Hungarian overview

The radical geopolitical reconfiguration following the First World War led to the creation of numerous new states and state borders in Central Europe. The new nation-state frameworks, shaped by great-power bargains, became for a long time the main obstacle to the expansion of interregional relations in Central Europe, and particularly in Hungary. The hostile relations and the atmosphere of mistrust accompanying this new situation were also unfavorable to the development of good-neighbourly relations.

The borders drawn under the Treaty of Trianon (1920), which drastically reshaped the map of the Carpathian Basin, not only resulted in an unprecedented loss of territory and population, but also fragmented spatial structural units—genuine regions—that had previously been organically integrated in economic, social, infrastructural, and ethnic terms. As a consequence, in the decades that followed Hungary was compelled to reposition its system of cross-border relations.