Burgenland corridor

View of the proposed corridor

The Burgenland Corridor (also an alternative name for the name: the Czech-Yugoslav Territorial Corridor ) is one of the most controversial projects of territorial delimitation in Central Europe, brought up for discussion during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, when the results of the First World War and the ethnic and territorial problems of the new independent states. In particular, territorial issues related to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were put on the agenda. The main goal of the corridor is to finally divide Austria and Hungary and create a corridor connecting western and southern Slavs . The project, however, did not find support from most of the countries participating in the conference, and therefore was rejected.

Content

Project

Hungary under the Treaty of Trianon (pink) and departed from it (green). In the west of Transleitania, Burgenland is visible, which, together with the three medias of the Western Transdanian Territory , was to form the Czech Corridor.

Immediately after the collapse of Austria-Hungary , as well as in the years preceding the collapse, the new Slavic countries that gained independence - Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia - were interested in obtaining the maximum territorial increments. They were played into the hands of the defeat of the alliance of the Austrian monarchy and Germany in the First World War, after which the victorious countries were able to dictate their terms and demand significant contributions. Moreover, in the late XIX-early XX centuries. The Slavic peoples of the region are engulfed by the euphoria of Pan-Slavism and the desire to become as close as possible to each other, including geographically. The author of the project of the Czech-Yugoslav corridor was the Czech sociologist and philosopher Tomasz Garrig Masaryk , who outlined it in his business letter to the French government in 1916. During the conference, the option of including the principality into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was considered, but the government agreed to the latter from the financial administration of the Czechoslovak considerations.

Geography

The corridor was supposed to be laid through the following Hungarian lands: Moson (Comitat) ; Sopron , Your (medye) , Zala (medye) , now included in the so-called Western Transdanubia (Western Hungary), as well as on the territory of Burgenland (Eastern Austria).

The optimal length of the corridor was to be 200 km, width about 80 km. More enlarged projects of the corridor were also put forward; the aim of all of them was to divide Austria and Hungary into a strip of Slavic lands in order to prevent the restoration of Austria-Hungary. Since both of these countries have already become independent of each other, other participating countries did not see the need to maintain their common border.

Justifications

To create the corridor, Slavic figures saw a number of historical motivations. Thus, in the indicated territories in the 9th century, the Blaten principality of the Slavs really existed, and the territories of Eastern Austria were ruled by Great Moravia. During its heyday, the principality was a kind of link between the Western ( Great Moravia in the north) and southern ( Croatia in the Balkans) Slavic peoples , destroyed by the Hungarian invasions. The Principality arose in the area of modern Lake Balaton around 839 years . In 901, the territory was invaded by the Hungarians . In the 10th-12th centuries, most of the local West-Slavic population underwent early Magyarisation and in its western part ( Burgenland ) - Germanization, although a small part of it, which later identified itself as Croats , remained dispersed in the rural areas of this region until the end of the 19th century. .

Reasons for rejecting a project

The main reason for the rejection of the project was primarily the ethnic composition of the territories to be included in the Czech corridor. The fact is that, although in the 10th century the bulk of the population of these territories were indeed Slavs , the intensive process of Germanization and Magyarization led to a significant reduction of the Slavic population by the beginning of the 20th century. So from 1,171,000 people who inhabited the region in 1910 (census), 662,000 (56.5%) called Hungarian as their native language ; 220.000 (18.8%) - Slavic dialects close to the Serbo-Croatian language and about 289.000 (24.7%) - German (among them were both Jews and ethnic Germans ). Obviously, under the conditions of the Hungarian majority, it was difficult to achieve the formation of a corridor through a referendum based on the right of ethnic self-determination of peoples, since the Hungarians and Germans would not agree to the Slavic administration of the territory, fearing an indirect increase in their influence in the region. And members of the conference did not dare to create a new focus of tension.