Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation

"Perhaps there is still time to halt the process threatening our very existence as a nationality." Memorandum of Transylvanian Hungarians to the Madrid Conference, 1980-83, reviewing adherence to the provisions

of the Helsinki Final Act.

(*This text represents an abbreviated version of the author's original.)

The relationship between Romania and Hungary has proved to be one of the most troubled and uneasy in the Danube region. Despite the enforced adoption of a Marxist-Leninist ruling ideology and Communist political system after World War II in both states, the relationship between the two countries did not improve; indeed, in some respects it has actually deteriorated.

It has been generally assumed that the differences between Hungary and Romania can be reduced to a territorial dispute over Transylvania.1 In reality, however, the Romanian-Hungarian conflict encompasses a broader set of problems which ultimately derive from the different historical and political experiences of the two national communities, and the different political cultures evolved by them.

Transylvania has been invested with a mythical significance by the political cultures of the two nations. It is regarded as having made crucial contributions to the autonomous survival of both nations. The distinction between Transylvania as myth and Transylvania as current political problem is thus being blurred by assumptions which seem to make a rational resolution of the conflict impossible.

Today, this complex problem is further exacerbated by the nature and interests of the ruling Communist regimes. They sustain their claim to legitimacy by references to a Marxist utopia, and they impose

a myth of unanimity on their national polities. Furthermore, contrary to doctrinal Marxism, self-interest prompted the ruling elites of the Communist regimes to use nationalism as an instrument of legitimacy. In that respect, Romania has definitely been far more strident than Hungary.2 Indeed, the Romanian leadership went so far as to discard the orthodox Leninist position and, in effect, proclaim a new doctrine of Communist nationalism.

This, then, is the background against which the deeper factors of the Romanian-Hungarian conflict are to be discussed before turning to the current problems of Transylvania's Hungarians under Communist Romanian rule.

The first factor to notice in any interpretation of Romania's political culture is the surprisingly weak concept of the state and the relatively low level of civic consciousness among its people. This has gone hand-in-hand with major discontinuities in the Romanian cultural tradition and a corresponding disorientation of values. Furthermore, there is a serious gap between high culture, as represented by the intelligentsia, and mass culture.

The weakness of the concept of the state can be attributed to repeated ceasuras in Romanian history. Also, it has something to do with the inability of the Romanian political elite to construct a strong state prior to the mid-nineteenth century, or even to 1918. Historically, the modern Romanian state was territorially limited to and divided between two state formations, Moldavia and Wallachia. Moreover, both provinces were, for centuries, under a peculiar semi autonomous system of subordination to the Ottoman Empire. The relationship between the Porte and its satellite rulers in the Romanian provinces was essentially tributary. By the sixteenth century, the traditional nobility of boyars was transformed, under the weight of Ottoman power, from landholders to officeholders in the service of the sultan. This situation encouraged the Romanian elite to concentrate on the economic exploitation of the peasantry, while at the same time destroying earlier bonds of loyalty between the two classes. This major shift in relations between ruler and ruled was accompanied by a destruction

or weakening of existing moral codes and values. Inevitably, as far as Romanian society was concerned, the political elite and the state which it controlled came to be seen as alien and parasitical. The new political rituals adopted by the elite intensified this alienation. In both Romanian provinces, particularly in Moldavia, the rulers established a neo-Byzantine court incorporating both Ottoman and Hellenic elements as well as conscious archaisms and anachronisms. The style of rule, therefore, was more and more divorced from political reality.3

Another set of discontinuities arose from the fate of organized religion, generally a repository and guarantor of both popular and elite values. In the seventeenth century, Orthodoxy in the Romanian lands was affected by outside influences from Roman Catholic Poland and Protestant Transylvania, as well as reformist movements in Orthodox Constantinople. When the conservative faction achieved dominance in Constantinople, the Romanians followed, at the cost of intellectual stultification, an empty ritual in the practice of religion. One result was externalization in political culture. External conformity, as distinct from internalized loyalty, came to be regarded as sufficient in political behavior.4 A further cause of erosion of traditional loyalties was the relative independence of the elite underpinned by the prosperity of the grain trade. Different factions among the boyars looked for different foreign protectors - Poland, Transylvania, Constantinople, or Vienna. Loyalties were unstable, offices were bought and sold. The process culminated in the emergence of Phanariot rule, a system that was corrupt and inefficient, causing backwardness and encouraging dependence on foreign protectors.

