At pains to understand Hungarian history

By Robert Cottrell

Date: 13/01/05

WHEN you say "that's history" in a western European country, you are usually dismissing something as old hat, no longer of importance.

But when you say "that's history" in a central European country, you are giving warning that the subject in question has been disputed for several centuries and could probably still provoke a large street fight or a small war.

It is a close call, but I would say that Hungary ranks first among the EU's new members in its capacity to produce more history than can be consumed locally. To understand Hungarian politics today you have to mug up on the past thousand years as well - a terrifying chronicle of defeats and invasions which Hungarians cherish as other countries do their victories and conquests. The national mood is a sort of triumphant gloom. "To be Hungarian is a collective neurosis," said the late Arthur Koestler, an émigré who wrote in English but dreamed in Hungarian.

The neurosis, if we accept Koestler's term, shows itself mainly in a debate about national identity which seems to have continued unabated since the Magyars first seized the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century. The question, "Who is a Hungarian?" goes on being asked because it can never be finally answered. Ethnically, Hungarians are often identified with the Magyars, who came from the southern Urals and were sometimes confused with the Huns. But neighbouring tribes of Szekelys, Pechenegs, Kabars and Cumans were absorbed or identified as Hungarians and even Magyars in the early middle ages. Germans and Slovaks, Romanians and Croats, Serbs and Jews were assimilated then and later.

Language serves now as a badge of a Hungarian national identity, but that is a relative novelty. Until the mid-19th century, educated Hungarians spoke mainly German and Latin.

And whoever the Hungarians were, they could rarely control their destiny. The Ottomans overran them in the 13th to the 15th centuries, the Habsburgs in the 16th to the 19th. After the First World War Hungary was partitioned by the Trianon Treaty of 1920, losing two-thirds of its land to what are now Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine.

That turbulent history has left a truncated Hungary surrounded by other countries with large Hungarian-speaking minorities. Hungary wants to keep ties with them. Four years ago it tried to offer them identity cards and financial support under what was popularly called the "status law".

But this proved unworkable without the help of the neighbouring governments, which hated the intrusion. Last month Hungarians voted in favour of offering minorities the option of Hungarian citizenship on easy terms, but the referendum failed because of low turn-out.

The EU dislikes this strand in Hungarian policy, fearing that it smacks of ethnic nationalism. Good Europeans are supposed to prefer civic nationalism, or supranationalism.

In Romania and in Slovakia the "Hungarian vote" goes straight to ethnic-Hungarian political parties which will join any government in exchange for concessions on narrow ethnic issues, which is hardly the way that democracy should work.

The Hungarian preoccupation with national identity may be irritating if you want a Europe that is more or less the same everywhere in its pasteurised post-modernism.

But it is rather pleasing if you like to see traces of older orders surviving. Hungary is a fine and strange country which poses no obvious danger to anyone nearby. Within living memory it has lost lands which it still feels like phantom limbs. It should be allowed to grumble a little. My ambition for the new year is to understand Hungary better. If I look miserable, you will know I am succeeding.

• Robert Cottrell is central Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Analytical feature on Hungary and the Hungarians' preoccupation with their history national identity.