THE ASSESSMENT OF HUNGARY IN GREAT-BRITAIN (1848-1956) - SPECIALIZATION
Brief History of Hungary (1848-1956)
1. The last 75 years
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The period, three decades and more, preceding this change is associated with the name of János Kádár, the Party boss (his official titles changed from time to time) who had come to power with the aid of Soviet tanks in 1956. In the latter part of his long rule he managed to turn Hungary into the most cheerful prison block behind the Iron Curtain, slightly relaxing travel restrictions -- but passports valid for more than one specific journey abroad, to the West, were in general not issued until 1988 -- and stepping up the supply of consumer goods at the cost of incurring excessive foreign debts. In the last years of this period limited small-scale private enterprise was also tolerated.
Kádár had come to power after Hungary's attempt to shake off Communism, in October 1956, had failed: additional units of the Red Army were moved in (at the behest of Soviet Ambassador Andropov, and in accordance with operational plans already prepared in July that year), to crush the popular uprising that demanded democracy, free elections and neutrality in international affairs. The West sympathised, but did nothing: Britain and France were busy waving the flag at Suez, the USA was electing a new President. In the aftermath tens of thousands were imprisoned, thousands 'vanished' into the Soviet Union, and many hundreds, including Imre Nagy Prime Minister for a few heady days, were executed. And some 200 thousand people, about 2 per cent of the population, mainly young (their average age was just over twenty), qualified and enterprising, fled to the West.
Communist rule was established in Hungary in 1948-49, somewhat above three years after the Soviet Red Army had liberated the country -- with much raping of women, looting of the population's belongings, and rounding up of civilian men to boost the number of POWs taken to the levels expected by Stalin -- in 1945. It then remained in occupation, augmented with units of the NKVD (the later KGB), initially to supervise the dismantling and removal to the USSR of most of what industrial infrastructure had not been destroyed during the war. At the General Election held in September 1945 the Communist Party had received only 17% of the popular vote, but using salami tactics (move towards power a small slice at a time), and backed by Soviet pressure and assistance, it gradually eliminated (often physically) all non-Communists -- and especially those who had been active in the resistance to Nazi Germany -- from political life and positions of any consequence.
A one-party Marxist-Leninist state, its government totally subservient to Moscow (behind the scenes the Soviet Ambassador acted like a viceroy: no decision of any import was taken without reference to him), and a Soviet-style planned economy were then set up, under the leadership of Mátyás Rákosi. All private businesses, down to the smallest one-man workshops, were nationalised without compensation; the peasants were forced into kolkhoz-style state farms; the borders were sealed; and the political police, the dreaded ÁVO, operating from their bland HQ at 60 Andrássy Boulevard (later renamed Stalin Boulevard), arrested, tortured, executed or imprisoned without trial -- public trials were reserved for spectacular show cases modelled on Stalin's purges of the 1930s -- anyone the Party disapproved of.
In 1945 Hungary had fallen from the frying pan into the fire: in March 1944 Nazi Germany had occupied the country, installed a pro-Nazi puppet government, deported anti-Nazis to concentration camps in the Reich, and extended the holocaust to Hungary too. Up to then Hungary had been an island of de facto tolerance in Axis-occupied Europe -- the application of such 'racial laws' as had been introduced under German pressure was lax in the extreme and easily evaded -- and provided a safe haven for numerous refugees from other Continental countries, as well as for escaped Allied POWs: German demands for their extradition were politely but consistently refused.
That occupation was Germany's response to Hungary's, clumsy and botched, attempt to get out of the war, into which Germany -- which had by then occupied all surrounding countries (except Romania, ruled by the pro-Nazi Fascist Iron Guard) -- had dragged a reluctant Hungary in the autumn of 1941. Up to then Prime Minister Count Paul Teleki, pushed into suicide by German aggression that spring, had managed to keep Hungary neutral.