With the decline of Ottoman power in the late eighteenth century, changes of a different kind began to affect the Romanian provinces. The most significant of these was the new cultural shift away from neo-Byzantine patterns to Western, particularly French styles. The Romanian political class thenceforward aspired to achieve modernization on Western models of enlightenment and absolutism, which they sought to implant in the very different political soil of the Balkans. No other European political community underwent two such major changes in its cultural aspirations in such a short period of time. These changes resulted in dislocations and discontinuities in Romania's political culture.5

The nineteenth century, despite the founding of an independent Romanian state at mid-century, did little to promote stronger loyalties

between ruler and ruled. The peasantry remained subject to the exactions of a state which did little or nothing for the great bulk of the population. Indeed, the degree of peasant dissatisfaction was shown by the 1907 uprising, the last jacquerie in Europe. The territorial enlargement of the Romanian state after World War I, including the annexation of Transylvania from Hungary, was primarily of benefit to the elite. Moreover, the Regatean elite of prewar Romania was not particularly welcoming toward the Transylvanian Romanians with their rather different, legalistic political culture imbibed in Hungary. The interwar state failed to promote either social or national integration. The political gap between elite bureaucrats and the people remained as pronounced as before, while the ethnically non-Romanian population, making up approximately thirty percent of Greater Romania, was given little incentive to develop a sense of loyalty to its new state.6

The post-World War II period has, of course, seen far-reaching improvements in the ability of the Romanian state to exercise control over the entire country. The rulers have at their disposal administrative instruments and means of communication undreamed of by King Carol and his regime. Yet, even in the Communist period, identification with the state, as distinct from the party or the nation, has tended to be weaker than in other East European countries. For many Romanians, the state remains a parasitical body and the power of the state is seen to be exploited for personal advantage.

Corruption in Communist systems is not, of course, confined to Romania. Nevertheless, Romania in the 1980s presents a unique spectacle of personalized rule by Nicolae Ceausescu and his extended family.

The innovations introduced by the Romanian party constitute a major divergence from orthodox Communist concepts of the state. According to classical Marxism-Leninism the party and the state should be kept separate and the party should exercise powers through an appointed "nomenklatura" (the ruling elite). The Romanians adopted a doctrine of intertwining the party and the state, even to the extent of occasionally subordinating the party to the state. This is unique in the Communist world.7

Seen against this background of a fractured historical development, the Romanian political culture has tended toward the construction of

systems of myths, symbols, and abstractions. One of the most persistent of these has been the concept of "national soul" and the "national specificity of the Romanian people."8 These abstractions tend to be put forward as axiomatic and incapable of empirical verification. It is particularly striking that these myth values are apparently freely accepted by the bulk of the Romanian intelligentsia and little attempt is made to question them, at any rate in public.9

In the context of Romanian-Hungarian relations, this mythicizing has had two major consequences. In the first place, it makes political communication complex and fraught with the danger of constant misunderstanding, a danger which is made all the greater because of the existence of parallel Hungarian myths.

The web of myths woven around this relationship on the Romanian side is such that all Hungarian utterances concerning Transylvania are interpreted as de facto irredentism. For Romanians, it is difficult to separate questions of historical or personal or sentimental interest in Transylvania from concrete expressions of Hungarian irredentism. Transylvania has become a mystical, abstract concept having little or nothing to do with the concrete reality of the situation. It is seen as the embodiment of everything that is good and worthy in the Romanian national soul, the cradle of the Romanian nation and the symbol of harmony which Romanians have always regarded as central to their own image of themselves. Transylvania is the mystical guarantor of Romanian-ness-"Romanity," that is-which in itself is a potentially mystical notion. To some extent, it may play even a different role for Transylvanian Romanians whose experiences at times set them apart from the Regateans. At any rate, non-Romanians are not welcome in Romanian Transylvania. And Romanian-Hungarian relations are further bedevilled by Romanian fear that the presence of a Hungarian population in Transylvania might once again provide a pretext for detaching part of it from Romania, as happened in 1940. By intensifying this fear, the Soviet Union has used the Romanian-Hungarian territorial conflict as a means of manipulating both countries to the advantage of Soviet imperialism.

In Romanian nationalist perceptions, since World War II the Soviet Union has triggered anxieties similar to those caused by Hungary. Again, the issues concern both territory and "Romanity." The Romanian territorial dispute with the Soviet Union over Bessarabia has similarities to its dispute with Hungary over Transylvania. And, while the Hungarians of Transylvania were seen as denationalizers, their

institutions seen as an offense to Romanian uniformity, the Soviet Union has been detested as the source of Slavicization, the continuing impediment to Romania's national self-realization. In addition, the Soviet Union is disliked as the source of an alien modernizing ideology, one which is completely at variance with Romanian populism, a significant current in the country's intellectual life.

