A területgyarapítást célzó román és szerb propaganda Csanád vármegyében

Abstract

Csanád county was under Romanian military occupation from the end of April 1919 to the end of March 1920. The only exception to this was Makó, which was under French supervision for about two months, so the town was not taken over by the Romanians until mid-June 1919. The occupation of the county was in keeping with Romanian territorial aspirations, as the memorandum containing their demands for the Paris Peace Conference called for the borders which had been set out in the secret Treaty of Bucharest in August 1916. This would have included the whole of Csanád County. However, the great powers at the peace conference rejected the Romanian demands to annex these thoroughly Hungarian territories, and on June 13, 1919, they drew a narrower demarcation line, essentially corresponding to today’s border, which has not been subsequently changed. Romanian diplomacy, of course, used every means to get the boundary promised in the Treaty of Bucharest, which was much more favorable to them. One way to do this was to take advantage of the dissatisfaction and secessionist aspirations of the nationalities living in the disputed territory. This study takes into account the manifestations of Romanian territorial propaganda in Csanád – and more tangentially in neighboring Békés county – which targeted not only the relatively small number of ethnic Romanians, but also the Slovaks, who formed a slightly larger community. Although the focus of this study is on Romanian propaganda, for the sake of completeness, reference is also made to Serbian propaganda, as the Serbs also had territorial aspirations affecting Csanád county. One of the main findings of the study is that while Romanian propaganda focused primarily on the acquisition of territories, Serbian propaganda focused on winning over the people, which ultimately took the form of strengthening the intentions for the right of option which was also enshrined in the Treaty of Trianon.