During the thirties Hungary came to be increasingly overshadowed by ever more powerful Nazi Germany, a direct neighbour after it had annexed Austria (the Anschluss) in 1938. Governments in favour of closer links with Germany, such as that of Julius Gömbös (who coined the phrase Berlin-Rome Axis), alternated with others inclined to cautiously distance Hungary from Germany -- a difficult task at a time when Britain and France were consistently appeasing Germany; especially difficult after Chamberlain and Daladier had agreed, at Munich in 1938, to let Hitler and Mussolini arbitrate in the matter of Hungarian-populated regions of Czechoslovakia (see below): by their Vienna Decision most of those regions were returned to Hungary, boosting the arbitrators' popularity.
In the twenties the Government lead by Count Stephen Bethlen, which lasted nearly a decade, consolidated the country after the ravages of the First World War.
From the end of the First to that of the Second World War Hungary remained a kingdom without a king. The last reigning monarch, Charles IV (1916-18), had been exiled by the victorious Allies after the First World War, and there was no consensus on how to fill the throne (or, indeed, whether it was vacant). Pending resolution of this issue Admiral Nicholas Horthy -- the last C-in-C of the Austro-Hungarian Navy (which had remained bottled up in the Adriatic throughout the war) -- was the country's acting Head of State, with the title Regent. As such he could advise, but not dictate to, governments that had sufficient support in Parliament; he also had the power to dissolve Parliament at will and call new elections, but he only used it once: to refuse the dissolution requested by pro-German Prime Minister Béla Imrédy, who considered Parliamentary support for his policy insufficient and hoped to improve it after new elections.
Horthy had been appointed Regent by Parliament in 1920, following a brief but bloody Bolshevik reign of terror in 1919, headed by Béla Kún (later, in the 1930s, 'purged' by Stalin). The Bolsheviks had come to power on the collapse of the feeble Government of Count Michael Károlyi who -- having been appointed Prime Minister by the King in October 1918 -- declared a republic in January 1919, and became its President. His most fateful action on coming into office was to order all, admittedly war weary, Hungarian troops to lay down their arms and return to their homes -- thereby effectively disbanding the Army.
The country undefended, the new Czech state, which already had an army, started occupying the Highlands of Hungary, which then became the Slovak portion of Czechoslovakia; at the same time Romania -- which had an intact army, since it had been under the Central Powers' occupation almost from the day it had declared war on them -- occupied first Transylvania, then most of the central Lowlands, and eventually even Budapest and parts of Transdanubia. Meanwhile Serbia annexed Croatia-Slavonia in the South-West.
This gave these states a strong hand when the victorious Allies finally got round to imposing their peace terms to Hungary at Trianon in 1920. There was no question of peace negotiations: the terms -- which, dictated by Clemenceau, were approved by Lloyd George and President Wilson -- were simply presented to the Hungarian delegation (held under house arrest while in Paris) for acceptance as they stood. They were harsh in the extreme: the area of Hungary was reduced to 28 per cent (yes: twenty-eight per cent) of what it had been, setting the arbitrary borders the country still has. And along with 72 per cent of its territory Hungary lost 60 per cent of its population to Romania, Serbia (which renamed itself Yugoslavia in 1929) and the newly created Czechoslovakia; for obscure reasons even Austria received a chunk (today's Burgenland).
The Allies, although purporting to act under the banner of self-determination, refused Hungarian requests to hold plebiscites in the regions to be transferred to the so-called Successor States -- and with 'good' reason: at least one third of those now suddenly no longer in Hungary were pure 'ethnic' Hungarians. And, since the Trianon Borders were reconfirmed after the Second World War, there are still millions of Hungarians living just across the present borders of Hungary. (For fuller details visit the Facts about Hungary pages.)
2. World War I to 1848-49
In June 1914 Gavrilo Princip -- a Serbian youth backed and provided with his weapon by officers of the Serbian army -- assassinated the heir to the thrones of Hungary and Austria, Archduke Francis-Ferdinand, who disliked Hungary as much as Hungary disliked him. The Austro-Hungarian military establishment then demanded a punitive war against Serbia and, despite the intial objections of the Hungarian Prime Minister Count Stephen Tisza, in July the fateful ultimatum that launched the First World War was despatched to Belgrade.
