On the contrary, along with the 1526 Mohács battle that paved the way to the century-long Ottoman occupation of most of the former Hungarian Kingdom, Trianon is being regarded as a national catastrophe even under communist rule.
Hungary became formally sovereign amidst the lost war, the short-lived radical-democratic government, the equally precarious but much more egregious Bolshevik experiment of 1919, the chaotic intermezzo of local civil wars and foreign military interventions, and finally the right-wing counterrevolution and the authoritarian regime led by admiral Miklós Horthy.
Whatever you think about the Hungarian war record and the escalation of the nationality issue before and during the conflict, there is little chance that ordinary Hungarians will ever accept as fair a peace treaty that reduced the new country’s territory by two thirds, and made millions of fellow citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy second-class minorities in the successor states.
Thus, how to talk about Trianon one hundred years later, and how to frame the last century of a national history so many regard as altogether unsuccessful? Over the last few years, Hungarian scholars – Balázs Ablonczy, Gábor Egry, Péter Csunderlik, Pál Hatos, and Béla Bodó to name a few – have produced fine-tuned historical accounts of the social and cultural conditions that made Trianon possible. However, public memory is less influenced by lengthy books than by private emotions and induced prejudices. Viktor Orbán is nationalist and pragmatic at the same time, and masterfully plays between these tones.
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