Peacekeeping after Paris: The Interallied Commission for the Delimitation of the Boundary between Austria and Hungary
Data publikacji: 12 lis 2024
Zakres stron: 36 - 51
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/adhi-2022-0015
Słowa kluczowe
© 2022 Michael Burri, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
With a cast of thousands and an audience in the hundreds of millions, the Paris Peace Conference that began January 18, 1919, delivered an enormous spectacle. That spectacle included everything from the towering statesmen who presided – Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando, Wilson – to the »councils« from which authority to conduct the business of the conference proceeded. On this stage, smaller states faded from the spotlight, as the Council of Ten shrunk to the Council of Five, followed by the Council of Four, and finally, the Big Three. But new roles also became available for some smaller states, most notably as petitioners standing before the leaders of the great powers.1 Memorialized in newsreels, set down in print and distributed to audiences worldwide, and even a subject for painters, everything was a matter of great public interest at the Paris conference, an event too momentous to be overlooked, yet too complex to be grasped.2
That such a spectacle would sow the seeds of discontent was virtually guaranteed. In this spirit, volumes entitled »What Really Happened at Paris« appeared not long after the conference had concluded.3 Its theatrical dimension would also ensure that individual leaders themselves acquired what were seen as roles in a larger drama. Sigmund Freud believed that Woodrow Wilson was possessed of an unconscious identification with Jesus Christ as the „savior of the world.”4 And because the scale of the event was taken to have cast a veil over its meaning, new interpretations fell on fertile ground. In »The Economic Consequences of the Peace«, John Maynard Keynes famously called for a closer examination of what he reformulated as the „Carthaginian Peace” imposed by the conference. That call was based on the premise that the spectacle of the conference had obscured its future significance.5
This paper examines the Interallied Commission for the Delimitation of the Boundary between Austria and Hungary. By necessity, such an examination is aware of the spectacle of Paris 1919. After all, and despite declarations to the contrary, the conference was primarily about territory and geography. Allied leaders drew three thousand miles of new, geometrically precise, linear borders, in what was the largest such administrative endeavor in geography up to that time.6 For their part, France, Great Britain, and the United States budgeted generously in advance for this undertaking, each creating their own research units to collect economic, linguistic, geographic, and other data on the territories for which new borders would be drawn.7 Meanwhile, at the conference itself, the territorial commissions, which were largely staffed by the research units themselves, exercised immense influence over the fate of peoples and lands.8 The Paris Peace Conference was a spectacle, a spectacle where boundaries were a main, if not
And yet, this paper is also an examination of what follows the Paris spectacle. For while Allied leaders provided for boundary commissions within the peace treaties themselves, the activities of the Interallied Boundary Commission for Austria and Hungary, like those of other boundary commissions, were conducted ›post-Paris‹. The difference, which is also recognized in international law, is the distinction between border delimitation and border demarcation. At Paris, Allied leaders delimited a new set of boundaries for Habsburg successor states. This delimitation received top billing, with articles concerning delimitation of frontiers placed at the beginning of the country-specific treaties of St. Germain and Trianon. Thus, Article 28(5) of the Treaty of St. Germain delimited the new boundary between Austria and Hungary by delivering fourteen instructions for the transfer of the ethnically mixed region »West Hungary« from Hungary to Austria.9 The eighth instruction, for example, specified one section as »a line to be fixed on the ground passing south-east of Liebing, Olmod and Locsmand, and northwest of Köszeg and the road from Köszeg to Salamonfa…«. But this delimitation, which was the outcome of interstate agreement, was not demarcation. It was boundary commissions that were responsible for demarcation. Boundary commissions materialized the border, they made the »line to be fixed in the ground«.
The Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission operated in a postwar interval framed between the authoritative display of Paris and the final recognition of the boundary by the League of Nations in 1924. In Paris, Allied leaders had produced the general topographic coordinates for the new postwar frontiers. What remained, at least as had been envisioned, was the technical task of boundary demarcation. In what follows, I turn to the acute crisis in West Hungary that confronted the Boundary Commission from the start of its work in July 1921. This crisis, I argue, decisively shaped the Commission’s activities, which were attentive not only to demarcating boundaries, but increasingly to securing a peace in the region that would make such demarcation possible. In the first section, I show how the delayed launch of the Commission’s work, along with some exceptional features of the Austria-Hungary boundary, compounded local resistance to demarcation in West Hungary. For its part, the Boundary Commission had been constituted as a military unit, a direct expression of its purpose to maintain order. Yet much of how the Commission conducted its work manifests the tenuous postwar certainty that future peace would be sealed not by martial attitudes but by citizen participation. In section two, I undertake a closer examination of the Commission’s engagement with citizen constituencies to show how public participation figured as an intentional factor in peacekeeping. The Boundary Commission operated in the space between coercion and consensus: rituals of public participation offered constituencies of every kind to deliver their input. Shaped by the distinct challenges it encountered, the Commission acquired both expertise and autonomy. Drawing upon such experiences, in 1922, it challenged the delimitation of the Austria-Hungary boundary that had been set by the Paris treaties. In section three, I explore the limits of Commission expertise and autonomy via the ruling handed down in response to its challenge by the Council of the League of Nations. The Council largely rejected the boundary modifications recommended by the Commission. Nevertheless, the supplementary agreements that followed the Council ruling underscore the Commission’s unabated authority in the region. These agreements not only constituted the legal basis for subsequent land transfer between Austria and Hungary but provided alternate remedies to the concerns that the Commission had intended to address in its boundary recommendations to the Council.
Allied leaders designed the Interallied Boundary Commission for the Delimitation of Austria and Hungary to carry out the boundary demarcation indicated in the Paris treaties. The enabling instructions for the boundary commissions issued by the Ambassadors Conference on 22 July 1920 promised consistency among the commissions.10 As Colonel Bellot, the French President of the Technical Commission for the Implementation of the Boundary Determination said following the Ambassadors Conference directive, deviation from the boundary setting practices was not desirable.11 From this standpoint, in Austria, the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission was just one of four interallied territorial commissions assigned to fix the boundaries of post-Habsburg Austria. Such joint boundary commissions, moreover, were a tried-and-tested institution in Europe, reaching back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 True, Allied leaders had recognized that not all boundaries between countries were ready to be fixed by commissions – most notably, between Germany and Poland in Upper Silesia, but also between Austria and the Serb-Croat-Slovene State in Carinthia. For these, the Paris treaties provided detailed specifications for the plebiscites that would settle territorial questions prior to the work of boundary commissions.13 At Paris, in any case, Allied leaders grouped West Hungary together with most of the other boundaries they addressed. It was a matter of conventional demarcation.
Despite that grouping, the circumstances faced by the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission were not those envisioned by the Paris Peace conference. Indeed, from the outset, and as the Ambassadors Conference never failed to mention, the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission was behind schedule.14 For whereas by late July 1921, as the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission held its constitutive meeting in Graz, the other boundary commissions in Austria had either completed, or were wrapping up their work.15 This late start was due primarily to the scheduling of the Paris conference. The Czechoslovak, Italian, and Serb-Croat-Slovene State boundary commissions had begun their work on 16 June 1920, based on the redrawn frontiers specified in the Treaty of St. Germain of September 1919, whereas the frontiers of the new Hungarian state were not ratified until the Treaty of Trianon was signed on 4 June 1920. As time passed, the authority of Allied victory at Paris faded, and delays such as these mattered.
There were technical issues as well. Treaty boundaries to be demarcated by the other boundary commissions, for example, were often more straightforward. Thus, Article 27(6) of the Treaty of St. Germain stipulated that an extended section of the boundary between the new Czechoslovak Republic and Austria, would be »the old administrative boundary between Lower Austria and Bohemia«. By spelling out what was expected, such treaty language did not ensure a trouble-free boundary demarcation. But it often did pre-empt opportunities for interested states to intervene in the process. Where the Austria-Hungary boundary is concerned, less was spelled out. This lack of specificity would later give the Boundary Commission more scope in recommending changes to the demarcation of the boundary between Austria and Hungary. But in the short term it offered to others the hope that intervention could succeed. As Joseph Roth, who traveled to West Hungary in 1919 as a journalist for the Viennese daily, »Der Neue Tag«, wrote, »At the border, the motto is: no answer soon becomes an answer«.16
The metaphor of an (imperial) power vacuum, as is sometimes proposed, captures an essential aspect of the circumstances in which the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission was placed. The fundamental crisis in state legitimacy and the rule of law that had been initiated by the war, together with the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, shattered the prevailing social and political stability in the region.17 But the metaphor of
Of course, as the response to Keresztes indicates, it was above all organized military violence that officials in Paris worried would upend the local balance of power. Still, if those officials were determined to affirm military authority, they seldom deployed interallied military forces themselves to West Hungary as they had done in the conflict in Upper Silesia.19 Nevertheless, the Austrian government, whose policy on the boundary was that international law as set forth in the Treaty of Germain should be enforced, did frequently call upon the Ambassadors Conference – and occasionally beyond — to intervene. When, in spring 1921, Austrian leaders sought Entente troops either from the Conference of Ambassadors or as mandataries of the League of Nations, in response to the growing presence of armed groups in West Hungary sympathetic to Charles I, for example, their request was quickly rejected.20
The direct impact of the Ambassadors Conference’s refusal to commit troops to West Hungary has not been overlooked by contemporary scholars, even as older, nationalist, German-language accounts judged the lack of military presence as proof that the new international order had failed.21 And it is true that elevated political pressure in the region exposed weaknesses in Paris peace planning.22 But what has been less recognized is that the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission, like other such commissions, was itself designed with a view toward acting as a stabilizing agent, both through its constitution and in its outward appearance as a military unit. As an institution, boundary commissions had historically been led by the military.23 This disposition had a clear logic. First, the military had generally resolved the conflict that led to redrawing boundaries. They remained ready to act. Second, the military was well equipped to draw boundaries, with respect both to trained land-surveying staff and to strategic expertise in identifying physical features that would offer an advantage in a future conflict. Finally, and what is most pertinent here, by manifesting itself visibly, the military exercised a pacifying effect on the local population. Their presence kept dissent in check, it restrained the return of violence, and it served as a reminder that an armed force stood behind the new boundaries.
