Trianon és a Brit földrajz I.

The ‘dismemberment’ of Hungary as a result of the Treaty of Trianon (1920) was a momentous event. This paper examines the reaction of British geographers to Hungary’s dramatic and extensive loss of territory and much-reduced national sovereignty. It considers two works by British geographers, Marion Newbigin (in 1920) and Alan Ogilvie (in 1922), who attempted to explain Hungary’s situation following the Treaty. To Hungary’s geographers, Trianon ruptured historical associations between nature and nation. Boundaries previously formed upon the Carpathians’ natural geography and the hydrography of the Great Hungarian Plain were now replaced by ethnic considerations, even although these proved difficult to effect in practice as the basis of the new boundaries. The paper explores maps produced by Hungarian geographers, and most notably Pál Teleki’s ‘Ethnographical Map of Hungary’ (1919)—the so-called ‘Carte Rouge’—which attempted to reveal Hungary’s ethnic identity and territorial integrity. The paper then examines Marion Newbigin’s ‘Aftermath: A geographical study of the peace terms’ (1920) and Ogilvie’s ‘Some aspects of boundary settlement at the peace conference’ (1922) as Britain’s geographers tried to explain and justify Trianon in terms of post-war geopolitics, ethnic diversity, and linguistic difference. For Newbigin, Hungary’s ethnic delimitation post-Trianon was largely dictated by the Western powers (principally by the American delegation to the 1919 Paris peace conference). In his work Ogilvie (a member of the British geographical delegation in Paris) shows that the principles on which Trianon was determined were often compromised in practice. The paper shows how the new geography of Europe and Hungary dictated by Trianon elicited different responses from different geographical communities.