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Budapest Business Journal | May 04 – May 17
Sir Bryan Cartledge: The Will to Survive In modern times, particularly in the aftermath of political cataclysms, Hungary has become the subject of profound political and historical studies. BBJ ANDRÁS SZARVASI
One of the most comprehensive surveys of Hungarian history written by a non-Hungarian comes from a former British ambassador who, though he spent only a few years in Budapest, gives convincing evidence of his vast knowledge and intellectual insight into this subject. The author, Sir Bryan Cartledge, is a distinguished British diplomat and academic. After studying in Cambridge, Oxford and the United States, he entered the diplomatic service in 1960. He was British Ambassador, first to Hungary (1980–1983), then to the Soviet Union (1985–1988).
In his book’s preface, Cartledge describes his motivations: “I began this book – The Will to Survive – in order to satisfy my own curiosity about Hungary’s past. While serving as British ambassador to Hungary in the early 1980s, I was frequently struck by how little British visitors to Budapest, both official and private, knew of the country’s history, and also by the small margin by which their ignorance exceeded my own . . .” Cartledge traces Hungary’s history from the arrival of the Magyars in Europe to Hungary’s membership in NATO and the European Union. The 1,100 years covered by this stirring account embrace medieval greatness, Turkish occupation, Habsburg domination, unsuccessful struggles for independence, massive deprivation of territory and population after the First World War, a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany, motivated by the hope of redress, and 40 years of Sovietimposed communism inter-
rupted by a gallant but brutally suppressed revolution in 1956. The most interesting sections are those in which the author, breaking off his narrative, sheds the aloofness of the impartial historian and shares his personal views with readers. A good example is his reflections on the (rather ignominious) role British diplomacy played in the Trianon Peace Treaty signed in 1920 after the Great War between the Allies and Hungary. “The Treaty of Trianon – the part of the Paris Peace Settlement that dealt with Hungary – constituted the most severe reverse sustained by the Hungarian nation since the Battle of Mohács in 1526 […] The implications […] included: the reduction of Hungary’s area by two-thirds […] the reduction of Hungary’s population by over half […] the confiscation from Hungary of two-thirds of her railway, road and canal networks, together with approximately 80 per cent of her forests and mines; and – perhaps more
importantly than all these losses – the transfer of over three million ethnic Magyars to Czechoslovak, Romanian, Yugoslav or Austrian rule. […] The obsessive concern of the Entente powers to give their new creations, the Successor States, frontiers they would be able to defend against the perceived menace of Bolshevik Russia – and even, at the time, Communist Hungary – had the effect of leaving Hungary herself virtually defenseless against any future foe. Hungary lost most of the security of her historic natural frontiers, mountains and rivers … Taken together, the effect of these provisions was to make future Hungarian governments dependent on alliance with a major power if they were to fulfill their basic duty of ensuring the security of their citizens […] […] The fact remains that in the relatively limited areas in which its deliberations could make a difference,
the decisions of the conference were on balance unjust and gratuitously injurious to Hungary. They sowed seeds of bitterness and resentment that would eventually poison Hungarian public life and endanger peace in the region. Nevertheless, in acknowledging the evident injustice of an outcome in which Versailles cost Germany 10 per cent of her territory against the 66 per cent of which Trianon formally deprived Hungary, a caveat must be entered: the major part of Hungary’s losses stemmed not from the Peace Conference, not even from the defeat of AustriaHungary in the war, but from the policies which for threequarters of a century had made Hungarian rule unpalatable, sometimes intolerable, to the non-Magyar nationalities of Hungary. Those policies helped to ensure the eventual victory of the national idea in a kingdom the heterogeneous ethnicity of which had been deter-
mined by geography, migration, historical accident and, in her medieval past, overambitious expansion; and they must, therefore, bear much of the responsibility for the kingdom’s dissolution […]” The book is both instructive and entertaining. It offers a profound, still fresh and sometimes original insight into Hungarian history. It should be required reading for all who wish to know more about the past of this country and its people. ■ The Will to Survive London: Timewell Press, 2006 ISBN 1857252128 From the same author: Mihály Károlyi and István Bethlen: Hungary (Haus Histories) 2009 ISBN: 9781905791736 This review was first published in HINT Business Magazin. Budapest Business Journal reprints the article with the author’s permission.