István Friedrich’s Opinion on the Entente and the Peace Negotiations (1919–1920)

Abstract

István Friedrich (1883–1951) began his political career in the 1910’s. During World War I, he was a supporter of Count Mihály Károlyi’s policies. In August 1919, in the shadow of the Romanian invasion, he formed a counterrevolutionary government. However, the victorious Entente Powers neither recognized his cabinet nor invited him to the peace negotiations in Paris. This international seclusion led to his resignation as prime minister in November 1919 and the subsequent formation, as a compromise solution, of a koncentrációs kormány (a coalition government in which every political party had representation) led by Károly Huszár.

Friedrich was initially given the role of Minister of Defense in this new government, but a few months later, he left the ruling coalition and began criticizing the Sándor Simonyi-Semadam government and its Pál Teleki-led successor for their poor handling of the peace negotiations, their having signed the Treaty of Trianon and its ratification by parliament. According to Friedrich, a realistic alternative to signing the peace treaty would have been to hinder and stall the start of the negotiations until the mutually exclusive interests of the states making up the Entente tore the alliance apart. This work attempts to analyze this line of thinking which, because it was a minority viewpoint among the political elite, was never undertaken.