In June 1920, when the Trianon Peace Treaty balkanized the eastern portion of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, three million ethnic Magyars were arbitrarily catapulted into three successor states — Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. Some 700,000 Magyars became citizens of Czechoslovakia's eastern province, Slovakia. By 1930, the Magyars had diminished to only 580,000. The situation at the present time is virtually unchanged. [1]
This study examines Slovakia's Magyar minority as a typical example of diaspora nationalism surviving in a hostile environment, and investigates the social dynamics that have protected the Magyars from the material lures of homogenization by the larger, ruling Slovak majority.
The post-World War II era created an unsympathetic milieu for an even-handed consideration of minority problems In Eastern Europe. Both East and West erroneously- condemned European minority problems as one of the principal causes of World War II. At the 1947 peace conference, hostile world public opinion inhibited the erection of minorities guarantees, as the Versailles treaties had done a generation earlier. Consequently, though nothing was revoked, nothing new was legislated. The minorities protection clauses thus remained in force, but they were ignored, and tarred with the unpopular brush of being only a "German problem." Thus the postwar era inaugurated a new philosophy in minority policy — that IP cynical neglect.
Consequently, East European governments showed no inclination to distinguish between ethnically fragmented newcomers and traditionally established ethnic minorities, whose citizenship had shifted only in consequence of changed national boundaries. The Magyar ethnic minorities in the Carpathian Basin are a classical example of this latter category. They reside in compact settlement patterns in three countries adjacent to Hungary; they possess a very strongly developed sense of collective national self-consciousness and appreciation of Magyar historical traditions; and a desire to preserve the Magyar language and culture. Successfully defying assimil-atory pressures after both wars, these Magyars not only refused to surrender their traditional ethnic loyalties, they have maintained and even strengthened them over time.
In the Socialist countries, nationality policies until the mid-1960s were governed by a system best described as "automatism." According to this approach, minority problems disappear automatically with the successful revolutionary transformation of class society. In the past decade, Socialist leaders have sensed that harmonious multi-national coexistence demanded more than a just economic transformation and respect for individual human rights. In vain did these governments erect economic and political safeguards for their minorities. In practice, innumerable petty nationalistic frictions and grievances exacerbated inter-ethnic relations and eroded mutual trust. This was particularly true in Eastern Europe, which boasts as many minority policies as there are Socialist countries. In each state, solutions have varied, depending on local traditions, interests, and prejudices; and in each, putative solutions addressed only abstractions rather than systematic, practical solutions.
In Czechoslovakia, economic variables have long been relegated to the background as Magyar minority policy determinants. Currently, the Magyar ethnic struggle centres chiefly on restoring the declining quality and quantity of minority schools, rescuing the diminishing niveau of Magyar culture, and, to a lesser extent, redressing the negative consequences of mixed marriages and internal migrations. In Slovakia, a natural dichotomy cleaves the aims of the assimilatory Slovak majority, some four million strong, and the endangered but determined Magyar ethnic minority. Both wish to solve the dilemma through the application of various Marxist nostrums. The Magyars, for example, seek to achieve cultural autonomy and establish a network of minority organizations. The Slovaks reject such a solution, and cite Lenin's turn-of-the-century dictum spurning cultural self-determination for ethnic minorities.
The Magyars, therefore, have no need at present to restore such basic privileges as human rights, equality before the law, or education in the mother tongue. At stake is the far more subtle matter of preserving Magyar as a language of quality. At peril is its deterioration into a rustic kitchen language. A minority society that lacks ethnic universities must compensate in some way, or run the risk that eventually even its intelligentsia will come to grief and adopt primitive speech patterns.
To the chagrin of minorities, classical Marxism plays into the hands of ruling majorities. Classical Marxist thinkers maintain that the Revolution will inevitably establish uniling-ualism in each nation for the sake of convenience. Minorities must expedite this process by voluntarily assimilating into the majority stream on pain of being labelled reactionaries. The Czechoslovak Marxist writer Sindelka has elaborated this view. [2]
According to Sindelka, assimilatory processes evolve through three phases. First, mutual antagonisms disappear. Second, ethnic groups become better acquainted. Third, they fuse; Leu, the smaller group adopts the cultural standards of the larger unit. Of course, Sindelka's paradigm embodies certain fundamental flaws. The second phase assumes reciprocity and parity, a condition totally lacking in Slovakia. Whereas most Magyars know the Slovak language and culture, very few Slovaks know Magyar. Few Slovaks are taught Magyar in the schools, yet Slovak is a compulsory subject in every Magyar institution. Even Slovak historians are no longer familiar with the Magyar language, though one thousand years of intimate links with the Magyars would certainly dictate a mastery of that tongue for purely practical and professional reasons, if for no other.
