The Hungarians: A Divided Nation [antikvár]

Preface Our purpose with this book is to inform. We wish to call attention to a serious conflict that exists among the nations of the Danube region about which the people of the world—the younger generations in particular—know little or nothing. One of the main sources of this conflict is the existence of large Hungarian minorities in Hungary's neighbors. Today one of every four Hungarians lives outside of Hungary. At the time of Hungary's partition after World War I, it was one in every three. The ratio was reduced as a result of concentration and growth of Hungarians in Hungary proper and their stagnation as minorities in the other countries. The Hungarian minority problem is one of sui generis, deserving, we believe, specific attention. It is a suppressed problem which will not politely go away just because it is treated as a nonexistent one. It is intertwined of course with the much broader— and quite well known—problem of half a continent, known since World War II as "Eastern Europe." But, despite the seriousness of the problem, the world seldom hears of the Hungarian minorities. The main reason for that is that the mother country, Hungary, hardly speaks about them. The official silence is imposed on Hungary, a member-state of the Soviet bloc, as a fraternal obligation to Communist solidarity. Hungary's unfair territorial treatment that created the Hungarian minority problem was originally the work of the Western democracies. And it is not without irony that the status quo of the Danube region, denounced after World War I by the Communists as an evil product