Claim:
Mihály Károlyi is responsible for the Trianon treaty.
Rebuttal:
One reason for the Trianon treaty is that the Romanians, Slovaks and Serbians wanted to create nation states just like the other European nations. Károlyi is not responsible for that. The other reason is Hungary having lost the war. He had been against entering the war in the first place.
In detail:
The outcome of the Trianon peace treaty for Hungary can be traced back to two main reasons. One is the emergence of nation states: between 1948 and 1920 the creation of nation states was the main goal of political communities east of the Rhine, this is how the Italians living in several different countries created Italy, this is how the German nation state was created, as well as several nation states in the Balkans, and after WW1 also the nation states in the Baltics and that of Ireland. It is enough to glance at the ethnic map of pre-Trianon Hungary to see how the settlement-level ethnic boundaries were not far from the outline of the later Trianon borders. The Romanians, Slovaks and Serbians had long been striving to create a nation state. The policies concerning ethnic groups in Hungary before WW1 had only given plus impetus to this process, but presumably even better policies had not been able to stop it. Lajos Kossuth had predicted as early as the mid-19th century that unless the peoples of the Danube basin were to organise themselves into a shared state based on the autonomy of the individual ethnic groups, then following a lost armed conflict the ethnic areas of Hungary would seek independence. That is, the other reason for Trianon is the armed conflict: the fact that Hungary lost the world war. Hungary had had no specific, important goals when entering the war, yet Hungarian politicians and the sucessfully manipulated public were almost equivocally behind the decision of entering the war. Moreover, there had been strong support for the measures taken in the foreign policy of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy that had led to the conflict itself: preventing Czechia from being equal with Hungary within the Monarchy (by Gyula Andrássy), preventing the reorganisation of the country on a confederate basis, a foreign policy dominated by a pro-German and anti-Russian line (also Andrássy), the annexation of Bosnia in 1908 (initiated by the Monarchy’s minister of finances István Burián). Obviously the Bosnians had not been asked whether they wanted to live in the Monarchy dominated by the Austrians and the Hungarians. They were meted out not simply unfair state borders like we were in 1920, they were fully annexed. (The shot that started WW1 was fired in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, by a Serbian nationalist who wanted to eliminate the leader of the invaders.) It was also István Burián who convinced Hungarian prime minister István Tisza about the inevitability of entering the war.
On the other hand, it was precisely Mihály Károlyi and a handful of others who were opposed to this alliance politics and entering the war. ’It is not in our interest to fight even a victorious war’, Károlyi said in 1913. ’Not only Hungary but the whole of Europe would be severely handicapped by a war for decades, and Europe would lose its leading role in the world’. This was precisely what happened. After 1916 Károlyi was advocating for a Hungary asking for peace independently of Austria, which would have meant better conditions. In the autumn of 1918 it was left to him to clean up the mess created by the others. Obviously he could have done a better job of that, but when evaluating his responsibility, it is a circumstance that has to be taken into consideration.
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