Sindelka reproves minorities for wishing to defend themselves against assimilation. He deems it bourgeois nationalism if a minority wishes to maintain its ethnic isolation, conserve its national distinctions, and support its own national development at all cost, without exercising due regard for a process of inter-ethnic rapprochement. [3]
Of course, minorities everywhere must reject Sixtdelka's proposition. Why sacrifice their ethnic identity to the Utopian assimilatory aims of a well-meaning albeit naive majority ? Sindelka's second phase encounters other difficulties. The majority always has better opportunities to conserve and fan antagonisms. In Slovakia, the establishment systematically keeps ethnic hatreds at fever pitch. The latest example is Samuel Cambel's 1972 book, [4] which approves all the worst excesses perpetrated by Slovak anti-Magyar persecutors after World War II. In the past, the Slovak Communist Party has roundly condemned such outrages. It has failed to do so now.
The present situation of Slovakia's Magyar minority requires a brief historical elucidation. After World War II., Slovakia possessed two important minorities — the Germans and the Magyars. The Germans were singled out as the primary culprits and punished accordingly; but the Magyars were not far behind. Czechoslovakia's first postwar regime practiced unabashed discrimination, vowing to annihilate Slovakia's Magyar ethnic establishment through compulsory expatriation. A series of expulsion laws deprived Magyars of their legal and cultural rights, and exposed their properties to limitless expropriation. Over a 3 1/2-year span, the Magyars lost all their cultural establishments, such as schools and newspapers. The educated elite thereupon fled to Hungary. In the spring of 1949, when Slovakia's Magyars gained a slight reprieve, they had to reconstruct their cultural base from the bottom. It took years for the Magyar minority school system to reach even remotely acceptable standards.
But in the interim, forced expatriation had wrought almost irreparable havoc. In the winter of 1946-1947, some 45,000 expropriated Magyars were forcibly resettled to the Sudetenland as agricultural servants, though to be sure, subsequently many were permitted to return. Even more harmful was the Hungarian-Czechoslovak population exchange treaty of 1947 and 1948. Of Hungary's 170,000 Slovaks, 73,000 voluntarily resettled to Slovakia. But in Slovakia, only 6,000 Magyars wished to emigrate to Hungary. About 68,000 more were forcibly deported. [5]
This large exodus shook the Magyar ethnic establishment in Slovakia. Many purely Magyar localities became ethnically mixed communities, because Magyar emigrants' properties were usually usurped by newly arrived Slovaks. Currently, at least 150 formerly purely Magyar villages are linguistically mixed, though some of the Slovak settlers moved, while others fused with the Magyar majority.
The removal of Magyars from agricultural properties after World War II rested on precedents established in the interwar period. The first Czechoslovak Republic attempted to settle Slovak peasants on formerly Magyar-owned large landed estates, in order to extend the Slavic ethnic boundary line ever more southward. [6]
Even so, the Magyar cultural condition was better then. Today, 80% of Slovakia's Magyar children attend Magyar schools; about 90% did so in the interwar period. [7]
The demand for Magyar reading matter was relatively modest then, yet more books, newspapers, and literary gazettes were available than currently. The Magyars even had their own scientific institute, the Masaryk Academy, and Magyar was taught on a higher professional niveau in the middle schools than now.
Economically, however, Magyars were second-class citizens in the old republic. According to the 1930 census, there were 181.8 Slovak day labourers (proletarians) per 1,000 employees, and 67.9 office workers. The Magyar share was 245.5 proletarians per 1,000 employees and only 40.3 office workers. Recently, a more evenhanded balance has been struck, whereby Magyars and Slovaks are treated as economic equals in every respect. It is only in the cultural arena where contemporary Magyars are fighting a seemingly losing battle. In sum, during the first republic, Magyars were first-class citizens culturally, but were discriminated against economically. Today, the reverse is true. This certainly challenges the claims of automatism that the minority question must be left alone, because inequality only involved class, never ethnicity. Ethnicity was allegedly one of those problems the Revolution would solve in a roundabout fashion by attacking economic injustice.
