| rdfs:comment
| - After World War I, the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary was split apart by the Treaty of Trianon to form several new nation-states, but Hungarians claimed that the new state borders did not follow the real ethnic borders. The new Magyar nation-state of Hungary was approximately 1/3 the size of the former Kingdom, and millions of ethnic Magyars now lived outside the borders of Hungary. Many historically important areas of Hungary were assigned to other countries, and the distribution of natural resources came out unevenly as well. Thus, while the various non-Magyar populations of the old Kingdom generally saw the treaty as justice for the historically-marginalized nationalities, from the point of view of the Hungarians, the Treaty had been unjust and even a national humiliation.
|
| abstract
| - After World War I, the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary was split apart by the Treaty of Trianon to form several new nation-states, but Hungarians claimed that the new state borders did not follow the real ethnic borders. The new Magyar nation-state of Hungary was approximately 1/3 the size of the former Kingdom, and millions of ethnic Magyars now lived outside the borders of Hungary. Many historically important areas of Hungary were assigned to other countries, and the distribution of natural resources came out unevenly as well. Thus, while the various non-Magyar populations of the old Kingdom generally saw the treaty as justice for the historically-marginalized nationalities, from the point of view of the Hungarians, the Treaty had been unjust and even a national humiliation. The Treaty and its consequences dominated Hungarian public life and political culture in the inter-war period. In addition, the government of Hungary swung more and more to the right in those years; eventually, under Regent Miklós Horthy, Hungary established close relations with Benito Mussolini's Italy and Adolf Hitler's Germany. The alliance with Nazi Germany made possible Hungary's regaining of southern Czechoslovakia in the First Vienna Award of 1938 and Subcarpathia in 1939. But that and the subsequent military conquest of Carpathian Ruthenia in 1939 still did not satisfy Hungarian political ambitions. These awards allocated only a fraction of the territories lost by the Treaty of Trianon, and in any event, the loss that the Hungarians resented the most was that of Transylvania. At the end of June 1940, as relations between Romania and all her neighboring countries were seriously strained, the Romanian government gave in to a Soviet ultimatum, and allowed Moscow to retake Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which had been incorporated into Romania after World War I. Although the territorial loss was undesirable from the Romanian perspective, the government viewed it as preferable to the conflict which could have arisen had Romania resisted Soviet advances, given Finland's bloody defeat the previous winter over it's border with the Soviets. However, the Hungarian government interpreted the fact that Romania gave up some of its territories as an admission that Romania no longer insisted on keeping its territory intact. So the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina inspired Budapest to escalate its efforts to resolve the question of Transylvania. However, Berlin persuaded Budapest to take no military action against Romania, who was, along with the Soviet Union at the time, Germany's main source of oil. Peace in the Balkans was very much in the interest of the Axis Powers, both for strategic and material reasons, and so they suggested to the parties concerned that they solve their problems by direct negotiations. The negotiations started on 16 August 1940 in Turnu Severin. The Hungarian delegation hoped to gain as much of Transylvania as possible, but the Romanians would have none of that and submitted only a small region for consideration. Eventually, the Hungarian-Romanian negotiations fell through entirely. After this, the Romanian government asked Italy and Germany to arbitrate. Meanwhile, the Romanian government had acceded to Italy's request for territorial cessions to Bulgaria, another German-aligned neighbor. On 7 September, under the Treaty of Craiova, the "Cadrilater" (southern Dobrudja) was ceded by Romania to Bulgaria.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)