Ignác Romsics

Nation and State
in Modern Hungarian History

The relationship between nation, nationality and state has been a focal point of Hungarian history ever since modern nationalism made itself felt for the first time during the 18th century. Some issues, however, can be traced back to the Middle Ages. In discussing his subject, Szekfű decided to go back to the eleventh century and Hungary's first ruler, King Stephen. Indeed, other historians went back even further in time. His contemporary, Tibor Joó, for instance, attempted to find the source of the fundamental features of Hungarian national identity, the Magyar sense of nationhood, in the social structures and world view of
the nomadic Magyar tribes in the times before they took possession of the Carpathian Basin.2 The ahistoric character of these endeavours needs no demonstration in the light of current scholarship. The Hungarian state, of course, does have its origins in the realm of Saint Stephen, it could be traced back even further, to the nomadic tribes of the East European steppe, but it must not be forgotten that such states have little to nothing in common with our concept of a constitutional, civic commonwealth. Not even the estates of high medieval and early modern Hungary can be considered direct predecessors of the modern Hungarian state. The founding of the Kingdom of Hungary implied-as the eminent medievalist Pál Engel put it-"a series of painful, but necessary measures which were meant to serve the peace of the realm and to secure the future of Christianity within it." "First and foremost, three items new to Hungarian society had to be established: a stable system of both feudal estates and rights, and the complex institutions of secular and religious governance."
One cannot speak of a modern nation, or of modern nationalities before the 19th century, since these terms refer to integrated cultural-political communities. As the term nobilis Hungarus could apply to any nobleman, thus covering the whole of the realm's nobility, the simpler term hungarus was meant to apply to every person native to Hungary. Feudal law in Hungary, which sharply distinguished between nobles and non-nobles, made no distinction whatsoever between Magyars and non-Magyars. Thus one cannot talk of a nationalities question-with respect to the state-before the 18th century. At most, one can observe a slow progression towards the articulation of a certain common national sentiment. Szekfű was, of course, not ignorant of the differences between a feudal and a modern nation, and he was also aware of the modern character of nationalism. He did distinguish between the nationalities question before and after the 18th century. In one of the essays included in his aforementioned book, he observed that while

it is certainly true that peoples have distinguished themselves based upon their nationalities prior to the French Revolution... the life of nations and peoples was not a self-conscious life... we would be victims of a massive misconception if we were to think that a king, a ruling class meted a decree with obvious national relevance while actually conscious of that relevance, in order to change, to alter some aspect of the structure of the nation or that of the nationalities within the state. ... Kings of old were ignorant of the nationalities question: it was present, but in a way ultraviolet rays or radioactivity are present in our life: these irradiations exist, but we usually do not realize their presence.

The relationship of nation, nationality and state became problematic mainly because of two major factors. One of these was that Hungary's reunification and independence were not achieved after the country, sundered into three in the 16th century, came under one ruler again at the end of the 17th. The territories reclaimed from Ottoman rule did not form part of a sovereign Hungarian state: instead, they ended up as provinces of the Habsburg Empire. What once used to be Hungary was divided into three administrative units from the 18th century to 1848, namely the so-called Kingdom of Hungary, the Transylvanian Principality and the Marches, which remained under military governance. The most heated debates in the country about state and nationhood centred around the relationship between these three provinces and their status vis-ŕ-vis the Habsburg Empire. What would be the best national policy-this question underlay most debates-should Hungarian independence, or at least separation, be pursued, should one strive to achieve the reintegration of the country, or would it be better to fight against staunchly conservative historical particularism and provincial separatism, accepting a programme of imperial centralization?

