István Bethlen

The scion of an old Bethlen de Bethlen noble family from Transylvania, he was the only son of Count Istvan Bethlen de Bethlen (1831–1881) and Countess Ilona Teleki de Szék (1849–1914). He had two elder sisters: Countess Klementine Mikes de Zabola (1871–1954) and Countess Ilona Haller de Hallerkeö (1872–1924).

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Bethlen was elected to the Hungarian Parliament as a liberal in 1901.^[1] The British historian C. A. Macartney described Bethlen as "not a striking personality" as he was a poor public speaker and very reserved in his manners.^[2] However, Macartney noted that Bethlen had "all the inward assurance and the external prestige of a man whose family's prerogatives it had been for centuries to be obeyed".^[2] Bethlen was a highly intelligent, cultured and sophisticated man who fluently spoke several languages and had gone on the Grand Tour of Europe several times as an young man.^[2] Besides for his native Magyar, Bethlen was fluent in English, French, German and Romanian.^[3] As a politician, Bethlen was cunning and ruthless as through a bad public speaker who was unable to work a crowd, he was very persuasive in one on one meetings and he proved to be an adept player at the political game.^[2] Macartney noted that Bethlen's most salient characteristic was the absence of any "inhibitions" when it came to obtaining and keeping power as Macartney wrote that Bethlen had "...a profound cynicism which colored his every belief save one: the natural right of Hungary to rule the Danube basin through his own class".^[2] Macartney described Bethlen as being "...a conservative in the truest sense of the word" as Bethlen favored the traditional system of Hungary being ruled by aristocracy and he was not willing to accept any other system for Hungary.^[2] Bethlen was not a dogmatic conservative and was pragmatic enough to make compromises if he had to, through for him compromises were made only to conserve the existing system.^[2] The picture sometimes painted by Bethlen's admirers of him as a "Whig" who favored gradual changes to advance to universal suffrage was not based in reality as Bethlen was a "Tory" who was very much committed to upholding the existing political and social system.^[4] Bethen was an intense Hungarian nationalist and very proud of his roots in Transylvania and his own family, which had been one of the greatest of the aristocratic families in Transylvania for centuries.^[5]

Macartney described Bethlen as "profoundly undemocratic in his soul" as he was against universal suffrage and land reform as he believed that the land-owning Magyar aristocracy alone were the only people capable of governing Hungary well.^[2] When Bethlen was elected to Parliament in 1901, he reluctantly took the oath of loyalty to the King-Emperor Franz Josef, but he made it clear right from the onset of his career that he was not loyal to the House of Habsburg and would had preferred for the Kingdom of Hungary to break away from the Austrian empire.^[2] Bethlen's cynicism about humanity gave him a certain tolerance as he believed that most people were stupid, selfish, self-interested, dishonest and vicious, and thus had to be tolerated in spite of their flaws.^[2] His cynicism made him a natural opponent of any movement that promised to create a perfect world full of perfect people and he was dismissive of both communism and fascism for precisely that reason.^[4] He favored a paternalistic state which would seek to improve living standards for the rural peasantry and the urban working class, but only as a way of avoiding dissatisfaction that might cause a revolution.^[4] Bethlen disliked Jews, but he believed that Hungary needed its Jewish middle class to advance from being a backward, mostly rural country to being an advanced, urban country.^[5] He felt that as long wealthy Hungarian Jews played the same role that they had in the 19th century, namely as socially inferior supplicants to the aristocracy whose approval they desperately craved, then antisemitism was wrong, but if any Jews sought equality or superiority with the aristocracy instead of being their supplicants, he could be quite "forceful" in expressing his anger.^[5]

Later, he served as a representative of the new Hungarian government at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In that year, the weak centrist Hungarian government collapsed and was soon replaced by the communist Hungarian Soviet Republic, under the leadership of Béla Kun. Bethlen quickly returned to Hungary to assume leadership of the anti-communist "white" government, based in Szeged, along with former Austro-Hungarian Navy Admiral Miklós Horthy. After the "white" forces had seized control of Hungary, Horthy was appointed Regent of Hungary. Bethlen again took a seat in the Hungarian Parliament and allied with the conservative factions there. In 1919, Bethlen rejected a personal union between Romania and Hungary under the King of Romania.^[6][7]

