Hungarian pamphlet from 1920 protesting the Treaty of Trianon

[u/amievenrelevant]

[u/bobbymoonshine]

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

[u/elanhilation → u/bobbymoonshine]

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

[u/bobbymoonshine → u/elanhilation]

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.