Decision in Vienna [antikvár]

PREFACEThirty-three years after the end of World War II the "European problem" still remains unsettled. Its most conspicuous aspect at present is that of seçurity. The fear of a direct confrontation be-tween East and West in Europe has been haunting the world for three decades. So far the attempt at reducing East-West tensions through the Helsinki Agreements of 1975 has not met with any resounding success. The prolongedone may say "dragging" Mutual Balanced Forces Réduction talks in Vienna do not seem to hold out much promise either.Seçurity, moreover, is a many-faceted problem, not confined to East-West tensions. Below the surface there exist tensions within Eastern Europe itself. The chronic instability of political bound-aries in Eastern Europe is part of the problem of political seçurity in that géographie area. The frequent shifting of boundaries attests to the difficulty of reconciling considérations of ethnicity or national self-determination with interests of stratégie, economic and historical nature. Occasionally submerged, the question of boundaries keeps resurfacing, only to threaten the stability of the area again and again. Solutions imposed by great powers seldom survive the shifts in the distribution of power.The study which is presented here deals with the boundary question of Czechoslovakia and Hungary; more specifically, with the boundary dispute of 1938, resolved at the time through an arbitral awardThe literature on the "Vienna Award" which followed shortly after the 1938 Munich Agreement and in a political sense connec-ted to it, is rather sparse. Most of the material pertaining to this somewhat unusual arbitration is scattered in documents, memoirs, books and articles which are historical or political, rather than légal in nature. Consequently, while it would be relatively easy to produce a purely historical account of the event, an examination from the viewpoint of international law has been a more difficult task. The légal approach, emphasized here, should explain why a number of sources, ideological and polemical in nature, have not