Nicholas T. Parsons
The Sweet Bonds of Property and Liberty
András Gerõ: Modern Hungarian Society in the Making: The Unfinished Experience. Translated by James Patterson and Enikõ Koncz. Budapest, London, New York, Central European University Press, 1995, 276 pp, with 11 pages of black and white photographs.
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András Gerõ's book offers us an account of Hungary's interrupted and conflict-ridden progress towards civil society, a progress which always seemed to have a built-in ambivalence. The main reason for this ambivalence was that national identity had in the past been vested in the feudal order, and therefore in the latter's twin (though opposed) pillars of conservatism, the nobility and the peasantry. There was always a danger that civil society, whose protagonists were typically metropolitan, liberal and often Jewish, could be stigmatised as "un-Hungarian" by a conservative, Christian right, that considered itself (like such groupings everywhere) to have a monopoly on patriotism. Under Communism, the slogans were different, but the effect was the same: civil society was the focus of "unreliable elements" keen on alternative culture, or at least not in the official one, who refused to have the prescribed version of Hungarian identity imposed on them.
A leitmotif of Gerõ's essays is the continuous presence of incompatibles in the process of modernization. Thus we are reminded of themes that do not seem to have lost their relevance today - in particular the phenomenon of wealth creation that flourishes without a concomitant development of civil liberties; (typical contemporary examples are the so-called "tiger economies" of South East Asia). Hungarian liberals (in the spirit of Edmund Burke) saw individual liberty and property rights as the twin pillars of a progressive society; yet the modern history of the country shows the ship of liberalism continually being "blown off course" in its development towards the ideal of a broadly-based property-owning democracy. There were, of course, intellectuals and politicians who saw the latter as a consummation devoutly to be wished; but it remained (some would argue, still remains) a state of grace that beckoned in the future, a mirage, a délibáb, made all the more frustratingly seductive by its partial realization. The Horthy era demonstrated that rights of private property could co-exist with only selective liberties; Stalinism demonstrated (if it needed demonstrating) that there could be no freedom without property rights, while Kádárism again showed that wealth creation (albeit on a limited scale) was possible without genuine individual freedom.
Why was the road to modernization so often a calvary for the Hungarians? Once a significant and influential section of the feudal nobility had accepted that their privileges, and the economic system that depended on them, were anachronistic, what obstacles stood in the way of progress towards a modern civil society? To these questions Gerõ offers some subtle answers that combine consideration of Hungary' s geopolitical straitjacket with an analysis of more familiar Central European leitmotifs - the tendency for change to come about only by "reform from above", the feudal legacy of legalism that so often produced a kind of tunnel vision concentrating on constitutional abstractions, the persistence of privilege and sinecurism; last but not least, there was the problem of the growing power of the non-Magyar nations that made democracy such a potential threat to the Hungarian state-forming caste.
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It is hardly possible to do justice to the richness of Gerõ's material, or the subtlety of his handling of it, in the space of a short review. Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in his ability to examine the exigencies and realities of politics and economics against the broader background of idealism, freedom, ethical consistency and national identity. In a way, his book is a morality tale, in which the Hungarian leaders of the Liberal era aspire to honour, but settle for social prestige and riches; neo-absolutism is the truth that dare not speak its name, while windy rhetoric obscures an obsession with personal gain, the absence of a democratic mandate, and the festering problem of the ethnic minorities. A Latin proverb often quoted at the time sums up the resultant disillusion: "the Senators are good, but the Senate is a beast". Nor was the creation of wealth, and thus of an emergent middle class that undoubtedly possessed many positive features, an adequate palliative for political decay and endemic corruption. This, at least, is a lesson worth pondering in the light of the political currents of the 1980's and 1990's, a century on from the cynical machinations of "General Tisza" and his cronies: as the Zala County delegate to the 1830 Diet so presciently put it: "A successful country is not measured by the number of rich people in it, but by the number of poor".
Nicholas T. Parsons,
a freelance writer living in Vienna, is the author of Hungary: A Cultural and Historical Guide. His latest book is The Blue Guide to Vienna.
