The Boundary Commission and Hungarian-Czechoslovak Anxiety over Territory

The Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission began to function as the last of four commissions that were responsible for the new Hungarian borders. The task was by no means trivial. The new boundaries were only accurately described in the treaty text for a few sections (such as along rivers). Otherwise the treaty cited geographically defined points between which the border still had to be defined by a separate commission on the ground. The legal basis was the general “directives for the boundary commissions” published by the 35th Conference of Ambassadors on 20 July 1920, which were supplemented by policies for individual commissions.Footnote ¹⁰ According to those regulations, the commission could modify the boundary line, but in principle any border adjustments had to be submitted for approval to the League of Nations or the Allied Council of Ambassadors.Footnote ¹¹ The six voting members decided by a simple majority: four representatives of the Allied Great Powers and one delegate each of the two interested powers, as they were called, that is, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The four Allied members of the delegation acted with astonishing independence and were interested first and foremost in ensuring that the work went smoothly. They kept their distance not only from the Hungarian but also from the Czechoslovak delegate. An internal Hungarian report argued that they did not include Václav Roubik, whose French was far from perfect, in their deliberations; he was not consulted about decisions beforehand; and they “jealously defended their unique position.”Footnote ¹² The British Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfred Carey chaired, while Lieutenant-Colonel René Uffler and Lieutenant-Colonel Giulio Pellicelli represented France and Italy, respectively. The Japanese member, Commandant Tsuchiya, was replaced as early as September 1921 by Major Ando.Footnote ¹³ In the course of the negotiations, Pellicelli and Uffler always showed some sympathy for Czechoslovakia, while Carey, as chair, behaved in a clearly more neutral manner and sometimes supported decisions in favor of Hungary.Footnote ¹⁴ He on various occasions also acted as an advocate for the local population and stressed that it was in their interests that the border be defined as early as possible.Footnote ¹⁵ Lieutenant-General Gábor Tánczos represented the Hungarians and engineer Václav Roubík, the only civilian within the group of official delegates, the Czechoslovak side. These two were supported in the sessions by nonvoting support staff. Their own experts were responsible for documentation and measuring and setting boundary markers; the Czechoslovak side employed thirty-two people for all commissions.Footnote ¹⁶ The delegates of Hungary and Czechoslovakia were backed up by the two foreign ministries, which established their own structures for the border demarcations. In the case of Hungary, this was the Central Office for Border Demarcation (Hungarian: Határmegállapitó Központi Iroda), which was prominently situated on the second floor of the Royal Palace in Budapest.

Hungarian foreign policy did not consider border demarcation to be an exclusively technical matter. In this view, one of the tasks of the commission was to politically evaluate the borders defined by the peace treaty. One starting point for this was the letter (lettre d'envoi) of 6 May 1920 accompanying the text of the peace treaty. This letter, signed by French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand, stated that the new borders of Hungary must generally run in the area laid down in the treaty. In establishing the borders, the stipulations of the treaty could be waived “at certain points” (certain endroits).Footnote ¹⁷ The persons responsible for Hungarian foreign policy therefore claimed that the commission had the right to revise problematic decisions made in Trianon through a flexible interpretation of the lettre d'envoi wherever possible. In their view, the Boundary Commission's work was the last chance to effect extensive adjustments to the territorial conditions for peace in the northern part of the new state territory.

In contrast, the Czechoslovak foreign policy and the Slovak authorities agreed that, for security reasons, no concessions to Hungary on the border issue were possible. Viktor Dvorský, expert at the peace negotiations in Paris and afterward Professor of Geography at Charles University in Prague, wrote a report for the Ministry of National Defence in July 1920 on possible future military threats. He assumed that none of Czechoslovakia's neighbors, except for Romania, had an interest in the continued existence of the state. In the event of a conflict, Slovakia would almost inevitably become the theater of fierce military clashes. It was therefore necessary to maintain military control of the Danube between its confluence with the rivers Morava and Ipeľ and to expand the railway network between Moravia and Slovakia as quickly as possible to speed up the transport of troops if necessary.Footnote ¹⁸ The Czechoslovak delegate to the Boundary Commission therefore refused to deviate from the Trianon border and was of the opinion that the line was definitively established; the task of the Boundary Commission was thus solely limited to technical implementation on the ground. As he stated, the commission was not supposed to make a political assessment of the border issue.Footnote ¹⁹

Due to these conflicting interpretations, the security dilemma described in the preceding text in abstract terms became clearly visible during the negotiations: The Hungarians’ maximalist positions and the anxiety of the Czechoslovak side reinforced each other, and their diametrically opposed views made the rapid progress of negotiations difficult from the start. The security concerns that both parties repeatedly brought up permeated the negotiations in all its stages. In this context, the argumentation developed two years ago in Paris were not only recycled, but also projected onto the future border region. The Hungarian side generally proved to be the driving force in attributing a principal relevance to the boundary issue, thereby exempting it from the normal procedures of the commission's work.