The instructions authorizing the boundary commissions issued by the Ambassadors Conference in July 1920 called for virtually all those who staffed these commissions to be members of the military. In addition, lead delegates were to be exclusively drawn from high-ranking military officials, as were the Austrian and Hungarian representatives to the Commission. Moreover, all commission members were required to wear a military uniform of a »notably marked character«.24 Such instructions rendered visible the implicit understanding that the post-Paris boundary commissions were enforcement units and also intended as a peacekeeping force. In fact, recent boundary commissions in Europe had not been quite so fully identified with the military. The joint French-German boundary commission that demarcated the border between France and Germany after the war of 1871, for example, included diplomats and government officials, among others, with civilian status.25 Meanwhile, instructions from the Ambassadors Commission applied from top to bottom of the boundary commissions; even members of survey departments had to hold the rank of officer. Only translators and topographers were exempted.26
To be sure, the expectation that the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission would function as a de facto peacekeeping force did not entirely survive its confrontation with postwar realities. One problematic reality was the structure of the Boundary Commission itself. Joint boundary commissions were traditionally comprised of former adversaries, both of whom had a transparent interest in the outcome — and one of whom could count on having a more authoritative voice in addressing the local population and setting boundaries. The Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission was something different. It was chaired by Major André Jocard (France), accompanied by Arthur J. Craven (Great Britain), Major Enrico Calma (Italy), and General Staff Colonel Y. Yamagutschi (Japan).27 These were representatives of four different Allied Powers, not all of whom had even been directly at war with Austria. Representing transparent interests and projecting a single, authoritative voice in boundary matters would always be a challenge for the Commission.28
The »notably marked character« of the Boundary Commission as a military organization recalls that maintaining order was both a prerequisite for the demarcation of the boundary and indispensable for its completion. At the same time, the war years between 1914 and 1918 had led to a peace settlement that directly questioned the use of military force by great powers to achieve foreign policy ends. That
In response to such concerns, the Ambassadors Conference relaxed its instructions. It agreed to let civilians serve, even as the commissions themselves were always led by high-ranking military officers. For its part, the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs vigorously protested, referring to the »international practice« that only military personnel serve on boundary commissions. Should the boundary commission include non-officers, foreign ministry officials ominously warned, they absolved themselves of any consequences of that decision.30 In the end, the arguments of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, together with the purposes of the Ambassadors Conference, prevailed over Ministry for Home Affairs objections. The Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission largely retained its military disposition, and this disposition acted as a form of coercion to secure the peaceful cooperation of the local population.
Nevertheless, as a symbol of international order in the region, the Commission also registered the limits of military presentation. For as the Austria-Boundary Commission finally launched demarcation work in January 1922, the month following the December 1921 Sopron/Ödenburg plebiscite, it had become clear that the Commission would need to mobilize public perception of it as an authoritative, yet unbiased and non-aligned institution. Wearing a uniform as part of a relatively small – by military standards – interallied organization of 250 people would not be enough. In his study of how events from the war into the postwar period unsettled large areas across the Baltics, Klaus Richter has shown how national elites, local activists, policymakers, and others harnessed the dynamics of territorial fragmentation to construct new states and new bearers of statehood.31 International actors in Paris and Geneva also sought to harness fragmentation. But to succeed, their emissaries in the Boundary Commission would need to secure participation, cooperation, and ultimately, assent from regional stakeholders.
