The Impact of the Treaty of Trianon on Hungarian Infrastructure

Special issue on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the treaty of versailles

Abstract

This study aims to give an overview of the clauses of the Treaty of Trianon specifically targeted at the Hungarian system of transportation, and its overall impact on the country’s infrastructure. In the place of well-publicized slogans of “national self-determination,” economic and strategic considerations were primarily at play in this issue, with the system of transportation at their intersection. Since railways represented the most important means of transportation at that time, given the fact that train connections were fast, cheap, and had a huge transport capacity, railroads came to the forefront of the postwar border settlement second only to natural or ethnic boundaries that could serve as bulwarks of the new borders. As it is commonly known, new borders created new divisions, cutting through traditional economic units, detaching major cities from their hinterlands. It is less well known what the repercussions were of the maimed transportation infrastructure on the national and regional levels.