A central component of this dilemma that historiography usually addresses is
the language question. Latin was used as the official language and was obviously becoming unfit to function as such; consequently there were debates over what language should be chosen to replace it. Neither an integrated cultural community, nor an economy could function without a living language as an effective channel of communication. In the western half of the Empire, German had been accepted as a lingua franca, but, in Hungary, the language most widely spoken was Hungarian, by masses of the peasantry as well. Vienna preferred German, ultimately pursuing a kind of Germanization, by Maria Theresa perhaps more tactfully, by her son, Joseph II, more vehemently. "How many great advantages are to be won," his diary says, "through the use of a single language in the whole empire, in intercourse of all kinds, in all professions, tying the parts of the realm closer together, uniting its populace with the bond of brotherly love-this is amply demonstrated by the examples of France, England and Russia, amply enough to convince us or anyone."
Administrative centralization, together with linguistic and cultural homogenization proposed by Vienna, was supported, however, only by a very small minority, recruited typically from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and bureaucrats of the central administration. One of them, the lawyer Samuel Kohlmayer, scion of a German family settled in Pest, expressed the opinion that Hungarian was "only fit for swearing," and were it to become the official language, it would set back cultural development by two centuries. On the other hand, he thought that "German relates more advanced German morals and science."6 However, the greater part of the Hungarian elite, first and foremost the nobility, did not accept Vienna's proposition. Partly under the influence of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, partly as a counter-reaction to the policies of Joseph II, they opted to modernize and standardize Hungarian. "Never on this globe had a
nation acquired wisdom before assimilating the sciences to its language. Every nation became savant in its own language, never in some other's," wrote György Bessenyei as early as 1778, pointing the way for many that were to follow.7 Language as the focal point of the national question had become an axiom of the new Hungarian nationalism by the beginning of the 19th century.
Latin and German were put on the defensive for the first time in the Education Acts of 1791/92, and the victory of Hungarian became complete with the passing of the Language Bill of 1844. This made Hungarian the language of legislation, administration and the judiciary. Along with this, a struggle unfolded aimed at the unification of Hungarian provinces, and at achieving a higher degree of autonomy within the Empire. This led to the armed conflict between the Imperial Court and the Magyar nation, which erupted at the time of the revolutionary wave which shook Europe in 1848.
The question of nation and state was further complicated by the ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity of the peoples inhabiting the Hungarian Kingdom. Reasonable estimates show that of the 8 million inhabitants of the Hungarian Kingdom, Croatia and Slavonia, as well as the Marches, at the outset of the 19th century, only 42 per cent spoke Hungarian as their mother tongue: 18.5 were Croats or Serbs, 14 were Slovaks, 10 were Romanians, 9 Germans, while Ruthenes accounted for 4 percent, with Slovenes and others making up the remaining two and a half per cent. In the Transylvanian Principality, with a total population of slightly more than one and a half million, the Magyar population had an even smaller share. They accounted for 36 per cent of the total, while Romanians were in the majority with 53 per cent, and German Saxons 9 per cent. Counting all the provinces of historic Hungary, Magyars made up 39 per cent of the population; even if we disregard Croatia and the Marches, that figure still only rises to 48 per cent.9
Travellers and educated men, who made up a minuscule group of perhaps twenty to thirty thousand people, were of course fully aware of the linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity of Hungary. Márton Schwartner, the first notable Hungarian representative of political arithmetic in Hungary, wrote in one of his books (1798) that "In keinem Lande der Welt sind vielleicht mehrere Sprachen-und eben deswegen auch so viele Nationen-einheimisch, als in Ungern". ("In no other country of the world are so many languages and, therefore, nationalities, at home than there are in Hungary.") One of his disciples, János Csaplovics, held in high esteem by ethnographers, anthropologists and statisticians alike, registered a similar picture two decades later in 1822:

Hungary is a miniature Europe, not only due to its varied landscape and resources, but also by right of its population, as almost all European tribes, languages, confessions, professions, almost all degrees of cultural development, mores, morals and customs can be observed here.