Mobilization for war in fall 1914 made violence part of everyday life in the Austria-Hungary border region, where the Commission began its work in January 1922, and low-intensity conflicts persisted there before dramatically escalating violence in 1921. It has, of course, often been noted that following the war, many sources fueled such violence, and also, that bringing such violence to an end presented many challenges.32 Hence, in some respects, the situation encountered by the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission fulfilled expectations. After all, in its design, and by tradition, boundary commission work is an exercise in crisis management. Some degree of local unrest was inevitable. Moreover, where the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission is concerned, its instructions from the Ambassadors Conference were calm and straightforward, namely, to »follow as closely the definitions given in the treaties« of St. Germain and Trianon.33 Finally, matters on the ground seemed settled. In response to the activity of Hungarian paramilitary units in West Hungary, the ›Venice Protocol‹, signed by Austrian, Hungarian, and Italian leaders on 13 October 1921, traded a Hungarian government promise to clear these units, in exchange for modifying the boundary agreement fixed in the Paris treaties and authorizing the plebiscite in Ödenburg/Sopron.34 The Venice Protocol also formalized a new agreement. Henceforth, no further plebiscites would be held. Boundary disputes that could not be resolved by the Commission would be referred to the League of Nations.35
The Boundary Commission ›fixed a line in the ground‹ – principally, between Austria and Hungary, but also at one point, between Austria, Hungary, and present-day Slovakia, and at another between Austria, Hungary, and present-day Slovenia. Characterized this way, demarcation suggests the execution of a technical task. But much of what the Boundary Commission actually did was not technical at all. It was rather an attempt to develop the communication skills required to complete the job. In ways that were essential to its enterprise, the Commission rendered instructions from Paris comprehensible and acceptable to the interested Austrian and Hungarian delegations; it clarified those instructions to itself, consistent with its own evolving self-understanding; and it made local claims intelligible and admissible to its superiors at the Ambassadors Conference in Paris and, increasingly, at the League of Nations.
This was an ever-changing performance directed to varying constituencies in varied settings, though none more critical than the elected leaders, community representatives, and townspeople living in and along the proposed boundary area. To this audience, the Commission addressed itself sincerely, expressing both an invitation to participate and the promise that its views would be carefully considered. Indeed, already in his August 1921 draft text to announce the planned launch of Commission activities, President Jocard called upon the local population for input on the boundary demarcation. In December 1921, when that launch finally took place, the Commission ordered the distribution of 300 placards – in French, German, Hungarian, and Croatian – declaring the start of work. Signed by Jocard, together with the Austrian and Hungarian delegation leaders, these placards were widely posted along the not-yet-finalized boundary, though only in the municipalities that would be impacted.36
Between 1 March and 14 March 1922, the Commission put into action its promised public outreach and engagement. Traveling the entire boundary line and adjacent areas, north to south, the Commission made 43 stops of roughly 30 minutes each. During these stops, the Commission interviewed local leaders, talked with community stakeholders, and gathered in-person impressions to supplement existing ethnic maps, official data, and other intelligence. A questionnaire with standardized questions, distributed in advance and collected on-site, also captured prevailing sentiments.37 Peter Haslinger has described the »superficial and fleeting« character of a similar tour undertaken by the Hungarian-Czechoslovak Boundary Commission from 28 September to 3 October 1921. At their stops, the Commission declined to receive delegations of more than six people, mass assemblies were forbidden, and Allied representatives made clear that they would cancel their visit if a larger demonstration was observed.38 Such protocols seem at odds with the intents of the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission. To avoid the impression that only some voices were being heard, for example, Commission President Jocard had requested that the first line of the questionnaire state that this document was distributed only in those municipalities where the Commission would demarcate a boundary.39 Moreover, in a number of instances, the Commission added new, unannounced stops. On these occasions, as in Rábafüzes/Raabfidisch, Jacobháza/Jakobshof, and Felsőrönök/Oberrradling, where no questionnaire had been distributed in advance, the Commission would simply pose questions to the hastily assembled citizens.40 The purpose of the extended Commission trip was not to inform the local population where the boundary would be drawn. It was, rather, an exercise in listening and consensus-building, a trip of choice that was not required of the Commission in its instructions from the Ambassadors Conference.
