Papers and Documents relating to the Foreign Relations of Hungary, Volume 2, 1921 (Budapest, 1946)

Documents

746 1921 of public opinion increases steadily and the position of the Hungarian Government is becoming correspondingly more difficult. Nevertheless, the Hungarian Government, which has already retreated from its original position, and in view of the great importance which it attributes to the friendly solution of this controversy, now communicates to the Austrian Government the following final proposals : The Hungarian Government accepts the position taken up by the Austrian Committee for Foreign Affairs that the negotiations should not deal exclusively with territorial questions but should include all questions pending between the two countries. However, in order to enable the Hungarian Government to explain this concession to Hungarian public opinion, it is indispensable that the Austrian political parties should give tangible evidence of their goodwill and their sincere desire for an agreement. Such evidence would be, first, Austria's consent that the territory claimed by us — or, at least, the City of Sopron and its suburbs — should remain in Hungary's hands until the negotiations are concluded, and, second, the communication of such consent to the Conference of Ambassadors by the Austrian Government

. Moreover, since Hungarian law will, for the time being, remain in force in those parts of the Burgenland which are to be transferred to Austria, it is desirable and necessary, in order to assure continuity of administration, that all Hungarian civil servants, who alone are familiar with this law, should remain undisturbed at their posts. We ought to receive appropriate assurances with respect to this question, which is of as much interest to Austria as to Hungary. Leaving those territories in the hands of Hungary is justifiable by reason of many questions which have to be solved previous to definitive transfer lest the population concerned should be exposed to great hardships. To mention only a few of the more important of these problems, reference may be made to the following: the question of civil servants; the reorganization of legal administration; schools and education; administrative questions; the various monetary and financial problems such as exchange of bank notes, tax arrears, allocation of Government debts and war loans; questions of communications and transit, including frontier traffic and the prevention of smuggling; provisions for