This mechanism of antagonistic securitization over the border question became already visible at the very beginning of the first meeting of the commission on 27 July 1921 in Brno. Tánczos invoked the lettre d'envoi and declared that the Hungarian government called for the line specified in the peace treaty to be changed for the entire length of the boundary.Footnote ²⁰ After a lively debate, the Hungarian delegate was prompted to propose their own boundary. This was presented a week later; it did not coincide with the Trianon line on any single point and left a number of important cities in Hungary.Footnote ²¹ The Hungarian accompanying letter was not free of alarming and scandalizing arguments: The peace treaty border was a “parody of the nationality principle of the Allied and Associated Powers” and due to its “ethnographic and economic absurdities” it was in the interest of both neighboring states “for the sake of economic development and intellectual progress in Central Europe to correct these abuses.”Footnote ²² Roubik also lodged an official protest against the Hungarian proposal, arguing that the proposed boundary line was neither compatible with the stipulations of Trianon nor did it correspond to natural boundaries. For the population in the more mountainous regions in the north, the proposed demarcation was ruinous, he said; smaller valleys were cut off from their natural trading centers, making independent economic activity impossible for them. The rail link between eastern Slovakia and the rest of the country would be broken by the proposed border, so “the defense of this part of our state would be an illusion.”Footnote ²³

When Tánczos explained this proposal by using an ethnographic map in the session on 9 August, it became immediately clear that such comprehensive adjustments would not receive any support whatsoever and that his attempt to gain advantage by dramatizing the situation would be doomed to failure. According to lettre d'envoi it was only possible, as the chair Carey reminded him, to adjust the boundary line “in certain places.” The Allied powers had recommended creating the necessary basis for the existence of Czechoslovakia as a new state. But the Hungarian proposal would make Slovakia an “unviable state.” The Hungarian proposal was therefore rejected, but Tánczos still received an opportunity to present a second, improved proposal under the condition that it had to correlate with the Trianon line at least in certain sections.Footnote ²⁴ The Czechoslovak side was also given the chance to provide the commission with its own border proposal.Footnote ²⁵ This proposed minor border adjustments in favor of Czechoslovakia in a few places, but otherwise held scrupulously to the stipulations of the treaty.Footnote ²⁶

On 20 August, Tánczos submitted the revised Hungarian boundary proposal that met the stipulations only in the eastern section.Footnote ²⁷ Therefore, this was also rejected—with five votes against that of the Hungarian delegate. The commission divided the entire border into nine smaller segments that were to be negotiated on separately. The commission also decided to deal with two of the three border sections through two subcommissions. The aim of the border inspections in the central and eastern segments was to get a direct impression of the site where the final border was still to be established, along a width of up to ten kilometers on either side of the existing demarcation line that the Entente had confirmed on 12 June 1919.Footnote ²⁸ As Carey put it, the population was to “be guaranteed the free expression of their desires, in the interest of the Commission's work” in the course of these visitations. The commission therefore also recommended that both sides inform the local authorities about the dates of the subcommission visits in advance.Footnote ²⁹ The western boundary section along the Danube was “provisionally postponed” as it was called (but ultimately never inspected by the commission).Footnote ³⁰

Layers of Agency and the Local Dynamics of Boundary Delimination

The two subcommissions conducted on-site inspections of the border regions independently from 28 September to 3 October 1921. This rather short time span meant, according to Roubik, that the visitations were “performed very superficially and fleetingly by automobile.”Footnote ³¹ Despite the tight time constraints, Allied representatives appeared quite eager to get an idea about the possible consequences of various boundary options first hand. They were also open to hearing the affected population's arguments and willing to consider local circumstances in some of their decisions. However, they also highly valued their ultimate authority and the formal correctness of the procedure. Thus the commission decided not to listen to the entire population of a municipality (because, as Carey put it, on such occasions most would only follow the crowd anyway), but only to receive delegations of no more than six people. These could explain the demands of the place or interest group in their own language in a face-to-face conversation (with the help of interpreters). They were also allowed to hand in memoranda that had to be translated into French by staff members of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak delegates. Mass rallies were not to be tolerated; the Allied representatives agreed that a local visit would be canceled if a larger demonstration was observed in a municipality. Tánczos attributed this to Pellicelli, who had been assaulted at an inspection of the Austro-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission in Gmünd once before and consequently developed a fear of large crowds.Footnote ³²

The main dynamizing element in the process that followed were the political concerns of Hungary and Czechoslovakia to achieve their goals: to change substantially the territorial provisions of the peace treaty by using the forum of the Boundary Commission or, accordingly, to strictly prevent any deviation from the Trianon line. The visitations, however, also made it clear that the security concepts of state authorities and the affected populations differed. Both the Hungarian and Czechoslovak representatives developed perception and alertness filters to classify the behavior of the local population in terms of risks to the “success” of the demarcation process. One consequence of this was that the same incidents were not only interpreted in the opposite way but also diametrically opposed strategies were derived from them, which had unsettling effects on specific sectors of the local population. The Czechoslovak representatives, for example, assumed that the inhabitants were obliged to loyalty as citizens of the areas defined by the Trianon line as their state territory. They interpreted all submissions for Hungary on the Slovak side of the demarcation line as disloyalty when they were voiced by people with higher levels of education. In severe cases, it seemed justified to take countermeasures, including arrests and criminal investigations. The authorities mostly attributed Hungarian patriotic statements by the rural population to the activities of irredentist networks and agitators who fueled the tensions and raised social pressure through networks and dependencies.