After the attempted return of King Charles IV to the throne of Hungary in 1921, Horthy asked Bethlen to form a strong government to eliminate the possibility of other such threats to the new country. Bethlen had always disliked the House of Habsburg and made it very clear that he through he wanted a Hungary to be a monarchy, he was against the restoration of the House of Habsburg.^[2] The politics of the Kingdom of Hungary were notable for the complete absence of the political left. The main divisions in Hungarian politics were instead between a right-wing group known as the conservatives vs. a more right-wing group known as the radicals.^[8] Horthy appointed Bethlen prime minister as a compromise candidate.^[9] His origins as a Calvinist from Transylvania led to the assumption that Bethlen would follow an aggressively revisionist foreign policy, which made him acceptable to the radicals while his status as a member of the great aristocratic families of Transylvania made him acceptable to the conservatives.^[9]

In practice, Bethlen governed as a conservative and his first task was to end the White Terror that started in August 1919 with the downfall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic.^[9] The American historian Andrew Janos described Bethlen as using measures such as "outright bribery" to tame the radical students and officers who travelled around Hungary, torturing and killing leftists and Jews (which were seen as the same in the eyes of the radicals).^[9] The more outspoken student radicals were silenced by giving them high paying jobs in the civil service, and then by quietly transferring them to rural backwaters far from Budapest.^[9] The para-military radical groups were co-opted by giving their leaders seat in the Lower House of Parliament or else were promoted to a higher rank in the Honved (Royal Hungarian Army).^[9] Bethlen pacified the Honved by giving all servicemen substantial pay rises and pension increases as well permitting the Army to covertly violate the Treaty of Trianon, which had limited the Honved to 35, 000 men and banned the Hungarian Army from having certain types of weapons.^[10]

Bethlen founded the Party of National Unity. Bethlen was also able to unite the two most powerful factors in Hungarian society, the wealthy primarily-Jewish industrialists in Budapest and the old Magyar gentry in rural Hungary, into a lasting coalition. That effectively checked the rise of fascism in the country for at least a decade. Bethlen reached an accord with the labour unions, earned their support for the government and eliminated a source of domestic dissent. Bethlen ensured that the Unity Party would always win elections by the Franchise Act of 1922, which made income level the qualification for voting and holding office.^[11] Under the Franchise Act, only 29.5 of Hungarians had a sufficiently high enough income to be allowed to vote with the rest disfranchised.^[11] Furthermore, the Franchise Act replaced the secret ballot with the open ballot, returning Hungary to the system that existed prior to the Aster Revolution of 1918.^[11] To be allowed to vote, a Hungarian had to prove they not only had a high income, but also had lived in the same area for the last six years and completed six years of schooling, a requirement that favored the well off.^[11] To be allowed to run for office, a candidate had to collect "recommendations", namely a certain number of signatures from those who were allowed to vote.^[11] The threshold for collecting the "recommendations" was much higher for opposition parties than the Unity Party.^[11] Finally, the Franchise Act the rural areas of Hungary were given 199 seats in the Lower House of Parliament while the urban areas were given 46 seats.^[11] The limited number of men in rural areas with high incomes along with the open ballot created a Hungarian version of rotten boroughs as it was very easy to bribe the small numbers of voters in the rural ridings to vote for the Unity Party.^[12]

The task of supervising elections was the task of the lord lieutenants for the county, who were all appointed by the prime minister, and Bethlen made certain that only loyalists to the Unity Party were appointed as lord lieutenants.^[11] The second most important portfolio in the cabinet was the Interior Minister, who controlled the State Police and the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie, both of which engaged in much harassment of opposition candidates in rural areas trying to collect signatures to run against the Unity Party in elections.^[12] The system that Bethlen created ensured that the Unity Party won every election in the Kingdom of Hungary, winning an average of 61% of the vote in the four general elections between 1922-1935.^[13] By contrast, elections in urban ridings were much fairer and cleaner as Bethlen allowed opposition politicians more leeway to run against the Unity Party and win seats in urban areas.^[14] Bethlen wanted a certain number of opposition politicians in Parliament to rebut allegations of electoral fraud in the countryside.^[14] Furthermore, allowing free elections in urban areas served as a "barometer" of public opinion, which thus allowed him to see how popular his government was without risking losing elections as the greater number of rural seats ensured that the Unity Party always had a majority.^[14] Bethlen also wanted opposition MPs in Parliament as a valve for public discontent as the opposition MPs regularly criticised corruption in his government, which also served as a way to check corruption as Bethlen would sack ministers whose corruption was too manifest.^[15]

