Ignác Romsics

From Christian Shield to
EU Member

Perceptions of Hungary's Situation and Role in Europe

 

[...]

Spreading the gospel was usually linked with territorial acquisitions. In the midthirteenth century, the time of the Mongol invasion, a new topos appears in the sources: the notion of the Hungarian nation as a bulwark of Christendom. Ten years after their first irruption into the country in 1241, the Mongols offered to ally themselves with Béla IV (r. 1235-70), holding out a share in the expected plunder as an inducement for his acceptance. Béla immediately rejected the offer and, in a letter to Pope Innocent IV in 1250, set out more resolutely and clearly than ever before the typical constituents of the medieval Hungarian self-image: a belief in the unity of Christian Europe and the idea that defending the Kingdom of Hungary was nothing less than shielding Christendom and thus checking the Mongol advance was not merely a task for Hungary but for Europe.

Since the Realm of Hungary has been largely turned into a desert by the Tatar plague, and since it is surrounded by diverse infidel tribes as the sheepfold is by hurdles, with whom our hosts are even now engaged in battle, we have seen fit to turn to the Vicar of Christ and his brethren as the only and chief help in the ultimate peril of the Christian faith, so that what we fear shall not befall us, and even less so you or other Christians. [...] "If the Tatar would occupy the country-from which the Lord may preserve us!"-the road to other Catholic kingdoms would be wide open to the enemy. Firstly, because no sea would stand in their way going on from us to other Christians; and secondly, because this would be a better place than elsewhere for them to settle their large families.¹

From the late fourteenth century onwards, when the Turks appeared on Hungary's southern borders and combat with them became permanent, the mission of Hungary's kings and captains as defenders of the faith was generally acknowledged, indeed, it became almost a cliché. Over time, the claim was extended to the country and its inhabitants as well: Hungary and the Hungarians were extolled as the shield or bastion of Christendom. Thus, "the borders of Hungary and Poland abut those of barbarian peoples, and it is to the glory of God's name and in defence of the Christian faith that these two countries are the wall and shield of the faith," says the diploma inaugurale of Wladislas I of Hungary (r. 1440-44, Wladislas III of Poland). As John Thuróczy commented in A magyarok krónikája (Chronicle of the Magyars), completed in 1488, Hungarians "even as they fight for their homeland defend Christendom as a whole". Following the victory over the Turks at Belgrade in 1456, the pride and sense of vocation of the Hungarian Estates understandably became even stronger. "We are fighting for Christ's laws and our Christian Church," and "we shall defend Christ with our swords," was how John Hunyadi encouraged the Hungarian host before the battle of Varna and the battle of the Field of Blackbirds. Hunyadi was perhaps the first Hungarian to clearly see the conflict with the Ottoman Empire in its true life-anddeath dimension. In one of his letters he writes: "Either we shall free Europe from the cruel Turkish yoke or we shall be slain for Christ and win a martyr's crown." His son Matthias tried to drum up support from the prince electors of the Holy Roman Empire with more or less the same argument: "From childhood on," he recalled, "we have striven for the good of Christendom; with the sweat and blood of our exertions we have done everything within our power to protect the Christian states from all misfortunes." Moreover, "Our Hungary, although even under our predecessors left without solace or help, was always a strong protector and bastion of Christendom." "This country," a decree of the 1505 diet of Rákos proclaimed, "is the shield and bastion of Christendom which, through great loss of its own blood, is constantly guarding Christendom."
The idea of Christian and European cohesion no doubt trickled down to only a small fraction of Hungarian society in those first centuries following the foundation of the state. Alongside it, in the thirteenth century appeared a second enduring topos of the Hungarian self-image: the myth that the Magyars were descended from the Huns and had inherited their valour from the Scythians. The Gesta Hungarorum, set down in the early thirteenth century by the chronicler known as Anonymus, first expresses the idea that Álmos and his successors of the House of Árpád were the descendants of Attila. The same work is the source for the assertion that the Székely people (Siculi) of Transylvania were a detached group of Huns, "the people of King Attila". ² In another chronicle (also entitled Gesta Hungarorum) written by Simon de Kéza between 1282 and 1285 the supposition first appears that the Hungarians as a whole were descended from the Huns, and that the power exercised by their leaders-their chiefs and princes- was conferred by their warriors, in a "general assembly", who accordingly also had the power to withdraw it. This may be looked on as the first recorded formulation of the Hungarian nobility's consciousness of themselves as constituting the nation because of a shared ancestry. It is also in this chronicle that Attila is transmuted from barbarian conqueror into dazzling warlord who "at the time he lived was more glorious than all other kings on Earth." ³
Initially, de Kéza's notion may well have gained currency only among the lesser nobility; in evidence we may cite Béla IV's aforementioned letter of 1250, in which Attila is not presented in any way as an illustrious ancestor, but simply as a heathen foe. As further evidence we may note that the first important Hun cult emerged during the reign of Matthias Hunyadi (r. 1458-90), who was himself of lesser-noble descent. One of the emissaries whom Matthias sent to the Pope in 1475 described the Hungarians as being "highly bellicose Huns". In the 1488 chronicle already quoted, János Thuróczy compared Matthias to Attila and, on the basis of his military victories, prophesied a return of "the bygone splendour of the Huns".⁴
The theory that the Hungarians were related to the Huns was closely tied to the myth of Scythian prowess. The Magyars, it was asserted, ranked with the Huns among the world's finest warriors, indeed had been created specifically for warfare, conquest and domination. Once again, it was de Kéza's chronicle which first articulated this Magyar awareness of Scythian roots, more often than not coupled with a sense of national pride and, at times, xenophobia. In Kézai's eyes, the military skill and bravery of the Magyar raiders who ravaged Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries had no rivals; in his account, even the battle of Augsburg (Lechfeld), at which King Otto I of Germany defeated the Magyars in 955, ended in a Hungarian victory. ⁵ This belief gained strength and currency during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Antonio Bonfini, Matthias' court historian looked on his patron "as a Scythian Mars" and portrayed Hungarians as belonging to the "Scythian nation", a valiant and intrepid military people "which is accustomed to the idea that they should rule over, without let or hindrance, their own and other people's lands; which is impatient of the yoke, and is indomitable in war." ⁶
The citing of Scythian valour as a trait and the defence of Christendom as a role or calling were not seen as contradictory. If anything, they complemented one another well. Bonfini added: "Because God settled this defiant remnant of the Scythians on the frontiers of the Christian community in order that they should absorb the right religion and then shield the true faith steadfastly in the face of all unbelief." ⁷

[...]