The non-Magyar peoples of Hungary followed essentially the same path of nation-building as the Magyars had, albeit with some delay in time. They too looked to reform their languages, founded academies or other such institutions, discovered or, sometimes, invented, their glorious past. The more advanced of these national movements, notably the Croat and the Romanian, articulated
political demands as well. Therefore it was foreseeable that the replacement of Latin and German by Hungarian, let alone the construction of a monolingual
society, would stumble upon resistance from the non-Magyar peoples. This
realization is not mere retrospective wisdom: several contemporaries recognized the inherent danger. Among them was János Galántai Fejes, a juror of the judicial court of the County of Gömör, and the great political economist, Gergely Berzeviczy. In works published in 1806 and 1807, they both held that a mono-lingual Hungary was a utopia which could never be realized. The non-Magyar half of Hungary, they argued, will never be convinced to write and speak in Hungarian.

The events after the March revolution of 1848 quickly put an end to the hopes of the Hungarian elite in the Age of Reform. The efforts to establish a Hungarian nation-state provoked not only the resistance of Vienna, but also spurred the non-Magyars of Hungary to articulate their own national goals. Serbian, Romanian and, to some degree Slovak, leaders demanded the federalization of Hungary along linguistic divides. Their initiatives, however, were categorically rejected by the Magyar politicians; this led to widespread guerilla fighting in the South and in Transylvania, and some minor skirmishes in Northern Hungary. Meanwhile, the Croats had designs even more ambitious than territorial and political autonomy. In their national congress of 25 March 1848, they demanded from Magyar leaders everything that the latter had demanded from Vienna: the unification of national territory, a national army, a government responsible to a Croat parliament, a national bank, etc.
In the course of 1848/49, the Hungarian revolutionaries, caught between Viennese imperial ambitions and national separatism, rethought their position on the national and the nationalities questions alike. Parliament, meeting in Debrecen rather than occupied Buda, declared the independence of Hungary and the dethronement of the House of Habsburg on 14 April, 1849. Simultaneously, however, the concept of the Magyar nation-state was revised. This led, by the summer of 1849, to peace negotiations with Serb and Romanian leaders, and Nicolae Ba×lcescu, representing the Romanians, even signed an agreement with representatives of the Hungarian government on 14 July, 1849. The majority still refused federalism and the granting of territorial autonomy to the nationalities. On 28 July, 1849 the House of Representatives passed a resolution which ensured the free use of any language in religious, municipal and county life, as well as in schools.
Only those with the keenest perception of the situation were willing to go beyond these concessions. Count László Teleki, minister to Paris of the revolutionary government, was one of these few. He wrote on 14 March, 1849 to Kossuth:

Let us show generosity in meting out rights to our nationalities. It is not only Austria that has died, but also Saint Stephen's Hungary. ... Liberté, égalité, fraternité do not suffice. Peoples desire to live national lives. We ought to construe a system which makes up for the lack of national unity by harmonizing and acknowledging both individual and national rights.

In practice this would have meant the full autonomy of Croats, Serbs and Romanians who, much in the spirit of Martinovics, would have been linked to the country of Magyars only within the framework of a federation. On the other hand, Slovaks and Germans were to receive a more limited form of territorial autonomy.
The relationship of individual citizen and collective or national rights, and consequently the most desirable inner and outward governance of the new Hungarian commonwealth, was a question which, after the Hungarian defeat in the War of Independence, intrigued exiles as well as those politicians who chose to stay in the country. Of the exiles, it was the designs of the former governor and president Lajos Kossuth that deserve the most attention. His 1851 plan for a constitution, drawn up in exile in Turkey, rested on a decentralized state and the strengthening of democratic local self-governance. This would have permitted, as in the law of 1849, that nationalities use their own languages and nurture their culture in all municipalities and counties where they formed a majority. Pulszky, Szemere, Klapka and especially Teleki, however, entertained more daring and generous ideas, and were prepared to grant territorial and political autonomy to nationalities.
Apart from reforming the structure of the state, Kossuth and his companions sought to give Hungary a fundamentally new diplomatic orientation. They were convinced of the desirability of a confederation between Hungary and its neighbours, especially the Balkan states. In this spirit, Kossuth proposed at the very beginning of their exile, in October 1849, a confederation to be formed by Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and the Danubian Principalities, calling this union the Alliance of Northeastern Free States. Later, he revised his position, and in his plan for a Danubian Confederation of 1862, he envisioned five member states (Hungary, Transylvania, Romania, Croatia and Serbia) as forming a loose political unit. The common affairs of the confederation were to be handled by a joint parliament and government, assembling every year in a different capital of one of the member states. As the official language of the union, Kossuth proposed neither Hungarian nor German, but French. Kossuth eventually went back on his offer, refusing to accept the separation of Transylvania from Hungary proper, and called the granting of territorial and political autonomies within Hungary the "murdering of the homeland". In spite of this, the ideas Kossuth developed in exile represent the best example of a certain current in Hungarian political thought. He was the one who produced the most realistic concept of a state based on decentralized and democratic self-government, and this is worth remembering-even if we know that his proposals did not satisfy the nationalities and were at the same time too radical for the greater part of the Hungarian elite, thus rendering them unrealistic.