Bethlen was a noted Anglophile who greatly admired the British Conservative Party and he always had great faith in Britain would at some point step in to peacefully revise the Treaty of Trianon in Hungary's favor.^[16] From the early 19th century onwards, Hungarian conservatives had tended to be Anglophiles. The reason for Anglomania in Hungary was due to Britain embodying the two ideas of modernity and tradition at once. The Industrial Revolution, which had made Britain into the world's greatest power, was widely seen as a model for Hungary to follow.^[17] At the same time, Britain had avoided what Hungarian conservatives considered to be the wrong path of the French Revolution, and preserved the monarchy along with the aristocracy.^[18] Hungarian conservatives wanted to modernise a backward, poor, and mainly rural country into a modern, wealthy and urban country by having an Industrial Revolution of their own while at the same time preserving the leading role of the Magyar aristocracy, hence their admiration for Great Britain as a model to be followed.^[17] Bethlen was very much a traditional Anglophile conservative and his wish to modernise Hungary economically explained his pragmatic opposition to antisemitism as he believed that the Hungarian economy would collapse without the Jewish middle class.^[5]

For various sociological reasons, minorities can be disportionately overrepresented in the middle class as was the case with Greek and Armenians in the Ottoman empire, Igbos in Nigeria, Indians in the British colony of Uganda, huaren (ethnic Chinese) in all of the nations of Southeast Asia and Jews in Hungary. In the Hungarian case, the social idea in Hungary was to be a land-owning "gentleman" or a "lady" married to the said "gentleman".^[19] In Hungary, working in any sort of a middle class professional job such as being a businessman, engineer, doctor, architect, lawyer, banker, scientist, dentist and so on was considered to be a deeply shameful and dishonorable way of making a living.^[19] Besides for being a land-owning "gentleman", the only other occupations considered to be honorable were working for the government as a civil servant, a policeman, a gendarme and above all serving in the military.^[19] Because most Hungarians refused to study for middle class jobs and because Hungarian Jews on the account of their religion could never be "gentlemen" and "ladies", Hungarian Jews made up a disportionate number of the people working as middle class professionals by the end of the 19th century.^[19] Through Hungarians often liked to exaggerate the number of Jews working in middle class jobs, Bethlen's belief that the Hungarian economy would collapse without the middle class Jews had a solid foundation in reality.^[3] Bethlen tried to discourage antisemitism and likewise encouraged Hungarian Jews to stay in Hungary.^[3]

Hungary was in a desperate financial situation after World War One, and Bethlen's major interest in foreign policy was securing an international loan to stabilise the economy, which led him for the moment to cease his agitation against the Treaty of Trianon.^[20] On 18 September 1922, Bethlen had Hungary join the League of Nations, which in turn meant accepting the League's rules about not invading other members of the League (Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were already members of the League of Nations).^[20] In early 1923, Bethlen asked for a huge international loan and was told that one of the conditions of the loan would be accepting the frontiers imposed by the Treaty of Trianon.^[21] In a speech on 16 October 1923, Bethlan explained his actions under the grounds that: "Today Europe’s situation is such that it wants peace at all costs, and if we do not accommodate ourselves to the intricacies of Europe’s interests, if we do not adapt our policies to Europe’s interests, then no matter how right we are, we will be portrayed as peace-breakers and in no area will our efforts be crowned with success...Believe me, if it is difficult for anyone to practice this self-denial, it is difficult for me."^[22]

Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia had in 1921 signed a defensive alliance known as the Little Entente committing themselves to come to the aid of the other members of the Little Entente if they were attacked by Hungary, which in effect ruled out any possibility of Hungary going to war to regain the lands lost under the Treaty of Trianon as the combined forces of the Little Entente were too strong.^[23] Furthermore, France had signed defensive treaties of alliance with Czechoslovakia in 1924, with Romania in 1926 and Yugoslavia in 1927, which gave the Little Entente a great power protector.^[23] As France was the principle great power allied to the three nations that Hungary had territorial disputes with, Bethlen's foreign policy was anti-French and he saw France's enemies such as Italy and Germany as natural allies for Hungary.^[23] However, the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann had no interest in Bethlen's offers of an anti-French alliance.^[20] Stresemann's principle interest in foreign policy was an anti-Polish policy aimed at taking back all of the lands Germany had lost to Poland such as Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor.^[20] However, France and Poland had signed a defensive alliance in 1921, which committed both powers to come to the aid of the other one if they were attacked by Germany. As such, Stresemann worked to improve Franco-German relations out of the hope that the French might abrogate their alliance with Poland, which would allow the Reich to attack Poland without fear of a war with France.^[20] Given Stresemann's priorities, Bethlen's offer of an anti-French alliance worked directly counter to his own foreign policy goals.^[20] Bethlen had more success with building an alliance with Italy as Benito Mussolini was both anti-French and anti-Yugoslav in his foreign policy, and he welcomed the idea of an Italo-Hungarian alliance against Yugoslavia and its ally France.^[20]

During the May 1926 trial of the Franc affair plotters, Bethlen was called to testify over his involvement in it.^[24] French Prime Minister Aristide Briand used the scandal by pushing for Bethlen's removal from power and his replacement by a more liberal politician.^[25] The plot centred on the efforts of Hungarian nationalists to damage the French economy by disseminating forged 1,000 French franc banknotes. Several plotters provided incriminating evidence of Bethlen's involvement, but he managed to cover up his role by exercising direct control over the proceedings.^[24][26][27] Facing considerable public pressure, Bethlen offered his resignation to Horthy, who refused to accept it.^[28] Bethlen subsequently shuffled his cabinet by replacing Interior Minister Iván Rakovszky.^[26] The outcome of the trials, in fact, increased Bethlen's popularity in Hungary.^[29]

During his decade in office, Bethlen led Hungary into the League of Nations,^[30] arranged a close alliance with Fascist Italy and even entered into a Treaty of Friendship with Italy in 1927 to further his nation's revisionist hopes.^[31] He was defeated in his attempts to change the Treaty of Trianon, which had stripped Hungary of most of its territory after the First World War. Once the Hungarian economy improved, Bethlen had less need for international loans and he came to be open in attacking the Treaty of Trianon.^[22] In a speech in 1928, Bethlen declared: "We did not lose provinces. We were partitioned...We cannot surrender one third of our race for all eternity. This we cannot accept as justice...If someone has buttoned his vest wrong, he can only correct his dress if he unbuttons it and then buttons it correctly. To build a permanent peace on these borders is impossible. What can only be built on these borders is a prison, in which we are the guarded and the victors the guards...what we need is new borders".^[22] The Great Depression shifted Hungarian politics to the extreme right, and Horthy replaced Bethlen with Count Gyula Károlyi de Nagykároly,^[32] which was followed quickly by Gyula Gömbös de Jákfa, a noted fascist and antisemite.

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Increasingly shunted into political obscurity, Bethlen stood out as one of the few voices in Hungary to be actively opposed to an alliance with Nazi Germany. Bethlen was appalled at the way that Germans were opposed to the idea of Hungary becoming a modern country, and wanted Hungary to stay a poor, predominantly rural country whose task was to supply the Reich with cheap food and other raw materials, which he saw trapping Hungary into a semi-colonial relationship with Germany.^[33] In 1938, Bethlen told a parliamentary commission: "During the talks we had recently,...the Germans repeatedly warned us: 'Don't keep insisting on a Hungarian industry. You are an agrarian country; be a country of peasants and sell us your agricultural products; we shall supply you with industrial goods'".^[33] Bethlen had considerable respect for the British empire, and believed that the immense resources of not only Great Britain, but also her colonies along with the Dominions would ultimately prevail over the Reich.^[34] This was especially the case as Bethlen felt that the United States as a fellow "Anglo-Saxon" power would come into the war as Britain's ally sooner or later, and the combination of Anglo-American power would be too much for Germany.^[34] Given these views, Bethlen was opposed to the idea of an alliance with Germany, predicating that Britain would win the Second Word War and that Hungary would be fighting on the losing side allied to Germany..^[34]

