Looking Back in Anger

Thursday, Feb. 28, 2002
A dispute over the aftermath of World War II in Central Europe has derailed plans for a meeting of regional leaders to discuss a common strategy for membership talks with the European Union.

Last week, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban opened the doors to a historical debate when he said Czechoslovakia's decision to strip the ethnic Germans and Hungarians living in the country of their property and expel them after World War II was not in line with E.U. legal norms. Speaking at a session of the European Parliament in Brussels on 20 February, Orban said "The decrees are not in line with E.U. legislation, so Hungary expects them to be automatically annulled when the Czech Republic and Slovakia join the union," Orban said.

The comments provoked a diplomatic dispute in the region, with the Czech Republic and Slovakia saying they would not attend a scheduled meeting of Central European leaders in Hungary this week, where the leaders were supposed to come up with a joint strategy for the E.U. membership talks. Soon afterward, Poland said it would also not attend, arguing that a meeting without the Czechs and Slovaks would be pointless.

The Hungarian Prime Minister repeated his criticism of the Benes decrees on 23 February, saying "every moral person stands against the international tradition that declares ethnic groups, including the Hungarians, to be collectively guilty." He described the issue as a "European problem," saying he hoped the decrees would be dissolved once the E.U. has accepted new members from Central and Eastern Europe.

Czech politicians have described the Benes decrees as "expired," and both the Czech Republic and Slovakia have refused to consider repealing the decrees, describing the issue as part of the historical settlement of World War II. Czech government spokesman Libor Roucek said he hoped Orban was not trying to question the postwar settlement in Europe.

Under the so-called Benes decrees, the three million-strong ethnic Sudeten German minority of Czechoslovakia was expelled from the country as part of the postwar settlement. There were also plans to expel the almost 500,000 ethnic Hungarian citizens of Czechoslovakia who lived in the Slovak part of the federation. But in the end, only some 70,000 of them went to Hungary under a program aimed at "exchanging" them for ethnic Slovaks living in Hungary. The rest were forced to declare themselves to be of Slovak nationality in order to save their homes. The decrees have long been a bone of contention in the Czech Republic's relations with its German and Austrian neighbors, but they have rarely surfaced as a problem involving Hungary.

Orban's comments, and the Czech and Slovak reactions to them, have provoked a major setback for the so-called Visegrad Four group of countries, made up of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The prime ministers of those four countries were slated to meet in Hungary in early March to discuss a common strategy for membership negotiations with the E.U.