The US peace treaty with Hungary

On 29 August 1921 in Budapest the American commissioner in Hungary, Ulysses Grant-Smith, and the Hungarian foreign minister, Count Miklós Bánffy, signed a treaty restoring friendly relations between the United States and Hungary. It was the third and last of the separate peace treaties with which Washington replaced the unratified Paris treaties. Similar documents had been signed in Berlin four days earlier and in Vienna the day before that. The Budapest treaty formally ended the state of war that had existed since December 1917 and, in American–Hungarian relations, took the place of the Treaty of Trianon, which a United States delegate had signed in June 1920 but which the Senate never ratified.

Why later than with Austria

The United States declared war on Austria-Hungary on 7 December 1917. After the monarchy’s collapse, that war formally continued with the two states that Washington regarded as its successors. The congressional resolution signed by President Warren Harding on 2 July 1921 declared the state of war with the “Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Government” at an end, but reserved to the United States all the rights arising from the armistice of 3 November 1918 and from the Treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon.

Hungary entered into normal relations with the rest of the world later than Austria. The Treaty of Trianon came into force only on 26 July 1921, when the Treaty of Saint-Germain had already been in force for a year. The country itself was only just emerging from the chaos of 1918–1920. Since 1 March 1920 Admiral Miklós Horthy had been regent, and since April 1921 the government had been headed by Count István Bethlen, who was to remain prime minister for ten years. Bethlen gave the foreign ministry to Bánffy, a Transylvanian aristocrat and writer who before the war had been intendant of the Budapest Opera and the National Theatre. The Easter attempt to regain the throne, made in March 1921 by the last king, Charles IV, ended in failure and in warnings from Hungary’s neighbours that a Habsburg restoration would mean war.

The American side was represented by the career diplomat Ulysses Grant-Smith, appointed commissioner in Hungary in December 1919. He was not a minister, since the two countries were still formally not at peace, but for a year and a half he had kept in touch with successive governments in Budapest.

The content of the treaty

The treaty was copied almost word for word from the Austrian one. The preamble quoted the congressional resolution and noted that the Treaty of Trianon had come into force without American ratification. Article I bound Hungary to grant the United States all the rights and advantages reserved to it in the resolution and provided by the Treaty of Trianon for the Allied and Associated Powers. Article II listed the parts of the treaty from which the Americans would benefit: the military clauses, those on prisoners of war and war graves, and the reparation, financial, economic, aerial navigation, ports, waterways and railways and miscellaneous provisions. The United States was not, however, bound by the Covenant of the League of Nations, the part on Hungary’s borders, the political clauses, the part on Hungarian interests outside Europe or the provisions on the International Labour Organization. It was entitled, but not obliged, to sit on the Reparation Commission. Article III provided for the exchange of ratifications in Budapest.

In practice this meant that Hungary confirmed to the United States its disarmament and its obligation to pay reparations, while the United States took on no responsibility for the new borders. Compared with the Treaty of Trianon, which in Budapest was called a dictate, it was a neutral document, without a word about guilt and without new demands.

The hot autumn of 1921

The treaty was signed just as shots were again being fired on Hungary’s western border. Under the Treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon, Austria was to take over a strip of western Hungary, the Burgenland. When the Austrian gendarmerie entered the territory being transferred at the end of August 1921, Hungarian volunteers attacked it, and irregular units took control of the area, where at the beginning of October they proclaimed the short-lived statelet of Lajtabánság (the Banate of Leitha). The dispute was resolved by a compromise reached in Venice in October through Italian mediation: Hungary would withdraw the volunteers, and the fate of Sopron and eight surrounding villages would be decided by a vote.

In October 1921 Charles IV made a second attempt to regain the throne, flying into Hungary by aeroplane. His troops were halted outside Budapest, and he himself was sent into exile on Madeira. Under pressure from the great powers and the Little Entente, parliament stripped the Habsburgs of their rights to the crown in November 1921.

The United States Senate took up the Hungarian treaty on 18 October 1921, the same day as the German and Austrian ones, and approved it by 66 votes to 17. The instruments of ratification were exchanged in Budapest on 17 December 1921, just after the Sopron plebiscite, in which a majority of voters opted for Hungary. On that day the treaty came into force and diplomatic relations were restored.

America and Hungarian revisionism

The United States, which was not a member of the League of Nations, proved an important partner for Hungary in the 1920s. A mixed American–Austrian–Hungarian commission, set up by a treaty of 1924, examined the claims of American citizens. When the League of Nations granted Hungary a stabilisation loan in 1924, its commissioner-general in Budapest was an American, the Boston lawyer Jeremiah Smith. Hungarian politicians, led by Count Albert Apponyi, went on lecture tours of the United States and courted the support of the Hungarian emigrant community, several hundred thousand strong, presenting Trianon as a wrong that Wilson’s America and its principle of self-determination ought to put right.

Washington, however, had no intention of putting anything right, because it had no intention of guaranteeing anything in Europe. Hungary’s hopes of changing its borders were fulfilled by other powers: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and, from 1938, Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In November 1940 Hungary joined the Tripartite Pact, in June 1941 it declared war on the Soviet Union, and in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor and following Germany’s lead, the government of Prime Minister László Bárdossy declared a state of war with the United States as well. Washington responded only half a year later: on 5 June 1942 Congress declared war on Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The path is well illustrated by the fate of the man who signed the treaty on Hungary’s behalf. Bánffy, who as minister had striven in vain for a revision of the borders, returned in 1926 to Transylvania, by then Romanian, and in April 1943 went to Bucharest to persuade Ion Antonescu’s government to leave the war jointly with Hungary. The talks foundered on the dispute over northern Transylvania. The peace concluded in Budapest on 29 August 1921 lasted twenty years. The next one, signed in Paris in February 1947, restored the Trianon borders – this time with the signature and ratification of the United States.