The official representatives of Hungary made it clear again that they were not prepared to recognize the existing Trianon boundary line as final. Referring to the right of self-determination, they rather sought to ensure that the population was able to articulate its national patriotic views completely undisturbed, and that these statements had to be considered in finalizing the border. The Hungarian representatives documented their impressions in appropriate detail during the local inspections and assessed these internally in terms of their value as a political argument. For instance, Tánczos meticulously noted the linguistic composition of the population of the lower Ipoly Valley municipalities in his records. To his delight, in the municipality Őrhalom, “even simple farm laborers wanted to move the border further northwards for ethnographic and economic reasons.”Footnote ³³

In fact, it is difficult to separate genuine patriotic enthusiasm and staged or orchestrated opinions from each other in the records of the local visits. National symbolism played a role in many memoranda, but were consistently combined with demands and proposals that were tailored to the respective region. In the town of Balassagyarmat (Slovak: Balážske Ďarmoty) on Hungarian territory, for example, the delegations of the city and county of Nógrád demanded the return of territory north of the proposed border the Ipoly River. According to their argumentation, six purely Hungarian-speaking municipalities would be completely cut off from the outside world in poor weather conditions. The restrictions meant that local farmers had been unable to sell their produce for years, especially freshly harvested fruit. Because of the presence of the demarcation line, the situation had begun to threaten the economic survival of several villages.Footnote ³⁴ In addition, the jurisdiction of two states complicated the much-needed regulation of the river bed. Deforestation in the upper Ipoly Valley on Czechoslovak territory had already caused landslides and widespread damage even in Hungary.Footnote ³⁵

As this document proves, the population in the area alongside the demarcation line had concerns that did not exclusively follow a purely national patriotic logic. As many other local statements vis-a-vis the Boundary Commission made clear, considerable uncertainty reigned because of the many practical problems that needed to be solved in everyday life. Many farmers enjoyed legal rights (e.g., for hunting, fishing, and the guaranteed use of water) or possessed land and other property on the other side. The owners repeatedly raised their concern that not only themselves but also their family members and farm workers needed to cross the border without restriction and take livestock and equipment with them. These people should be able to pass the border without duties or tolls and commute freely on the routes to railway stations, markets, and mills. Workers and craftsmen needed a clear passage for their daily way to and from work. Access to medical services also played an important role in many local statements. Especially in emergencies, doctors, midwives, and veterinarians should be allowed to cross the border without restriction and delay. Hospitals and pharmacies located on the other side should remain accessible in the event of injury or acute illness.

These concerns of the population had already given the impetus for regional and local authorities on both sides to start making direct contact with each other after the end of military conflict in the autumn of 1919 to overcome the most serious difficulties with provisional agreements.Footnote ³⁶ The associated security risks, however, got the central authorities in Prague and Bratislava (Hungarian: Pozsony) involved. Their assessment clearly differed from that of the regional authorities, which indicates that the state should by no means be perceived as a “unitary actor” in this instance.Footnote ³⁷ The main objective was rather to centralize the security measures and to regain control over the movement of people and goods from the regional authorities that, at least according to the Slovak press, were still in the hands of the old Hungarian patriotic elites.Footnote ³⁸ Standardized stipulations were intended not only to avoid a proliferation or patchwork of local agreements but also to create guarantees that municipalities close to the border, through no fault of their own, did not get themselves into an emergency economic situation that could cause further social unrest.

On 8 May 1921, the branch of the Czechoslovak ministry of the interior for the administration of Slovakia had issued a decree that defined a ten-kilometer zone in which certain segments of the population were allowed to cross the border, although only to reach the closest town on the other side. Every authorized person had to apply for their own border crossing card, which was not valid for more than three months and included a photograph to prevent misuse.Footnote ³⁹ A further decision on 9 June 1921 concerned all Hungarian citizens who were not registered within the local border traffic area. This ruled that to cross the border, residents from the rest of Hungary, like other foreigners, needed a passport for international travel that was valid at least until the end of 1923. The intention was to protect the country against military and other spies and “from the influx of elements that threaten the security of our state, especially Hungarian irredentism.”Footnote ⁴⁰