Despite his own family's origins in Transylvania and his long-standing opposition to the Treaty of Trianon, Bethlen was opposed to accepting the Second Vienna Award of 1940, which returned northern Transylvania to Hungary while allowing Romania to keep southern Transylvania.^[35] Bethlen complained that the price of accepting the Second Vienna Award was too high as the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop forced upon the prime minister Pál Teleki an German-Hungarian economic agreement that was highly unfavorable to Hungary.^[35] In exchange for receiving northern Transylvania, Teleki had to sign an agreement on 10 October 1940 that saw the pengő artificially devalued in regard to the Reichmark, meaning that Germans brought Hungarian goods such as grain on the cheap while making German goods more expensive in Hungary.^[36] At the same time, the German-Hungarian economic agreement of 10 October 1940 forced the Hungarians to commit to buying German imports in the same value of Hungarian exports to the Reich, which ensured that the Hungarians had to pay more for German goods valued in Reichsmarks while the Germans paid very little for Hungarian goods valued in pengős.^[36] Besides for the economic agreement, Teleki had to sign another agreement that declared the Nazi-aligned Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn (People's League of Germans in Hungary) to be the only legal party for the Hungarian volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) while giving the volksbund wide powers to govern affairs in the volksdeutsche community, in effect creating a state within the state.^[36] Bethlen charged that the Second Vienna Award had been a Faustian pact under which Hungary received only part of Transylvania instead all of Transylvania as he wanted in return for becoming a semi-colony of Germany with an exploitative and one-sided economic agreement and the German state taking control of the Hungarian volksdeutsche community.^[35]

In June 1941 following the Bombing of Kassa, Bethlen strongly advised Horthy against declaring war on the Soviet Union, which he predicated would be a disaster for Hungary.^[37] Bethlen did not share the blind faith in a Nazi "final victory" that other Hungarian decision-makers had such as László Bárdossy, Henrik Werth and Károly Bartha, and argued it was not inevitable that Germany would defeat the Soviet Union.^[37] He further informed the Regent that Royal Hungarian Army was not ready for modern war and predicated Hungarian losses on the Eastern Front would be very heavy.^[37] Finally, Bethlen told Horthy that the war against Soviet Union would be extremely unpopular and Hungary had no duty to defeat the Soviet Union "by sacrificing the flower of her people".^[37] In 1944, Bethlen wrote about the decision to declare war on the Soviet Union "the gullible Hungarian public was made to believe this by propaganda meant to trick us into the war by painting the bogey of Bolshevism on the wall".^[37]

As it became apparent that Germany was going to lose the Second World War, Bethlen attempted to negotiate a separate peace with the Allied powers. Following Operation Margarethe, the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, a warrant was issued for Bethlen's arrest and he went into hiding.^[38] On 25 June 1944, from his place in hiding, Bethlen wrote Horthy a long letter asking him to dismiss the prime minister, General Döme Sztójay and stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz death camp, which had started on 15 May 1944.^[39] Bethlen wrote he was against "the inhuman and stupid persecution of the Jews with which the present government had strained the Hungarian name...and threatened to corrupt once and for all large segments of gentile society".^[39] Bethlen ended his letter by asking Horthy to "chase away the present cabinet from its place", pull all Hungarian troops serving on the Eastern Front back to Hungary, appoint a new prime minister and a cabinet of technocrats, and sign a new armistice with the Allies (the government of Miklós Kállay had signed a secret armistice in 1943).^[39]

By the spring of 1945, most of Hungary had fallen to the advancing Soviet troops. The communists, who returned with the Soviets, immediately began their scheme to take over the country. They saw the aging Bethlen as a threat, a man who could unite the political forces against them. That made the Soviets arrest him in March 1945. Soon afterward, Bethlen was taken to Moscow,^[40] where he died in prison on 5 October 1946.^[41]

On 27 June 1901, he married his distant cousin, the author Countess Margarete Bethlen de Bethlen (1882–1970). They had 3 sons:

• Count András Bethlen de Bethlen (1902–1970) ⚭ Magda Viola (b.1901) ⚭ Eszter Mészáros (1892–1955) ⚭ Maria Palma 'Mizzi' Hoffmann (b.1906); no issue
• Count István Bethlen de Bethlen (1904–1982) ⚭ Donna Maria Isabella dei Conti Parravicini (1912–2008); had issue
• Count Gábor Bethlen de Bethlen (1906–1981) ⚭ Edith Schmidt (1909–1969); had issue