The nobility also came in for strong criticism in Count Miklós Zrínyi's Török áfium (Remedy Against Turkish Opium) of 1660-61. The chief attributes of Hungary's leaders, according to this great captain and poet, were "ostentatious displays of their importance" and "giving themselves airs", "racing horseflesh, or in a word: swearing on oath, lying and being up to no good." The first canto of his epic poem of 1651, A szigeti veszedelem (The Peril of Sziget) speaks of nothing less than the "divine retribution" visited on the Magyar nation before Mohács on account of "manifold debauched morals and harsh cursing, / Covetousness, loathing and giving false witness, / Loathsome lasciviousness and calumny, / Larceny, manslaughter and ceaseless revelry."⁸ For him, though, these were not as basic to the ruinous outcome as Ottoman military might and the indifference of the Great Powers of Europe towards it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His rational and realistic survey, passing from country to country, and taking the precedence of raison d'état for granted, concludes that "we Magyars are alone," and "we can only rely on ourselves." After all, "if it's not your own calf, you don't lick it" and "a man on a ship fears a drowning man lest he himself be dragged under." ⁹ Sin and divine wrath, dissension, isolation and weakness: those were the mutually reinforcing motifs in the reasons adduced for the catastrophe.
But what was to be done? What political strategy could restore the unity and independence of the state that were postulated as self-explanatory goals for any politically right-thinking Hungarian? It was becoming less and less possible to rely on a supranational Christian solidarity. The polities of each state were guided by self-interest, and if that called for entering into an alliance with the Turks, then as the proto-nationalist hommes d'état increasingly abandoned Christian universalism -the French in 1534, for example-they were not going to flinch from doing so on the grounds of Christian unity. A section of the Hungarian Estates counted on support from the Habsburgs because they were also joined to Hungary through a sense of cultural affinity and a similar geopolitical situation. As the Palatine, István Báthori (1519-23), pointed out at the diet in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia) in December 1526: driving the Turks off was inconceivable without a strong ruler and that ruler could only be Ferdinand of Habsburg. Arguing for the election of Ferdinand II as king of Hungary (r. 1618-37) at the County Assembly in Pozsony close to a century later, in 1617, Péter Pázmány, Archbishop of Esztergom, was of a similar opinion:

The king of Hungary needs to be such that he is able, on his own, to shelter our country and, through kinship with the Christian princes, is strong enough to be able to hope for assistance should the Turks attack us. On the grounds that someone possesses Bohemia, together with Moravia and Silesia, and alongside that Austria, with Styria and Carinthia, it seems bounden upon us to bow our head to him. Because [...] it is impossible that Hungary, with the strength that she has, should be able to survive between those two powerful princes, but it must either fall into the Pagan's gullet or else must rest satisfied under the wing of the neighbouring Christian prince. ¹⁰

Anti-Turkish sentiment was widespread in royal Hungary and usually linked to the defence of Christendom. What was new was that the idea of fighting for Christendom and "for one's good repute and name" (in other words for individual glory) was being superseded more and more by the notion of defence of country and nation. Stephen Bocskai, who was to wage war first against the Turks, then, in 1604-06, against the Habsburgs, was not presented by a contemporary lay as a defender of Christendom but was endowed with such epithets as "the Magyars' shield", "wise father of the Magyars", and "commiserator of the nation". ¹¹ By the end of the seventeenth century, nationalist sentiment had essentially overtaken the Christian faith as a mobilising call for warriors to man the border fortresses against the Ottomans. "When you combat with pagans / You hit out right and left for our nation," runs one such seventeenth-century soldier's song ("The Song of Zsigmond Balogh"). Along with fealty to the monarch and religion, even Miklós Esterházy, the Palatine, appealed primarily to national cohesion when, in his summons to arms of 1630, he urged his troops "from hither and thither" with the words: "All of us are Magyars, and we have but a single crowned king and a single lord." ¹²
Up to 1526, Hungarian politicians had rejected any form of co-operation with the Turks; this was to change after Mohács. One section of the Estates- particularly the lesser nobles, who had been mistrustful of the Germans earlier as well-were in favour of a Turcophile policy. At first, King John Zápolya followed this path by becoming the sultan's vassal in 1528-29. John and his entourage and, later, many of the leading men of Transylvania and eastern and southern Hungary, took the view that the country's and their own interest would best be served through a temporary break with Christian Europe. In order to rescue the "expiring homeland", Bishop István Brodarics of Szerém, in 1533, argued that they could, indeed should, ally not just with the Turks but "with any infidel people". Among the justifications for renouncing the defence of Christendom and co-operating with the Turks, mistrust of the German nations and the Habsburgs had a prominent place. These circles doubted that the Germans had either the will or the capacity to save Hungary. Many supposed that they were striving to gain dominion over Hungary. Ferenc Frangepán, Archbishop of Kalocsa, made clear in a letter to King Ferdinand I in 1537: "The larger part of the Hungarian nation would rather expose themselves to the most extreme danger, to Turkish power, than bow their heads in the German yoke against their will." ¹³ In his testament of 1629, Prince Gabriel Bethlen of Transylvania went into detail about the orientation towards the Turks that he had adopted of necessity:

It is my wish and my advice to my country that, as long as nothing else is possible than that they uphold accord with the Turkish nation, even with the harms that may be suffered, that they should not break off relations with them but seek their favour by every means. ¹⁴

[...]

