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Hungary and Its Neighbors: Security and Ethnic Minorities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Daniel N. Nelson
Daniel N. Nelson*
Affiliation:
Old Dominion University, USA
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Extract

Good neighbors are rare. Those who are most proximate might offer the potential for mutual assistance and reassurance. Mistrust and rivalry, however, seem endemic among individuals and groups sharing space and resources. Schopenhauer's simile refers to porcupines who huddle together in the winter to keep warm, but separate as they feel each other's quills, until they discover “a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist.” Referring to Schopenhauer, Freud observed that “No one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbor.”

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 313 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Schopenhauer, Arthur, Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol II (orig. 1851) (Munchen: 1988), pp. 559–560.Google Scholar

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4. I use the term diaspora in a manner guided more by common usage than by the strictest ethnographic definition. In the more precise definition, the dispersion of an originally homogenous people is indicated—typically under duress. Hungarians settled, rather than being “dispersed,” into regions that were later ceded to or reclaimed by neighboring states. Nevertheless, diaspora now suggests those parts of an ethnic group not situated within the state wherein that group constitutes a majority.Google Scholar

5. A superb treatment of these relationships, with ample citation to principal theoretical and empirical studies, is Gartner, Heinz, “Nationalism, Ethnicity and the State,” International Politics, Vol. 34, No. 1, February 1997.Google Scholar

6. I have developed this understanding of security in a number of previous articles and essays. Among these are “Security in a Post-Hegemonic World,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, Vol. 22, No. 3, September 1991, pp. 333–345; “Great Powers and World Peace,” in Klare, Michael, ed., World Security: Trends and Challenges (New York: St. Martin's, 1993), pp. 27–42; and “America and Collective Security in Europe,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 1994, pp. 105–124.Google Scholar

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8. The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe of the U.S. Congress, for example, refers to one million people of minority ethnicity, or almost 10% of Hungary's population. Within this, the Commission uses the 400–800,000 range for their estimate of the Roma population. See the Commission's Human Rights and Democratization in Hungary (Washington, D.C., December 1993), p. 17.Google Scholar

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11. No European state exceeds the Hungarian figure except Albania—the diaspora of which includes about two million in Kosovo and Montenegro, and another few hundred thousand in Macedonia, i.e., more than 60% of Albania's own population of 3.2 million. At the outset of the twentieth century, many European nations were dispersed to a far greater degree, Romanians, Serbs and Greeks, among those nations with state “homelands,” and Poles, Jews, Gypsies/Rom (among others) then without a state, were more dispersed than Hungarians are today. Hungary itself, then ruling Transylvania, the Banat, Vojvodina, much of Croatia and Slovakia, included almost all Hungarians. See, Magocsci, Paul Robert, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), pp. 97–98.Google Scholar

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13. These points draw on a discussion of Hungarian nationalism in the twentieth century in Tibor Frank, “Nation, National Minorities, and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Hungary,” in Sugar, Peter F., ed., Eastern European Nationalism in the 20th Century (Washington, D.C.: The American University Press, 1995), pp. 222–242.Google Scholar

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20. On the economic side, Germany is overwhelming. The Budapest Sun (3 May 1996) reported, for example, that Germans were the largest purchasers of Hungarian assets; the 98 companies valued at $1.7 billion which had been purchased by Germans in 1995 amounted to 37% of all Hungarian property sold in that year, more than 2.5 times the proportion purchased by Americans (p. 2). In diplomacy, however, a rough estimate based on Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports for Eastern Europe from mid-1995–mid-1996 would be that the U.S. and Germany, combined, were destinations in more than half of the foreign trips made by cabinet level or higher officials—with the U.S. probably exceeding Germany by a slight margin.Google Scholar

21. European Commission, Central and Eastern EUROBAROMETER (Brussels: EU, Directorate General for Information, Communications, Culture, Audiovisual–Survey Research Unit, March 1996), Annex Figures 1, 4, 6, and 8.Google Scholar

22. The Government Program of Premier Antall as translated in BBC, Summary of World Broadcasts—Eastern Europe, EE/0773, 25 May 1990, C1, pp. 3–9.Google Scholar

23. In 1990 and 1991, while the author served as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to then House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, conversations with Entz took place in Budapest, the Hungarian Embassy and Capitol Hill.Google Scholar

24. For an account of Le Pen's visit to Budapest, and a Justice and Life Party rally, see Magyar Hirlap, 27 October 1996.Google Scholar

25. Glenny, Misha, The Fall of Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 39 mentions this character of early Draskovic. This author interviewed Draskovic in early 1990 during research for Balkan Imbroglio (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991) and recorded his comment that “Hungarians were so close to Croats that the differences did not matter.”Google Scholar