While the Allied delegates remained focused on the task and mission of the Boundary Commission, the Czechoslovak authorities increasingly linked local security assessments with a worst-case perspective on the international situation and what they experienced as Hungarian interference in agency on the local level. This intersection of all these threats helped multiply the anxiety of state bureaucracy based in Slovakia. Ahead of the border inspections in September/October 1921, the Czechoslovak authorities had apparently not informed their offices in areas with a Hungarian-speaking population about the arrival of the subcommissions.Footnote ⁴¹ They observed the undisguised Hungarian self-confidence with a mixture of anger and anxiety. Roubik noted in his report to the foreign ministry in Prague that the Hungarian representatives not only appeared on local visits in uniform but also obviously took advantage of their presence on Czechoslovak soil and, “at every available opportunity, contacted Magyar elements that are hostile to us and act against Czechoslovak interests.”Footnote ⁴² The agents sent from Hungary were clearly so diligent, as Roubik laconically put it in another internal report, that “there was no lack of anti-government statements and celebrations or Magyar uniforms and other Magyar emblems. Plenty of bouquets were also presented in Magyar national colors with the Magyar tricolor and various irredentist slogans.”Footnote ⁴³

Even the memoranda of small and remote communities used very similar expressions (like the stereotypical formula “for economic and ethnographic reasons”) to justify their desire to return to Hungary.Footnote ⁴⁴ The memoranda and oral statements were arranged in advance by agitators, he said. Therefore, the Czechoslovak government felt obliged to vigorously oppose this agitation from the perspective of maintaining public order “because of the dangers that these pose to the inner peace of the state and its correct relations with foreign countries.” They stated that they were therefore opposed to “misuse of the principle of ensuring the free expression of the will of the people” and thus proposed “to put an end to the common practice of accepting memoranda and declarations from irresponsible individuals that are directed against the conditions of the Treaty of Trianon.”Footnote ⁴⁵

These observations of Roubik made it quite clear why both sides had opposite impressions of the events in Košice (Hungarian: Kassa). The regional center of eastern Slovakia served as the base from which the subcommission for the eastern border section made inspection visits. Zoltán Gerevich, who was involved in the Boundary Commission as a Hungarian expert on all Slovak questions, described in his report with obvious delight how the Hungarian anthem was sung in tears in Kassa and how women decorated the subcommission car with flowers before it set off. Even Slovaks (“tótok”) who spoke little or no Hungarian demonstrated vocally for Hungary. Many even referred to the Hungarian flag as “our colors” (naša farba). In such moments, as Gerevich noted, it was clear that the pro-Hungarian mood reflected an inner passion and was not staged. Accordingly, he said that the “Czech authorities” had been very nervous all the time. Although they tolerated the rallies in the presence of Allied representatives, they stepped in, however, after their departure and arrested several people. Gerevich was left with the impression that “the Czech Republic” could not consolidate Slovakia because of Hungarian, Slovak, and Ruthenian resistance. All of this could well be used as an argument in favor of border adjustments.Footnote ⁴⁶

On the Hungarian side, more intensive preparation for the border inspection was indeed evident. The authorities were fully informed in advance and their help was accepted to bring arguments into circulation that supported the Hungarian strategy. Budapest's influence on local positions also had its limits, however. No uniform picture emerged in Lučenec (Hungarian: Losonc), for instance, as the positions and memoranda put forward were so contradictory as to raise the question whether the individual representatives were authorized to speak for portions of the population at all. Before the World War, Lučenec was a town of 13,000 inhabitants and additional 1,400 soldiers. According to the official census of 1910, the ethnic composition included 13 percent Slovak-speaking population, it is likely, however, that many counted as Hungarian were indeed of Slovak background (in 1930, the Slovaks and Czechs would already account for 60 percent of the population, a figure like that cannot be explained by migration alone).Footnote ⁴⁷

Now the first delegation submitted a memorandum signed by “ten notable citizens” on behalf of “the population sentenced to the political, economic, and cultural destruction,” demanding that the town be returned to Hungary. A second delegation of Hungarian workers argued “in the name of humanity and justice” for Lučenec to belong to Czechoslovakia and against return to “Horthy's Hungary.”Footnote ⁴⁸ A third memorandum by the “Slovaks of Lučenec,” with nine signatures, concluded that the town had been subject to “violent Magyarisation” and was a purely Slovak town in the nineteenth century. Therefore, they saw the establishment of Czechoslovakia as conforming with the spontaneous will of the Slovaks from Lučenec and the surrounding area who would never return to the Hungarian yoke and declared their solidarity with the “brotherly Czech nation.” While Tánczos felt challenged to respond to these arguments with his own diplomatic note, the Czechoslovak representative Houdek and the Chair of the Industrial Association of Lučenec protested a fourth memorandum by the journalist Sándor Kristóff, demanding that Lučenec belong to Hungary.Footnote ⁴⁹ Kristóff claimed to represent the Hungarian-speaking population of the city, but at the same time was in contact with a Hungarian assistant delegate. Houdek was not prepared to accept “that Magyar delegates on our territory communicate with citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic behind the commission's back.” Carey had also passed Kristóff's memorandum on to Tánczos, which was against the rules according to Houdek, as it “came from a Czechoslovak citizen and should have been given to the Czeschoslovak commissioner first.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The Hungarian side was surprisingly well informed about the Slovak local authorities’ unease on the question of how to react to pronounced expressions of Hungarian patriotism. The leadership of the Hungarian army came into the possession of a highly confidential letter from the Czechoslovak intelligence service of the plenipotentiary ministry for the administration of Slovakia, which demanded that both the Magyar and the Slovak population be placed under stricter observation to nip any subversive movement in the bud. Above all, in the future clearer action was to be taken against the “bigoted Hlinkists who remain faithful to the idea of the Hungarian state to this day.”Footnote ⁵¹ The response of the central authorities in Prague and Bratislava was both regulatory and deescalatory. In December 1921, the ministry for the administration of Slovakia instructed all župane (heads of the regional administration districts) to send a list of all occurrences and misreporting in the border area to the Czechoslovak delegation to the Boundary Commission. To prevent protests on the Hungarian side, the nature of the offense was to be noted as precisely as possible on any regulatory intervention. The central authorities also stressed, however, that it was necessary to oppose all incidents “with caution and the necessary tact.”Footnote ⁵²