Boundary Commission activities constituted a form of self-presentation on behalf of an internationally coordinated system, and as in all such demarcation, those who lived along the proposed boundary lines had meaningful agency in the process.41 But engaging these citizens also had practical benefits for boundary making. After all, resistance was common, and citizens did not need to join militias to cause problems. Indeed, like most such commissions, the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission frequently encountered their own survey markers that had been removed or destroyed.42 In addition, because each national government acted aggressively to gain territorial advantage, the Commission neutralized local opposition to boundary demarcation by claiming to act as advocates for the inhabitants themselves. In a letter he sent to both the Austrian and the Hungarian delegations following his early March trip, for example, Jocard characterized himself as speaking as »an interpreter in the name of farmers« in the proposed boundary area who asked that they not be subject to any »petty administrative measures« (Sekkaturen) from either side that could impede the management of their fields.43
At the 1919 Paris Peace conference, Allied leaders promised a bold transformation of great power politics, one that would mark an end to the era of secret agreements, backroom trading, and spheres of influence. Going forward, as they hoped, citizens themselves would be mobilized to create a postwar peace bolstered by their participation in shaping it.44 Arno Mayer once summarized this »New Diplomacy« as a criticism of the practice, theory, and objectives of the »Old Diplomacy«, arguing that what was new stood out most clearly against the old.45 But what a closer examination of the boundary demarcation process put into practice by the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission suggests is that much of this demarcation was routine work directed to securing buy-in from local constituencies. And little of it was new. In addition to soliciting feedback in person during its March tour, for example, the Commission urged individual citizens to express their views directly to the League of Nations. These letters, telegrams, and petitions have long been dismissed by scholars because of the similar phrasing used in their appeals.46 But considered from the goal of the Commission to defuse local conflict by creating opportunities for public participation, these documents had a manifest purpose. Indeed, past boundary commissions had also created such opportunities. The commission that demarcated the boundary between France and Germany between 1871 and 1877, for example, solicited letters and petitions from local citizens.47
In drawing the Austria-Hungary boundary, the Commission trumpeted the importance of popular participation. Of course, some voices did matter more than others. A particularly influential group of stakeholders in the demarcation process was large land landowners.48 In fact, Commission documents clearly record the privilege given to these landowners – Batthyány, Erdődy, Esterházy, Friedrich, Lónyay, among others. Unlike most individual citizens, or the localities canvassed during the March 1922 public tour, for example, such landowners were able to arrange private meetings before the Commission.49 Moreover, minutes of Commission meetings during which boundaries were agreed upon indicate just how attentive Commission members were to fixing borderlines where, say, »
Much of the scholarship devoted to the Boundary Commission has focused on efforts by individuals, local groups, and governments to sway the Commission toward a particular demarcation.53 But what is clear is that the Boundary Commission had its own objectives. One not-always-recognized objective was to fix the boundary such that it would not become a source of conflict in the future. At the same time, as the Boundary Commission increasingly became engaged in the demarcation process, it also acquired a sense of its own identity and purpose. The 43-stop information-gathering tour, for example, certainly served to strengthen the Commission’s belief in its own expertise and authority. To that, the fact that the Ambassadors Conference instructions acknowledged the prerogative of the Commission in decision-making added an imprimatur to independent action. Of course, the boundaries specified by the Treaty of St. Germain remained the principal reference point. But as the 3 June 1921, »Supplemental Instructions for the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission« noted, »It may be that an investigation undertaken on the spot will show it to be necessary to reposition at certain places the boundary indicated by the treaty«.54 Instructions of this type signaled to the Commission that administrative autonomy derived from being ›on the spot‹, even as the Commission would soon find that such autonomy had its limits.
Charles Maier once observed that what needs to be explained in a time of upheaval is stability.55 With the Paris Peace Conference, West Hungary had metamorphosed into a territory upon which leaders in Prague, Rome, and Belgrade projected their geopolitical fantasies. It had become the preferred theater of operations for irredentist Hungarian paramilitary and armed Karlist legitimist forces, the testing ground for at least two failed states (Heinzenland, Lajtabánság) and in December 1921, the site of a contentious plebiscite.56 Still, by January 1922, the Boundary Commission had gone to work. It had announced the launch of its enterprise, scheduled a listening tour of its own devising, and conveyed to the Austrian and Hungarian delegations where it expected boundary compromises. In doing this, the Boundary Commission declared its authority. Indeed, the official launch announcement made no reference to the boundaries set in the treaties of Germain and Trianon, but rather simply proclaimed the Commission’s task »to fix the border between Austria and Hungary«.57 Following the dissolution of the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control that had overseen the Ödenburg/Sopron referendum in January 1922, the Boundary Commission was the region’s most visible manifestation of the postwar order. With its mission to restore stability in demarcating the boundary, and broad latitude in fulfilling that mission, the Commission charted its own path. The Commission pressed forward boundary resolutions based on information it had gathered, what it judged to be equitable, and what was expeditious.
