Hungary got back the territories which it was due?

  • 2025. December 10.
  • Krisztián Ungváry

Claim:

Hungary got back the territories which it was due.

Rebuttal:

The claim is false, Hungary got back numerous territories where Hungarians were a minority.

In detail:

Hungarian revisionist politics were two-faced, because for the outside world they were using mainly ethnic, while in the domestic discourse, mainly geopolitical arguments to legitimise its claims to territories. The reannexation of Upper Hungary (Felvidék) region from Czechoslovakia in 1938 mainly followed ethnic principles and as such was in harmony with the wish of the population in that territory. The annexation of the Zakarpattia region in 1939, however, radically contradicted this, since there over 96% of the population was not a native speaker of Hungarian. In the case of Northern Transylvania, returned to Hungary in 1940, the census in 1941 established that only 54% of the population were ethnically Hungarians. As for the Délvidék region annexed in 1941, there this number was only 39%. Despite the fact that by 1941 Hungary became a multiethnic country, with 21% of the 14.1 million inhabitants non-Hungarian, these ethnic minorities were just as oppressed, as the Hungarians had been in neighbouring countries. The only and still just partial exception was the ethnic German community in Hungary.

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