The Hungarian officers, in turn, felt that their case was strengthened after the border inspections by the sheer number of pro-Hungarian memoranda.Footnote ⁵³ The dominant view was that the Allied representatives had been very impressed by the “purely Hungarian population which enthusiastically demonstrated for a return to their Hungarian homeland.” Above all, the “economic absurdities” that the Trianon border brought with it for the local population was seen to have aroused great interest.Footnote ⁵⁴ The records do indeed state that in October 1921 a window of opportunity opened, not only to make adjustments of a purely local scope, but in some regions to also achieve more substantial changes to the course of the border in Hungary's favor.Footnote ⁵⁵ In return, the Allied representatives expected Hungary to freely accept the border determined by Trianon for one or two other sections. For Tánczos, however, the real motive of this offer for talks was that the representatives of the victorious powers could always refer to any such free acceptance as evidence that Hungary had freely withdrawn some of its territorial claims.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even such a small concession to the conditions of the Treaty of Trianon would therefore create a precedent and an obstacle to any more extensive revision of the border in future.

Due to that assessment, Hungarian foreign policy lost the opportunity to change the border more substantially within a month because of the choice of the wrong strategy. The Hungarians made the decision that it was the right moment to oppose the whole Trianon boundary on principle again. Budapest's maximum strategy led in October and November 1921 to a veritable note war between Tánczos and Roubik.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Allied representatives must have found it especially strange that after the border inspections the Hungarian side began to openly question the Danube border as well, and that they employed the Slovak and Carpatho-Ruthenian issue as a tool that should work against the proposed border demarcation.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the following diplomatic spat between Budapest and Prague, the respective national perspectives completely dominated. All the local and regional arguments that had served Hungary well in the context of the border inspections faded far into the background.

In the Boundary Commission session on 30 November 1921, it became clear that the Hungarian side had failed to seriously call the Trianon boundary into question—the votes on individual border sections always ended five to one against Hungary.Footnote ⁵⁹ After Tánczos had submitted one last comprehensive boundary proposal to the commissionFootnote ⁶⁰ and another session on 19 December 1921 revealed that this would remain completely ineffective, the Hungarian delegate caused a diplomatic incident. Because the last hope for his fragmented homeland had now been crushed, Tánczos said, he could no longer take any responsibility and had to first consult his government. With these words, Tánczos and the rest of the Hungarian representatives walked out of the meeting.Footnote ⁶¹ Roubik's initial reaction was to show that while he could understand the Hungarian delegation's feelings, he could not see the reason for their declaration. After all, the border had been determined by an international treaty that the Hungarian government had also acknowledged by ratifying it.Footnote ⁶² As a result, the commission confirmed the peace treaty boundary in six out of nine sections; the commission still wanted to decide about how to proceed in sections four (Salgótarján, Slovak: Šalgov-Tarjany), six (Rimovská Sobota, Hungarian: Rimamurány), and eight (Sátoraljaújhely, Slovak: Nové Mesto pod Šiatrom).Footnote ⁶³

This fundamental decision did not end the Czechoslovak-Hungarian dispute about the course of the border at all. In the following months bitter rivalries flared up, mainly over microregions that were of particular economic or strategic interest. One of these microregions was the Šahy railway station, which was situated right on the border, on Czechoslovak territory. Czechoslovakia planned to develop the station into a hub, so Roubik protested strongly against the proposed boundary because Czechoslovakia would need two hundred meters more land to achieve this.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the Boundary Commission session on 16 May 1922 in Bratislava, it was therefore decided with a vote of five to one to conduct a second local inspection; in the interim however, the commission's proposed border almost completely coincided with the Hungarian position already.Footnote ⁶⁵