The question that exercised Hungarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to decide on a national policy: should they strive to bolster Hungarian separatism and to reunite the individual parts of the old kingdom, in other words strike out on the path to a sovereign nation-state, or should they abandon historical and provincial particularisms and accept or even, in the long term, assimilate into a Habsburg empire? For the overwhelming majority, the ideal would have been the restoration of the pre-1526 independent Kingdom of Hungary, but that proved to be unattainable. There was a fundamental European interest in maintaining the Habsburg Empire; this interest was what lay behind the lack of support for the rebellion led by Prince Francis II Rákóczi of Transylvania (1703-11) and its eventual suppression, as well as behind several key provisions of the Holy Alliance entered into by Russia, Austria and Prussia in September 1815. Because of this and because of imperial Russian expansionist ambitions fuelled by pan-Slavism, by the first half of the nineteenth century there was a growing view that Hungary only had a future as part of the Austrian Empire. "The prosaic truth," Count István Széchenyi cautioned his countrymen in 1842, "is that you will have to discern your true size and contentment in the Austrian beehive." Ferenc Deák and most of his fellow reformers, during the thirty or so years that immediately preceded the 1848-49 War of Independence, also believed that Hungary's incorporation into the Habsburg Empire was anything but a tragedy, in fact it was an imperative necessity. They hoped the Monarchy would quickly perceive that there was a mutual interest in evolving into a confederation of two units: one comprising Hungary and Transylvania, along with their associated Croatian lands and the Military Frontier region to the south, the other comprising the hereditary provinces and other territories conquered by the empire. ¹⁵ Baron Miklós Wesselényi's proposed reform differed only in that it paid greater heed to the emerging national feeling of Hungary's non-Magyar ethnic groups and, instead of a putative Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, proposed a five-member confederation of Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Bohemians and Poles. ¹⁶
One bone of contention between Austria and Hungary was the question of the official language. Latin, though still used in official life in Hungary, was increasingly unsuited to the needs of the new age. Supplanting it by a modern language that was spoken to some extent by virtually the whole population was an inescapable necessity. What, though, should that language be? Should it be the German advocated by Vienna and already the lingua franca of the western part of the empire, or the Hungarian that was comprehensible to most of Hungary's "lower orders"? There were proponents of German, but the majority of Hungary's higher classes accepted the direction György Bessenyei and other reformers had mapped out for a modernised Hungarian language at the end of the previous century. To put it another way: "No nation has ever become learned in a foreign tongue." ¹⁷ The supercession of Latin and German by Hungarian commenced with the Education Act of 1791-92 and concluded with Law 2 of 1844, which made Hungarian the language not only of public education, but also of legislation, public services and the administration of justice.
A second question that dominated political thinking over these two centuries ensued from the ethnic and linguistic make-up of the territories within the Hungarian state, a make-up which had undergone radical change during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An estimated 75-80 per cent of a population of 3.3-3.5 million at the end of the fifteenth century spoke Hungarian as their mother tongue. The population had grown to some 10 million by the end of the eighteenth century, but because of losses due to war and assisted immigration, the proportion of native Hungarian speakers had dropped to 39-40 per cent. This proportion looked more favourable if Croatia and the Military Frontier were disregarded, but even then it was only 48 per cent. ¹⁸ During the Middle Ages and the early modern age, when Latin or German was used in public administration, and the serfs who made up around 90 per cent of the population were outside the political community, this ethnolinguistic multiplicity had not posed much of a problem. Making Hungarian the primary language, however, inevitably led to serious conflicts. The Hungarians of the Enlightenment and the Reform Age, from György Bessenyei through István Széchenyi to Lajos Kossuth, envisaged that the population as a whole would be willing to embrace a Hungarian identity in language and opinion within a transformed framework of civic life in return for a legislative programme that would be implemented without regard to ethnolinguistic differences. At most, any disagreement that there may have been lay in Wesselényi and Deák endorsing a longer-term and amicable assimilation, founded on the attraction of moral and cultural values. Most of their peers saw nothing wrong with applying more coercive methods.

[...]