26. Author's interview with Gheorghe Funar, Cluj, Romania, June 1993.Google Scholar

27. Open Media Research Institute (OMRI), Daily Digest, 17 September 1996.Google Scholar

28. For a flavor of this sharp rhetoric in mid-1993, see “Slovaks and Hungarians Disagree at CEI Meeting,” OMRI Daily Report, No. 135, 19 July 1993. Also in mid-1993, the Council of Europe admission of Slovakia was brought into doubt by Hungarian efforts to extract further guarantees from the Meciar government for Magyars in Slovakia. See Fenyo, Krisztina, “Debate Increases Magyar–Slovak Tension,” in Budapest Week, Vol III, No. 17, 1–7 July 1993, p. 2.Google Scholar

29. The Bratislava daily Sme, 26 January 1995, gave detailed coverage of and comments on the Meciar government program presented in Parliament.Google Scholar

30. Boland, Vicent, “A Question of Autonomy,” Financial Times (Special Supplement on Slovakia), 23 October 1996, p. 11.Google Scholar

31. Sme, 10 October 1996, p. 2, quoting a CTK dispatch.Google Scholar

32. Meciar's comments, during a 30 October 1996 television debate, were repeated in the OMRI Dailv Digest, 31 October 1996.Google Scholar

33. Romanian Foreign Minister Melescanu, while in Washington, D.C. in July 1996, told the author that he had been “counseled repeatedly” to accelerate the treaty preparation.Google Scholar

34. I was told of such efforts by senior State Department and NSC officials.Google Scholar

35. OMRI Dailv Digest, No. 171, 5 September 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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37. OMRI Daily Digest, No. 172, 6 September 1996.Google Scholar

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39. World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers. 1994–1995 (Washington, D.C.: US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1996).Google Scholar

40. See The Military Balance. 1995–96 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1996), p. 265.Google Scholar

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46. Mill, John Stewart, Considerations on RepresentativeGovernment (London: 1872).Google Scholar

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48. Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1960), p. 72.Google Scholar

49. Valki, Laszlo, “Ethnic Minorities and National Security,” (London: International Institute for Security Studies, 1993), p. 16.Google Scholar

50. Goble, Paul A., “Ethnicity as Explanation, Ethnicity as Excuse,” in Pfaltzgraff, Robert L. Jr. and Schultz, Richard H., eds, Ethnic Conflict and Regional Instability (New York, 1993), p. 51.Google Scholar

51. Horowitz notes the danger of attributing ethnic violence to rational or materialistic motives. Horowitz, op. cit.Google Scholar

52. Ted Robert Gurr's classic Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), of course formulated the relative deprivation thesis. He has more recently applied this toethnopolitical conflicts in “States Versus Peoples’ Ethnopolitical Conflict in the 1980s with Early Warning Forecasts for the 1 990s,” paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, CA, March 1996. Donald Horowitz has distinguished between advanced and backward secessionist (minority) groups in “Patterns of Ethnic Separatism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1981, p. 165.Google Scholar

53. Ted Robert Gurr and his colleague Michael Haxton have provided an empirical exploration of these relationships in their “Minorities Report (1): Ethnopolitical Conflict in thel 990s,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, CA, March 1996.Google Scholar

54. I have discussed this relationship in greater detail in “Civil Society Endangered,” Social Research, Vol. 63, No. 2, Summer 1996, pp. 345–368. Economic insecurity in environments of high-income inequality is, for example, negatively associated with democratization. See Edward N. Muller, “Democracy, Economic Development and Income Inequality,” The American Sociological Review, Vol. 53, No. 1, January 1988, pp. 50–68. Further, systemic pessimism and negative expectations regarding personal finances are negatively associated with support for “democratic principles.” See McIntosh, Mary E., MacIver, Martha Abele, and Abele, Daniel G., “Publics Meet Market Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, 1991–1993,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, Summer 1994, p. 502.Google Scholar

55. Research from this project will begin to appear in 1997 in articles by all or part of the research team—Dovile Budryte, Susan Morris, Georgeta Pourchot, Blagovest Tashev and Daniel N. Nelson.Google Scholar

56. Haxton, Gurr and, “Minorities Report (1),” op. cit., p. 10.Google Scholar

57. Joint Declaration from the Conference on Hungary and Hungarians Beyond the Borders, issued by the Hungarian News Agency, MTI, 7 July 1996.Google Scholar

58. The nature of such complaints and criticisms and a general account of this event is in Szilagyi, Zsofia, “Hungarian Minority Summit Causes Uproar in the Region,” Transition, Vol. 2, No. 18, 6 September 1996, pp. 45–48.Google Scholar

59. Personal communication, Washington, DC, 4 August 1996.Google Scholar

60. My interviews in Budapest during late June 1996, although a couple months before either of these events, included conversations with several analysts in think-tanks who anticipated such a move by the Horn government—i.e., “covering” themselves vis-à-vis the parliamentary opposition and diaspora with a non-binding political declaration while pressing ahead with treaty finalization.Google Scholar