Of the politicians who did not leave Hungary in 1849 or who returned after
some years in exile, it was Baron József Eötvös who devoted the greatest effort to overcoming the tension between the unity of the state and its multiethnic character. His views on constitutional rule and the nature of national sentiment did not change considerably over the years; in the two decades following defeat in the War of Independence he did revise, however, his position on how the question should be approached. In his 1850 book, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in Oesterreich (The Equality of Rights of the Nationalities in Austria), he accepted the termination of Hungarian autonomy and thought in terms of a centralized empire, with Hungary being one of many crownlands. He did not acknowledge national rights beyond those covered by individual civic rights, consequently he did not propose that provinces take shape with ethnic boundaries. "The nation does not live in its language" he wrote, daringly challenging one axiom of Hungarian and East European nationalism. Language is one element of national identity, but is not equivalent to it, nor is it necessarily the most important component. He went on to argue that wherever civic rights are observed, national equality is automatically realized. As opposed to such an equality of status, recognizing collective national rights based on language would equal granting privileges such as the nobility once enjoyed.
The unfolding crisis of the late 1850s and the ideas of the exiles propelled Eötvös to revise his views several times. In his 1859 book, Ausztria hatalmának és egységének biztosítékai (The Guarantees of Austrian Power and Unity), he supported a kind of imperial federalism based on historic entities as opposed to centralization, and after 1861 he was a supporter of the dualist system that finally came into being in 1867. His opinion on national rights changed as well. In his book, A nemzetiségi kérdés (The Nationalities Question, 1865), he opposed a potential Hungarian state structure which "would have only recognized historical rights, while not satisfying the demands made by nationalities different in race and language." In the same study he also declared that the nationalities question "can only be solved for good if reasonable demands for political and linguistic rights are observed." Hungary will never become a nation-state, he proposed, as the other nationalities have reached a degree of development where they will never willingly abandon their sense of nationhood and become Magyars. Therefore he emphasized federalism as a means of survival. But he had to realize that since even counties had mixed populations in Hungary, his plan would not be particularly successful. A redrawing of some county boundaries, he hoped, would yield ethnically more homogenous areas, and he firmly believed that no sane person could oppose such a plan. The fundamentals, he added, have to be equality and democratic self-governance, as Kossuth had envisaged them. He therefore refused to take over the French and Prussian example of centralization, emphasizing that Hungary can never be a centralized state, as "under such an administration even the most moderate demands of the nationalities could not be satisfied". Eötvös, and a few fellow thinkers, such as Baron Zsigmond Kemény or Lajos Mocsáry and the few diehard liberals of the 1860s did not think of Hungary as a nation-state; they viewed Hungary as a neutral institution aimed at balancing and equally promoting the development of all nationalities living inside its borders.
This liberal notion, however, failed to become the basis of a nationality settlement, just as Kossuth's anti-Habsburg and democratic plans remained but dreams. The dominant part of the country's political elite, oblivious of the lesson they should have learned in the War of Independence, held tight to the notion
of a nation-state first promulgated in the Age of Reform. This meant that they wished to preserve the Hungarian character of legislation state and county-level administration. Consequently, the Nationalities Law of 1868 contained the stipulation that

In accordance with the basic principles of the Constitution, all citizens of Hungary form one single political nation, the indivisible unitary Hungarian nation, of which every citizen, whatever his ethnic affiliation, is a member with equal rights

and since,

by virtue of the political unity of the nation, the state language of Hungary being Hungarian, and the country's official language being Hungarian, the sole language of debate and administration in the Hungarian Parliament shall continue henceforth to be Hungarian.