This pipe-dream of what might be called the Hungarian imperial idea materialised as an actual political programme amid the new circumstances created by the 1848-49 revolutions. A plan for German unification that would encompass all German and Austrian territories raised the possibility of a Danubian empire, centred on Hungary and under Habsburg rule. Besides Croatia and Slavonia, Transylvania and the Military Frontier, this Danubian empire would have included Galicia and Dalmatia as well; indeed it would also have attracted, in some shape or form, those provinces on the lower Danube that were breaking away from the Ottoman Empire. This audacious concept, which in its broad outline bore a marked resemblance to the plan that Kossuth was later to propose (albeit without the Habsburgs) for a Danubian confederation, was quickly sidelined under the more pressing concerns of the defensive war that Hungary was engaged in during 1849. ¹⁹
It was not totally forgotten, however. Baron József Eötvös (1815-71) was Minister of Education and Religious Affairs under both Batthyány in 1848 and Andrássy from 1867; he worked with Deák to hammer out the terms of the Compromise and the legislation for Hungary's national minorities and thus was one of the most profound political thinkers of the age. He too harboured the fantasy, both before and after 1849, that a Hungarian state reminiscent of King Louis I the Great's dominions would ultimately be created through unifying the Bohemians, the Poles, "other Slavs of the Roman Catholic persuasion and even, at a pinch, the Romanians". ²⁰
The arguments used to legitimize a Hungarian imperial concept ranged over the historical claims, the commercial angle, the geographical (or to be more specific, geomorphologic and hydrographic) necessity, and the cultural slant. The role as a defensive shield was skipped over since it had been rendered completely anachronistic and irrelevant. All the more emphasis was given to the Magyar function of acting as an intermediary between East and West: an Oriental people in the West and, through its being westernized, a nation suited for spreading the values of Western civilization eastward. Mátyás Rát, the editor of the Magyar Hírmondó (Magyar Messenger) at the end of the eighteenth century, still considered the primary task to be that of learning the languages of the Oriental peoples and disseminating their culture to the West. In that way, he wrote "we could be, so to say, middlemen between the Orientals and Occidentals, communicating the treasures of the former and the sciences of the latter." ²¹
Later on, though, and especially during the post-1867 boom in Hungary's economic and cultural life, an eastward diffusion of Western culture was tied to the idea of Hungarian expansion. "The East cannot remain forever in frosty seclusion...," said Benjámin Kállay, the joint Austro-Hungarian Minister of Finance, in his inaugural address as a newly elected member to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. That called for levelling-up and intercession, which "we Hungarians should undertake, because we are best equipped for that... the leading role in tackling this task, should we want it, is ours." ²²
In the years leading up to the First World War, Turanism emerged as an even more ambitious version of Hungarian imperialism, for such it may be called. Playing up the Asiatic roots of the Magyar nation and the supposed close relationship of Hungarian to the languages of Central Asia, this politically tinged intellectual vogue considered not just the Balkans, but also the regions between the Caspian Sea and the Pamir mountains as potential targets for economic and cultural penetration by Hungary. The very first issue of Turán, a journal started up in 1913 by the Turanian Society (founded in 1910), declared:

Go East, Hungarians! East in the national, scientific and economic spheres! [...] The Hungarian nation is standing before a great and splendid future, and it is certain that, after the Golden Ages of the Germanic and Slav peoples, the turn has come for the flowering of Turanism. For us Hungarians, the Western representatives of this awakening huge power, awaits the mammoth and arduous yet glorious task of providing intellectual and economic leadership for a Turanian population of six hundred million souls.

The author of these lines was none other than the young Count Pál Teleki, later to become well known as a geographer, member of parliament and a two-term prime minister (1920-21 and 1939-41) renowned for his sober-minded foreign policy. ²³
This strand of Hungarian imperial thinking, aimed at controlling the Balkans and even setting part of Asia as an objective, was clearly lacking any realistic foundation and profoundly illusory and megalomaniac in character. It was a situation appraisal and role perception that István Bibó (1911-79) aptly described as "springing from a distorted grasp of the real forces." ²⁴

[...]

"The architects of the peace," insisted Count István Bethlen, the most distinguished politician of the time, "did not in the least appreciate the significance of the peoples who live in the Danube Basin, or their relations with one another," whereas "the Czechs, Serbs and Romanians, who were acknowledged as the West's allies, made use of every opportunity to mislead them in that respect." The upshot was that in the place of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which for centuries had ensured a balance of power between West and East, "they have created two mutilated countries, which are cut off from the most basic means of subsistence, and created three other unviable countries, whose very existence is threatened by the danger that internal ethnic antagonisms and tensions may explode at any instant." At the same time, they had failed to take care of establishing new forms of regional co-operation, indispensable for economic and security reasons alike. As a result, Bethlen predicted, it was likely that "either the Slav giant in the East or the Germanic Drang nach Osten, or both in concert, will act against the small nations of Central Europe." Because "it was impossible to reach an understanding with the leaders-constantly egged on against Hungary from the outside as they were-of the new inhabitants that were settled, or migrated into, the territories." In Bethlen's opinion, the Hungarians carried no share of the blame. ²⁵
The role of "international freemasonry and the plutocracy"-something Bethlen, who was generally rational in his arguments, did not mention-was "unmasked" by, among others, the Jesuit Béla Bangha. This Christian Socialist Party ideologue proclaimed in his 1920 book that the above two factors:

intended us for decline as a European colony, and as a tool for this purpose they singled out-just as in Russia-a Social Democratic Revolution. After four and a quarter years of unprecedented carnage, Social Democracy, liberalism's stepchild, did indeed wrench the arms from the nation's grasp and even prevented it from defending its own frontiers with the retreating army, instead it dispersed the army, terrorized right-thinking but passively inclined citizens, and drowned what little of value remained in the red sea of the proletarian dictatorship. ²⁶

Against this, the Horthy regime's left-wing opponents created an explanatory schema that rested on the conviction that the collapse of the Monarchy, and of Hungary within its historical borders, was in line with the general trend of development of the states and nations of Europe. The only way to prevent that from happening would have meant either federalizing the empire, or granting autonomy to the nationalities. It was in this spirit that Oszkár Jászi, Minister for the Nationalities in Count Mihály Károlyi's cabinet in 1918, wrote his book in exile in the United States.

The dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy and the establishment of new national states on its ruins was, in its essence, the same process which in many other states of Europe led to the integration into the state of those peoples having a common language and culture. The same fundamental causes working for unity in the nationally homogeneous states worked toward dissolution in the ethnographical mosaic of the Habsburg Empire [...] The monarchy collapsed on the psychic fact that it could not [...] establish reciprocity among the different experiences, sentiments and ideals of the various nations. ²⁷

The writer László Németh, arguably the most prominent theoretician of the Populist movement and an exponent of the middle or "Third Way" during the 1930s, likewise interpreted what had happened as a logical outcome of history. "The Habsburg Monarchy," he expounded, "was torn apart by what was the end product of nationalism, the principle of self-determination. While this nineteenthcentury principle propelled our nationalities into power, Hungary could not remain in its old form; it would have blown apart, as much through concessions as through intolerance." ²⁸ Ede Ormos, who had once supported Jászi's Civic Radical Party and is Béla Bangha's left-wing alter ego in this context, was less fatalistic. He placed the blame on the lack of generosity in Hungary's policy towards the nationalities over the previous half century:

