The Fate of Western Hungary 1918-1921 - Corvinus Library ...

Romanians, in like manner, wanted the Great Hungarian Plains up to the Tisza
River, East to the millennial border and along the eastern and southern
Carpathians. Serb demands included a zone North of Szeged – Baja – Pécs
(with the Mecsek coalfields), the area southwest of Lake Balaton, the area
between the Zala and Rába Rivers up to Lake Fertő, where the South Slav
country would have had a common border with Czechoslovakia. The so-called
‘Slav corridor’ presented by Eduard Beneš (1884-1948), Foreign Minister of
Czechoslovakia, was meant to create a corridor through Western Hungary,
giving Czechoslovakia contact with the South Slav country, and an outlet to the
Adriatic Sea.
To remark briefly on the proposed ‘corridor’: this question was one of the
most difficult matter at the peace conference, a faithful mirror of the state of
affairs at the Congress. The decision makers went back and forth on the
question of the Slav corridor, for weeks between January and March of 1919,
with diligence and complete seriousness. This raised a new hope not only for
Czechoslovakia but the Kingdom of Serbs-Croats-Slovenes (Yugoslavia only
after 1929) of grabbing new Hungarian territories in the West or Southwest. For
the proposed capital of the as-yet-nonexistent Slovakia, Pozsony, to be
connected with the Croat capital of Zagreb (a Slav corridor or Western
Hungarian Slav corridor) was proposed early during the war by the leading
Czech politicians Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 95 Eduard Beneš and Karel Kramář.
They also repeated the importance of its creation. Later, Beneš worked it out in
detail while an émigré in France, presenting a series of lectures at Sorbonne
University on the Slav question and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. He
published his thesis in 1916 in Paris, in a French-language pamphlet.
According to the concept formulated by Beneš, Great Serbia, created from
Serb, Croat and Slovene lands, was to be “joined to Czechoslovakia by a
corridor running between the Lajta and Rába Rivers through Hungary.” 96 This
corridor, approx. 200-220 km. long and 150-200 km. wide, was to run between
the Danube River in the North and the Mura River in the South. Its western
95 After his university studies in Vienna, he studied philosophy in
Leipzig in the early 1870s. Here he met his future wife, the American
Charlotte Garrigue, who was Woodrow Wilson’s niece. The founder of
Czechoslovakia even took his wife’s name and became the well known
Czech, later Czechoslovak, politician as Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
(1850–1937). In: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk a Podkarpatská Rus / Т. Г.
Масарик та Закарпаття [T. G. Masaryk and Sub-Carpathia].
Šefredaktor Ivan Latko. Užhorod, 2000. Klub T. G. Masaryka v
Užhorodě, p.6.
96 Beneš, Edvard: Détruisez ľAutriche–Hongrie. La martyre des tcheco–slovaques à
travers ľhistoire [Destroy Austria-Hungary. Czechoslovak sacrifices through history].
Paris, 1926. Libraire Delagrave. Nagy, Andrea: JATE Történész Diákkör. Szeged,
1992, p. 45. (The Beneš pamphlet was also published in 1917 in London, in English.)
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