The four Allied representatives continued to hear appeals and issue final decisions, but in some cases, they sought to mediate between the two parties. In April 1922, the Hungarian Foreign Ministry received a proposal from the commission to adjust the Trianon border in the county of Abaúj-Torna by agreement. It was at the discretion of Hungary, Tánczos commented on this initiative, to decide which area has greater value and “whether the economic benefits that go along with the recovery of the areas of Abaújvár balance the disadvantage or advantage offered by Czechs, in terms of political propaganda and agitation.” In his view, it should also be born in mind here that it would not be in their own propaganda interests “if the two, to my knowledge purely Magyar, municipalities would suffer economically because weakening Hungarian border municipalities economically would serve Czech interests.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Tánczos again classified this type of initiative as an intervention that was disguised as humane but, rather than the good of the population near the border, the ulterior motive behind it was to avoid larger border adjustments and to facilitate the work of the commission.Footnote ⁶⁷

Also, counties, župy, and municipalities pursued their own interests at this stage of the border demarcation. The town of Balassagyarmat recommended border adjustments for their area (of course in favor of Hungary) that precisely oriented the boundaries of their own citizens’ land—and promoted this idea with the argument that this would reduce the burden of border control for both states, as significantly fewer crossings would need to be made.Footnote ⁶⁸ The vice-prefect of the Hungarian county of Abaúj-Torna, for their part, urged the Central Office for Border Demarcation to advocate for a border adjustment on the Hornád (Hungarian: Hernád) River, as this was “a question of survival for the county.” Twenty-one landowners would suffer unacceptable disadvantages from the current border because their property would fall on the other side. If the “Czechs” really insisted on compensation, it should be offered in other counties that were better able to do so for economic or other reasons.Footnote ⁶⁹

Documenting and Marginalizing Local Security

At the same time, the representatives of Slovak and Carpatho-Ruthenian župy began to petition the government and President T. G. Masaryk with reports that referred to a general atmosphere of anxiety and an unsafe situation. The security in some segments of the border was indeed precarious, also because of many unresolved details of the boundary line. Numerous illegal crossings resulted from uncertainties about the exact location of the border. Even the Hungarian Foreign Ministry listed a total of twenty severe incursions between 25 September 1921 and 29 June 1922 along the Hungarian-Czechoslovak border.Footnote ⁷⁰ A white paper on the situation in the border area, which was delivered to President Masaryk, Prime Minister Edvard Beneš, and all the other ministers, showed that the Czechoslovak authorities took these concerns seriously.Footnote ⁷¹

Meanwhile, the documentation, surveying, and marking work took place on the ground from the spring of 1922. A mixed Hungarian-Czechoslovak working group was launched on 9 December 1921 for this.Footnote ⁷² Unaccompanied by Allied representatives this time, the working group inspected 475 kilometers of the ultimately 832.3-kilometers-long border, in individual sections and within thirteen months.Footnote ⁷³ On the day-to-day working level, it was usually possible to agree on procedures and a solution to emerging problems quickly and easily.Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition to these technical aspects, the working group's task also included consulting the municipalities along the length of the resulting border once more and “with the involvement of all interested authorities … to minute the proposals and wishes.”Footnote ⁷⁵ These statements were to be translated into French and then submitted uncommented to the Boundary Commission.Footnote ⁷⁶ This then took a stance on all the questions that could not be resolved by mutual agreement between both sides, and decided disputes by voting.

During the technical work on the ground, contact with the local population was significantly different from the situation in September and October 1921. Then, groups still had to take their own initiative and approach the commission themselves, whereas this time contact was significantly more systematic. There was plenty of time and opportunity for all affected communities, interest groups, and individuals to voice their concerns in their own languages. While we encounter standard formulations yet again—such as the argument that in the interest of maintaining public order, the close economic and family ties between the population on both sides of the border should continue to develop peacefully and undisturbed.Footnote ⁷⁷ But local voices stood out much more clearly and authentically than before—the minutes contain a wealth of local unfiltered statements and individual opinions. The national arguments were almost absent from statements by the rural population. It is possible to explain this as the population becoming resigned to its fate and merely seeking to achieve final improvements to their situation. The evidence suggests, however, that the security interest of the local population did not primarily focus on issues of national relevance, but above all on their own economic survival, maintaining established social relations, and ensuring a certain degree of predictability in everyday life.