This law, of course, was enacted after the Hungarian elite and Vienna agreed on the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, which included the reunification of the parts of historic Hungary as well as delegating the question of the nationalities to the sphere of Hungarian domestic affairs.

This antagonism did not recede during the years of the First World War, in fact it deepened as the war dragged on. When in the autumn of 1918, Oszkár Jászi, minister without portfolio in charge of Hungary's nationalities and, like Mocsáry, a true white raven of the era, offered granting an extensive territorial and political autonomy to the leaders of the nationalities, those were already preparing for secession. They were doing so not only with the support and sanction of their conationals in their own nation-states, but also with that of the Great Powers. The dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and historic Hungary
was a result of three coinciding factors: the separatism of the nationalities, the irredentist policies of the neighbouring nation-states and the interests of the victorious Great Powers. Had Hungarian politicians been more skilful, minor rectifications could possibly have been obtained as to the terms of the Trianon Treaty. Any fundamental changes, however, as difficult as it is to acknowledge this, were out of question.
The ruling elite of the inter-war period considered Trianon and the loss of two thirds of the country's territory and one third of the Magyar people a historic calamity and an unprecedented injustice or crime committed against Hungarians. The typical answer of these groups was total rejection. The political platform of integral revision logically followed from this standpoint. If Trianon is totally unacceptable, if it is a crime, historic Hungary must be restored entirely.
This platform was supported by a variety of arguments. Some historians
argued the thesis of Hungarian priority in the Carpathian Basin. As János Karácsonyi, a Titular Bishop of the Catholic Church stressed in his essays, Hungarians and only they held full historical rights to the territory of Greater Hungary because, when they captured the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century, the area was basically a no man's land. Historical thinking jumped from this observation to the conclusion that the Hungarian nation held an exclusive right to all territories between the Carpathians and the Adriatic. Count Albert Apponyi, both as leader of the Hungarian peace delegation and as author of the opening essay in the book Justice for Hungary, emphasized the cultural superiority and extraordinary political gift of Hungarians, which made them fit to function as a civilizing force in the region, protecting the Christian West at the same time.
A further historic argument was based on the allegedly always tolerant Hungarian nationality policy, beginning with Saint Stephen, the first King of Hungary. This theory, called the "Saint Stephen State Concept", emphasized the peaceful coexistence of the various ethnic groups within Hungary through centuries and projected the reestablishment of this idealized coexistence in the form of a federation in which Hungarians would have enjoyed a status of primus inter pares. This solution, the representatives of this interpretation emphasized, was desired not only by the Hungarians but by the former nationality groups as well. Thus, the rebirth of historic Hungary was only a question of time. Among others, Gyula Szekfű popularized this approach, as unhistoric as it is unrealistic. But it should also be noted that the Fascist Arrowcross leader Ferenc Szálasi
also subscribed to this theory, showing how popular and widespread it was in Hungarian society and politics.
A fourth characteristic argument stressed the unusual geographical and economic unity of historic Hungary. The unity was characterized as being absolute in Europe and it was claimed that the forced dismemberment of this unity cannot be upheld for a protracted period of time. The reintegration of the detached parts of historic Hungary is an economic necessity without which all the peoples in the region would experience disaster, famine, and a general decline. This view was also accepted and popularized by a number of eminent scholars and politicians, including Count Pál Teleki. "Geography," he emphasized in university lectures in the United States in the early 1920s, "is the most important nation building factor," and the Paris Peace Conference had been seriously mistaken when, instead of geography and economies, it had based its decisions basically on linguistic differences.
The above approach, it has to be stated, did not remain unchallenged in the political thinking of the inter-war period. Alongside integral revision, there were other visions and plans including the programme of ethnic revision, based on ethnicity and ethnographical characteristics. Viewed from this perspective, the dissolution of the multi-ethnic Hungarian state was not as much a result of an arbitrary Great Power decision, nor of some fatal mistake on the part of the
revolutionary governments, but an organic consequence of historical development. As the writer László Németh put it:

