictate of 1940. 164,000 people were then ghettoized and sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. 135,000 were killed for the “guilt” of being Jews. It was the culmination of a global ethnic cleansing action conceived by the Hungarian governments legitimized by Miklós Horthy, which had begun four years earlier by killing 1,100 Romanians and expelling 220,000 Romanians from their homeland.
And now imagine that in 1920, in the small palace at Trianon, Count Ápponyi, the head of Hungarian diplomacy, managed to convince through false maps and statistics that, despite the decision of the Grand Assembly in Alba Iulia, Transylvania must be assigned to Hungary. The number of victims among the Jews would probably have been double, and the Romanians, for the most part, would have disappeared as a nationality.
Returning to the present day, losing in the World War II, fascist Hungary was again reduced to its ethnic territory by the decisions of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. It is strange that, although the current borders were recognized again in 1947, in Paris, the target of the revisionist attacks remained the Trianon!
The mystery of this deliberate amnesia has, first of all, its explanation in the magical power of the slogan “Trianon”. Repeated to the point of exasperation during the irredentist offensive, between the two world wars, “Trianon” was deeply imprinted in the Hungarian national consciousness. Its resumption at present arms the irredentist-revisionist cause with a formidable advantage. The tactic relies, at the same time, on the gross ignorance of young people in terms of history and on feeding, with erroneous information, the world public, which largely ignores the history of this part of Europe.
The casualness with which the “injustice” committed in the small palace at Trianon is claimed in every way can be seen today in the European Union, taking advantage of the fact that the general public, uninformed, ignores the Peace of Paris of 1947, as if there had not been a Second World War, lost by the fascist Hungary, a war that ended with the restoration to territorial rights of countries whose territories had been taken by force by their Hungarian neighbors.
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