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

accept, could afford be seen to accept, a union openly. Austria’s situation was
further improved when the Austrian National Assembly passed a law banishing
the Habsburg family from the country. Shortly after, the ex-emperor, Charles
IV, left Austria on March 25, 1919 and settled in Switzerland. However, in the
first months of 1919, Austrian politics were defined by Anschluss tactics.
Vienna cleverly continued to raise the possibility of a union with Germany in
the hope of receiving economic benefits and a reduced territorial loss from the
Entente.
In light of the previous circumstances, Austria’s position improved in the
eyes of the Entente Powers. Exploiting it – but also encouraged by the
unrestrained territorial claims by the Czechoslovak, Romanian and South Slav
against Hungary – the Austrian government continued to raise the Western
Hungary question ever more vigorously. Naturally, not as hard demands but on
a wish, based on ethnic grounds, which primarily found support among the
American circles of the Peace Conference. This meant that the Austria-South
Slav and Hungary-South Slav new borders were linked with the question of the
reassignment of the Klagenfurt zone, Szentgotthárd and area, the Baranya
triangle, and Bácska (Bačka). The South Slav armed forces tried to occupy the
area around Klagenfurt in January (1919) but local Austrian units were
successful in repelling them. Austria’s economic situation, in the meantime,
became worse, having lost its sources of raw materials – the population of
Vienna was starving due to a trade embargo. As a consequence, the populace
tended to shift toward the ‘Red’ or Left-wing, even to Communism. 104 Because
of the revolutionary atmosphere in Vienna, the Austrian countryside distanced
itself from the capital, some provinces even wanted to secede from Austria. In a
plebiscite held in May (1919) in Vorarlberg Province, 80% of voters wanted a
union with Switzerland, the 1921 referendum in Tyrol showed a 98.8% wish to
join Germany, 99.2% in the Salzburg area. However, the victorious Entente
Powers refused to accept the provincial plebiscite results and, under their
pressure, the Austrian government did not authorize further expressions of the
people’s wish in the other regions. 105
The Austrian government was able to avoid the outbreak of a revolution in
Vienna in April (1919), easing the threat of a Communist takeover. The
Hungarian Communists were expelled from the country and border controls
were stepped up along the Austria-Hungary sector in an attempt to crack down
on arms smuggling into Hungary. The ‘masters’ of the Paris Peace Conference
were satisfied, the upper leadership of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, however,
was disappointed. Relations between Vienna and Budapest cooled and by June
were almost adversarial, since Austria again officially raised its territorial
‘claim’ to Westungarn or Western Hungary on May 11. The claim was linked
104 Ormos, 1983, op. cit., pp. 258–270.
105 Paál, Vince: Ausztria identitásai [Austria’s identities]. In: Nemzeti és regionális
identitás Közép-Európában. Szerk/ed.: Ábrahám, Barna – Gereben, Ferenc – Stekovics,
Rita. Piliscsaba–Budapest, 1999, pp. 76–77.
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