The Habsburg Monarchy broke up due to the final consequence of nationalism, the principle of ethnic self-determination. As soon as our nationalities had been attracted by this nineteenth century principle, Hungary had no chance to survive unchanged, tolerance would have caused its break-up just as much as intolerance did.

This ethnic or linguistic approach was characteristic not only of László Németh and many other populist writers, but also of various liberal and democratic forces of the period that formed the leftist opposition to the Horthy regime. In the name of the radical-democrats Rusztem Vámbéry declared in 1928: "We do not aim at anything other than the completion of the country following the ethnographic pattern and the effective protection of the Hungarian minorities". A less radical but still liberal personality, Miksa Fenyő wrote in 1935, "The revision must be more than the reannexation of the ethnically, exclusively or predominantly Hungarian regions along the frontiers."
Some maverick intellectuals, such as the exiled Oszkár Jászi, a radical demo-crat, or the populist writer and essayist Dezső Szabó went even further. They rejected not only the concept of an integral revision, but the idea of a territorial solution as such. "The question", Oszkár Jászi argued, "is incapable of a territorial solution. The problem is one of racial autonomy in language and culture, and the racial organization of populations within a common territory". As a promising solution he proposed a confederation of the Danubian peoples. Dezső Szabó imagined something even larger: the confederation of all peoples living between the Germans in the West and the Russians in the East. Hungary and its neighbours, he wrote, "have two nightmares: Germany and Russia", and they can only escape from them if they establish the Confederation of East European States. In 1937, the peasant politician Imre Kovács declared, with more determination than was absolutely necessary: "Danubian confederation: there is no other way."
A characteristic product of the rethinking of the Hungarian concept of state and nation was Transylvanianism. The maximalist programme of Transylvanianism did not stop at the demand for an autonomous province: it actually required an independent Transylvania or one that rejoined Hungary. Moderates, however, who found a voice in the manifesto Kiáltó Szó (Speaking Out Loud), from 1921, would have been satisfied with being granted territorial and political, as well as cultural and religious autonomy within Romania. Due to its peculiar character, Transylvanianism had contacts with revisionist ideologies and confederationalist, "Danubian" initiatives, as well.
We must not underestimate the influence of Jászi, Szabó and Németh. Younger generations of the inter-war period developed their thinking under this influence. Their own generation, however, could hardly be influenced by such ideas. As for the ruling elite and government circles, they entirely rejected these approaches, and state propaganda was based exclusively on integral revision.
A typical example was Lord Rothermere's first proposal of 1927. He had an ethnic readjustment of the frontiers in mind, but his initiative was "corrected" by the writer Ferenc Herczeg, president of the Hungarian Revisionist League by a reminder, that "the so-called Rothermere-line is not a Hungarian proposal ... the Hungarian nation does not surrender its right to territories it held for a thousand years." The same attitude is seen in Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, a Member of Parliament, as well, who even in 1943 wrote that "Transylvania must be restored as a whole-as an integral unit-to the jurisdiction of the Holy Crown." In the later years of the war, Hungarian government circles sent several similar memoranda to British and American diplomats. Reacting to one such document which proposed a federalized reestablishment of historic Hungary, a Foreign Office official wrote: "If these are the ideas upon the basis of which the Hungarian government hope to enter into discussion with us, they still have a lot to learn".

