Between States

The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II

Holly Case

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780804792042, 9780804759861
• eBook ISBN: 9780804787550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2010 George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.

The struggle between Hungary and Romania for control of Transylvania seems at first sight a side-show in the story of the Nazi New Order and the Second World War. These allies of the Third Reich spent much of the war arguing bitterly over Transylvania's future, and Germany and Italy were drawn into their dispute to prevent it from spiraling into a regional war. But precisely as a result of this interaction, the story of the Transylvanian Question offers a new way into the history of how state leaders and national elites have interpreted what "Europe" means. Tucked into the folds of the Transylvanian Question's bizarre genealogy is a secret that no one ever tried to keep, but that has remained a secret nonetheless: small states matter. The perspective of small states puts the struggle for mastery among its Great Powers into a new perspective.

CHAPTER ONE

The “Transylvanian Question” and European Statehood

The Transylvanian question appears to affect only Hungary and Romania. But insofar as both states have conflictual interests with other states in the region, the Transylvanian question can readily become a first-order European question, and if it is badly resolved, it can upset chances for peace in the neighboring states and in the whole of Europe.

—Count Albert Apponyi, head of the Hungarian
delegation to the peace conference at Versailles, 1920¹

Throughout history, the problem of Transylvania was not merely of domestic Transylvanian significance, but extended beyond those boundaries, possessing even international importance.

—From an article in the Romanian Communist
newspaper Scînteia [The Spark], September 25, 1944²

THE TRANSYLVANIAN QUESTION

Transylvania is what one Hungarian anthropologist has described as “the epicenter of the frontier land,” playing a leading role in the formation of two national imaginaries.³ Its centrality to those imaginaries emerged mostly during the nineteenth century and became more entrenched over the first half of the twentieth. The result, Romanian historian Lucian Boia argues, is that “Hungarians have come to dream of a remote historical period when the Romanians were not there” and the “Romanians . . . are tempted to separate [Transylvania] retrospectively from the Hungarian crown and from any Hungarian historical and political project . . . integrating it into a general Romanian history.”⁴

Transylvania enjoys a position at once unique and essential to the national metanarratives into which the territory has been woven. In a conversation with Hitler during the Second World War, Romanian leader Ion Antonescu referred to Transylvania as the “cradle of Romania.”⁵ And in 1942, Romanian diplomat Vasile Stoica wrote that Transylvania “constitutes a fortress, as if intentionally created to be the center of a nation . . . and today it is the heart of our ethnic space, the center of the Romania of yesterday and tomorrow.” ⁶

In the Hungarian national imaginary, Transylvania occupies the center of true Hungarianness, “a little Hungarian microcosm.”⁷ The only region to have been ruled by powerful Hungarian princes, even when the rest of the Hungarian Kingdom was under Ottoman or Habsburg rule, Transylvania possessed what one wartime Hungarian diplomat called “a strange mystique. . . . The Transylvanian principality stood as the stunning achievement of Hungarian political talent [and] an integral and carefully guarded part of a person’s Hungarian national consciousness.”⁸ At the post–World War I peace conference, Hungarian delegates argued that Transylvania had been “the stage for the most remarkable events in Hungarian history. Here Hungarian blood flowed in streams for the freedom and independence of the nation.”⁹ The Hungarian leftist poet Endre Ady would later opine: “Transylvania you are Hungary, and if the world needs Hungary, you will remain with us.”¹⁰

Since the late nineteenth century, both Hungary and Romania have made claims on Transylvania. Nevertheless, solutions to the Transylvanian Question were not consistently cast in winner-takes-all terms. A variety of solutions were proposed and considered at various points, including during World War II. Among the options put forward were autonomy or independence for Transylvania, a reorganization of the Dual Monarchy into a federation in which Transylvania would be given separate status, partial revision of the Treaty of Trianon to give the border regions back to Hungary, the creation of a “Danube Federation” to effect a kind of shared sovereignty over regions like Transylvania, or the delineation of an autonomous region in the majority-Hungarian eastern core of Transylvania, the Szekler Land.¹¹

It is also the case that many of the most seemingly single-minded individuals who make appearances in this story pondered a variety of solutions to the Transylvanian Question. Iuliu Maniu, whose voice comes through during the war as among the most adamant and uncompromising lobbyists for the complete return of Transylvania to Romania, had once proposed autonomy, even independence for the region. Hungarian prime minister Pál Teleki, who oversaw the return of Northern Transylvania to Hungary in 1940, did not consistently favor the reannexation of the whole of Transylvania to Hungary. Furthermore, within the region many cultural and intellectual groups and figures tried to circumvent the politicking of the two would-be nation-states around the Transylvanian Question by asserting a regional identity distinct from and superior to both the “Regat” Romanian and “core” Hungarian varieties.

