Made in Paris? Contested Regions and Political Regionalism during and after Peacemaking

Asking someone in Hungary about the Treaty of Trianon would most probably yield an answer close to a lament.Something about injustice, intolerable loss, mourning, truncation and amputation, incredible suffering of ethnic kin beyond the borders set with the treaty.While most people would certainly use this tone, rooted in the immediate aftermath of the WWI when it was first used consciously, hardly any would believe if they were told that the same tropes, metaphors and emotions dominated debates in the Romanian parliament throughout the 1920s.Romania was, after all, the "winner of Trianon", the triumphant neighbor, the nation that still today defiantly celebrate the anniversary of December 1, only to frustrate Hungarians.Maybe, also most Romanian would be astounded to learn that Romanian political parties in the 1920s sought scapegoats for an alleged national tragedy, warned about the catastrophe that befell a part of the nation, invoked truncation and injustice when they debated who were responsible for the loss of a third of the Banat.Such unexpectedly similar emotions, however surprising they are, serve only as a secondary motive for taking two symbolically important geographic areas, the Szkelyland and the Banat, and compare how the diplomatic struggle for these regions around 1919-1920 related to the phenomenon of regionalism.The making of nation states in 1918-1920 was, after all, a series of decisions made over the affiliation of regions with states.These were sometimes simple geographic entities, or functional regions defined by economics and communication lines, but some of them had dense histories, symbolic significance for certain national projects, and the people in such regions often nurtured a sense of community within.However, the broad claims in the period mostly based on the idea of national self-determination, and the wide array of arguments used -ethnic, historic, economic, * Research for this work was supported by the ERC CoG-2017 Nepostrans grant 772964 strategic etc. -makes it handy to interpret struggles over such areas predominantly as part of a uniform national struggle, obscuring the specifics and peculiarities of each region.Both the Banat and the Szkelyland are cases, in which people were mobilized within and outside the region, nd throughout this attempt emphasis was laid onsomething that could be called regional peculiarity.Both cases figured strongly in the debates over the new boundaries of Hungary and Romania.Therefore, I argue, they offer useful insights in the way the peace-making affected, even transformed regionalism, enhanced the potential of the Szkely elite to push back against attempts of subordination from Budapest, and made interwar Banat regionalism more dependent on Bucharest, despite the permanent confrontation of self-claimed Banat regionalists with the Old Kingdom elites.I will start with outlining the basics of peacemaking, including the typical arguments of the contestants, followed by an analysis of the different forms of popular mobilization within and for the regions.Finally, I will connect the events of the tumultuous years with its afterlife, pointing out how the struggle affected the tenets of regionalism and how the debates were later used by different actors to pose competing claims on being the true representatives of the region. Red lines, white spots: peace-making and arguments for a new boundaryThe collapse of the dualist Monarchy was of breathtaking speed after the Bulgarian armistice was signed on 29 September 1918.While Franchet d'Esprey's troops moved to the north, pushing back a gradually disorganizing Austro-Hungarian army, 1 national councils was formed in capital cities of the Monarchy and its provinces.In Hungary, Istvn Tisza admitted military defeat on 17 October 1918, and Alexandru Vaida-Voevod announced in the lower house of the Hungarian parliament that only the Romanian National Party represented Hungary's Romanians and was entitled to decide over their fate

Democracy · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Immigration · National identity · Nationalism · Nationality · Peacemaking · Political science · Politics · Romanian · Sociology · Central European national history · Gender Studies · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Law · Soviet and Russian History