Claim: Successful military resistance would have led to a renegotiation of the Trianon peace terms, as it did happen in Turkey’s case.
Rebuttal: Turkey was completely different from Hungary in terms of its geographic, military and ethnic situation, so it’s fruitless to draw any parallels between them. Besides, their military resistance only took place after the peace settlement.
In detail:
The Ottoman Empire signed a peace treaty at Sèvres on 10 August 1920, whereby they gave up their Arabic territories in the Middle East to the French and the British, while they conceded a significant amount of land to Italy and Greece as well.
However, this latter loss of territory caused a national movement to emerge in Turkey headed by pasha Mustafa Kemal. As a result, the Italians gave up their territorial claims and the Greek military was stopped by Turkish troops. Kemal set Turkey on the path to becoming a modern nation state, and to achieve that, in the case of some minorities (e.g. the Greeks, the Armenians, the Kurds) he wasn’t shy to use drastic methods like forced resettlement and genocide. The entente powers, for fear of losing access to the oil deposits in the Middle East, refrained from more serious intervention.
The Peace Treaty of Lausanne set in stone the current state of affairs in June 1923, yet it was condemned by the Anglo-Saxon powers as soon as it was signed. George Curzon, British minister of foreign affairs called the treaty ’a poor solution through and through’, while the American ambassador of Germany stated that ’Christian civilisation was sacrificed for the sake of oil speculators in Lausanne’.
Several people called out Mihály Károlyi, then leader of Hungary, for not going the same way as Turkey. To refute this idea it is enough to look at the map: while Turkey only had to fight one enemy, Hungary was surrounded by enemy troops from the north, east and south. After a lost war, expecting such efforts of a population suffering from starvation, economic blockade and the Spanish flu would have been unrealistic. Let’s not forget either that ’Kemal’s way’ included genocide, which would hardly have been tolerated in the heart of Europe by great powers – not to mention its potential long-term consequences.
References:
- Hatos Pál: Az elátkozott köztársaság. Budapest, 2018, Jaffa.
- Ormos Mária – Majoros István: Európa a nemzetközi küzdőtéren. Budapest, 2003, Osiris.
- Révész Tamás: Nem akartak katonát látni? Budapest, 2019, MTA.
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