Address by Zsolt Németh Minister of State for Foreign Affairs at the Presentation of the Book “The Unfinished Peace” Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 3rd May 2013.

Today’s Hungarian Diplomacy in the context of the Paris Peace Treaties

Mr Secretary General,
Mr Director General,
Distinguished Professors,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen!

I accepted with pleasure the invitation for this presentation and I would like to express my sincere thanks to the organizers and my appreciation to Professor Mihály Fülöp, author of the book about “The Unfinished Peace”.

You might have noted that here in Hungary we often talk about Trianon and much less about the 1947 peace treaty. We have to take note of the fact that the public opinion’s perception about both of these treaties is far from being positive.

But if we look at the latter one, we can realize that it is the Paris peace treaty that sets up the frame and rules of our everyday life and that of our foreign policy. Let us now have a look at some of its aspects.

1.
We have to admit that the 1947 Paris peace treaty formally meant the almost complete ending of World War 2 for Hungary.

It was not complete because Hungary did not become a full member of the international community with the signing of the peace treaty. This was achieved only some years later: with the UN membership in 1955, and above all with the 1956 revolution. These two events represent the bases of our actual political life. The path to the UN membership was prepared by the Paris peace treaty. And the UN membership, the UN documents and the UN values are still nowadays a basic source of our foreign policy.

We may not talk about it every day, simply because it is self-explanatory, but distancing ourselves from WW2 is one of the basic elements of Hungarian political life today. We distance ourselves from the concept of war in general – as it is reflected in the Hungarian Fundamental Law as well. However, separation from WW2 means more than that: breaking away from racist far right Nazism or any modernized version of that. Any kind of association with such forces is therefore excluded for the Hungarian Government.

In this case I am not talking about totalitarian regimes in general because this peace treaty was made with the victorious great powers including the Soviet Union whose entire state structure was based on such a totalitarian system. The complete breaking away from any kind of totalitarian system came in 1956 with the revolution again.

2.
If we can say that the 1947 peace treaty had some positive connotations for the contemporary people it is because it brought the overdone care of the Allied Commission to an end. That is Hungary gained back her formal sovereignty. Unfortunately, it was only a formal thing because the Soviets in the meanwhile were busy building their network of control and finally, they practically broke the real sovereignty of Hungary in, approximately a year after the peace treaty.

The essence of the communist system was that Hungary had to give up most of her sovereignty, guaranteed in the 1947 peace treaty, for the Soviet Union, under pressure that is in an illegitimate way. This is why our Fundamental Law rejects – besides the rejection of the also illegitimate 1944 Nazi occupation – the illegitimate communist system as well.

With rejecting both the Nazi and the illegitimate communist occupation we do not question in any way the legitimacy of the peace treaty drawing the line in between the two. That is clear from the Fundamental Law when the text declares the full acknowledgement of our international obligations. And keeping the peace treaty is one of these obligations. What is more, discrediting the communist system comes exactly from acknowledging the peace treaty that guaranteed our sovereignty.


3.
Considering all these aspects, I cannot say that the popularity of the peace treaty in the Hungarian public opinion is as high as it is among the great powers on the winning side. And we have good reasons for that as well.

One is, without a question, that nobody likes to make peace as a defeated party. We do not like it either. But that is “only” an emotional question without any consequences to our political life today.

Another reason, which faded away by now, is that an already destroyed country had to pay an enormous amount of war compensation, and what is more to countries, like Czechoslovakia where almost no Hungarian military activity – thus zero harmful actions done by our troops – took place.

However, the chief reason why the public opinion dislikes the peace treaty is the minority issue. The contemporary Hungarian public opinion expected more advantageous borders than after Trianon but what we got was even worse. (Three more villages were separated from Hungary and given to Czechoslovakia.) And don’t forget that while the Trianon peace treaty included some minority protection regulations, the 1947 Paris peace treaty did not protect the Hungarians who became involuntarily citizens of another state.

The mound of problems of those people who were concerned by the lack of minority protection regulations was so enormous that it needed a correction after half century. The correction was the so called “Balladur Plan”, named after the then French prime minister who launched it in 1993 to encourage Central and Eastern European countries to conclude cooperation and good neighbourliness agreements with each other. Its concrete consequences were the new basic treaties that Hungary signed with her neighbours which, without an exception, include minority protection clauses.

The judgment of the basic treaties in the public opinion is, however, controversial again because they might have corrected minority protection but not necessarily in a satisfactory measure.

According to our judgment the ‘more than nothing’ minority protection is good but it is not enough, the Hungarian communities would need more than what is laid down in the basic treaties. What we would find satisfactory is seeing prospering communities in their place of birth secured by appropriate forms of autonomy.

That is not ensured in the Paris peace treaty, nor in the other documents based on that but neither are they excluded by these. As the peace treaty did not exclude the option of the basic treaties either. The international law allows people in the region to create institutions to promote human rights. The only problem is that it needs mutual political will.

We have the will: we stand on the basis of the peace treaty and, on this base we tend to make this peace for all those who live with it as advantageous as possible.

(Ministry of Foreign Affairs)