HUNGARIAN SITUATION OUTLINED BY DR. CZAKO

The following article written for the Crimson by Dr. Stephen Czako, Roya Hungarian Ministerial Vice-Secretary and Pugsley Scholar in International Law, deals with the Hungarian situation of racial minorities. It is supplementary to the article by Professor W. L. Langer '15 on the problem of racial minorities in Europe which appeared in last Tuesday's Crimson. Professor Langer's article dealt chiefly with the German side of the question and so interested Dr. Czako that he volunteered the following discussion of the Hungarian situation.

According to the Peace Treaty of Trianon (closed between Great Britian, France. Italy, Japan, as well as the Associated Powers and Hungary) the greatest part of South-East Hungary, the Historic Transylvania with more than 1,700,000 Hungarians was given to Roumania.

The new state Czeckoslovakia got the whole of Upper Hungary with more than one million Hungarians. To the newly reorganized Balkan kingdom Jugoslavia was delivered the south part of old Hungary, with Hungary's sole sea-shore and the harbor of Fiume, with about 600,000 Hungarians. And finally, Austria, Hungary's erstwhile spouse with whom she lived during the four hundred years of a very unhappy international marriage, got a bit of old Hungary with about 65,000 Hungarians. Nevertheless as is well known, because the United States Senate refused to ratify the so called Treaty of Trianon, the United States closed a separate treaty with Hungary at Budapest in 1921 from which the new frontiers of mutilated Hungary were omitted. This shows that the United States was the first power to discover that, as Professor Langer points out, "in the peace settlements of 1919 the principle of national self-determination was applied in an imperfect way to the problem of territorial readjustment and in view of the vaguenes of national frontiers a settlement of entirely satisfactory character was out of the question" and further that "the great weakness of the peace settlement was not that it had not solved this question but that it had not followed the principle of self-determination as far as possible."

The Treaty of Trianon has prescribed the right of Hungary to the language and education of her minorities. Nevertheless it is for the most part stultified by the stipulation of the law whereby Roumanians (Hungarians and former Hungarian citizens) who have "forgotten" their mother tongue must send their children to Roumanian schools. And the same situation obtains in Czeckoslovakia and Jugoslavia. It means that the Hungarian schools in these three countries step by step cease to exist, and all Hungarians are compelled to attend the national schools of the respective successor states. The minority treaty concluded, for instance, between the Allied and Associated Powers and Roumania on December 9th, 1919, declared that the racial linguistic and religious minorities are entitled to maintain schools and that the state must to a certain degree subsidize them. In reality, however, this is not true; it exists only on paper. In Czeckoslovakia there is one such school to every 6,919 Czecks or Slovaks (because "Czeckoslovak" indicates an artificial and only apparent citizenship), but only one to 59,254 Hungarians, and more than half of the Hungarian children are forced to attend non-Hungarian schools and will thus be lost to the Hungarian language when they grow up. We see the same situation in Jugoslavia and in West Hungary (now belonging to Austria) in regard to the language and rights of the Hungarian minorities.

This is the obverse of the medal; the reverse might be shown by long quotations selected from the speeches MM. Pribicevic, Hlinka, Maniu and other leaders of the Croatians, the Slovaks, and the Roumanians of Transylvania to prove that they consider the present state of their people worse than it ever was under the Hungarian regime.

That is the reason that, as Professor Langer says, these unsatisfactorily settled minority problems are the most dangerous questions in European politics and that the reason why "the present arrangements for the protection of minorities are inadequate" lies largely in the fault of the peace settlements; not least in the case of Hungary which lost, by the Treaty of Trianon, without any legal self-determination or plebiscite, three and a half millions Hungarians to the so called successor states, thus creating not one but four Alsace-Lorraines in the middle of Europe