Nobody can deny that the immediate cause is our defeat in the world war. That, though, was the punishment that was inflicted for our ancient sins [...] The reason why the nationalities fled from the ruins of the collapsing country; why the Romanians, Slovaks and Serbs wished to be free of Hungarian rule [...] was the chauvinistic and arrogant disregard towards the common people on the part of the nobility, which made Hungarian rule loathsome and detestable to the nationalities. ²⁹

There was broad agreement across the two main camps-from the conservatives through the liberals and democrats to the populist movements-that, for economic and security reasons alike, the structure of mutually antagonistic small states had to be replaced by a form of regional co-operation. As to when such an alliance could come about, and in what form, opinions were divided. Those who sided with Hungary's conservative government considered that the first step should be the most thorough revision possible of Hungary's borders; within the federation or confederation to be set up, they envisaged the leading role or, at the very least, the position of primus inter pares for Hungary. The reannexation of territories by Hungary that went ahead between 1938 and 1941, which from a strictly ethnic viewpoint could be regarded as fair, was therefore seen as just a first step; this ought to have been followed by a restoration of the internal structure of St Stephen's Kingdom of Hungary, albeit in a modernized form and with due allowance for the needs of the national minorities. In the reasoning that underpinned this vision, a central place was given to the cultural dominance and civilizing mission of the Magyar nation over the course of history, along with their particular skills in political organization and experience of state administration. This viewpoint pervaded establishment thinking during the Second World War and the journalism of representative writers of the era such as Sándor Márai. In a "pamphlet" on the subject of "national education" that he published in 1942, Márai argued:

The situation created by the war has designated for the Magyar nation a leading role in the Danube Basin. Yes, we believe that the sole historical means of subsistence for Magyars is for them to consciously accept and demand this leading cultural and economic role [...] the Magyar nation in Southeast Europe is the balancing force whose useful and beneficent effects no new power constellation can do without [...] No one can deny that the Magyars have a calling, the supreme sense of which is that they should allow free expression of the talents and abilities of all the nationalities who live here within the framework of a Hungarian state. St Stephen's design created, in this part of the world, the conditions for the effective interplay of all the peoples who are living here that, given Magyar intellectual leadership, also guarantees a qualitative leading role for the nation in the Danube Basin [...] And just as it is an undeniable historical fact that Hungary was, for centuries, the eastern bastion of Western Christian culture, so too is it an undeniable reality that this Western Christian culture continues to radiate most shiningly in Southeast Europe, to the present day, within the boundaries of historical Hungary [...] Two nations, it is my firm conviction, will have an exceptionally important task in the new Europe as it is being regenerated in a moral and material catharsis of qualitative competition: the Magyars in Southeast Europe, the French in the West. ³⁰

In the interwar period, the idea of Hungarian imperial expansion beyond the Carpathian Basin no longer occupied centre stage. It did not disappear entirely, however, living on primarily among members of the Turanian Society. The aim of this fringe body was "to make the Magyar people [...] once more as powerful as it was at the time of King Matthias", or "the restoration of the realm of St Stephen and King Matthias". Among the political parties that kept the imperialism of the Turanians and others alive, was the Arrow Cross Party under Ferenc Szálasi and, later on, the "Hungarist" movement. The ancestral lands of the Greater Hungary envisaged in "Aim and Demands", the programme of Szálasi's first party, the National Will Party, when it was founded in 1935, would have included not only the pre-1918 country but also-"reaching across to the Adriatic coast"-Bosnia and Dalmatia. Subsequently, when Szálasi divided Europe up into Lebensraums in 1943, he classed the entire Völkerchaos of Southeast Europe as falling within the Hungarist or "Carpatho- Danubian" Lebensraum. He envisaged this as being "the most completely central area" of the "great European Lebensraum"-one that was "a gateway to the East" and also "the threshold... for anyone coming from the East towards the West". ³¹
The revisionist programmes put forward by the left-wing opposition adhered to ethnic or ethnographico-national principles: "We aim for nothing other than an ethnographic rounding-off of the country and effective protection of Hungarian minorities in foreign lands," was how Rusztem Vámbéry formulated the Civic Radical Party's priorities in 1928. "Revision," wrote the liberal Miksa Fenyő in 1935, could mean nothing less than "the reannexation of territories inhabited by populations that are either solely Magyar or Magyar in the majority." ³² The same is put forward by László Németh: "there is a watchword much more sacred than an integral Hungary and that is an integral Magyar nation." "The Magyar nation instead of a Magyar state-that is the watchword through which a Hungarian writer can veer back to the community that is sending him off." ³³ An ethnicallybased revisionist agenda was something that left-wing intellectuals liked to link to a co-operation that was based on full equality of rights for all the peoples of the region. In that context, they frequently referred to the plans for confederation that Kossuth had floated a good three quarters of a century earlier. "A Danubian confederation, there is no other path," declared Imre Kovács, one of the young rural sociologists in 1937; Dezső Szabó, a writer who can be regarded as a forerunner of the Populist movement, envisaged a union of the states (Association of Eastern European States) between the Baltic and the Black Sea. ³⁴

[...]