Romanian nationalism as a dominant component of the ideology of that country's Communist party can be dated from the early 1960s. It had its positive and negative aspects. Under Communist rule, the Romanian state was an effective instrument for enforcing national integration, more so than its prewar predecessor had been. On the other hand, conformity with an ideology equating Romanian nationhood with Romanian citizenship as the sole criterion of true loyalty to the state, had a negative effect on the non-Romanian minorities. Inevitably, it exacerbated relations with Hungary, where these developments were viewed according to an entirely different set of criteria. 10

From the early 1960s onward, Romanian nationalism was expressed by means of the traditional abstract and symbolic language. Great stress was placed on national sovereignty as a fundamental value, ensuring the harmonious development of the Romanian nation. Even rapid industrialization acquired an abstract quality. It became a yardstick by which a variety of errors or injustices were justified, most notably the catastrophic neglect of agriculture. Slogans replaced substance. Ad hoc political considerations prevailed over technical rationality. Grandiose developments, like a large petrochemical industry, acted as a facade of modernity, behind which political relations remained authoritarian and arbitrary. The frustrations resulting from the Ceausescu strategy of rapid industrialization were channeled into the mysticism of official nationalism, encouraging propaganda campaigns, such as the Cantece Romania (A Song for Romania).

The clearest expression of mysticism in Romanian culture and its application to politics can be found in the so-called "traditionalist" school of thought. It dates back to the late nineteenth century and it constitutes a far-from-negligible source of values in Romania today. Traditionalism denied the possibility of applying rational criteria to the decoding of political, economic, and social phenomena, but argued that the glorification of nationhood, mysticism and contempla-

tion transcended reason.11 The clearest expression of this is to be found in the poem Miorita, a hymn to self-sacrifice and communion with nature, which exalts passivity, spirituality, and irrationalism.12 The philosopher Lucian Blaga defined the "mioritic" space as the Romanian dimension of existence, "a mystical existence of reunion with nature," with its stress on "contemplation, disregarding and ignoring history's temporal dimensions."13 For the protagonists of traditionalism, there was no room in the Romanian way of life for democracy or parliamentarianism. The introduction of Western institutions was pointless, because they constituted only "forms" which ignored the Romanian "content." Individual or group action, social autonomy, and the existence of intermediate institutions between state and society could have no room in that scheme of things.

Today, neo-traditionalism coexists comfortably with Communist party rule, indeed, in some respects, it offers a highly satisfactory ideology for conformist intellectuals who can thereby justify their passivity and cooptation. Also, one of its central components is xenophobia. In current practice, this emerges as covert anti-Russian sentiment and overt anti-Hungarianism, as well as anti-Semitism. It argues that because Transylvania has always been a Romanian land indeed, the quintessential Romanian land - the other national groups that live there are there only by the good grace of the majority. They are intrinsically strangers and always will be. Any assertion of minority rights or demands that the minority be accorded powers of autonomy, even those which can be reconciled with the dictates of Marxist "democratic centralism," are at best treated with incomprehension and at worst as irredentism.

A recent work by Ion Lancranjan illustrates this tendency very clearly. He takes issue, for example, with a Transylvanian Hungarian writer who had claimed that he had been brought up in Transylvania "in the spirit of Hungarian culture" in a community that was 99 percent Hungarian. To Lancranjan, this was an impossibility, for that spirit of Hungarian culture never existed in Transylvania.14 The implications are illuminating. Hungarian-ness cannot and should not exist as an autonomous value system in a Romanian land, and insofar as the rights of the Hungarian minority should be respected, these must always be subordinated to Romanian political and cultural interests. Another member of the neo-traditionalist current, Adrian Paunescu, who has distinguished himself by his performance as Ceau-

sescu's court poet, went so far as to extend the argument over Transylvania into outright irredentism. Paunescu rhetorically complained: "Why does Romania have truncated rivers?"15 To Romanian ears this is an allusion to the unfulfilled promise of the secret Treaty of Bucharest of 1916, in which, as a price for Romanian participation on the Entente side in World War I, the great powers promised Romania a western frontier all the way to the Tisza River. Paunescu's complaint expresses a lingering Romanian resentment at the failure of the Entente powers to keep their promise.

Although there are some features of the Hungarian political culture that resemble its Romanian counterpart, there are others which are very different. Among the latter, the most significant has been the different development of the Hungarian concept of the state.