Almost all statements and declarations were dominated by fears that personal mobility would remain permanently restricted by the new border and that livelihoods were at risk. As numerous documents show, this applied not only to the wish to use well-established transport routes and work in the fields and import and export crops, fodder, fruit, and wood without tolls or duties, but also to the mobility of livestock, machinery, building materials, and mined goods.Footnote ⁷⁸ Repeated requests were also made for the cards for local border traffic to be valid throughout the day (not only from sunrise to sunset) and on Sundays and public holidays. Some people had to allow significantly more time for their journey due to the new border, which often resulted in additional costs.Footnote ⁷⁹ A spokesman for the landowners from Šahy, who owned land on the Hungarian side of the border, stated for the record that transporting wood used to take only a few hours but now took at least two days. The current fee for the border pass was also seen as too high, and it was hoped that the border guards on both sides would be accommodating and humane in their interaction with the locals.Footnote ⁸⁰

The existential challenges faced by municipalities that were in a particularly exposed position on the new border are palpable in the minutes. Residents of Ipolské Kosihy (Hungarian: Ipolykeszi), for example, stated that they had delivered milk to Budapest before the war, but “today we have no railway and no market anymore, so it can no longer be sold.” They also said that the necessary machinery was sourced from Hungary, and spare parts were currently difficult to get. For all these reasons, they requested permission at least to continue to use the railway station on Hungarian territory and the bridges leading to it, which was then prohibited.Footnote ⁸¹ Many residents of Tajty (Hungarian: Tajti) working as miners across the demarcation line in Hungary were paid in kind. They not only demanded the right to take these across the border duty-free, but also proposed to keep records so this could also be monitored.Footnote ⁸² The statement by twenty-six residents of the municipality of Szeteharaszt was particularly unusual, as it addressed the Boundary Commission directly in Hungarian with the demand to be annexed to Czechoslovakia, coupled with the request “to conceal our desire from the Hungarian authorities …We cannot survive in Hungary, our currency is bad … Economically, we gravitate towards Ipolyság [Slovak: Šahy], where our market is located and which is the only place where we can sell our produce. Our fields are on the other side of the border, making it considerably difficult and costly to farm them.”Footnote ⁸³

Problems also arose regarding the use of water. Border rivers such as the Danube, the Ipeľ, or the Tisza (Slovak: Tisa) were seen as natural boundaries in the deliberations at Trianon.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the minutes of the 1922–23 inspections, however, the question of access to rivers and the problems resulting from high and low water recurs. Issues around the use of border waters for fishing, hunting, or electricity production remained just as much on the agenda as the use of bridges or ferries with as little restriction as possible. For the Ipeľ/Ipoly Valley alone, this meant determining the water rights not only of the population living by the river but also of sixteen mills, even if many of them were not even operating anymore. Also, the maintenance of eighteen bridges and a ferry and conditions for the local population to cross had to be regulated.Footnote ⁸⁵ On 7 November 1923, residents of Sokolová (Hungarian: Ipolyszalka) and Szob demanded a guarantee that they would still be able to cross the railway bridge over the border on foot, because no other way was possible in the event of flooding.Footnote ⁸⁶ The swine and goose herd of Szob also complained that he had to now graze his animals on Czechoslovak territory if the Ipoly was at low water.Footnote ⁸⁷

Another constantly recurring theme was health care for people and animals. The municipality of Ipoľské Kosihy hoped that physicians and veterinarians from Hungary could continue to provide their services on Czechoslovak territory without restriction, for the whole district had only a single doctor and the nearest veterinarian was in Šahy, twenty-four kilometers away.Footnote ⁸⁸ At a site inspection in Letkés on 1 November 1923, to obtain faster medical assistance and ensure the municipality had access to health care, the residents demanded that the doctor from the neighboring Ipeľský Sokolec could be called out and the fee could be paid in Hungarian crowns. They also referred to their close relationship with relatives in various municipalities on the Slovak side and wished it could be made easier to visit sick relatives.Footnote ⁸⁹

The working group was also constantly busy with questions about documenting ownership and existing laws, or the division of assets.Footnote ⁹⁰ Municipalities repeatedly demanded that the title deeds to their land, which were kept in offices on the wrong side of the border, be handed over to them to safeguard their legal certainty. Educational and pastoral needs also recur among the demands of the local population. The inhabitants of the village of Szurdok stated for the record that the village children were now without a school. Trusting that elementary and middle-school teaching would still be in Hungarian in the future, they asked for permission to send their children to their former school, now located over the border in Czechoslovakia.Footnote ⁹¹ The municipality of Ipolytölgyes had so far shared a priest with the neighboring municipality of Malé Kozihy (Hungarian: Ipolykiskeszi); however, he now found it difficult to cross the border. They requested that he be allowed to cross the border freely, mainly to celebrate Sunday and feast-day masses, but also to perform marriages and baptisms and hear confessions.Footnote ⁹² Some documents even provide glimpses into local lifestyles and mentalities. On 1 November 1923, the residents of Bielovce (Hungarian: Ipolybél) made the following suggestion for the record: “We also ask for the ban to be lifted so that we can bathe on Sundays and holidays in the river Ipeľ in future, because the farm workers, who work all week, only have time to wash themselves on these days which is so necessary to take care of their health. We also request permission to bathe the cattle in the usual places on those days.”Footnote ⁹³

