Claim:
Us Hungarians have always been innocent throughout history
Rebuttal:
Others didn’t betray us more often than we betrayed others or even ourselves.
Others didn’t let us down more often than we betrayed others or even ourselves. Obviously, Hungarian society has never been unified, just like other societies – neither before nor after becoming a nation. A well known example is the indifference of the aristocracy in the face of the Ottoman threat, and even the common middle nobility cherished its tax exemptions too much to contribute to the financial burdens of fighting against the Turks. We have written before about the Hungarian pro-Ottoman politicians, who were important supporters for the forced Catholicisation carried out by the Habsburgs, with Péter Pázmány at the forefront. Metternich, usually cast as the greatest enemy of Hungary, was supported by Hungarian conservative aristocrats, church leaders, nobles and towns. The oppressive Bach regime following the failure of 1848 also had its Hungarian supporters. The concept that there was widespread ’passive resistence’ has been relegated to the world of historic legends.
It is also wrong to look at the treaty of Trianon as the result of some international anti-Hungarian conspiracy that had nothing to do with what had been going on in Hungary and at the frontlines. The question whether and to what extent Hungary’s earlier treatment of ethnic minorities played a part in what happened in Trianon is hotly debated by historians. It is a fact that the number of schools teaching in the languages of the ethnic minorities was halved in the pre-WW1 period, while the actual number of minorities had increased. This and similar measures didn’t do much to motivate ethnic minorities to want to stay under Hungarian rule, and it doesn’t do to say that most contemporary states were acting even more unfairly towards their minorities or to cite the even more drastic anti-Hungarian policies of the newly created nation states after 1918. But even if we say that Hungarian internal dynamics played no role in the outcome of Trianon, it was still not a product of a hostile conspiracy but the international trends such as the creation of nation states and the lost war. (More on the road that led to Trianon in Miklós Zeidler: Képletek egy megoldhatatlan egyenlethez.)
The responsibility of Hungary is more obvious to see when we look at the outcome of the next world war. Hungary attacked the Soviet Union and declared war on the US of its own free will, before it was even demanded of it by Germany. Then it tried to exit the war like Romania or Finland but failed – all this put the country in an unfavourable light at the peace conference. There were leading Hungarian politicians involved in the deportation and killing of hundreds of thousabds of Hungarian Jews and then the deportation of the ethnic Germans, not to mention the thousands taking an active part in the practical carrying out of these atrocities and the millions looking on passively, many hungrily grabbing the properties of the deported. (More on these see here and here.)
Moreover, Hungary itself has a history of betraying others. True, most of the time it was in no position to actively help other peoples and countries, but even when it was, it sometimes failed to do so. We can be proud of providing asylum to the Serbs fleeing from the Turks throughout the 14th-17th centuries, the Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia (1914), the Polish and French soldiers fleeing from the Germans (1939-40) and opening the western border to the East Germans in 1989. However, the leading Hungarian politicians in the pre-WW1 period had little compassion for the Czech cause, so similar to the Hungarian one, and they actively supported the annexation of Bosnia, even though the Bosnians didn’t want to be part of Austria-Hungary.
István Bibó was right in criticising the small nations of this region, the Hungarians among them, for ’showing the world their wounds acquired from Attila, the Ottomans, in defense of European freedom or democracy when they were held accountable for their internal mess, dictatorships and oppression’, and also when he said that ’the role of the victim of unfairness’ is one of ’the most fruitless psychological positions’, moreover, it is based on self-deception. Yet Hungarian history is glorious enough so that we wouldn’t need to lie to aourselves about it. (About this see A családáruló testvér.)
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