The two weeks of the 1956 Revolution were too short for anything coherent to emerge about the nation or the state. The published programmes of the various political parties and other organizations all demanded the restoration of the country's independence, but none addressed the peculiar, divided character of the nation. There is some sporadic information, however, that this latter question was also on people's minds. On 22 October, 1956, at a meeting of the student parliament of the University of Miskolc, some supposedly chanted "Everything back!" and other irredentist slogans, and on 29 October, 1956, the revolutionary committee of the county of Veszprém demanded that the government devote more attention to the needs of Hungarians living outside Hungary. In the same communiqué there was also word of the necessity of a Danubian confederation. It is known that a lawyer of Transylvanian birth, István Dobai, intended to work out a memorandum for the UN about the reorganization of Transylvania based on federalist principles and its desirable international status.
The Communist leadership after 1956 had to tackle the national and
nationalities question in a fundamentally different environment. Nationalism came to be seen as the greatest ideological and political threat, which, as a 1959 party resolution, On Bourgeois Nationalism and Socialist Patriotism put it,
"was one of the chief weapons of the counterrevolution of 1956." This explains that the emphasis laid on the notion of independence regained, so strong
after 1945, receded in the late fifties. The new ideology, argued mainly by
Erik Molnár, challenged the progressive character of the national movements, and styled the Habsburgs as the great supporters of modernization. A revaluation of post-1867 developments followed, with Austro-Hungarian history
receiving far more sympathetic treatment than heretofore. This outlook simultaneously challenged the independence-centred Marxist view of the state and
the nation as represented by József Révai, Erzsébet Andics or Aladár Mód, but
also the actualized historical discourse of the Reform Communists and
other 56ers which emphasized the struggle for real independence and the threat of Russian imperialism. "National Communism as popularized by these reformists," the above document goes on, "is a bourgeois ideology, which denounces the universal laws of Marxism-Leninism by appeal to national character and the possibility of a third way. Therefore it threatens the unity of the Communist parties and Socialist countries, and can facilitate the fall of the dictatorship of the proletariat."
The "nationalist counterrevolutionary ideology", this very same resolution states, often focuses on "the question of borders". This attitude, the document reasons, falsifies the historical and ethnographical facts that have led to the
formation of these borders.

Nationalists deceive the public by equating Versailles and Paris, the peace treaties after the two world wars. Trianon was an imperialist peace dictate, which caused strife amongst the Danubian peoples, and it contributed to the consolidation of the interwar fascist regime. The Paris Peace Treaty is a democratic charter aimed at establishing peace in the Danubian basin, promoting the cooperation of its peoples and preventing fascism raising its head once again in the region.

The document is rounded off by a discussion of the conditions of the Hungarian minorities, and concludes by stating that there can be no complaints as far as their fate is concerned.

The seizing of power by the proletariat made it possible to solve the national question in a new way, following the doctrine of internationalism. The nationalities, just as Hungarian minorities in the neighbouring countries, are free of bourgeois or manorial exploitation, as well as of national oppression. After the working classes assume power, national feuds are replaced by the common cause of building Socialism. Mistrust, nourished by centuries of strife, is replaced by trust and the establishing of friendly relationships. The party and the government has these principles in mind, the most basic needs of our people, the building of Socialism and the protection of peace, when it declares that it considers the question of national borders to be settled. In the development of Socialist societies, boundaries lose their significance and function. In the Socialist world order, political boundaries melt away with the triumph of communism.