In expanding public participation in the demarcation process, the Commission elevated its own role in the final setting of the boundary. But increased Commission autonomy brought with it other consequences. One is that it effectively put Austrian boundary claims at a disadvantage. Austrian foreign policy had made adherence to the Paris peace settlement the centerpiece of its foreign policy. As a consequence of the Boundary Commission’s decision to grant more weight to public input, Austria’s repeated appeals to the treaty boundaries thus became increasingly irrelevant.58 For its part, Hungary sought to push this advantage as far as possible. For example, the Hungarian delegation cited the new boundaries set by the December 1921 Ödenburg/Sopron plebiscite to argue that the Venice Protocol had created new realities and insisted that the plebiscite region should be demarcated, while the remaining areas should wait.59 Propositions such as these were rejected by the Commission. The Commission configured its own work plan, and it adjusted this plan in response to local exigencies. But the Ambassadors Conference had set a completion deadline for the end of March 1922, and the Commission never entertained proposals to postpone demarcation.
Still, in looking ahead to how the boundaries were finally drawn in 1922, it might be said that the most enduring consequence of increased Commission autonomy was the undoing of its own work. For while the Commission’s public performance may have helped to build trust and calm local discord, that performance could not resolve differing opinions within the Commission itself, nor could it suggest how to proceed where the boundary principles themselves seemed to justify two possible determinations. In anticipation of such extraordinary situations, the 3 June 1921, instructions from the Ambassadors Conference, as well as the Venice Protocol, had placed final authority for boundary disputes with the Council of the League of Nations.60 For its part, the Ambassadors Conference would act as the first instance for boundary dispute referrals before forwarding them to the League. Here, as always, the Conference put local stability first. As its instructions noted, »with a view to upholding order«, boundary commissions were still required to draw a provisional boundary following the lines indicated in the Paris treaties and to inform the local authorities.61
Already by January 1922, President Jocard had made known that the Boundary Commission expected to bring disputes concerning a section of the northern boundary before the League of Nations.62 To be sure, an appeal to the League was not the Commission’s preferred outcome. Generally, the Commission desired to have both sides accept its determination, or at least to negotiate a compromise among themselves. And when it wished, the Commission could extract such compromises. It was not unusual, for example, for Jocard to suggest that if a certain agreement could not be reached, the Commission would either impose a much more unfavorable solution on the resistant party or simply overrule that party. In fact, according to the Austrian report of the Interallied Commission meeting held on 28 March 1922, the Commission had overruled most of the dispute cases put forward by the Hungarian delegation.63
Nevertheless, the Commission planned to appeal sections of the Austria-Hungary boundary to the League of Nations, and in moving towards this decision, it pursued a path that it alone had created. That is, the Commission designed and carried out what today might be called »a stakeholder process«, and this process yielded a particular set of findings. To the Commission, these findings suggested that the boundaries set forth in the Paris treaties were flawed and needed to be rectified. On 15 June 1922, the Council of the League of Nations received the Boundary Commission’s request, via the Conference of Ambassadors, to review and rule upon the boundary modification it had recommended. In response, Eric Drummond, the League’s Secretary General, asked that the Austro-Hungarian frontier be put on the agenda of the next Council meeting. In approaching the League, the Commission had identified three boundary stretches that it proposed should remain in Hungary, or as the formal request carefully formulated it, three districts, in which the Commission asked the League to be »release[d] from the obligation of maintaining the frontier line«. These districts were: 1) Pamhagen »because it controls a system of irrigation and navigation canals affecting a wide area of Hungary«; 2) »a group of villages to the East and Southeast of Liebing, because they gravitate around Güns/Köszeg which remains in Hungary«; 3) »a narrow strip of territory some 20–25 kilometers in length to the East of Szombathely (Steinamanger) inhabited by a mixed Hungarian, German, and Croatian population, of which the economic center is the said [Hungarian] town of Szombathely«.64
A complete record of the internal deliberations that led the Council to its final ruling on the boundary modifications proposed by the Commission is not available.65 Nevertheless, the documents that have been preserved offer a clear picture of how the Council received and responded to the proposal. In the first phase, the Ambassadors Conference instructions guided actions. These instructions required the Boundary Commission to deliver a report that summarized its investigations and set forth its motives for suggesting rectification of the boundary. Each interested party also submitted its proposed demarcation. In the second phase, Council protocol provided guidance. Thus, on 19 July 1922, the dispute was brought before the Council by Paul Hymans, President of the League Assembly. The Council then heard statements from the Austrian and the Hungarian representatives, whereupon the Council requested that the League Secretariat, under the direction of Hymans, study the question and provide recommendations. The Council then placed it on the agenda of the next Council session.66 The memorandum presented by Austria in connection with the July 19 meeting stated that the proposed boundary modification constituted almost one-third of the frontier between Austria and Hungary.67 But the Boundary Commission, which had proposed these modifications, had no designated function at the League and did not appear.