Other, more subtle factors, must also be considered in evaluating the current status of the Magyar minority. In the fall of 1948, when the Magyars were once again recognized as bona fide Czechoslovak citizens, a slow, measured ethnic improvement began, although substantial results could not be discerned until about ten years had elapsed. For instance, during the 1950 census, only 350,000 respondents dared to declare themselves Magyars. By 1961, they approached the half-million mark. This accretion certainly did not result from greatly-augmented Magyar fertility rates, but from having fears of ethnic persecution allayed.
Yet even the Magyar struggle for economic equality was far from smooth. Generally speaking, at war's end, the industrial plant in Magyar-inhabited regions was anachronistic. About 60% of the Magyar population practiced agriculture. By 1950, only 55% did so, and thanks to the great subsequent industrial spurt, by 1961, only 40% of the Magyar populace engaged in agricultural pursuits. Nonetheless, the Magyar community has retained predominantly agricultural characteristics to this day. The most telling proof of this is that far fewer Magyars past the age of fourteen continue to be educated than their Slovak counterparts, and Magyar female employment trails the Slovaks'. The 1970 census confirms these statistics. [8]
Certainly, contemporary trends in Czechoslovak society work strongly against the preservation of Magyar ethnicity. Some of the most revealing data concern education. In 1965, slightly more than one out of five Magyar children attended non-Magyar schools. The situation improved only marginally by 1970, when 17,000 pupils of Czechoslovakia's total Magyar student body of 86,000 were enrolled mainly in Slovak schools. This steady erosion of Magyar youth poses a serious potential survival problem, especially since the Magyar live birth rate in 1970 was lower than the Slovak (16 per 1,000 vs. 19 per 1,000). Consequently, the Magyar under-fourteen age group constitutes only 24.5% of the total Magyar population, whereas the Slovak proportion is nearly 27%. The Magyar population increase has declined from an annual 5,000 before the 1970s to only 4,200 annually at the present time, and will certainly continue to diminish in future.
Internal migration, and to a lesser extent, inter-marriage, also exacerbated the process of Magyar ethnic erosion. Magyar migrants, numbering about 1,000 annually, are usually rural folk seeking better opportunities in the industrial centres of Bohemia, Moravia, and ethnically Slovak northern Slovakia. Second-generation migrant Magyars tend to assimilate into the predominantly Slavic ethnic stream. One-fourth of the uprooted Magyars marry members of other ethnic groups. The 1970 census found that 52,000 professed Slovaks listed their mother tongue as Magyar, whereas only 4,000 individuals claiming to be Magyars were born Slovaks. Despite these unfavourable auguries, the Magyar ethnic body has kept itself remarkably intact, mainly because the Magyars do live in large, contiguous ethnic blocs adjoining Hungary. [9]
The question arises, is a nationally-conscious, compact, and sizable ethnic minority, such as Slovakia's Magyars, justified in seeking cultural autonomy as a corporate body, or should they be content with enjoying equality before the law as individuals? Currently, Czechoslovakia's Magyar minority is suspended in a constitutional limbo. The preamble to Nationality Law 144 of 1968 suggests that nationalities indeed compose the Czechoslovak nation, but the various laws and ileges pertain only to individual citizens. The question reus, therefore, are the authorities planning to constrict or expand privileges pertaining to the use of ethnic languages? The new constitution of 1 January 1969, has failed to elucidate this point, thus resurrecting Magyar fears that the repressive views and practices of 1940-1955 might yet be rekindled.
