A forgotten treaty that drew borders still contested today

In March 1921, representatives of three newly formed states met in a provincial Austrian town to settle a border dispute that had been simmering since the end of the First World War. The agreement they reached — signed in a hotel dining room, ratified within weeks, forgotten almost immediately — drew a line across a landscape that had been administratively continuous for three centuries.

The line is still there. The dispute, in various forms, is also still there.

The treaty of which I am speaking is not, in the standard diplomatic histories, considered important. It does not appear in most textbooks. The town in which it was signed is not a place of pilgrimage for students of international law. And yet the consequences of that March afternoon have shaped the lives of several hundred thousand people across three countries in ways that remain entirely unacknowledged in the countries themselves.

I first encountered the treaty in a footnote. I have spent several years since then trying to understand what happened in that hotel dining room, why it happened the way it did, and why it has been so thoroughly forgotten by everyone except the people who live with its consequences.

The context

The dissolution of the Habsburg Empire produced, as everyone knows, a proliferation of successor states with overlapping territorial claims and populations that did not map neatly onto the national categories the peacemakers in Paris were attempting to institutionalise. What is less well known is the degree to which many of the resulting border disputes were settled not at Paris, not at Versailles, not even at Trianon or Saint-Germain, but in a series of bilateral and trilateral negotiations that occurred largely below the threshold of historical attention.