István Eördögh, Erdély román megszállása: 1916-1920: olasz és vatikáni levéltári források alapján [Romanian Occupation of Transylvania: 1916-1920 Based Upon Italian and Vatican archives] (Szeged: Lazi, 2000)

It was eighty-five years ago that the so-called Treaty of Trianon was signed in the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles, which turned to be perhaps the most tragic event in the history of twentieth-century Hungary. This alleged "peace-treaty" resulted in an unprecedented mutilation of the country—Hungary lost 71 % of its territory and 63 % of its population. This loss was not only confined to the population and territory but also to the urban network system, mines, forests, rivers, mountains, roads, railways, natural resources and the most beautiful landscapes. The inconsistency of the agreement concluding the First World War is perfectly shown by the fact that the so-often declared principle of autonomy was not observed where and when it could have been applied without any difficulty. The treaty did not require the announcement of referendums in cities and villages, thus every third person (out of 10.5 million people) was Hungarian in the annexed territories-1.6 million lived in Transylvania or other areas attached to Romania, 1 million in Czechoslovakia and half million in Yugoslavia. Consequently, the Treaty of Trianon brought about the disruption of Hungary and, to a different degree, the ongoing repression of the people living outside the borders of the country.

This book offers more than the title would suggest. Eördögh does not only examine the development of the annexation of the multinational Transylvania to Romania based upon Italian and Vatican archives but the reader gets acquainted with the attitude of the Vatican to the disintegration of Hungary as well as how the Holy See established a relationship with the remaining independent Hungary, now, after four hundred-years, freed from the ties of the Hapsburg Empire.

In his preface the author notes that since his childhood at Dunakiliti he has been aware of the imposed minority position of Hungarians and points out that the border modifications also caused hardship to the area populated by Slovaks, Croatians and Germans. Eördögh examines the historical consequences of the conferences concluding the First World War relying on largely unexamined primary materials. The findings of his research were first published in his Alle origini dell'espansionismo romeno nella Transilvania ungherese (1916-1920). This volume is not simply a translation of the Italian work as it provides many new interpretations about the issues raised in the previous work.

Transylvania has a decisive role in both the Hungarian and Romanian historical-political thought. Since the foundation of the thousand year-old Hungarian state, Transylvania enjoyed a certain administrative independency. When the Turks occupied the central areas of the Hungarian Kingdom in the sixteenth century, the country was divided into three parts. Besides the Hapsburg-ruled Western territories and the central region under Turkish control, the Transylvanian Principality came into existence in the East. In the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries the latter represented the Hungarian statehood, consequently, Transylvania became the symbol of independence. In the thirteenth-century the Romanians appeared in Transylvania, who formed a relative majority as of the eighteenth-century. It was the eighteenth-century Transylvania where the Romanian national consciousness began to awake and the idea of Romanian national unity was formulated, which aimed to unite the Romanians living in Transylvania or outside the Carpathian mountains. In this light it is easy to understand why Transylvania became an equally significant symbol in the national consciousness of both nations. After the union of Moldva and Muntenia (Havasalföld) (1859), the next objective of the new Balkan state was to annex Transylvania to Romania. The Romanian political leadership managed to achieve this goal during the First World War. Eördögh`s book is an attempt to investigate the process of how the Romanian government took advantage of the opportunity, stemming from the defeat of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the war, to obtain Transylvania. Based upon the evidence of the Vatican sources, the author emphasizes that the diplomacy of the Balkan state tried to justify the eager Romanian territorial expansion with the crusade against bolshevism.

Moreover, this work clarifies several problems related to church history. The war defeat resulted in internal political crises in Hungary. The cause of the so-called Aster rebellion of 1918 was supported by the Hungarian community of bishops as well as part of the lower clergy. The attitude of Hungarian clergy was opposed by the Vatican. The pope, XV Benedict (1914-1922) was personally astonished by the establishment of the National Clerical Council, which was, even in contemporary Christian Europe, a unique and radically socialist ecclesiastical movement. Among others, the Council demanded the usage of Hungarian language in liturgy and the launch of a nunciature in Budapest.

The Romanian, Czechoslovakian and southern Slavic political powers, coming out of the war at the winners' side, intended to tear out as big part from the body of historic Hungary as possible. In their disappointment with the Western powers giving up the Wilson-principles, the ministers of the Károlyi republican government resigned and the Bolsheviks, supported by the Soviet communists, seized the power in 1919. Eördögh does not avoid the delicate question of why the Vatican showed signs of diplomatic willingness to establish a relationship with the well-known anticlerical communists. The author rightly concludes that the till this day astonishing political attitude can be explained by the centuries-old realpolitik of the Holy See, which always sought to build a modus vivendi diplomacy with the different (even communist) governments in order to ensure the continuous activity of the catholic church in a given country. This view-point was dominant in the so-called "Ostpolitik" ecclesiastical policy of the Vatican, which characterized the relationship of the Holy See and the socialist countries beyond the Iron-curtain between 1963 and 1989 (the collapse of communist dictatorships in Eastern-Europe).

The problems analysed by Eördögh in this volume have reoccurred many times since the First World War. The failure of the peace-treaty politics of the great powers is shown by the division of the artificially created Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia into national states. Europe's largest minority, the 1.5 million Transylvanian Hungarian community, has been longing for their autonomy for eighty-five years.

Gábor Péterfi/Institute of History, ELTE University

Translation by Róbert Péter

© 2005 by Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe. All rights reserved. ISSN 1553-9962

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