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Romania Greater Romania and the Occupation of Budapest
In late 1918 Romanian leaders traveled to Paris to
forward the
kingdom's broad territorial claims at the upcoming peace
conference, which opened on January 18, 1919. At the
conference,
Romania insisted that the Allies respect the principle of
national
self-determination and fulfill the territorial promises
made in
1916 that had brought Romania into the war on the side of
the
Allies. The Allies had promised Romania the
Banat (see Glossary),
a fertile agricultural region bounded by the Tisza, Mures,
and
Danube rivers, which Serbia also claimed because of the
region's
large Slavic population. The conference participants
supported
almost all of Romania's claims, including those to
Transylvania,
Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina, but arbiters finally
partitioned
the Banat between Romania and Serbia.
In March 1919, the French head of the Entente mission
in
Budapest handed Mihály Károlyi, the fledgling Hungarian
republic's
leftist president, a diplomatic note dictating the last in
a series
of border rectifications that stripped Hungary of large
swaths of
its traditional lands. Károlyi resigned in disgust and
turned power
over to a coalition of social democrats and communists,
who
promised that the Soviet Union would help Hungary restore
its
prewar borders. The communists, under Béla Kun,
immediately seized
control and announced the founding of the Hungarian Soviet
Republic. In late May, Kun backed his promises to restore
Hungary's
lost territories with military action against
Czechoslovakia. When
the French threatened to retaliate, Kun turned his army on
Romania.
Romanian units, however, penetrated Hungarian lines on
July 30,
occupied and looted Budapest, and scattered the members of
Kun's
government. When the Romanian troops finally departed
Budapest at
the beginning of 1920, they took extensive booty,
including food,
trucks, locomotives and railroad cars, and factory
equipment, in
revenge for the Central Powers' plundering of Romania
during the
war.
Romania's occupation of Budapest deepened ongoing
Hungarian
bitterness at the Paris conference against Bratianu, who
stubbornly
opposed the partition of the Banat and provisions of the
treaties
guaranteeing rights of minority ethnic groups. When
Bratianu
resigned rather than accept the treaty with Austria, King
Ferdinand
appointed a nonpartisan government and called for
elections. In
1919 Romanians voted in the country's first free elections
and
swept away the Liberals' artificial parliamentary
majority. Victory
went to Iuliu Maniu's National Party, the major prewar
Romanian
party in Transylvania, which quickly carved out a niche in
the
political life of
Greater Romania (see Glossary) by
attracting
peasant support in the Old Kingdom, the territories of
pre-World
War I Romania. Maniu's colleague, Alexandru Vaida-Voevod,
became
premier and rapidly signed the treaties. Vaida-Voevod ran
the
government until 1920, when the king named General
Alexandru
Averescu premier.
Data as of July 1989
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