Is there any way that Hungary could keep the full extent of their borders after WW1, while still being seperated from Austria. It seems like a lot of today's ethnic tension in that area, materialized from the division of Hungarian lands and Hungary seems to be the only country in the Balkans to be very stable. However the division of Hungarian lands allowed a communist and then a fascist government to take control, both with revanchist tendencies.
I do wish to point out that my information may be biased, seeing as it is coming from Budapest museums,
. I don't know how other countries in the balkans see the division of Hungary.
Most of the lands Hungary lost was extremely minority Hungarian. The main reason that Hungary is (debatably) stable is that it's ethnically homogeneous, whereas the rest of the Balkans are ethnic melting pots. Allowing e.g. Croatia to persist under Hungarian rule would probably mean that the Croats and Serbian minority stop fighting each other and struggle against the Hungarian oppressor instead (gross oversimplification.)
Like for instance, there's almost no chance that Hungary could get to keep Slovakia, which was of course heavily Slovakian. Nor did they have much of a claim to Slovenia (80% Slovenian), or Croatia. It's unbelievable that the Allies would let Hungary keep the lands of those other nations without protest - the analogy would be allowing Poland to continue under German/Russian rule after WW1. Or to use another analogy, one could extend your argument to "Is there any way Germany could keep Belgium after WW1? It seems like there's a lot of ethnic tension in that area today, and Germany is in contrast an extremely stable Central European nation. Also, the loss of German lands allowed a fascist and then communist government to take control, the former with revanchist tendencies."
Hungary did have a *bit* more of a claim to:
- Transylvania (30% Hungarian, majority Romanian.) If Romania didn't join the war, for instance, I could see Hungary keeping much of the heavily Hungarian parts.
- Transcarpathia (majority Ukrainian; assigned to Czechloslovakia) - if Hungary had let the local assemblies have considerable freedom for self-rule, I could see it keeping the region.
- Southern Slovakia - which was Hungarian majority, and the basis for the Second Vienna Award.
- Vojvodina - (~40% Serbo-Croatian, 30% Hungarian, 20% German.) To get this to stay Hungarian, you'd need an enlightened/tolerant ethnic minority policy
But having Hungary keep it's pre-WW1 borders to the present day is essentially ASB*, without mass ethnic cleansing/genocide/etc.
*Or if an ASB decided to come down and have Hungary magically reform into a tolerant federation that protected minority rights. Highly unlikely.
