Hence, during the general débâcle of the Quadruple Alliance in October-November, 1918, Hungary disintegrated almost as spontaneously and easily as Austria. It was in vain that the new republican government of Count Károlyi fought frantically to save the territorial integrity of the state by offering the non-Magyar peoples the widest and most sweeping concessions, going even so far as to propose the transformation of Hungary into a federation of national cantons on the Swiss model. Nothing could make the seceders believe that the Magyar could change his spots, or tempt them back into the cage.
Equally fruitless were the diplomatic or propagandist efforts to persuade the Allied Powers that Hungary had suddenly become a new creation, which could not be held responsible for the acknowledged sins of its former rulers, and ought to be let off intact and scot-free. It is scarcely necessary to enter here into the tangled and not quite edifying relations between the Allies and the various governments that have succeeded each other at Budapest: the genuinely democratic and reforming government of Count Károlyi (October 1918—March 1919); the Bolshevist interlude under Bela Kun (March—August); and the more recent cabinets made up of more or less unsmirched remnants of the old regime. These many changes of government have long delayed the conclusion of peace with Hungary.[57] At all events, the treaty is now apparently about to be signed; and it seems safe to assume that this treaty will embody the territorial arrangements which were decided upon at Paris in the spring of 1919 and which I shall now try briefly to describe.
The northwestern highlands of Hungary, which are inhabited mainly by Slovaks, are to be incorporated into Czecho-Slovakia. This state touches the Danube at one point through the acquisition of Presburg, the one-time capital of Hungary. Regrettable as it may be that so historic a city should be lost to its old owners, it must be said that Presburg was always rather German than Magyar in population; and that it will furnish the land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia with a much-needed port on the Danube and a means of commercial access to the Balkans and the Black Sea.
The half-million Ruthenians who inhabit the mountains of northeastern Hungary form a secluded and backward population which has hitherto been supremely indifferent to the affairs of the outside world. Alone among the races of Hungary, they had no national movement and probably very little consciousness of nationality. Before the War they had not a single school in which their language was taught, no political newspaper of any kind, and scarcely any educated class. What went on in these primitive and illiterate heads when the gospel of self-determination penetrated to them, it is difficult to guess. There are tales that within a very few weeks three so-called National Assemblies were held, each claiming to represent the ‘Carpatho-Ruthenian nation,’ and that these rival gatherings ‘self-determined’ their people, the one for union with Czecho-Slovakia, the second for union with Hungary, and the third for union with their kinsmen over the mountains in Galicia. At any rate, the Czechophile tendency appears to have been the strongest. Going on the best evidence it could get as to the preferences of this enigmatic population, the Peace Conference has decided to attach them to Czecho-Slovakia, though under the form of an autonomous province with generous rights of self-government.
An ideal which has haunted the minds of Roumanian patriots for a century, but which long seemed only an iridescent dream, has been realized by the annexation to Roumania of Transylvania and the adjacent zone of territory on the west. This aspiring kingdom has now very nearly attained the frontiers of Trajan’s province of Dacia; and everyone knows with what ardor the modern Roumanians claim that they are descended from the Roman colonists sent out to Dacia in Trajan’s time.
Contrary to what appears to be widely believed in this country, Roumania’s acquisitions, with the possible exception of some small contentious border districts, are based strictly upon the principle of nationality. They serve to liberate over three millions of Roumanians, who, among all the subject peoples of Hungary, were the race most hated and oppressed by the Magyars, because of their numbers and the tenacity of their patriotism. It is true that in eastern Transylvania several large compact bodies of Magyars and Germans (900,000 of the former, 200,000 of the latter) are now transferred to Roumanian rule. But this is unavoidable in the case of such isolated enclaves. The Germans apparently do not object seriously; and as for the Magyars, it would be impossible to leave them to Hungary without cutting off a far larger number of Roumanians from their mother country. But of all the dramatic changes of fortune in Eastern Europe, there is none more striking than this one, which has put down the mighty Magyars from their seats, and exalted the humble Roumanian, for eight hundred years a slave and an outcast in his own country.
Roumania and Serbia have had an unpleasant controversy over the former Hungarian territory called the Banat of Temesvár. Although this dispute had very nearly brought those two Allied nations to blows, when it was laid before the Peace Conference one distinguished prime minister burst out in an audible whisper, “Where on earth is the Banat?” The Banat lies just southwest of Transylvania. It is the quadrangle enclosed by the Danube, the Theiss, the Máros, and the Transylvanian mountains.
It would take over-long to set forth the arguments, historical, economic, geographic, ethnographic, and miscellaneous, with which the two rivals regaled the Peace Conference. The Conference gave what was, I think, a proof of its wisdom by repeating the judgment of Solomon and dividing the disputed object between the litigants. Roumania will receive the larger portion, most of which is overwhelmingly Roumanian in population. Serbia acquires the very motley western section, in which Serbs, Roumanians, Germans, and Magyars are terribly intermingled, but in which the Serbs are at least a plurality: she acquires a much-needed zone to protect Belgrade on the north and east, and a number of towns which have played so great a rôle in Serbian intellectual movements that they are considered the cradle of the Serb national revival.
Farther to the westward lies the historic kingdom of Croatia, which has for eight hundred years been bound to Hungary by ties which no one could ever quite satisfactorily define, but which have often been compared to the connection between England and Ireland. In the last half century at least, Magyar-Croat relations have been even less serene and amicable than Anglo-Irish ones. It goes almost without saying that Croatia has now, of her own choice, united with Serbia and the Slovene lands of Austria to form the new state popularly called Yugo-Slavia.
That state has also received Bosnia and the Herzegovina, two provinces which have been the Alsace-Lorraine of southeastern Europe ever since their ill-fated occupation by Austria-Hungary in 1878. Thus the unity of the Southern Slav race is very nearly completed.