During the Second World War, frustrations with state leaders’ efforts to manhandle their own national constituencies domestically and across the border found frequent expression through an array of venues. Hungarians in Transylvania often openly resented the “parachutists” from Trianon Hungary who had come to take administrative posts in Northern Transylvania without adequate knowledge of local conditions and minority languages.¹² This resentment mirrored the one many Transylvanian Romanians had expressed when Transylvania was annexed to Romania after World War I, who felt patronized, bullied, and misunderstood by the imported “Regaţeni” officials who, like the “parachutists,” possessed limited or no knowledge of the region and its diverse population.¹³

In short, there has been much disagreement over how the Transylvanian Question should be resolved—on the level of high diplomacy, on the front lines of battlefields, in local administration, and in interactions between individuals in “everyday” settings. Indeed, since the Transylvanian Question emerged simultaneously with modern nation-states in this region, it has involved not just territorial aspirations, but the myriad dilemmas of nation-and state-building. Far from being a modern manifestation of long-standing antagonisms between Hungarians and Romanians, the Transylvanian Question is thus a product of changes in the European geopolitical landscape that began in the mid to late nineteenth century with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. These changes raised questions about the rights of the nation and the individual within it; about the terms of citizenship and national belonging; about the nation’s role in “Europe” and the international order; about the structure of society; about overlaps and fractures between class, religious, race, linguistic, and gender categories; about challenges to state sovereignty over territories and populations; and about relations with neighboring states and Great Powers. These dilemmas often clustered around particular people and places, taking on lives of their own. Hence the proliferation of “questions” in the nineteenth century: the Polish Question, the Eastern Question, the Jewish Question, the Macedonian Question, and the Transylvanian Question. And as these questions moved into the twentieth century, it became apparent that resolving them would require reconciling boundaries with ideas—ideas not only about nations, but about Europe.

The stakes in these questions were thus very high from the outset. The fate of Transylvania was so important to leaders of Hungary and Romania that attempts to obtain or retain the territory more than once determined the success or failure of governments, shaped wartime alliances, and radically changed the demographic constitution and ideological bearing of both states. On the micro level, attempts to resolve the Transylvanian Question also affected how soldiers understood what they fought and died for; caused people to change their address, citizenship, religion, marital status, mother tongue, or nationality; pushed them up or down the social hierarchy; gave or took away property, jobs, privileges, and even lives. And being fully aware that the Transylvanian Question would be resolved one way or another only with the blessing of one or more Great Powers—among them the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union—statesmen and other elites in Hungary and Romania lobbied incessantly to raise the Transylvanian Question to the status of a European problem. Determining who should have Transylvania, they contended, was a decision affecting the political stability, economic health, and prospects for peaceful coexistence of the entire continent and furthermore should serve as a litmus test for the justness and efficacy of the European balance of power, international law, and agreements between states.

Such attempts to raise the profile of the Transylvanian Question did not always produce the desired results, nor was the fate of Transylvania the only issue that influenced decision making among political elites and the attitudes of their constituencies in these countries. Both states and their inhabitants had other concerns before and during World War II: widespread and sometimes debilitating social inequality, intensifying ideological extremism, and two expansionist Great Powers—Germany and the Soviet Union—on their respective borders, not to mention other territories besides Transylvania they had gained, lost, or feared losing to neighboring states. Yet the extent to which governments and citizens understood even these issues in terms of their relation to the Transylvanian Question is remarkable. Part of the goal of this book is thus to reveal the extent to which the Transylvanian Question saturated everything from politics to diplomacy, from social relations to legal structures in Hungary and Romania before and during World War II, and what the legacy of that saturation has been since.

Yet by now emphasizing the centrality of the Transylvanian Question to ideas of Europe in these two states may seem overdetermined. There are, after all, plenty of people in both Hungary and Romania who are “over” or “past” the Transylvanian Question as a contest for territory, including most Hungarian and Romanian politicians and state leaders. Furthermore, today Hungarians’ historical preoccupation with territorial revision is certainly fertile ground for satire even within Hungary, and the freakishly ultra-Romanian Gheorghe Funar era in Transylvania’s capital of Cluj has been the butt of many a good joke as well.¹⁴ Hence suggesting that the Transylvanian Question accounts for the way ideas of “Europe” developed in these states certainly would be overdetermined if the question were understood merely in terms of states’ aspirations to control a particular swath of territory.

But historically speaking, the Transylvanian Question has not always or only been about gaining control of a place called Transylvania. It has been about sovereignty, about the viability and vitality of peoples and states, and about the legitimacy of governments and European orders. The Transylvanian Question has also been about who belongs to the state, and to whom the state belongs, and as such about the transformation from “old-style” diplomacy to population politics with its accompanying emphasis on international propaganda, geopolitics, and demography.¹⁵ In short, the balls that were tossed into the air during nineteenth-century processes of nation- and state-building are still in the air, are still being juggled by the states and peoples of East-Central Europe, and are not likely to come down anytime soon. This chapter therefore probes the origins of Transylvania’s transformation from a place into a question and how an idea of Europe emerged out of the process.

STATE, NATION, INDIVIDUA...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Nomenclature
• Names and Labels
• Between States
• Introduction: Between States
• CHAPTER ONE - The “Transylvanian Question” and European Statehood
• CHAPTER TWO - “Why We Fight”
• CHAPTER THREE - People Between States
• CHAPTER FOUR - A League of Their Own
• CHAPTER FIVE - The “Jewish Question” Meets the Transylvanian Question
• CHAPTER SIX - A “New Europe”?
• Conclusion
• Reference Matter
• Index