A recent decision of the Hungarian parliament which declared 2020 a year of commemoration of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon – in which the Kingdom of Hungary lost two thirds of its population and 72 percent of its territory to its neighbors – has resulted in a wave of protests from those countries, conservative daily Magyar Hírlap reports.
On June 4, the anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon, the government communications office tweeted a map showing how the country was divided between its neighbours 99 years ago, with English-language explanations. Slovenia, Romania and Croatia reacted with varying levels of intensity.
Slovenian Prime Minister Marjan Šarec demanded an apology from Hungary, Romania said the tweet went against the spirit of the European Union while Croatia said the map was based on an inaccurate context as Croatia was never part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the only belonged together on account of sharing the same ruler.
The second act of the story came last week, when the Hungarian Parliament officially voted 2020 to be “The Year of Hungarian Unity”. This time Slovakia was the first to protest, saying that it was unjustified to open old wounds and that demanding regional autonomy for the Hungarian minority of Slovakia amounted to saying that minority rights are not being observed in the country.
But the most vehement reaction came from Romania, which itself celebrated the gains of the same territories at an expense of one billion euros last year. Zsolt Pászkán, foreign policy analyst at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and Trade told Magyar Hírlap that Romania responded with a statement that was both factually inaccurate and went against the 1947 Treaty of Paris that formally ended World War II.
Pászkán said Romania was unjustly accusing Hungary of revisionism, while Romanian politics keeps vehiculating the idea of unification with the Republic of Moldova, an independent state.
Title image: Romanian war memorial in the Úz valley Austro-Hungarian military graveyard in Transylvania (source: Magyar Hírlap/Róbert Hegedüs)
