Hungarian Borderlands: From the Habsburg Empire to the Axis Alliance, the Warsaw Pact, and the European Union

272 Pages·2011·1.19 MB·English

by  Frank N. Schubert

Hungarian Borderlands

Hungarian Borderlands
From the Habsburg Empire to the
Axis Alliance, the Warsaw Pact and the
European Union
Frank N. Schubert
Published by the Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London, SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © Frank N. Schubert, 2011.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
First published 2011
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-14411-2894-2
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
A könyvtárosoknak
To the Librarians

Contents
Preface ix
Part I State of Flux: Hungarian Borders, 1914–1945 1
1. The Incredible Lightness of Borders 3
2. The Aftermath of Defeat 8
The Slav Corridor and the Treaty of Paris 8
The New Austrian Border 11
Marking Turf 14
The Loss of Transylvania 16
A Hungarian Border Force 18
Hegyeshalom, Gateway to the West 19
Change in the Air 22
3. Expansion and Contraction 26
Felvidék (Southern Hungary) 26
Kárpátalja (Trans-Carpathian Ukraine) 31
Erdély (Transylvania) 32
Délvidék (Southern Hungary) 34
Occupation, Defeat And Contraction 37
Part II Bordering on Insanity: Hungarian Borders 1945–1989 43
4. Before the Iron Curtain 45
5. The Stalin Era 50
The Czech Approach 51
Emergence of a Hungarian System 52
The First Barrier System 58
1956: Mine Removal and Revolution 70
Developments in Germany and Austria 73
6. From Minefields to Electric Fences 76
Resealing the Border 76
Electric Signal Wire 78
Paper Wall 79
Border Anxieties 82
viii Contents
7. Hungary and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain 84
Reconsidering The Signal Wire 84
Many Small Steps 85
A Picnic 92
9/11 and its Aftermath 100
Part III Reversal: Hungarian Borders from 1989 105
8. The Emergence of a New Europe 107
9. From One Edge to Another 119
A Dramatic Turnabout 119
Joining Schengenland 124
Austrian Unease 128
The Hungarian-Slovakian Border 131
10. Inside Schengenland 136
‘Hello, Neighbour!’ 137
Monuments and Museums 138
Remembering the Picnic 141
Borderland Enterprise 146
A Detention Camp for the Borderland? 152
Border Crossings Transformed 154
Revising Border-Guard History 156
Credit for the Change 159
11. Beyond Schengenland 161
Migrants via Ukraine 162
Local Cross-Border Traffic 167
The Southern Route 168
Croatia and Romania 175
The Complexity of Barriers 177
FRONTEX and the European Neighbourhood Policy 184
12. Hungary and Arizona 188
Context and Comparison 188
Conclusion 192
Notes 194
Glossary 231
Terms and Phrases 231
Place Names 232
Bibliography 234
Index 252
Preface
The tumultuous twentieth century, marked for Hungary by catastrophic
defeat in two world wars and forty years under Communism, brought frequent
and sometimes traumatic changes to the country’s borders. Its independent
neighbours increased from two to four, then to five, and finally reached seven.
Outside forces often determined changes in the state’s size, shape and relation
to its neighbours.
In fact, for most of the century, the ‘power centres controlling the borders,’
to use William Zartman’s phrase, were not in Hungary.1 They were in Vienna
through World War I, then in Paris, where the Allied makers of the Trianon
peace treaty shaped the borders, later in Nazi Berlin, and for forty years in
Moscow. Soviet dominance turned on its head Hungary’s traditional self-image
as an eastern bastion of Western civilization and made the country the western
edge of the Communist empire. Then the sudden, dramatic end of the Cold
War was followed by a period from 1990 to 2004 in which Hungary managed
its borders without control by a larger dominant entity.
When Hungary joined the European Union, border control again became a
function of a larger body, this time centred in Brussels. Now European Union
policies set the framework for Hungarian border management, which ultimately
reflects worldwide phenomena and concerns about the nature and limits of
globalization, fears and insecurities regarding migration, and disparities between
rich and poor. Because of its location peripheral to centres of power and policies
that bound it to the fate of other countries, Hungary’s twentieth century borders
were almost always shaped by the interests and decisions of others.
Whether it was the eastern edge of the west or the western rim of the east,
Hungary was a frontier zone through most of the century. Its boundaries
contracted, expanded and contracted again. People fled into and were driven
out of the country by the thousands, and its borders have been closed and
open, hard and soft, deadly and free. Since accession to the Schengen group
of EU states with open internal borders and hard external boundaries, some
segments of Hungary’s borders have been open, some have been protected but
porous, and others have been rigorously guarded and practically shut against
the uninvited. It is impossible to predict the ultimate Hungarian situation as
the EU expands eastward, but at the start of the second decade of the twenty-
first century, the country guards the outer border of the EU in a position that
resembles Arizona’s on the United States border with Mexico.
While on the edge of something much bigger to which it answered,
Hungary sometimes played key independent roles. After the 1956 revolution,