György Barcza (2 July 1888 – 18 April 1961) was a Hungarian diplomat, best remembered as serving as the Hungarian minister-plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom between 1938 and 1941.
Entry into diplomacy Barcza was born into an aristocratic, wealthy Roman Catholic family in Pusztazámor. After having obtained a degree in the law from University of Budapest, he went to study at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. The Hungarian historians' Anita Faust and Viktória Németh wrote: "His personal traits proved to be more important for building relationships and moving up the ranks than his family background, i.e. aristocratic descent. This phenomenon coincides with the trend described by Somogyi and Godsey, that is, the professionalisation of the organisation came to the fore, as opposed to gentility. Coming from a middle noble family in Transdanubia, György Barcza himself was not part of the aristocratic elite but did have kinship ties to it. He built his diplomat career on professionalism, rather than his own social status". He supported the existing political system established by the Compromise of 1867, feeling that Eastern Europe was dominated by three great empires, namely the German, Russian and Austrian empires, and membership in the latter allowed the Hungarians a degree of influence and power in world affairs that they would not have if Hungary were independent.
In 1911, he paid an extended visit to Scandinavia, going as far north as the Barents Sea, which was recounted in his book Útijegyzetek: egy jegestengeri vadászkirándulásról. He especially wanted to see the Barents Sea because the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition of 1872–1874 had discovered Franz Josef Land, which was named after the King-Emperor Franz Josef. For him, the polar expedition that found Franz Josef Land was a symbol of what Austria-Hungary could achieve as the crews of the ships were made of peoples from all over the vast Austrian empire. On 12 November 1912, he married Baroness Alexa Jeszenszky in Budapest. The couple had three children, two daughters Alexandra Barcza and Erzsébet Barcza, and a son Péter Barcza.
World War One In 1914, he began his diplomatic career with a posting at the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Athens. In 1916, he was posted at the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Copenhagen. Denmark was a neutral state in World War One, and served as a place for smuggling raw materials from overseas into the Central Powers along with being a center of espionage. Barcza insisted that as a diplomat, he played no role in the murky business of espionage, saying that was the responsibility of others at the Austro-Hungarian embassy. Denmark also served as the protecting power for Austria-Hungary in Russia and as the Russians had taken a substantial number of Hungarians prisoner during the campaigns in Galicia, Barcza was constantly involved in negotiations with the Danish Red Cross concerning the status of Hungarian POWs in Russia. During his time in Copenhagen, Barcza ensured the return of 15, 000 sick Hungarian POWs to Hungary in exchange for the release of the same number of sick Russian POWs. Because the Austrian empire together with Prussia had committed aggression against Denmark during the war of 1864, most Danes were pro-Allied in their views of the war, and Barcza found himself on the defensive in Denmark.
Barcza recalled about his time in Denmark: "Morally and politically, the Central Powers-and Germany in particular-caused themselves immense harm. Since in their trade, Scandinavian countries rely practically entirely on transportation by sea, unlimited submarine warfare was having a severely negative impact upon their economy...We have not opted for neutrality only to suffer for this, they said. When will this war that is causing hardships for the innocent finally end? The unpopularity of Germans, which until then, had been only political transformed into a general hatred and anger". He described the propaganda carried out by the Austro-Hungarian embassy as ineffective with the main emphasis being on the modernity of the Austrian empire, which did not address the anger caused by the use of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany. The collapse of the Austrian Empire in October 1918 left Barcza in a difficult position as he found himself representing the newly independent Hungary without any budget. Barcza wrote in his memoirs: "I was fine with the Danish government, I was there in Copenhagen as the envoy of Hungary, but I had no office, no secretary, no errand boy, and – last but not least – no official budget. So, I had to create an embassy out of thin air...This is how the first Hungarian embassy was established in the Scandinavian states."
Because the existence of Hungary was only considered provisional, Barcza held the title only as envoy instead of ambassador. Barcza was appointed Hungarian envoy to all the four Scandinavian states, not just Denmark, and he relocated to Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, the most populous and richest of the Scandinavian states. The image of the newly established Hungarian People's Republic in Sweden was hostile with the perception being the liberal Count Mihály Károlyi was an impractical idealist who was far too soft on the political left. The country that welcomed Barcza the most was the newly independent Finland on the account of the discovery that the Magyar and Finnish languages belonged to the same Finno-Ugric linguistic family with origins deep in Asia. Barcza recalled that during his visits to Finland: "Wherever I went, the Finns welcomed me most cordially, even celebrated me, as a representative of a nation related to them. At times I felt as a rich and aristocratic relative visiting the poorer." Finland was by far the most anti-Communist of the four Scandinavian states on the account of the attempts of Soviet Russia to export its revolution into Finland, which led to a brief, but bloody civil war in Finland between Finnish Communists vs. Finnish anti-communists. Barcza reported that the Finns were very hostile to the Hungarian Soviet Republic and regarded Admiral Miklós Horthy as playing a role analogous in Hungary to what Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim had played in Finland. Most of Barcza's time was spent trying to mobilise sympathy for Hungary against projected territorial losses to Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia. After the Treaty of Trianon was signed, Barcza lobbied hard for Scandinavian support for Hungarian revanchism against the Treaty of Trianon. In 1922, he returned to Budapest.