Despite its absence, the Commission exercised an unmistakable influence upon the initial reception of the boundary modifications at the League. In its own evolution, the Commission had increasingly prioritized economic consequences as a factor in fixing the new borders.68 The questionnaire distributed in advance of the March listening tour, for example, was primarily devoted to assessing economic impacts, posing questions of municipalities, such as »Is there a public utility (gas works, power station, drinking water reservoir…) whose retention is vital to the economic life of the municipality?«69 If anything, the Commission report to the Council intensified this emphasis, such that economic considerations underpinned its rationale for boundary modification. Thus, the second of the four reasons presented to justify relocating the boundary around »a group of villages to the East and Southeast of Liebing«, or case 2), was simply put as »to arrest to some extent the economic decay of the town of Közeg/Guns«.70
Meanwhile, the Austrian and Hungarian representatives themselves indicated just how thoroughly each had internalized the Commission’s standpoint that boundary modifications had become about economic consequences. On 19 July 1922, Emerich Pflügl, the Austrian representative, opened his brief statement to the Council with the familiar Austrian appeal to the confidence Austria had always placed in postwar international authorities and their treaties. But he now added,
Using similar language, though to justify the transfer of territory to Hungary, Frigyes Villani, the Hungarian representative, referenced the Commission itself. »Experts who had considered the matter«, he told the Council, »were of the opinion that the district in question should be attached to Hungary for economic reasons«.71
At the League of Nations, the authority of the Boundary Commission had been fully acknowledged, first, by the Ambassadors Conference, who had forwarded the Commission’s request to the Council, and subsequently, by the Austrian and Hungarian delegations themselves. In addition, the report to the Council, prepared by Paul Hymans, placed at its center the Commission’s findings and conclusions. Nevertheless, at the League of Nations, the authority of the Commission clashed with the verdict of a yet greater authority. On 22 September 1922, the Council publicly released the results of its arbitration, which largely rejected the Commission recommendations. In the first case of Pamhagen, the Council instructed the Commission to draw up a legal protocol that addressed the hydrotechnical issues of irrigation and navigation canals. In the second case, it only partially accepted the principal recommendation of the Commission that a»group of villages« around Liebing be assigned to Hungary. Finally, in the case of the narrow strip of territory near Szombathely, the Council again denied the Commission’s territorial request, though it did provide new boundary language, assigning the area north of Pornóapáti to Hungary, because of its proximity to a power station linked to the Hungarian network.72
The Council recognized the hard-won practical expertise acquired by the Commission in its investigation. The Council yielded at certain points, for example, in the second case to the economic arguments of the Commission. Thus, as the formal decision put it,
But for the most part, the Council did not see in the Commission’s reasoning a compelling case to alter the treaty boundaries. With respect to the economic relationship between Lockenhaus/Léka, a village among the Liebing group, and Kőszeg, for example, the Council found that the economic »consideration did not appear to it to be sufficient to justify tracing a frontier line which would create a new and deep salient in Austrian territory«. Local dynamics and experiences, together with its own understanding of its mission, convinced the Commission to propose significant revisions to the treaty boundaries. Possessed of a different understanding, the Council simply overruled it.
In early 1919, the Paris Peace Conference spectacle had long since reached West Hungary, as across the region, as local groups of every size and profile had spontaneously organized self-determination referenda.74 And yet, for the commissions designated by the Conference to specialized tasks, the course of action was flexible. For the Austria-Hungary Boundary Commission, the work plan was shaped by circumstances on the ground. In its activities the Boundary Commission explored its role as an agent of peace within the new international order. But what a closer examination of the Boundary Commission suggests is that its activities also shaped local constituencies for an unfamiliar post-Habsburg reality in which these constituencies would be subjects of both the Austrian Republic and the new international order. Scholars of this region have often highlighted the ambiguity of local identities, including national indifference, along with the low degree of rural political mobilization before 1918.75 What a closer examination of the Boundary Commission brings to such perspectives, however, is insight into the role of the Boundary Commission itself in educating citizens to state sovereignty and the concept of the boundary. Geographers have noted how modern efforts to draw new, geometrically precise, linear borders have functioned to reinforce the state’s effective control over every corner of its territory.76 Reflecting upon the activities of postwar boundary commissions, to what extent may the same be said of the international ambitions of the architects of the new order in Geneva, Paris, and London?