The victors of the Second World War had no more interest in a "Greater Hungary" as advocated by conservative circles during the interwar years than in the "Little Hungary" position taken by left-wing parties in government following the war. Instead they reinstated the Trianon borders of 1920. Plans for a Danubian confederation also foundered after 1947-48; promoting co-operation between the states of East-Central and Southeast Europe was not in the interest of a victorious Soviet Union, now the power exercising hegemony in the region. The dashing of revisionist hopes and the stranding of plans for a confederation was compounded by the sovietization of Hungary, which at the highest level was managed from Moscow. Prospects for the future were even bleaker than they had been after 1920. Many of the old elite chose exile; some were executed or, in the case of István Bethlen and others, carried off to the Soviet Union. Among those who stayed and were allowed to express themselves publicly was Gyula Szekfű, the pre-eminent historian during the Horthy regime and appointed as ambassador in Moscow in 1946. He foresaw the advent of a "new period of foreign occupation" reminiscent of that under the Ottoman Turks. In his 1947 book, After the Revolution, he stated:

The circumstance that the Danube valley and the states lying along it have become neighbours of the Soviet Union has put them in a position similar to that of the limitrophe states further to the north and the south of the Soviet Union. Hungary today is in a line stretching from Finland to Bulgaria, which includes the vanquished as well as the Czechs, Poles, Romanians and Yugoslavs who sit with the victors at the peace table. The difference between victory and defeat dissolves, first of all, in the fact that we are all neighbours of the Soviet Union and by virtue of this fact we have passed under its political, economic and social influence [...] From all this, it is the easiest thing to draw conclusions as to the behaviour we must adopt today and tomorrow. There can be no talk either of any doubledealing since we have just one neighbour, the Soviet Union [...] To the West, the fate of the lands of the German empire, huge and powerful for centuries, is for the time being one of chaotic amorphousness. Its splintering means that at least some parts of it will fall under Soviet influence. We can no longer dream of a role as a bridge between West and East either, not just because this expansion of the "East" towards the West has already transcended our meridian, but because we are just one modest stitch in the seam that, passing from north to south, joins what we might almost call two different continents [...] We can toss the bridge idea onto the scrapheap on which so many empty phrases from all our political pasts that were born of boastfulness, but were not realizable in practice, now lie at eternal rest. The only possible conclusion is none other than to accept the situation and hit upon a course of action with which, by gaining the trust of our neighbours and, above all, our huge eastern neighbour, we can secure a peaceful development for Hungary under new, but in my opinion unchanged, conditions. ³⁵

Szekfű's appraisal was accepted by many who tried to adapt to the new circumstances. Others, however, put their trust in help from the West and urged resistance. Among them was Archbishop József Mindszenty, the Prince Primate of Hungary, whose pastoral letters set out the plain truth about the abuses that were being committed by the Soviet army of occupation as the incipient sovietization of the country took place. "We have to say," was his message to the faithful in the autumn of 1945, "that we are now experiencing many, a great many, events in public life in Hungary that are in glaring contrast with democratic principles [...] it seems as though in Hungary one totalitarian tyranny has been replaced by another." He went on to encourage his congregations:

Do not be frightened by the threats of the sons of Evil! It is easier to stand up to and suffer a simple threat than it is to take the path onto which foolish and unscrupulous people wish to lure Hungarians. Violence and despotism will be all the greater the lesser the resistance they encounter. ³⁶

Communist power in Hungary, with the backing of the Red Army, was ruthless in eliminating opposition to the transformation that gathered speed from 1947 on. This was also the fate of the uprising that erupted in late October 1956, whose prime goal was to win back Hungarian sovereignty, both internally and vis-a-vis the outside world. Despite its failure, the Revolution proved to be a watershed in the country's postwar history. In its aftermath, most Hungarians fully comprehended and accepted Szekfű's 1947 assessment-that Hungary could not count on getting any effective external support in its struggle for independence and could truly only imagine its future within the Soviet camp. Recognizing and exploiting this, János Kádár, Moscow's new, post-1956 "proconsul", shaped the policy that, over time, would be referred to as the "Hungarian model"; this managed, without jeopardizing the Soviet Union's Great Power interests or the foundations of its dictatorship, to create conditions that few Hungarians frankly cared much for, but most accepted as the best that could be expected.
Through his manner of coming to power, his policies and their results, several commentators have likened Kádár to Prince Gabriel Bethlen. ³⁷ Understandable, and partially justified though the comparison may be, the differences are striking. Bethlen regarded co-operation with the Turks as a necessary evil, and his ultimate objective was to restore Hungary's integrity and sovereignty; Kádár, by contrast, accepted the kind of sovereignty that the country enjoyed from start to finish within the Soviet camp, strictly limited though it was to the very end, and he looked on the Soviet troops that were stationed in the country as the ultimate and necessary guarantee of his authority. The ideology that legitimized all this was proletarian internationalism, which was usually coupled with a disparagement of the traditions of independence and patriotism cherished in Hungarian history. As Party documents had it, Hungary formed part of the "socialist world system", and its duty was to facilitate the triumph of socialism worldwide by contributing to the ultimate overthrow of "imperialism" and the "capitalist world". ³⁸ In this perception, naturally, not much notice was paid to Trianon or to the Magyar ethnic minorities in "fraternal socialist countries". Shifts in this policy took place in the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, insofar as greater emphasis was placed on national traditions in the loosest sense of the word; the Party line that had forecast that ethnic minorities would become assimilated and die out as such was replaced by condemnations of the assimilation of nationalities and, in conjunction with this, cautious support for efforts to preserve the ethnic and cultural identity of Magyar minorities abroad. "Here in Hungary," Kádár himself said in an address to the Party's 12th congress in 1980, also intended for consumption outside Hungary, "people of various nationalities live, work and prosper as citizens with full rights, in accordance with the principles of Leninist nationalities policy, our laws and our constitution. We wish the same for those Magyars who live beyond our borders." ³⁹
Hungary's place and opportunities were redefined by the epoch-making collapse of the Soviet Union, which had become a fait accompli by 1991. The opposition parties that were organizing within Hungary from the autumn of 1987 on demanded, much as in 1956, the restoration of Hungarian independence and free elections; they saw the most urgent foreign-policy task as "to take the country as close as possible to the developed countries of Europe." ⁴⁰ In his address to Parliament on the policies that he was planning to follow, József Antall, who headed the new multi-party government formed after the democratic elections of 1990, declared:

The new government will be a European government and not merely in the geographical sense. We profess the traditions of democracy, pluralism and transparency. The past 40 years represented a break in the history of our nation; we wish now to return to the European heritage, and to those newer values that Europe has created over the past 40 years, in the aftermath and in light of the dreadful events and experiences of the Second World War. The other aspect of Europeanness is a return to what history disrupted: the unity of the continent. The government is committed to the idea of European integration.

