The victorious Allies were confronted in 1945 with the conundrum of how to construct an enduring peace that was free of the structural problems of the post-World War I state system that had contributed to the inevitability of World War II. The present work is largely an exposition of the deliberations of the Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM), which was established at Potsdam as a forum through which Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States would draft the peace treaties to be imposed on the vanquished allies of Nazi Germany, from its creation in May 1945 until the completion of its charge in 1947. The author primarily uses diplomatic records to trace, in exhaustive detail, the machinations of the Council's work and the differences between the respective foreign ministers that shaped the postwar order and delineated the path to the Cold War.

Fülöp establishes early on that the British proposal to impose peace treaties on the defeated states, rather than negotiate separate agreements with them, was the basis from which the CFM's activities proceeded. The United States regarded the CFM as a surrogate for the UN Security Council, which would not come into being until the formal ratification of the United Nations Charter in October 1945. While the position of U.S. Secretary of State Byrnes was informed by President Truman's more literal interpretation of the Big Three's deliberations at Yalta, calling for free elections across the postwar space, the British Foreign Office argued from June 1945 that the disproportionate influence being exercised by Soviet authorities in Eastern Europe was “sensible” considering that the Red Army was effectively in control of those countries (47). Moreover, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov argued that U.S. posturing about free elections in Bulgaria and Romania was hardly consistent with U.S. support for the political systems of postwar Italy or Greece, which were no more open, and that the United States maintained relations with the regimes in Spain and Argentina, which could hardly be described as democratic (85).

The territorial basis on which the postwar Hungarian Peace Treaty was negotiated was that of Trianon, the treaty that had reduced the post-1918 Hungarian state to roughly a third of the size of the Hungarian Kingdom. The Allies rejected Hungarian claims to have been victimized by Nazi Germany, as there had been little Hungarian public opposition to the war while it was going well for the Axis. Moreover, “democratic” Hungary did not declare war on Germany until January 1945, while the Fascist forces of Ferenc Szálasi were still actively combating the Red Army in May 1945 (193). These facts buttressed the Romanian claim to the full restoration of Transylvania to Romanian sovereignty, as did the Romanian volte-face of 23 August 1944, which earned it the status of a co-belligerent against the Axis. Fülöp further suggests that Soviet support for the return of Transylvania to Romanian control was informed by the Soviets' eagerness to procure Romania's recognition of the Soviet Union's retention of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia as part of the USSR.

The author's discussion of the Hungarian-Romanian border issue is but one example of his consistent failure to assess critically why certain propositions were simply untenable or the broader significance of issues he raises. Any Trianon-revisionist border adjustments with Romania would not substantively affect a clearer inclusion of Hungarian ethnic majorities in Transylvania within the postwar Hungarian state. The ethnographic map (410) reveals that the area in Transylvania with the highest concentration of Hungarians (over 75 percent) is located in the Southeastern-most part of the region, geographically the farthest from the border with Hungary.

Fülöp's conclusion that “the Hungarian peace treaty…proved to be a solid pillar of European peace” (334) is dubious at best. While the superpowers avoided a military confrontation with one another, the dynamics of the Cold War still made the peace a fragile one. Indeed, while Western historiography generally attributes Hungarian aspirations in the 1956 Revolution to Khrushchev's 20th Party Congress denunciation of Stalinist excesses, it is also evident that the negotiation of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, which removed Soviet troops from Austria and established it as a nonaligned republic at the center of Europe, was a model Hungarians sought to emulate a year later.

The book includes a substantial bibliographic essay that discusses the author's sources. It is primarily as a guide to future research that the present volume will prove most useful.