On 19 August 1924, after more than four years of service, the Interallied Commission for the Delimitation of the Boundary between Austria and Hungary convened for its final meeting. In its September 1922 decision, the Council had not »drawn a [new] line in the ground«, but rather ruled upon recommendations to adjust boundary delimitation set forth in the Paris treaties. The Commission still needed to complete much of the actual demarcation. Nor did the Allied Commission members, along with the Austrian and Hungarian delegations, consider the September 1922 Council decision to be the final word on the boundary. A December 1922 agreement, overseen by the Commission, led to a one-time package of land exchanges between Austria and Hungary.77 Austria, for example, was permitted to acquire Rattersdorf / Rötfalva and »some of the villages to the East and Southeast of Liebing« that the Council revision of the Paris treaties had recently assigned to Hungary. In this land exchange, Hungary was permitted to sidestep the third Council ruling regarding the »narrow strip of territory« near Szombathely and acquired, for example, Szentpéterfa / Prostrum, which the Council had said »it must leave to Austria«, as it was »essential for the purpose of ensuring communication« between villages.78
Boundary Commission activities following the September 1922 Council decision merit attention, particularly in view of the self-assured voice in the region that the Commission had acquired. Indeed, the land exchange agreements that emerged under Commission leadership, before these agreements were then approved by the Ambassadors Conference and forwarded to the League of Nations, raise important questions about why the Council would reject Commission boundary recommendations that would soon be reached bilaterally through the authority of the Commission. But in its later work, the Commission also addressed less consequential issues, including local concerns regarding access to resources and small border traffic. Thus, Commission members put their signature to a number of supplemental agreements, or ›legal protocols‹ that formally authorized exceptional circumstances. Legal Protocol No. 3, for example, ensured that the lane situated on the boundary »near the house of the parish priest of Szent Imre Church« in Rönök / Radling remain open during operation and that »the persons employed there, together with their cattle and draft animals, [may have] the free passage of the frontier, without any formality«.79
As the last of the nine provinces to join Austria, the integration of Burgenland during the 1920s constitutes a fascinating and unusual chapter in the study of state consolidation in the First Austrian Republic. Indeed, Hungarian restrictions in some fields, such as primary education, remained in force in Burgenland until 1937–1938.80 Nevertheless, the investigations undertaken by the Boundary Commission generated not only a unique expertise in public opinion, but an enormous body of technical knowledge. With research into hydrologic systems, electric power stations, timber receipts, transportation networks, and more, the Boundary Commission developed a comprehensive understanding of the area that surpassed any Austrian state agency. In what ways, this knowledge of regional interconnections, public attitudes, and economic networks fits into broader accounts of integration in the 1920s remains a topic for additional study.
Today, aside from the stone pillars bearing the year 1922 that mark the border between Austria and Hungary, few physical signs remain of the demarcation carried out by the Boundary Commission. And while in 2021, Austrian leaders celebrated the centennial of the ›Burgenlandgesetz‹, few recalled that the League of Nations backed both Austria and the Paris treaties in rejecting the boundary modifications brought before it. Calling attention to advocacy by Paris and Geneva on behalf of post-Habsburg borders strikes a discordant note in what remains settled public opinion on the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations — at least in Austria.
In such a context, the single public marker in Austria, a plaque, commemorating the work of the Boundary Commission is a remarkable phenomenon. Dedicated in 1991, and situated near the entrance of the Lockenhaus castle, this plaque recounts the visit to the castle by the Commission on 15 March 1922. According to the plaque text, over 100 citizens attended this visit, which was largely held in Hungarian. The plaque attributes the use of Hungarian to »private and public reasons«, but what is likely meant is that the interests of the Esterházy family in impressing the Commission prevailed.81 The Boundary Commission listened to the audience, and following public discussion, assured those present that Lockenhaus would be assigned to Hungary. At this point, it is said that many of the citizens spoke up in German, declaring that that they preferred to belong to Austria. The plaque, which is also one of the few detailed accounts whose source is not the Commission, correctly observes that the final boundary determination was made by the League of Nations.
And yet, the story rings false – it must be invented. After all, the Commission was neutral. It had no authority to announce boundary determinations, especially if they violated treaties signed in Paris. Then again, the Commission answered to its own judgment, and it bestowed upon itself its own authority. Forged in the crucible of early postwar West Hungary, this authority continued to shape the region to the end of the Commission in 1924. The story told by the plaque at Lockenhaus is probably true.