Alignment with the Soviet Union, adopted under force of circumstances, thus gave way to an alignment with Europe, or in other words a swing round from the East to the West. Alongside this, two other major planks in the new Hungarian foreign policy were to be the promotion of regional interstate co-operation and the protection of, and support for, Magyar minority communities beyond the borders.
Amid changes of such far-reaching importance, many Hungarians within and across the borders thought that after Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, it was time to set aside, or at least modify, the agreements reached by the Great Powers at Trianon. The 4th of June 1990, the eightieth anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon, brought several hundred demonstrators onto the streets in Budapest. One of their speakers declared: "A future for the Carpathian Basin is only conceivable on the basis of unity, but for that a revision of the Treaty of Trianon is absolutely necessary." ⁴¹
After 1990, the issue of frontier revision was kept on the agenda by various political fringe groups, but was not espoused by any of the main political groupings. With minor shifts of emphasis, the three chief goals enunciated in 1990 have remained government policy ever since. In the meantime, Hungary became a full member of the European Union in 2004. With membership came a voluntary renunciation of certain elements of state sovereignty and, in all likelihood, there will be more such to come. To that extent, the position of Hungary, in this new millennium, is comparable to the circumstances that were faced after the expulsion of the Ottoman Turks. The parallel also stands up insofar as, from a linguistic and cultural viewpoint, the country once again finds itself in a "beehive", and sooner or later a lingua franca is going to be needed, which obviously will not be Hungarian. At the same time, regional co-operation, to which so many have attached excessive hopes, has not really come to pass. For a lack of economic complementarities and other reasons, various initiatives either faded or lost their appeal by the end of the last century. The cause of the ethnic Magyars who live outside Hungary's frontiers, by contrast, has acquired added significance, with EU expansion, both to date and yet to come, placing it in a new perspective. The most important task now facing Hungarian public life is to think this issue through, as well as Hungary's new position and possible role within Europe.

¹ Szöveggyűjtemény a régi magyar irodalom történetéhez. Középkor (Compendium of Texts on the History of Old Hungarian Literature: the Middle Ages), ed. Edit Madas. Budapest, Tankönyvkiadó, 1992, pp. 162-164.

² Anonymus: A magyarok cselekedetei (Deeds of the Magyars). Transl. from the Latin by László Veszprémy. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 1999, p. 13. and p. 43.

³ Simon Kézai: A magyarok cselekedetei (Deeds of the Magyars). Transl. János Bollók. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 1999, pp. 93-96. Cf. Jenő Szűcs: "Társadalomelmélet, politikai teória és történelemszemlélet Kézai Gesta Hungarorumában" (Socio-political Theory and Historical Viewpoint in Simon de Kéza's Deeds of the Magyars), in: Jenő Szűcs: Nemzet és történelem. Tanulmányok (Nation and History: Essays). Budapest, Gondolat, 1974, pp. 413-556.

⁴ János Thuróczy: A magyarok krónikája (Chronicle of the Magyars). Transl. from the Latin by János Horváth. Budapest, Európa Könyvkiadó, 1980, p. 423.

⁵ De Kéza: op. cit., pp, 103-107.

⁶ Antonio Bonfini: A magyar történelem tizedei (Decades of Hungarian History). Transl. from the Latin by Péter Kulcsár. Budapest, Balassi Kiadó, 1995, p. 197.

⁷ Ibid., p. 241.

⁸ Zrínyi Miklós összes művei (Complete Works of Miklós Zrínyi). Budapest, Kortárs Könyvkiadó, 2003, pp. 24-36.

⁹ Miklós Zrínyi: "Török áfium" (Remedy Against Turkish Opium), in Magyar gondolkodók, 17. Század (Hungarian Thinkers: Seventeenth Century), ed. Márton Tarnóc. Budapest, Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1979, pp. 240-271.

¹⁰ István Bitskey: op. cit., p. 134.

¹¹ László Nagy: "Megint fölszánt magyar világ van..." ("Magyar Land is Ploughed Up Once More..."). Budapest, Zrínyi Katonai Kiadó, 1985, p. 248.

¹² Ágnes R. Várkonyi: "A nemzet, haza fogalma a török harcok és a Habsburg-ellenes küzdelmek idején 1526-1711" (The Concepts of Nation and Homeland during the Turkish Wars and the Anti- Habsburg Struggle, 1526-1711), in: A magyar nacionalizmus kialakulása és története (The Emergence of Hungarian Nationalism and Its History), ed. Erzsébet Andics. Budapest, Kossuth Kiadó, 1964, pp. 58-61.

¹³ Géza Pálffy: A tizenhatodik század története (History of the Sixteenth Century). Budapest, Pannonica, 2000, pp. 86-87.

¹⁴ Gabriel Bethlen's last will and testament, in: Magyar gondolkodók, 17. század, op. cit., pp. 111-112.

¹⁵ János Varga: Helyét kereső Magyarország (Hungary Seeking Its Place). Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982, pp. 120-141.

¹⁶ Baron Miklós Wesselényi: Szózat a magyar és szláv nemzetiség ügyében (Manifesto on the Matter of Magyar and Slav Nationalism). Budapest, Európa, 1992, pp. 186-189.

¹⁷ Bessenyei György válogatott művei (Selected Works of György Bessenyei), ed. Ferenc Bíró. Budapest, Szépirodalmi, 1987, p. 588.

