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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2009
Issues concerning the status and rights of ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe have become significant in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A focus on co-nations in neighboring states, “others” in so-called nation-states, and questions of immigration dominate the media in many areas in Europe. Even though ethnic minorities and ethnic identity are part of modern conversation, the subject of ethnic minorities needs to receive serious scholarly attention to demonstrate its nuanced sense of meaning. Like nations, ethnic minorities are not static entities; they are not primordial. They are constructed or imagined in the same way nations are, even though there has been little scholarly attention devoted to minority building. In order to understand the complex meaning of an ethnic minority, one needs to view the creation of a minority—minority building—on different levels, and understand it as members of the minority understand it and as others perceive it.
1 Crisen, Sabina A.-M., Minorities and Tolerance: Central and Eastern Europe & the NIS (Washington, 2001).Google Scholar In former communist societies, most issues are defined by ethnic criteria. Schöpflin, George, “Nationalism and Ethnic Minorities in Post-Communist Europe,” in Europe's New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict, ed. Caplan, Richard and Feffer, John (New York, 1996), 152.Google Scholar
2 “Minority building” is an ever-changing category used and constructed by different individuals and groups for different goals, even though it is similar to “nation building,” which often invokes a ideological sense of development.
3 This follows the advice of Rogers Brubaker, who argues in support of viewing nationhood as a category of practice, not a category of analysis. Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The writing of Fredrik Barth has also influenced the arguments in this article, especially concepts of self-ascription and ascription of others. Barth, Fredrik, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, repr. ed. (Long Grove, 1998).Google Scholar
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8 This article is part of a larger project on minority building from the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth century, using the Hungarian-Germans as an example. For reasons of space, this article focuses on one period of this history.
9 This group will be referred to as Hungarian-Germans, as this is the current, accepted name, even though it is a designation that became popular only after World War II. See Seewann, Gerhard, “Siebenbürger Sachse, Ungarndeutscher, Donauschwabe? Überlegungen zur Identitätsproblematik des Deutschtums in Südosteuropa,” in Ungarndeutsche und Ethnopolitik (Budapest, 2000), 98.Google Scholar There also was and remains the name Schwabe or svàb (Swabian), which has very little to do with their land of origin, since only a small percentage of them originated from Swabia. It is, however, another name for the Hungarian-Germans.
10 In this article, the term Magyar will usually refer to ethnic Hungarians and Hungarian to inhabitants of the state of Hungary. This oft quoted dichotomy is a little misleading, however, since in Hungarian there is no distinction, and the original meanings of Magyar and Hungarian were the same. Ignotus, Paul, Hungary (New York, 1972), 12.Google Scholar
11 The use of these levels has been influenced by Rogers Brubaker's study of nationhood by focusing on a triadic nexus of national minority, nationalizing state, and homeland nationalism, which are themselves often in conflict with each other, since they lay claims to the same set of people. Brubaker, , Nationalism Reframed, 111.Google Scholar
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14 The period from 1918 to 1929 is framed by two major international events: the end of the Great War and the economic crisis of 1929. It is true that such periodization is not only arbitrary, but problematic, since events may be watersheds for some and only passive information for others. In the structuring of this article's argument, the arbitrariness of the period is not so problematic. The slice of the past is more important, as is our understanding of the overlapping, ever-changing sense of ethnic minority at any given time. Of course, things changed, but the change is not tied to the reaction to one or a couple of major events, but rather to a changing political, social, cultural, and economic context.
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38 The most infamous example is the minister-president Gyula Gömbös, whose original family name was Knöpfle. Other examples include Ferenc Erkel, Sàndor Mária, and Mihàly Munkàcsy. See Lendvai, Paul, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton, 2003), 354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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47 The Pester Lloyd was still published, but its audience remained educated Hungarians who spoke German, as well as non-Magyar-speaking people in and outside Hungary.
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54 The most obvious example is Franz Basch, who succeeded Bleyer after his death in 1933 as the leader of the Hungarian-Germans. Even in 1929, the German government was informed that many younger Hungarian-Germans were not satisfied with Bleyer's style and tempo. PA AA-po.5/R74172–8. A.Nr 129 P.24.
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97 Borrowing from sociolinguistic explanations of language use, the anthropologist Susan Gal has written on “code-switching.” Gal's work focuses on the symbolic association between language and social group, especially regarding status, power, and solidarity. She looks at bilingual communities, including Hungarian-Germans, and their “code-switching” practices and language choice as a form of “resistance” to the language of the nation-state. See especially Gal, Susan, “Codeswitching and Consciousness in the European Periphery,” American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 637–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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