HUNGARY: Unfair Competition

Count Stephen Bethlen von Bethlen, onetime Premier of Hungary, decided last week that trying to straighten out the problems of a mad world was a waste of time, announced his retirement from politics. “Nowadays,” said he, “only those who breakfast on Jews, lunch on aristocrats, and after dinner deal out fortunes and properties not belonging to them are national heroes. I am no match for them.”

A descendant of ancient Transylvanian Princes, long an inconspicuous member of the pre-War Hungarian Parliament, the gaunt, mustached, eagle-beaked Count was almost unknown outside his own country when in 1921 he became Premier of storm-tossed Hungary. After the War, when Hungary was ravaged by Bela Kun’s flaming Bolshevism, Count Bethlen was one of the organizers of the French-sponsored aristocratic counterrevolution that exterminated the Communists and eventually established Admiral Horthy as Regent of the kingless Hungarian kingdom.

When Count Bethlen became Premier, Hungary was undergoing a bloody White terror, production was at a standstill, the Government was almost powerless, and Republicans and Legitimists were cutting each other’s throats. No one expected him to last any longer than his short-lived predecessors, but the Count surprised everybody, hung on for more than ten years, set an endurance record for Premiers in post-War Europe. The first problem facing him was what to do about the Emperor Charles’s attempt to regain the Hungarian throne. Republicanism ran against the Count’s aristocratic grain, but he knew that a Habsburg restoration would provoke Allied intervention. So he approved the dispatch of troops that repulsed Charles and his Royalist forces when they attempted to reach Budapest in October 1921, earned the title, “the man who fired on his King.”

The Count never declared openly against eventual Habsburg return, saying that it was “a matter for the future.” He was equally vague about all other domestic issues, preferring to pursue a secretive, opportunist course toward economic recovery and political stability. Fixed elections and Sphinxlike silence on controversial problems kept him in power. In foreign policy he snuggled close to Benito Mussolini, managed to keep on passably good terms with Yugoslavia and Rumania, but detested Eduard Benes, the Czech Foreign Minister, who tried to get his scalp in the 1925 French banknote forgery scandal involving the Count’s close associates. Count Bethlen’s great dream was a bloc of “revisionist” States to overturn the Versailles and Trianon settlements.

In 1931 Count Bethlen suddenly resigned as Premier when a financial collapse compelled him to give up revisionism as the price of a French loan. Since then he has played a background role in opposition politics, occasionally coming out of his shell to issue warnings against getting too cozy with the Nazis or to growl about the decadence of his own aristocratic class. Hopeless and outmoded as most of the surviving diplomatic bigwigs of the ‘205, the crusty Count is convinced that his country is going to pot: “It is much to be feared that Bolshevistic ideology will again strike root in the nation. … At present I feel that any part I might play in politics would be tilting at windmills.”