The Kingdom of Hungary -- which then consisted, as it had since the 11th century, of all of the area encircled by the Carpathians (including Slavonia south of the Drava and Croatia to the Adriatic in the west) and thus formed a well-balanced political and economic unit, with geographical borders as natural as the sea that surrounds Britain -- was at that time one half of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, whose other half was the Austrian Empire (which included, besides today's Austria, the present-day Czech Republic, most of southern Poland and western Ukraine). The two component states of this composite "k.u.k." (kaiserlich und königlich: imperial and royal) Dual Monarchy (not Empire) had the same ruler, Francis Joseph (1848-1916), and currency, joint foreign and defence policies, and a customs union. All affairs of each half -- other than foreign policy and defence -- were managed by its own separate government.
Of the two, Hungary's Government had to depend upon majority support in its Parliament, whose roots went back to the 13th century. Like Britain's, it had two Chambers, but was even then dominated by the elected Lower Chamber (not least because hereditary members of the Upper had long been permitted to stand for election to the Lower, instead of taking their seat in the Upper, which most of those with serious political ambitions did throughout their careers). The physical arrangement was, as it still is, a hemicyle, and the government majority -- for decades the Liberal Party lead by Coloman Tisza* -- tended to occupy the centre, the opposition being split between those (politically and in seating) to its right and left. The Upper Chamber -- reformed in the 1880s, following several occasions when it had frustrated the Lower's will -- consisted of those who had inherited titles (and payed taxes above a set minimum amount), the bishops or equivalents of all of the country's historic Churches (Catholic, both Roman and Uniate, Calvinist, Lutheran, Orthodox), the judges of the Supreme Court, the holders of a small number of other offices, and up to 50 life members nominated by the Crown on the Prime Minister's advice (who, however, did not receive titles).
* Father of Count Stephen Tisza, who inherited his title from an uncle.
The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy had resulted from an agreement generally referred to as the Compromise (Ausgleich), concluded in 1867 between Hungarian parliamentary leaders, notably Francis Deák, and Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria and, at that time not yet crowned, King of Hungary. The immediate trigger for it had been Austria's defeat at the hands of the Prussians at Königgraetz (Sadowa) in 1866, preceded by a series of military defeats during the previous years in northern Italy, up to then also part of the Austrian Empire. The reason that made it necessary was the unconstitutional and oppressive direct rule that Austria had imposed on Hungary from 1849.
In August 1849 Austria had finally defeated Hungary, albeit only with massive Russian assistance, in a year-long struggle known as the War of Independence (Szabadságharc): thirteen Hungarian generals, and quite a few others, were executed on the orders of Field Marshal Haynau the Austrian C-in-C in Hungary, thousands were imprisoned, and thousands fled into emmigration (not a few of them later, after 1867, played prominent parts in Hungarian, even Austro-Hungarian like, for example, Count Julius Andrássy who became Foreign Minister, political life). Earlier that year Francis Joseph had 'abolished' Hungary by decree; the Hungarian Parliament had responded by depriving him, and the House of Habsburg as a whole, of the throne.
That war had started in the summer of 1848, when conservative elements at Court in Vienna (dominated by the Archduchess Sophie, mother of Francis Joseph) incited Hungary's ethnic minorities -- first the Croats, who had always enjoyed a degree of local autonomy, under Baron Josip Jelashich the Viceroy of Croatia (technically an office under the Hungarian Crown); then the Serbs in the south, and the Vlachs, or Romanians, in Transylvania; the Slovaks of the Highlands did not, on the whole, respond to Vienna's agitation -- to take up arms against the country's constitutional government. By the autumn they had forced Ferdinand V to abdicate in favour of his eighteen year old nephew Francis Joseph, unfettered by previous undertakings or a Coronation Oath; the Austrian army was then put in the field too, initially under the command of Field Marshal Prince Alfred Windischgrätz.
