Hungarian Geopolitics during the interwar period

In: Euro-Atlantic studies, Heft 3, S. 7-23

Abstract

The end of the First World War produced a major reconfiguration of the political map of Europe. The three anachronistic empires that continued to exist in the Eastern part of the continent (Ottoman, Tsarist, and Austro-Hungarian) quickly disintegrated and gave way to a system of politically unstable nation-states. The Trianon Treaty signed in 1920 annulled the Hungarian multiethnic state formed by a context of circumstances in 1867 and sowed the seeds of the conflicts that followed. The Hungarians, the main losers of the peace treaty, developed a real cult for the Hungarian "millennial" state and tried to identify solutions for its recreation. Geopolitics, a rising science at that time, became the main instrument of Hungarian revisionism and created the necessary conditions for the renegotiation of borders at the beginning of the Second World War.