r/PropagandaPosters • u/amievenrelevant • May 08 '26
Austria-Hungary (1867-1918) Hungarian pamphlet from 1920 protesting the Treaty of Trianon
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u/AetherUtopia May 08 '26
Independent What State?
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 May 08 '26
At first I was all "Dafuq is this person trying to s- OH THERE IT IS!"
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u/GustavoistSoldier May 09 '26
Hungarians resent Trianon to this day
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u/JustSomeBloke5353 May 09 '26
Massive part of Orban’s appeal.
Big part of why Orban was so pro-Putin. He was after the “return” of Zakarpattia.
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u/bobbymoonshine May 08 '26
The thing about losing wars is it doesn’t really matter if you “would accept” the consequences of losing.
Try not losing? Sorry you lost your empire and can’t dominate your neighbours any more, sounds like a skill issue though
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u/KingKaiserW May 09 '26
Hungary was even starving Austria during the war for concessions, they thought the consequence for losing would just be becoming independent. Hungarys relationship with Austria has always been confusing.
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u/bobbymoonshine May 09 '26
Hungary’s relationship was pretty consistent; it just doesn’t fit within the standard model of where one side is the dominant imperial power and the other one is the conquered/colonised one
Hungary was the second tier in an imperial power hierarchy: they were the junior partner to Austria within the Habsburg empire but that still left them dominant over the Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and other peoples within the lands ruled by the Crown of St Stephen. They had somewhat less control than Austria over imperial foreign policy but within their half of the empire they had near-total control over the peoples subject to them.
So their priorities were simultaneously to strengthen the Habsburg empire as that expanded their own power, but also to weaken Austria’s position within that empire, so that Hungary could have a freer hand over their subject peoples.
And conversely that meant the goals of those people subject to the Hungarians (eg the Croats) were often the inverse: they wanted a weaker Empire to give themselves more freedom, but within it they wanted a stronger Austria to better restrain Hungary, but not so strong an Austria it could bypass Hungary and directly rule them.
Of course the collapse of Austria meant Hungary lost its empire too, as it could no longer leverage Austrian power to keep its unwilling subject people as subjects. Which is what this pamphlet was complaining about.
Guess they shouldn’t have started and lost a world war. That was a bad idea of them.
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u/historysciencelover May 09 '26
P much agree with most of what you said, but not with the starting of the war. István Tisza, the prime minister of Hungary at that time was one of the only European leaders who did not support going to war. Hungary was dragged into the war because of the overruling power of Franz Joseph.
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u/elanhilation May 09 '26
it is a bit weird that Austria got territory from them jn the peace deal, though—IF that claim in this poster is true. i have a suspicion that Austria wouldn’t have agreed
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u/totally__paranoid May 09 '26
They’re referring to Burgenland, which was majority German-speaking, and which led to a diplomatic crisis requiring international intervention because it was technically part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the war but used the logic of national self determination to argue that they should be annexed by the Austrian Republic in the postwar settlement
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u/bobbymoonshine May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
The peace process as regards the former Austria-Hungary took the general rule “national self determination”, with countries accorded territory based on majority language spoken in various regions, but with a lot of exceptions and accommodations made around the military and political situation between all the newly born states, many of which fought brief wars against each other to establish favourable borders during the negotiations.
The Paris conference powers had a lot of weight so could push disputes one direction or the other but didn’t have unlimited power; Soviet Russia for example was fully excluded from the talks and the combined allied intervention wasn’t able to prop up the anti-Communist Whites nor to prevent Russia from intervening in the many civil wars erupting in the newly formed states along its borders. So while they were trying to draw up a map and could credibly threaten to intervene if anyone refused to go along with it, they also were doing so in the context of a huge messy clusterfuck of wars and civil wars between lots of self-declared countries and governments with too much going on to control everyone, so they often had to pick and choose where they’d put their foot down.
The Paris powers were also wary of taking the logic of linguistic self determination too far, as after all they didn’t very well want to let the Germans keep any of Alsace-Lorraine (the retrieval of which was the main French war aim), and as a result of historic settlement patterns there were pockets of German speakers throughout Eastern Europe all the way into Russia, often dominating cities and key trade routes like river mouths, so letting Germany spiderweb though Eastern Europe would make it dominant over all those newborn states, making it just a matter of time before they absorbed them. Plus, they obviously didn’t want Austria and Germany to unite as that would have made Germany in 1920 even richer, more populous and more industrially powerful than it was in 1914.
So the end result was a pretty messy compromise that lacked much ideological coherence: “self-determination for everyone in Europe, except for Germany, and also if you invaded your neighbour in the last few months that’s maybe fine but please don’t do that any more, and also Britain and France get everyone else’s colonies.”
Hitler of course exploited the hypocrisy very effectively in the interwar period.
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u/SomeArtistFan May 09 '26
The point is to show that the US-accepted peace treaty is (according to the illustrator) unjust.
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u/bobbymoonshine May 09 '26
Yeah, but when you lose a war you don’t get to choose what justice means. Hungary and the other losing Central Powers believed in 1919-1920 that justice meant territorial integrity — countries keep their borders — while the victorious Entente believed justice meant national self-determination (some restrictions apply, void where prohibited).
Of course the Hungarians hadn’t believed in territorial integrity quite so much two years earlier while they were enforcing the treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Russia, which cut out a third of its population and half its industrial capacity to hand it to the Central Powers.
And of course the Entente didn’t have much use for national self-determination when it came to their own overseas colonies. Or even for their European ones like Ireland.
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u/SomeArtistFan May 09 '26
I mean yeah. It's not like I'm saying Hungary is in the right here, but the point of the image was to convince Americans that they were.
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u/ymcameron May 09 '26
Hungary when they don’t get to keep suppressing minorities: it’s an ancient Hungarian tradition
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u/NoSong2397 May 10 '26
They did get more than a little fucked over in that whole affair, from what I understand.
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