The ire of conservatives at Court, shaken by revolutionary events in Vienna that had forced Metternich to resign and flee abroad, was directed against Hungary because in April 1848 its Parliament (Diet, as it was until then called) had passed a raft of progressive Acts, usually referred to as the April Laws.* These -- which inter alia extended the franchise, made the Ministry answerable to Parliament only, abolished all legal distinctions between citizens (and consequent special privileges, notably tax exemption, the sole right to own land, the entitlement to peasant services), removed censorship, gave new powers to elected city corporations, and re-united Transylvania with the rest of Hungary -- made of Hungary a fully fledged 19th century constitutional monarchy, the powers of the Crown severely curtailed; they failed, however, to regulate the country's relationship to Austria, still an absolute monarchy, adequately. After some vacillation Ferdinand V (1835-48), also Emperor of Austria, had given his Royal Assent; elections were held on the new franchise and the new Government of all talents, headed by Count Louis Batthány (to be among those executed in 1849), moved its seat from Pressburg to Pest, only to be embroiled in war within a few months.
* Populist and popular accounts tend to concentrate on events at Pest and Buda on the 15th of March 1848 but these, although colourful in their own way, had only a marginal effect on the course of events.
The April Laws, inspired by the revolutionary spirit that was then sweeping across Europe, completed a process of reform that had been fermenting for decades, driven in particular by Count Stephen Széchenyi, Louis Kossuth, Baron Nicholas Wesselényi and Francis Kölcsey. Despite government attempts, inspired by Vienna, to influence elections -- some five per cent of adult males had the franchise, which was tied to 'noble' status, not property: at election time the poorer of these were feasted on a lavish scale -- the Lower Chamber of Parliament was becoming increasingly progressive, and even in the Upper Chamber younger hereditary members were increasingly speaking and voting for progressive measures. The Parliamentary Reports edited and published by Kossuth -- at times in the form of 'letters' to bypass press censorship -- spread awareness of this new attitude. From the 1830s industry and commerce were also modernising, rivers were regulated and the first railways built, new methods were introduced in agriculture; a new building for the National Museum and Library was completed, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (akin to the Académie Française) was founded.
This ferment, whose intellectual foundations had been laid in the closing decades of the 18th century, was going on at a time when Austria was governed by the arch-conservative Prince Clement Metternich, creator and principal sustainer of the Holy Alliance. 1848 merely brought matters to a head between Hungary and the Habsburgs, the reigning dynasty of both countries, of Hungary since the 16th century.
The Habsburgs considered the various lands whose sovereigns they were their personal property, their Hereditary Lands, even after these had been renamed the Austrian Empire in 1804, when Francis I (1792-1835) wished to have a title comparable to Napoleon's new one (only in 1807 did he finally relinquish the, by then totally meaningless, title Holy Roman Emperor). And they firmly believed that it was their divine right to govern these by decree, as they saw fit -- maintaining that it was only the person of the ruler that conferred unity, a common identity and legal standing on his lands (which, given the heterogeneity of these possessions, made some sense).
Hungary saw it differently. It held that the Kingdom, symbolised by the Holy Crown of St Stephen, existed as a distinct and coherent state irrespective of the King's person, who was merely the incumbent of the highest office, bound by his Coronation Oath to rule the country in accordance with its Constitution -- evolved by precedent and legislation over the centuries -- with and through Parliament that represented the nation.
Seen through Habsburg eyes Hungary, with its constitutional pretensions, was an anomaly that undermined the bland unity of the Habsburg Gesamtmonarchie; seen from Hungary the Court at Vienna, with its absolutist tendencies, was an attempt at tyranny. This divergence of views had resulted in three centuries of, on occasion armed, struggle between Nation and Crown over how, by whom and - crucially - from where Hungary should be governed. For not only were the Habsburg Kings foreigners (Francis Joseph was the first who spoke Hungarian), but they also continued to reside in Vienna. Not one of their number ever spent more than a few days, let alone took up residence, in Hungary, despite a law that required the monarch to reside in the country (Act VII of 1741), which had received the Royal Assent of Maria Theresia (1740-80).