Hungary at crossroads: war, peace, and occupation politics

Abstract

This thesis traces the steps of the Hungarian foreign policy from 1918 to 1946, and analyzes the impact of revisionism after the Treaty of Trianon on Hungarian foreign policy decisions and calculations after the First World War. Placing the Hungarian revisionism at its center, this thesis shows the different situation Hungary had as a South European power as an ally of Germany throughout the Second World War and subsequently under the Soviet occupation. It also argues that it was the interlinked Hungarian foreign policy steps well before 1941, the official Hungarian participation in the war, which made Hungary a belligerent country. Also, based largely on the American archival documents, this study places Hungary into a retrospective framework of the immediate post-war era in Europe, where the strong adherence to Nazi Germany and the Hungarian revisionism shaped the future of the country.