The real problem of ethnic survival boils down to the fact that the Magyar cultural establishment is decidedly second-rate. The schools are basically at fault. Neither the Magyar elementary nor the secondary schools offer sufficiently sophisticated Magyar instruction for admission into university. Ambitious Magyar youngsters have few options. There is no Magyar university in Czechoslovakia, and they are forbidden to attend institutes of higher learning in Hungary. This imperils the survival chances of a cultivated Magyar language la Chechoslovakia. Lacking higher education, the Magyars urgently require optimum-quality, dynamic cultural organizations to act as substitutes. But CSEMADOK, the official Magyar cultural parent organization, has been severely curtailed. Before 1970, as a member of the National Front, it could create branches dealing with cultural and scholarly concerns. It sponsored the Sociological Society, the Economic Society, and the Historical Society. Only the latter has survived and members must publish only in Slovak. After 1971, CSEMADOK was forced out of the National Front, and the government decided that its jurisdiction must remain exclusively cultural. Currently, CSEMADOK is only permitted to sponsor folklore studies and political mass-indoctrination programmes all under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Education. This constitutes a breach of Article 5 of the Czechoslovak Constitution, which explicitly grants ethnic minorities the privilege to maintain special interest groups. Today, Magyar members function on a joint Czechoslovak nationality board, where they are vastly outnumbered.
There is a Czechoslovak Magyar press, but it is severely curtailed in quality, if not in quantity. There are currently eighteen popular Magyar dailies and periodicals, but none satisfies sophisticated, let alone scholarly tastes. This contrasts sharply with other non-Magyar countries, as for example Yugoslavia, where nearly half-million Magyars enjoy the highly sophisticated and competent periodical Létünk. One exception in Czechoslovakia in an otherwise bleak and unpromising intellectual landscape is a lively and growing development in belle lettres; yet even this medium is inadequate.
The Magyars also lack an effective printed forum in their own language to investigate and publicize sundry grievances. All these limitations have caused and continue to preserve the Magyars second-rate cultural status.
The Magyars' cultural relegation is not the fault of Socialism. To blame is the recrudescence of postwar nationalism, and the mutual antagonisms it has unleashed. This is a reality one must accept in southeastern Europe. The intensity of nationalistic feelings among the region's minorities is in direct proportion to the level of chauvinism practiced by the majority peoples among whom they live, and to the geographic boundaries and historical traditions over which they clash. The nationalism of the majorities frequently masquerades behind the facade of dogmatism, as the Hungarian historian, Zs. P. Pach has observed:
Unfortunately, daily praxis and experience have shown, whether we contemplate our proximate neighbours, or whether we cast our glance farther east, how strongly and conclusively sectarian dogmatism and nationalism coexist. [10]
The nationalism of Czechoslovakia's Magyars grew out of the crucible of certain circumstances and stimuli. It began in 1920, when the new Trianon frontiers confronted them with two painful realities: They had ceased belonging to a nation, whose members had exercised undisputed authority over other peoples for one thousand years. Suddenly, the assimilators became an insecure minority, in fear of their ethnic survival. The other unpleasant reality was that the Magyar minority lost some 100,000 of its most valuable members. Voluntary exodus and forced settlement to Hungary deprived the Magyars of their intelligentsia, The remaining few leaders had difficulty reconciling the Magyar masses to their loss. The Magyars never accepted the new order, and the flames of nationalism flickered beneath the surface of enforced submission throughout the interwar period. In 1938, the Magyars' thin veneer of loyalty to Czech rule cracked, and they readily participated in the destruction of the Czechoslovak state.
Magyar nationalism was thus stimulated in the interwar era by hostile feelings and separatist expectations. The postwar persecutions merely confirmed and strengthened these sentiments, Undoubtedly, persecutions and inferiority feelings provided the psychological breeding grounds for the creation of a defensive in-group mentality among Slovakia's Magyars. In-group sentiments frequently goad a persecuted people into a bond of common misery and hatred of the oppressor. Fortunately, Magyar minority nationalism is currently in no position to defy the rights, privileges, and culture of the ruling Slovak majority, At the same time, token solutions proposed by the Slovaks, such as demanding perfect bilingual-ism of the Magyars, will never replace genuine trust and respect, which are the true prerequisites of durable sectarian peace.