Between the wars From 1925 to 1927, Barcza served as the chief the political department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose subordinates included the future prime minister László Bárdossy. Barcza came from a more prominent and wealthier aristocratic family than Bárdossy and had a "grand seigneur" attitude towards his social inferiors, which led to embittered relations between the two men. In World War Two, the relationship between Barcza and Bárdossy was to be reversed with Barcza serving as the Hungarian minister-plenipotentiary in London and Bárdossy serving as foreign minister and prime minister. Barcza was close to the prime minister István Bethlen whose conservative politics he largely shared. From 1927 to 1938, Barcza served as the Hungarian ambassador to the Vatican in Rome. A devout Roman Catholic, Barcza greatly admired Pope Pope Pius XI.
From 25 May 1938 to 7 April 1941, Barcza served as the Hungarian minister plenipotentiary in London. A noted Anglophile, Barcza very much enjoyed his posting in London. The Hungarian historian Andreas Bán described Barcza as typical of the older Hungarian diplomats trained at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna who subscribed to "a high-minded conservatism" that rejected both extremism of the left and the right while being deeply Anglophile. Like other foreign diplomats in London, Barcza noted that the professional diplomats of the Foreign Office experienced a nadir in terms of influence on policy during the prime ministership of Neville Chamberlain. Barcza reported to Budapest that British politics were dominated by an "Inner Circle" that consisted of Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, the Home Secretary Samuel Hoare, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon, and the Chief Industrial Adviser to Chamberlain, Horace Wilson. Barcza stated that decisions were made by the "Inner Circle" during private meetings and that the Cabinet largely served to rubberstamp what had already been decided by the "Inner Circle". During the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, Barcza's chief role was to lobby the Chamberlain cabinet to champion the Hungarian territorial claims against Czechoslovakia, arguing that if the Sudetenland region should go to Germany, then logically the Hungarians should be allowed to annex all the regions of Czechoslovakia that they claimed. As such, Barcza's chief rival in London was Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak minister plenipotentiary in London whose task was to champion his nation's cause. On 30 August 1938, Barcza reported that the British "understood" the reasons for the expansion of German-Hungarian trade and regarded as natural and normal that Hungary should fall into the German economic sphere of influnce. Reflecting his understanding of the power of the "Inner Circle", Barcza largely by-passed the Foreign Office and instead met personally with Lord Halifax, where he emphasised that Hungary was committed to peacefully revising the Treaty of Trianon and that Halifax should consider Hungary's territorial claims against Czechoslovakia. Via Andrian Dingli, an Italian diplomat in London who was a friend of Chamberlain, Barcza sent the prime minister a lengthy memo stating out Hungary's case against Czechoslovkia.
At the Bad Godesberg summit, Adolf Hitler rejected the Anglo-French plan for turning over the Sudetenland as insufficient, which pushed the world to the brink of a world war. After the Bad Godesberg summit, Lord Halifax summoned Barcza to a meeting, where he warned Hungary against attacking Czechoslovakia, saying that if an invasion of Czechoslovakia would lead to an automatic British declaration of war on Hungary. About the problems of the Maygar minority in Czechoslovakia, Halifax told Barcza that Hungary should try to have the League of Nations serve as a mediator. Halifax stated he was not willing to support "adjustments" in the Hungarian-Czechoslovak frontier, but suggested that the League of Nations might be able to mediate some sort of frontier "adjustments" that might settle the Hungarian-Czechoslovak dispute. Barcza was deeply disappointed by Halifax's attitude, charging that Britain was willing to support Germany's demand for the Sudeten Germans to "go home to the Reich" because Germany was rich and powerful while unwilling to do anything for Maygars living in Czechoslovakia because Hungary was poor and weak. He complained that the League of Nations was useless, and that only great power pressure like the sort that was applied on the Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš on the behalf of the Sudeten Germans would work. Under the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938, which ended the crisis, the Hungarian-Czechoslovak dispute was to be resolved later.