The Hungarian state, too, was alienated from the population socially, yet it retained or recovered its native quality. The unbroken tradition of the Hungarian nobility (both the aristocracy and the gentry) ensured a continuity in perceptions of the state from medieval to modern times. The conservatism of the gentry stood in the way of modernization in the nineteenth century, yet at the same time it was the bedrock of continuity and contributed to the survival of the concept of a native state. During the lengthy periods when Hungary was divided and ruled by foreigners, the perception of Transylvania was particularly significant. Having played a crucial role in the survival of the Hungarian national community, Transylvania came to be regarded as the repository of many authentic Hungarian values.

After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Hungary became for all practical purposes autonomous. This meant that a much stronger native political class could emerge to rule the state and to begin the process of modernization. Hungarian society - the peasantry in particular - certainly regarded the activities of this elite as exploitative and parasitical, but it did not consider the state as alien and illegitimate. The state was accepted as a native Hungarian institution. Furthermore, more successfully than the Romanians, the Hungarian elite did create middle social strata. Albeit never as important as in the West, they did serve as bridges between the elite and the people below.

The Hungarian elite, unlike the Romanian, based its residual power, before the Compromise, on an authentic native institution, the county (megye) system. Despite repeated attempts by the Habsburgs to break down this bastion of gentry power, the conservative nobiliary class successfully defended it. A somewhat analogous, though probably vaguer, role was played by the Hungarian Diet, representing the elite's "ancient liberties." These factors contributed to the emergence of a key feature of Hungarian political culture - litigousness and legalism. That, in turn, implied the existence of tribunals which were at least partially autonomous and therefore not the creatures of the rulers. All these features were absent from Romanian development.

Religion, too, played different roles in the history of the two nations. Unlike Orthodoxy in Romania, neither Roman Catholicism nor Protestantism in Hungary was subjected to the state and therefore neither could be readily transformed into value systems of the state. Both religions offered political refuge for those threatened by the Habsburgs. But since the Habsburgs stood for the extension of Roman Catholicism, Calvinism assumed functions of a semi-national religion, especially in Transylvania and eastern Hungary. The different role played by religion, coupled with differences in the development of feudalism, lay behind another distinctive aspect of Hungarian culture, namely the traditional notion of peasant autonomy, which relied ultimately on the protection of the Hungarian crown. Here the contrast with Romanian traditional passivity, only occasionally punctuated by spasmodic uprisings, is very striking.

The challenge of modernization beginning in the nineteenth century pulled Hungary toward a corporatist state controlled by a native elite. While much of Hungarian society was excluded from political participation, the native elite, including elements of the intelligentsia, succeeded in developing an ethos of self-determination, a claim to control their destiny as a nation. During the period of Austro-Hungarian Dualism, this self-image went even further and Hungarians saw themselves as carriers of a civilizing mission in the central Danubian region.

That particular myth, which was expressed in the concept of the Crownlands of St. Stephen and the thousand years of Hungarian imperium, was shattered by Hungary's partition after World War I. Nevertheless, it was kept alive by the revisionist ideology of the post-

war Horthy regime. The collapse of the Horthy system in World War II destroyed the stratum that had kept this ideology alive and thereafter the concept of the Crownlands disappeared from Hungarian political thinking. However, this did not mean the abandonment of interest in those Hungarians now beyond the frontiers, it merely evoked a reformulation of the problem. If integral revisionism was discredited, the concept of a single cultural community of Hungarians, with no political arriere-pensees involved, arose to take its place.16

The argument, propagated since Hungary's partition, that all Hungarians of the Danube region were an organic part of a broader community of language and culture always found ready echo in Hungary itself. It was not, in the same way, quite so acceptable in Transylvania, where autonomist currents of Transylvanianism existed as long as the Romanian state did not require a total identification of loyalty to the state with loyalty to the Romanian nation. Obviously, there were Hungarians who wished for the reattachment of Transylvania to Hungary. Influential Hungarian elements sought, however, safeguards of Hungarian cultural life in Romania as an end in itself. Such a separation of cultural and political loyalties was not just unacceptable but incomprehensible to Romanians. Hungarians could make a distinction between state and nation because of their confidence in their state and nation. Romanians, on the other hand, feeling insecure and blending as they did the two concepts of state and nation, automatically assumed that the Hungarians were only dissimulating their irredentist aims, just as the Romanians were disguising their intentions toward Bessarabia in the various pseudo-historical debates of the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, the concept of the Hungarian nation is based on the assumption of one community of Hungarians transcending boundaries of states. Occasionally, expressions of nationalism promoting this community of all Hungarians may seem to justify Romanian fears of Hungarian intentions. Such fears were triggered, for instance, by the Hungarian celebrations on the occasion of the return of the Crown of St. Stephen to Hungary in 1978 from its place of safekeeping in the United States. And, in 1982 an article in the Budapest daily Magyar Nemzet on St. Stephen,s Day (August 20) had the same effect. The article spoke of the community of Hungarians, wherever they may live throughout the world. Unmistakably, the author was

less than enthusiastic about the fact that the Hungarian state founded by St. Stephen did not encompass today the entire community of the Hungarian people.17

On the other hand, Hungarian fears of Romanian intentions are kept alive by the policy of the Romanian state. As Romanian state policy became increasingly oppressive even toward its own people in the 1970s, the Hungarian minority suffered under the dual hardship of national as well as socioeconomic persecution.