It is the grey area of psychological loss, manifested by cultural deprivation, that serves Slovak-Magyar parity least, and feeds Magyar minority nationalism most. Magyars are perturbed because Magyars-Slovak historical traditions clash, and historians keep these differences alive. Clashing myths have emerged aplenty because copious common Magyar-Slovak historical experiences, such as the 1848-1849 Revolution, and the 1946-1048 pre-Marxist period, have evoked different emphases and interpretations from their respective historians, and given rise to competing, even hoetile, value systems. In this crucial controversy, the Magyars have been made to appear as history's culprits. Their past oppressions against minorities have been overemphasised and overdramatiaed by Slovak historiographers, whereas the Magyars' cultural contribution in the past millenium for the common good they have totally ignored. All this reinforces Magyar inferiority feelings, and stokes the fires of nationalism. Deprived of effective media in one field, the Magyars overoompensetee in another, and exploit whatever opportunities come their way. Magyar strides in belle lettres and elaborate schemes to preserve every single facet of Magyar ethnic peculiarities and folk customs are typical manifestations in the growth of this diaspora nationalism. To this extent, nationalism and socialist patriotism are destined to clash, especially if Magyar inferiority feelings permeate the masses.
These inferiority feelings have gradually crept into the Magyar consciousness by degrees over the past few decades. Inferiority feelings have made such strides because the Magyar minority question in Slovakia has been relegated to limbo and suspended there. Socialist literature is forbidden to discuss the minority problem in concrete terms, and at best, does so only in the nature of philosophical abstractions. There are no guidelines to govern the behaviour of either the minority or the majority. Should a minority possess extraordinary constitutional privileges? If so, what criteria should be used? Should all minorities have similar rights, regardless of numbers or distribution patterns, whether they live scattered throughout the nation or in compact ethnic blocs? Should minorities be permitted to organize along ethnic lines? Are they a corporate body, or merely a collection of individual citizens speaking a different tongue? It has caused great harm to ignore these questions and treat minorities in a cavalier fashion, assuming that they are mere relics from the bourgeois past, whom industrialization, technology, and urbanization will ultimately extinguish, and thereby eliminate as a point of friction. Indeed, it is chimerical to suppose that any human force might eradicate so many centuries of ethnic acculturation and national traditions within mere decades.
On the contrary. The scientific-technological revolution, which many have hoped would eliminate minorities from sundry national scenes, has certain characteristics which actually help preserve ethnic and other peculiarities. Thanks to having been goaded into sentiments of rejection and feelings of inferiority by the Slovak majority, Slovakia's Magyars have responded in classical fashion. They are in the midst of forging a brand of diaspora nationalism, the intensity and success of which will largely depend on the negative stimuli which the Slovak majority in future brings to bear. As for the biological survival of the Magyar minority, there appears to be no danger of extinction.
The Magyars might enjoy lower birth rates than the Slovaks, but in absolute numbers they continue to increase annually. Thus the controversy cannot be settled either by biological nostrums, or by environmental forces. Only forthright action by the power-wielding Slovak majority can determine the course and intensity of Slovakia's Magyar diaspora nationalism in the years to come.
Jelsava, Czechoslovakia
Translated and edited by Thomas Spira, University of Prince Edward Island
1. Demograflcka prirucka (Prague, 1966), p. 46.
2. Jan Sindelka, Narodnostni otazka a socializmus (Prague, 1966).
3. Ibid., p. 287.
4. Slovenska agrarna otazka 1944-1948 (Bratislava, 1972).
5. Juraj Zvara, A magyar nemzetisegi kerdes megoldasa Szlovakiaban (Bratislava, 1965), passim.
6. Faltus-Prucha, Prehlad hospodarskeho vyvoja na Slovensku v rokoch 3918-1945 (Bratislava, 1967), p. 138.
7. Zdenka Holotikova, "Niektore problemy slovenskej politiky v rokoch 1921-1926", Historicity Casopis. 3 (1966), passim.
8. Although only 34.7% of the Magyar population engaged in rural occupations by then, the Slovaks, with only 18.6%, were infinitely better off. Moreover, 35.2% of the Slovaks were industrially employed, compared with only 22.8% of the Magyars. Demografla, 4 (Prague, 1971), passim.
9. According to the 1970 census, 83% of the Magyars live in 442 villages, where they form the ethnic majority. In 92 other villages, Magyars comprise substantial minorities. Ibid, and Deme Laszlo, Nyelvi es nyelvhasznalati gondjainkrol (Bratislava, 1970), pp. 272-273.
10. Kortárs (Budapest, January 1974).
Source: Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism III, no.1 (1975-1976) 34-44
{jumi [NZONLINE/addfb.php]}{jcomments on}