Even the Boundary Commission had repeatedly recommended that local border traffic be extended because of the numerous problems. What made the authorities in southern Slovakia hesitate, however, were the numerous irregularities and significant deviations in the border traffic with Hungary.Footnote ⁹⁴ Czechoslovak citizens often used the opportunity to travel as far as Budapest, although they had no other travel documents. For their part, the Hungarian authorities issued a border crossing card to residents of towns in the Hungarian interior. Therefore, the directive stated that all wrongly issued or misused passes were to be withdrawn and handed in to the nearest government office and, if necessary, the foreign ministry, so that diplomatic action could be taken.Footnote ⁹⁵ To address this misuse and to prevent a precedent for future intergovernmental agreements, on 23 March 1922, the ministry for the administration of Slovakia replaced the temporary ordinance on local border traffic of 8 May 1921 with a new system with detailed directives.Footnote ⁹⁶ Local border traffic on both sides was now only permitted on a strip of ten kilometers from the border and moreover excluded in principle the citizens of Bratislava and Lučenec. Exceptions of up to fifteen kilometers could be granted if the area clearly differed from the interior because of its remoteness or character. Everyone who enjoyed the ordinary and permanent right of residence in this zone was included; people who moved into the area could only benefit from this regulation after three months.Footnote ⁹⁷ The cards were valid for a maximum of half a year, had to include a photograph, and had to be presented for confirmation to the authorities in the neighboring state.Footnote ⁹⁸ The only exceptions were deaths, baptisms, or other important family events, as well as in urgent cases, such as visiting doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals.Footnote ⁹⁹

The activities of the local population were only able to indirectly affect measures designed to alleviate the most serious impact on them. Sometimes these measures even reinforced the tendency to fit regional agreements into an abstract framework of rules designed by the central authorities and thus significantly bureaucratize the process. On the one hand, the new border regime created a degree of legal certainty for the local population, but on the other, this framework fell far short of restoring “normality” to rural communities. Their interventions were ultimately fruitless, as their own national representatives only ascribed any significance to them when they supported state strategic interests.

At its session of 4–6 May 1925, the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission made its final decision on which points of the border proposed in the peace treaty should be amended. This marked the end of almost four years of service. On 31 May 1925, the commission officially disbanded. With a total of forty meetings, the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission by far held the record for all four commissions that defined the borders of Hungary.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Border adjustments were made in twenty-eight segments;Footnote ¹⁰¹ in total Czechoslovakia was awarded 51.21 square kilometers and Hungary 86.21 square kilometers.Footnote ¹⁰² Thus the border between the two states was finalized, and, except for a small section in the far west, this remains the northern border of Hungary with Slovakia and Ukraine today.

Conclusion: Securitizing Future Borderlands

As early as 2009, Patricia Noxolo and Jef Huysmans contended that “[t]he issue of security—what it means and how it can be achieved—is one of the defining questions of the early twenty-first century. It is a question that has come to affect more and more intimate elements of people's lives, impacting on relationships between states, between individuals and the state, but also between individuals as they interact day by day.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In the context of these current challenges, “security” has become a central concept in historical research.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As this article indicates, the question is no longer asked as to whether security objectively existed in a particular historical situation. Instead, researchers consider how actors create an understanding of security communicatively, which patterns of behavior are derived from this, and how security agendas shape social processes and structures.

If we now evaluate the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission in terms of its activities, the following picture emerges. Three groups of actors faced each other on this stage, and there was a clear imbalance of power between them from the outset. The first group, the four Allied representatives, identified with the security concerns of the local population to varying degrees. Their main interest, however, was that procedure be followed correctly and the results be legally watertight. Even the Boundary Commission paid selective attention to local actors, and their advocacy for the local population, with whom they had only fleeting direct contact during the first border inspection, came to an end as soon as latent conflicts threatened to escalate and become visible on the international level.

Although the task of the commission was legally defined and its procedures were heavily formalized, the security premises of the competing neighboring states gave rise to a complex and, at the same time, enmeshed dynamic of interactions. The representatives of those two “interested powers” therefore formed the second group of actors. Their constant monitoring and strategic assessment was based on mutually exclusive security concerns—about the viability of a Hungarian state within the boundaries of Trianon, or about the military situation of the Czechoslovak state and the loyalty of Slovaks and Carpatho-Ruthenians to the republic. Due to this security dilemma, Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest looked at local communities and their serious problems almost exclusively from the angle of possible (geo-)political risks for the nation-state. As a consequence, the bilateral dissent over borders was introduced into the local context under international auspices. Even if there was a desire to work on the solution to the many practical issues, this came up against each party's own national security agenda and control as well as enforcement needs again and again.

The third stakeholder group, the local population, had been dealt the worst hand for enforcing their security interests. What made it difficult is that this was not a homogeneous group, but was made up of small communities with very different security agendas and hardly any effective means to lobby for their interests. In addition, the second stage of the border inspections showed that central government representatives approached security with a completely different logic to that of local actors. Especially outside towns, individual municipalities then placed their concerns about livelihood and a focus on rural life at the heart of their security agendas. Even if some people gained some advantages from the border situation (e.g., through activities such as smuggling), the local population on both sides of the newly drawn state border were the real losers in the described security dilemma.