Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [169]
Thanks partly to the French, whose troops made up the bulk of Allied forces in Central Europe, Hungary had already lost control of much of its territory before the Peace Conference started. When Károlyi and his colleagues had arrived in Belgrade in November 1918 to surrender, they had come full of optimism, with postcards for the French general Louis Franchet d’Esperey to autograph. He had greeted them coldly, dismissing their claim to represent a new, liberal Hungary. “I know your history,” he said. “In your country you have oppressed those who are not Magyar. Now you have the Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Yugoslavs as enemies; I hold these people in the hollow of my hand; I have only to make a sign and you will be destroyed.” The French allowed the Serbians to move north into Hungarian territory, the Czechs to take over Slovakia, and the Rumanians to advance westward into their coveted Transylvania. When the Hungarian government complained to Colonel Ferdinand Vix, the head of the French military mission in Budapest, he refused to pass on their complaints.10
The Hungarians feared that temporary occupations would harden into permanent possession. They had resigned themselves to the loss of Croatia, even Slovakia, although in both cases they had hoped for more generous boundaries than the ones they finally got. Transylvania was something else again. Over the hills dividing the Hungarian plain from the highlands, it lay sheltered within the arrowhead of the Carpathians where they point down toward the Black Sea. Transylvania was almost half the old kingdom of Hungary; it was rich; and it was woven into Hungarian history.
Geography gave Transylvania natural defenses, but over the centuries outsiders—Romans, Germans, Slavs, Magyars—found their way there. By the eleventh century, it was under Hungarian control and it remained so, in various forms, until 1918. Rumanian scholars dismissed this history, claiming that Rumanians had been there long before anyone else. “It was in this territory,” Brătianu told the Supreme Council in February, “that the Rumanian nation had been constituted and formed; and all its aspirations for centuries had tended towards the political union of that territory.” (Brătianu did not mention that the Rumanian claims went well beyond the old boundaries of Transylvania, into Hungary proper.) Rumania, he went on, had been promised Transylvania under the Treaty of Bucharest when it entered the war in 1916. This was not persuasive, because everyone remembered how Rumania had made a separate peace with Germany in 1918. In fact, Brătianu had a much better argument: even according to Hungarian statistics, Rumanians made up more than half the population in Transylvania; Hungarians constituted only 23 percent, with Germans and others accounting for the rest. At the end of the war, an assembly of Transylvanian Rumanians had voted overwhelmingly for union with Rumania. The local Germans eventually added their support. The Hungarians, of course, remained opposed. The peacemakers expressed some concerns over the Hungarian minority—Brătianu said they would be treated in the most liberal fashion—but did not question that Transylvania should go to Rumania. Indeed, the French had made up their minds long before they had heard the Rumanian case.11
The peacemakers asked the Commission on Rumanian and Yugoslav Affairs to draw the new border between Hungary and Rumania. The French and the Italians wanted to give Rumania a generous swath of Hungary as well, while the British and the Americans followed ethnic lines, which would have kept the border further east. As one of the British experts said, “The balance must naturally be inclined towards our ally Rumania rather than towards our enemy Hungary.” The commission came up with a compromise report in March, which went a long way toward satisfying Rumania’s demands. When rumors of its contents reached Hungary, they caused consternation. Posters with maps of a Hungary divided into four asked