It is known that Kádár and his fellows-Gyula Kállai and Ferenc Münnich- delivered this message to both the Czechoslovak and Romanian leaders, as well as to representatives of the Hungarian minorities living in both those countries. This, however, proved to be an incentive for these states to continue on the road of national homogenization, which (just like Magyarization before 1918) did not recognize conationality, but considered members of minorities to belong to culturally and linguistically different subgroups of the otherwise unitary nation. The only exception at this time was Yugoslavia, where the federal principle was given some room. It has to be mentioned, however, that for some time after the Second World War, the Hungarian government also continued to boost assimilation within the country.
Proletarian internationalism and its corollary, antinationalism and neglect of the minority question both within and outside Hungary, were finally replaced at the end of the sixties by a new doctrine which acknowledged the nation as an existing cultural and political entity, and in practice promoted the establishment of bonds between Hungarians in the world. In interpreting this transformation, one has to acknowledge once again the pragmatism of the Kádár system, manifested in its economic policies and cultural liberalization.
The new approach is well documented by Party memoranda. The Committee for Culture, a body working with the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers' Party, submitted a paper which can be regarded as the most important. Noteworthy in this study is the implicit distinction between the cultural and the political nation, and its support of pluralistic identities acknowledged as natural. "The nationalities will identify with their leaders and with Socialism all the more, if they feel their culture, their language and educational rights and their right to cooperate with their co-nationals is insured." To promote this, the authors thought it extremely important to provide constitutional guarantees and practical fields of application for the collective rights of the newly recognized nationalities. These guarantees were thought to be the conditions for real cooperation between countries. The study also contained a sentence, probably tacitly meant to inform the neighbouring states about the discrepancy in scale, according to which "the nationalities question has different significance in different countries, depending on the numbers of a minority, and their concentration".
After this expert opinion, a series of newspaper articles and government decrees demonstrated that Hungary had really broken with the ideology of "automatism." It soon became obvious that the new Hungarian policy was to centre on the refusal to endorse assimilation and in the support for the Hungarian minorities in the struggle to preserve their identity. Kádár's circle experimented with what Bibó and Szekfű had essentially been promoting in 1947, and what reappeared through a mini-renaissance of the national idea under the influence of writers like Gyula Illyés, Zádor Tordai, Sándor Csoóri and some others at
the end of the sixties. The Mother-Tongue Movement (Anyanyelvi mozgalom), launched in 1970, was just one visible sign. At its triannual meetings only Hungarians living in the country or in the West were permitted to participate at first, but by 1977 Czechoslovak, Yugoslav and Soviet Hungarians also appeared, with only delegates from Romania being conspicuously absent.
Hungarian domestic policy was modified as the Hungarian minorities came to be viewed in an entirely new way. The aforementioned doctrine of automatism was replaced by positive discrimination for minority cultures around 1970. In 1972, the constitution was revised so as to permit acknowledging minorities as collective bodies. This radical reform was in all likelihood propelled by the hope for mutual minority policies on the part of neighbouring countries. At the 20th Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party in 1980, Kádár expressed his views on the matter with unusual frankness: "Here with us, in Hungary, people of different ethnicity, in accordance with Lenin's programme of minority protection live with us as all other citizen do, work with us, and progress in their lives under the protection of our laws and constitution. We wish the same for Hungarians outside of our borders."
The Hungarian example was only reciprocated by the Yugoslavs. The situation turned extremely problematic in Romania, where Hungarians suffered increasingly serious discrimination after Ceausescu's rise to power in 1965. The Hungarian government attempted to intervene in the treatment of this minority on several occasions. Kádár met Ceausescu twice in 1977, in Debrecen and in Oradea, while in 1982 György Aczél, the chief ideologist, visited Bucharest for the same purpose. Meanwhile, at the follow-up meetings of the Helsinki Conference, the Hungarian delegates usually pursued a vigorous human rights and minority protection policy, thus in Belgrade in 1977, in Madrid in 1980 and in Ottawa in 1983.
Hungarian government intervention, however, did not meet with success. This failure explains in part why in the years before, during and after the collapse of Communism and the triumph of democracy, one of the most heatedly debated issues still remained the fate of the Hungarian minorities. The first coherent programme of these years appeared in 1982, and was authored by the editors of Ellenpontok (Counterpoints), a samizdat Transylvanian publication. The memorandum stated that "two ethnic groups can coexist only if they regard each other as equal partners." Taking this as an axiom, Géza Szőcs and his fellow dissidents claimed autonomy for predominantly Hungarian territories and a "due share" in government. They went on to plead for Hungarian being recognized as an official language, equal to Romanian, in all areas of Transylvania where a Hungarian populace still lived.