Poland’s ambassador to Hungary has criticised Hungary’s most senior general for saying that World War Two was a “local conflict” between Germany and Poland which escalated due to a lack of peace efforts. Gábor Böröndi, the recently appointed chief of the general staff of the Hungarian armed forces, made the comment in an interview to Hungarian public broadcaster MTVA on Tuesday, which ambassador Sebastian Kęciek characterised as an „unacceptable distortion of history.”
Böröndi’s comment echoes some European Federalists’ framing of WWII as ‘The European Civil War’ – an expression which has quietly vanished from discourse since Russia’s 2022 invasion of the Ukraine and which implies a danger in protecting a nation state. national interests, and a moral complicity of victims in their brutalisation.
Kęciek reminded readers that the outbreak of the Second World War was not caused by a lack of peace talks with the aggressor, but by an international policy of appeasement and constant yielding to the successive demands of the Third Reich.
He also noted that Hungary joined the Axis coalition of Germany, Italy and Japan, gaining territory from Czechoslovakia and Romania.
Poland and Hungary have long been close allies, but their relationship has been frayed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Kęciek called for lessons from history to be applied to the current conflict, where MTVA queried whether Hungary may be in favour of a complete ceasefire.
CENTRAL EASTERN EUROPE NEWS
Polish Ambassador Rebukes the ‘European Civil War’ Trope
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