¹⁸ Kálmán Benda: "Népesség és társadalom a 18-19. század fordulóján" (Population and Society at the Turn of the Eighteenth Into the Nineteenth Century), in: Magyarország története tíz kötetben (History of Hungary in 10 Volumes), vol 5/1, Magyarország története 1790-1848. (History of Hungary 1790-1848), ed. Gyula Mérei. Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980, pp. 425-441.

¹⁹ István Hajnal: A Batthyány-kormány külpolitikája (The Batthyány Government's Foreign Policy), 2nd edn, ed. Aladár Urbán. Budapest, Gondolat, 1987, pp. 118-126, and Domokos Kosáry: Hungary and International Politics in 1848-1849. Boulder, CO & Highland Lakes, NJ: Social Science Monographs and Atlantic Research & Publications (Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, No. 112), pp. 7-44.

²⁰ Baron József Eötvös: Naplójegyzetek-gondolatok (Diary Entries and Notes), ed. Imre Lukinich. Budapest, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1941, p. 217 and idem (ed. Imre Czegle): Naplójegyzetek, 1870. augusztus 6.-1870. november 30. (Diary entries for 6 August-30 November 1870), Történelmi Szemle, 1978, no. 2, p. 409.

²¹ György Kókay: Felvilágosodás, kereszténység, nemzeti kultúra (Enlightenment, Christianity, National Culture). Budapest, Universitas Könyvkiadó, 2000, pp. 102-107.

²² Béni Kállay: Magyarország a Kelet és a Nyugat határán (Hungary on the Border of East and West). Budapest, Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1883, pp. 68-69.

²³ Pál Teleki: Válogatott politikai írások és beszédek (Selected Political Writings and Speeches), ed. Balázs Ablonczy. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 2000, pp. 9-13.

²⁴ István Bibó: "A német hisztéria okai és története" (The Causes and History of German Hysteria), in: Összegyujtött munkái (Collected Works), vol. 1, ed. István Kemény and Mátyás Sárközi. Bern, EPMSZ, 1981, p. 111.

²⁵ István Bethlen: Válogatott politikai írások és beszédek (Selected Political Writings and Speeches), ed. Ignác Romsics. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 2000, pp. 269, 315 and 324.

²⁶ Béla Bangha S.J.: Magyarország újjáépítése és a kereszténység (Hungary's Reconstruction and Christianity). Budapest, Szent István Társulat, 1920, p. 17.

²⁷ Oscar (Oszkár) Jászi: The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy. Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1929 (5th impr. 1971), pp. 7 and 130.

²⁸ László Németh: "A magyar élet antinómiái" (The Antinomies of Hungarian Life), in: László Németh: Sorskérdések (Vital Matters). Budapest, Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1989, p. 119.

²⁹ Ede Ormos: Mi okozta Magyarország szétbomlását (The Cause of Hungary's Collapse). Vienna: Verlag Julius Fischer, 1921, in: Trianon, ed. Miklós Zeidler. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 2003, p. 354.

³⁰ Sándor Márai: Röpirat a nemzetnevelés ügyében (Pamphlet on the Matter of National Education). Bratislava, Kalligram Könyvkiadó, 1993, pp. 46-87.

³¹ For a more detailed survey of the different ways of thinking about a Hungarian empire, see my article "A magyar birodalmi gondolat (The Hungarian Imperial Concept)," in: Ignác Romsics: Múltról a mának (About the Past for the Present). Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 2004, pp. 121-158.

³² Quoted by Zsuzsa L. Nagy: Liberális pártmozgalmak 1931-1945. (Liberal Party Movements, 1931-1945). Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986, p. 79.

³³ László Németh: "Új reformkor felé (Towards a New Reform Age)," in: Sorskérdések, op. cit., pp. 41-43.

³⁴ Dezső Szabó: Az egész látóhatár (The Whole Horizon), vol.1. Budapest, Magyar Élet, 1939, pp. 211-236. Cf. Gábor Bátonyi: "A Duna-konföderáció gondolata a két világháború közti Magyarországon (Ideas for a Danubian Confederation in Hungary During the Period Between the World Wars)," Alföld, 1985, no. 8, p. 39.

³⁵ Gyula Szekfű: Forradalom után (After the Revolution). Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1947, pp. 120-122.

³⁶ Mindszenty okmánytár. Pásztorlevelek, beszédek, nyilatkozatok, levelek (Mindszenty Archive: Pastoral Letters, Speeches, Communiqués, Letters), vol. 1, ed. József Vecsey. Munich, 1957, pp. 70-76.

³⁷ Mr. Kádár, ed. Jenő Faragó. Budapest, Hírlapkiadó Vállalat, 1989, p. 131; Ágnes Hankiss: "Bethlen Gábor. Adalékok a 'kötéltánc' archetipikus képletéhez" (Gabriel Bethlen: Addenda to the Archetypal Imagery of Tightrope Walking), Valóság, 1983, no. 3, pp. 22-43; Paul Lendvai: Magyarok. Kudarcok győztesei (Hungarians: Masters of Failure). Budapest, Helikon, 2001, pp. 127-128; and Sándor Kopátsy: Kádár és kora (Kádár and his Era). Budapest: C.E.T. Belvárosi Könyvkiadó, 2001, pp. 143-145.

³⁸ Magyar történeti szöveggyűjtemény 1914-1919 (Compendium of Hungarian History, 1914-1919), ed. Ignác Romsics. Budapest, Osiris Kiadó, 2000, p. 257 (Resolution of the 8th Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party [MSZMP], 1962).

³⁹ A Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt XII. kongresszusának jegyzőkönyve (Minutes of the 12th Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party). Budapest, Kossuth, 1980, pp. 450-451.

⁴⁰ A rendszerváltás programja (Programme for the Change of Regime). Budapest, Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Free Democrats), 1989, pp. 18-19.

⁴¹ Magyar Nemzet, June 5th, 1990.

 

Ignác Romsics
is Professor of Modern History at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His best-known book in English is Hungary in the Twentieth Century, Budapest, Corvina, 1999.