The Hungarians of Transylvania are doubly unacceptable to the Romanian majority. They are rejected as not belonging to the dominant cultural-political community of a state in which the ruling ethos places great stress on loyalty to a transcendental concept of nationhood overshadowing civic duties. And, at the same time, they are rejected because they constitute a potential or actual source of competing values which are readily branded alien to the majority. The very demand for cultural autonomy - the chance of being allowed to live a Hungarian life - is unacceptable from this perspective.

Thus, from the Romanian viewpoint, the only long-term solution that makes sense is the disappearance of the Hungarian minority. This is unacceptable to the Hungarian minority and is equally intolerable to the Hungarians of Hungary. Hence, the Romanian-Hungarian conflict will persist, with all its risks of regional destabilization - including external intervention - and subordination of democratic goals to nationalistic manipulations.

II Transylvania's Hungarians in Communist Romania

On paper, the legal provisions made by Communist Romania for the minorities look generous and sensible. Article 17 of the Romanian Constitution states:

The citizens of the Socialist Republic of Romania, irrespective of their nationality, race, sex or religion shall have equal rights in all fields of economic, political, juridical, social and cultural life. . . . Any attempt at establishing restrictions [on the rights of minorities], at nationalist-chauvinist propaganda and at fomentation of racial or national hatred shall be punished by law.

To that, Article 22 adds:

In the Socialist Republic of Romania the coinhabiting nationalities shall be assured the free use of their mother tongue, as well as books, newspapers, periodicals, theatres, and education at all levels in their own languages. In territorial-administrative units also inhabited by population of non-Romanian nationality, all the bodies and institutions shall use in speech and in wnting the language of the nationality concerned and shall appoint officials from its ranks or from among other citizens who know the language and way of life of the local population.

These constitutional provisions are reinforced by a battery of other laws and decrees. Formal statements of official policy on the rights of minorities are further supplemented by Communist party documents and by high level statements today deriving exclusively from the party leader and head of state, Nicolae Ceausescu.

Transylvania's principal non-Romanian ethnic group whose existence as a nationality depends on the observance of the constitutional provisions for the minorities is the Hungarians. The population pattern in Transylvania is extremely complex. Its total population numbers around 7 million, the majority of which-around three-fifths is Romanian. The bulk of the rest is Hungarian (around 2 million); there is a German minority of perhaps 400,000, and there are smaller minorities of Serbs and Ukrainians, and other much smaller groups of Slovaks, Czechs, Bulgarians, and until relatively recently there were thought to be several thousand Armenians. There is also an unspecified number of Gypsies. Many of the settlements are nationally mixed and there are comparatively few communes which do not contain a minority population of at least one nationality. All urban settlements are mixed and the dynamic urbanization has ensured that the composition of several towns has undergone changes favoring the Romanians over the last thirty years. Bilingualism is thought not to be uncommon and this includes many members of the Romanian majority as well. In the Banat, individuals sometimes grow up speaking all three major languages -Romanian, Hungarian, and German. 18 While the primary badge of loyalty and national self-identification is linguistic and cultural, religion does play an important reinforcing role in Transylvania. The overwhelming majority of Romanians are Orthodox, while Hungarians and Germans are Catholic and Protestant. Religious adherence has come to be identified with national and cultural loyalties. Churches have tended to be regarded as national institutions which have helped to underpin national cultures, and

attacks on religious life - whether before or after the Communist takeover - have always been interpreted in national as much as religious terms.

The general principle according to which Communist states are supposed to treat their national minorities is derived from the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of primacy of class over that of nation. In Romania's case, this doctrine was initially interpreted as a call for providing the Hungarian minority with extensive cultural facilities of their own. On the other hand, from the outset, it was made evident that the Hungarian-language educational network was to teach a Romanian Communist culture in Hungarian. As early as 1948, history textbooks were being revised to stress the Romanian as against the Hungarian version of the history of Transylvania.

Stephen Borsody: The Hungarians: A Divided Nation