Papers and Documents relating to the Foreign Relations of Hungary, Volume 1, 1919–1920 (Budapest, 1939)

Appendix III. Parliamentary debates

950 prehensive and detailed programme. Today great principles, great tendencies and general directions are the only ones that can govern. (Approval.) And in these I do not detect any differences. (Approval. Exclamations from the right: „There are none.") That is why I said that I did not wish to take my place within the bounds of any party, or if I must join a party because both parties feel that I should, I would do so only as a formality. From this place I wish to announce that in the foreign ministry I do not wish to recognize party views (Approval) nor can I do so. And I wish to proclaim this as emphatically as possible, both for this country and for those abroad. Dénes Patacsi : Foreign affairs concern the whole nation ! Count Paul Teleki : As far as my non-partisanship is concerned, it should not be taken as superiority over parties (a voice from the right, „or inferiority to parties") but simply that I am called upon to represent the Christian nationalist programme in the foreign affairs field and not any one section of the Christian national party. This is how I desire to interpret it and how I wish to fulfill my duties in this position. (Approval.) The mistaken belief of many that I desire a state of extraparliamentarianism is a great error. I am not urging the superfluousness of parliamentary responsibility but that of responsibility to parties. It is necessary that parliamentary responsibility prevail in its full extent, naturally in the case of the foreign minister as well as with any other. It would have been naive of me to present any other conditions. Now regarding my request for a somewhat freer hand in pursuing my activities as Foreign Minister, I have emphasized that it is impossible for everything one does in this position to be as much the subject of open discussion as are the activities of other government departments. This, I believe, will be understood by every one of my fellow deputies. I did not attain this position as the result of a diplomat's career; in fact, I have not been concerned with these problems before. But as a delegate to the Peace Conference, I have worked with diplomats, politicians and ecomomists and I have tried to examine critically their methods and approach from the point of view of my profession as a scientist. I saw, and if you will look back on the events of the last few years, you also will see that wherever open diplomacy and the abolition of secret diplomacy were advocated loudest, there have the doors been shut the quickest. A good example of this is, first of all, the Paris Peace Conference which began with this slogan but quickly discarded it, together with many other principles. It was realized that