Ethnicity and Society in Hungary [antikvár]

Political Systems and Nationalism The Stalinist regimes of East Central Europe bom after 1948 did not offer opportunity for the so-called nation-states of the region to develop effective diplomatic channels to manage the problem of the national minorities. The relations of these states resembled the philosophical system of Spinoza, where people kept contacts through God. The states in question could get into contact with one another only through Moscow or at least within the framework determined by the Kremlin. The Stalinist system was a unified, monolithic and standardized one, and as such it pushed to the background the hostilities of the nations of the region and the nationalism manifested both in political life and among the people. An abstract internationalism was made compulsory instead in the propaganda, the textbooks and the cultural concepts of these states. This abstract internationalism prevented these peoples from finding their actual place in the East Central European cooperation and at the same time pushed their old bourgeois nationalism into the background. Let us only cast a glance at the school textbooks published in the neighbouring countries in the 1950's. It is not only that history got generally reevaluated in them with the workers' movement and the class struggle in the centre, but also that the old nationalism of the Hungarians, the Rumanians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Poles and others disappeared from them entirely. (There remained of course an anti-German and anti-Habsburg attitude together with a cult of the Slavs.) From the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, however, this monolithic image of socialism started to crack, and the states in question won a relative independence or at least a tacitly understood greater scope of action within the socialist bloc. This relative independence brought with it, in a paradoxical manner, the revival of the old nationalistic feelings. The cause of this phenomenon was that the relative liberalization after 1956 did not make it possible for the parties and intelligentsia of these peoples to settle their inherited or recent national conflicts with one another, let alone the Soviet Union. In other words, they could not reconcile the national considerations they felt justified with those of the „bloc" or the Soviet Union in everyday politics. This duality resulted in a substitute, namely in the strengthening of the feeling of national (i.e. historical) identity instead of actual political independence. The pre-1945 romantic national elements, never really analyzed and explained but forcefully obliterated, contributed to the post-war national self-consciousness of the socialist countries and saturated it with the arguments of a nationalism going back to centuries. To my view, this was the cause of Daco-Roman revival of the 1970's in Rumania that got finally elevated to the rank of one of the basic ideological theses of the Rumanian state and Party. This was the time when the Bulgarians devoted huge sums of money to digging up the remains of the 3000-year-old Thracian empire, and when the Poles rediscovered their Sarmatian past as a symbol of national independence. It was also in the 1970's that the idea