AHC: Make the Banat Republic a recognized state and/or make it join Hungary!

The Banat Republic was a very short-lived and generally unrecognized state in 1918, it was quickly overrun by Serbian and French troops.
In 1920, ethnic Germans from the Banat sent a request to the Paris Peace Conference asking for the re-establishment of the Republic as the Republic of Banatia, but this proposal was rejected.

Your job is to make it a recognized and independent state. Bonus points for making it join Hungary!

Banat Republic in 1918:



Republic of Banatia, as proposed by Banatian Germans in 1920:

Still nobody?

What could be the official language of Banat Republic?

Any language.

Perhaps they make a dash for Romania, as the Germans there seemed to take the sides of the Romanians in the past there and had similar feelings against the Magyars after WWI. In Transylvania, at least. I don't really see them wanting to be in Hungary as they knew how the Hungarians treated the minorities who had made up a majority of their half of Austria-Hungary. Most of those lands having been gained by German-speaking troops, come to think of it. What are the general demographics of the area?

Just wait for that chapter of my timeline that involves the BIM (Banat Independence Movement) and the Banat territory becoming interwar Hungary's lower scale, 1920s version of Vietnam. Yeah, things do not take a turn for the better until years later, in the 1930s and especially after WWII. Among other things, Banat-touring Hungarian peacekeepers discover the "joys" of roadside IEDs and drive-by shootings decades earlier... Then Romania joins in the fray and some international solution for the partition of Banat is cooked up, finally ending the crisis.

But some of the questionable things done in the interwar years by the provisional Banat government and its militias inspire certain post-WWII extremist movements in the wider central European region (including Banat, where they prove just as unsuccesful as the actual Republic of Banat many years earlier). Did I mention that the geopolitics of my timeline's 20th century are pretty screwed up ? (Thankfully, it's no dystopia. Just different and slightly worse at certain periods. Overall, the 20th century is better than the OTL one.)

Thanks for your input guys!
I'm just quickly chiming in, in a hurry.

Demographics (from Wikipedia):
The population of the republic was 1,582,133, of which 592,049 (37.42%) were Romanians, 387,545 (24.50%) Germans, 284,329 (17.97%) Serbs, and 242,152 (15.31%) Hungarians, with smaller numbers of other ethnic groups such as the Slovaks, Croats, Banat Bulgarians and Rusyns.[citation needed] The religious composition was as follows: 855,852 (54.10%) were Orthodox Christians, 591,447 (37.38%) were Roman Catholics, with a scattering of adherents of other religious groups such as Calvinists, Lutherans and Jews.

The Solun front must not colapse is the first thing, if you get that you might get more. CP wining and A-H curbing power of Hungary might be another.

Yes, that also has potential as a scenario.

Zeller said:

The population of the republic was 1,582,133, of which 592,049 (37.42%) were Romanians, 387,545 (24.50%) Germans, 284,329 (17.97%) Serbs, and 242,152 (15.31%) Hungarians, with smaller numbers of other ethnic groups such as the Slovaks, Croats, Banat Bulgarians and Rusyns.

Click to expand...

You need more Germans, I think - the Romanians, Serbs and Hungarians will all want to join their respective ethnic states, leaving the Germans (and other minorities) as the only ones to support an independent republic as an end in itself. The leaders of the project in OTL seem to have been mostly German.

Maybe a situation in which Germans are ethnically cleansed from the surrounding areas during the last months of the war, and for some reason can't go to Austria or Germany (enemy troops in the way?) might lead to a sufficient number of them fleeing to the Banat and making a stand against the Serbian army. On the other hand, this would probably make things ugly for the Serbs living in the German-held area, and the multiethnic republic proposed by the OTL founders might not come into being.

Does it have to be that exact Banat Republic and are we limited to post-1900 points of departure? I ask as I've actually been toying around with an idea for a German 'Banat' that is formed from what is today's Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia and roughly the western two-thirds of our timeline's Banat, actually somewhat similar to the Republic of Banatia the Danube Swabians proposed. It was however based on changes several hundred years back which obviously makes things much easier.