Modern Hungary
By PROFESSOR R. W. SETON-WATSON
THE reader may at first be tempted to think that in a book which aims at interpreting Hungary's position in the modem world, undue emphasis has been laid upon earlier centuries. But no one who is familiar with Hungarian psychology and who knows the extent to which, at any rate, the ruling class is steeped in tradition and precedent, blending mystic and romantic claims with a minute insistence upon legal forms, will challenge Mr. Macartney's view that in no other European country is the present so inexplicable without a sound working knowledge of the past. His general survey of the pre-War period is exceedingly fair, though it might have been made clearer for English readers if he had warned them against the highly superficial analogies sometimes drawn between the Hungarian and English constitutions, and explained the still more fundamental differences. The simple fact that the towns were an alien element in Hungarian life' right on till the nineteenth century and collectively only possessed the same voting power as a single county, suffices to show how pro- foundly different was the social structure of the two countries.
What Mr. Macartney says of the Hungarian nobility as " a rank, not a title," and as replenished by constant recruits, is perfectly correct, but does not go far enough. Nobility was also a political privilege reserved for the people (or " populus") while the plebs (sometimes, it is true, admitted' for special reasons, as when whole villages were ennobled for services in the Turkish wars) had no political power, but enjoyed the exclusive privilege of paying taxes. It is hardly too much to say that for Hungary the Middle Ages only ended in 1848, when the franchise was based on other qualifications than birth, when all exemptions froin taxes and tolls were abolished and when the peasants were freed from seignorial control. But the mystical doctrine of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen has survived almost unaltered and still plays a Hiring part in the constitutional theory of this kingdom without a king. Mr. Macartney emphasizes the great political role of the gentry, as distinct from the magnates, and draws some apt comparisons with the Irish gentry of a now vanished age (though the analogy breaks down if pressed too far, and, indeed, applies better to Transylvania, where lord and peasant were different both in race and religion, than to the purely Magyar districts of Hungary). He commits hiifiself to the view that the result of the war and revolution has been to make the gentry's internal, position almost impregnable : despite the progressive decay of the landed interest ever since the 'eighties and the acute economic distress of recent years, there are clear signs of an alliance between the gentry and the Hungarian equivalent of the kulak class, at the expense of the floating urban population.- - Curiously enough, Mr. Macartney deals with the War and its tragic aftermath in a somewhat perfunctory way, though this enables him to skate swiftly over thin and treacherous ice. But after the initial survey he subdivides his subject under a number of headings of which the order is deliberate, and significant—The Constitution, the Church, the Magnates, the Gentry, the Traders, the Peasants, the Workmen, the Minorities, the Crown. Legal and Constitutional considerations have always figured in the forefront of Hungarian political and national aims. Long-vanished claims to " Rascia " or
`` Rama" coloured the outlook of Hungarian Cabinets towards the Dual Monarchy's annexationist policy in Bosnia : and
one of the most burning aspects of the " King Question " in Hungary is the coronation oath which pledges the new Hungary. By C. A. Macartney. Foreword by H. A. L. Fisher. (Beim. 21s.) sovereign not merely to maintain, but wherever possible, to augment, the boundaries of the Kingdom.
The influence of the Roman Church, with its vast estate; still subject to the " dead hand," is admittedly very great in Hungary today. But Mr. Macartney scarcely does justice to the vital political role played by Hungarian Calvinism, and he seems almost to have overlooked that of Lutheranism, to which Kossuth and many other important political figures belonged.
Two later chapters deal with the delicate problem of revision and foreign policy, and here Mr. Macartney man- fully preserves his objectivity. Here and there he is guilty of extreme euphemism, for instance when he says that " Hungary is by no means exempt from the nationalist tendencies which prevail among her neighbours "—the fact being that Magyarization is as rampant against the Germans and Slovaks who are still left in the " Rump Hungary " of our own day as it ever was in the greater Hungary before the War. It is only necessary to study the German Nazi Press to realize the latent dangers of this policy.' But of course Mr. Macartney is fully justified in leaving this awkward question on one side, for he could only acquire the right to treat of it in detail by plunging into the contentious problem of the Magyar minorities in the four Succession States, and this would lead him far beyonl the scope of his book. In my opinion he states no more than the bare truth when he writes that those who drew the new frontiers weighted the scales against Hungary. " Wherever it was to the advantage of Czechoslovakia, Roumania or Jugoslavia that the national principle should be applied rather than the economic, it was duly applied : wherever those three States found that economic or even strategic considerations out- weighed national, the national principle suddenly lost its importance " (p. 329). On the other hand, he has the courage to point out that while it would be perfectly easy to hand back several hundred thousand Magyars to Hungary without at the same time surrendering a noticeable number of non-Magyars with them, this would almost certainly increase the economic difficulties of the Succession States " without appreciably easing Hungary's own situation." Above -all (and here is the crux of the whole question), such revision " would quite fail to solve the problem of the Middle Danube Basin, but rather aggravate it by further con- cessions to the national principle. In writing .this Mr. Macartney is tilting at the whole conception of national States in Central Europe, and here he seems to me to go much too far in theory, besides of course asking for manifest impossibilities in the imperfect world in which we live. But when he pleads for a diminution of nationalist megalo- mania on all sides and denounces the idol of the nationally homogeneous State, and again when he reminds us that the Minority Treaties " are far too weak to afford a national minority adequate compensation for exclusion from its own national State," he commands the sympathy of all right-thinking men and is raising a problem which lies at the root of the European peace-problem.
Mr. Macartney's book will not satisfy the extreme nationalists on either side, and those who like myself regard satisfied nationalism as not only leading up to, but as entirely compatible with, an international outlook, and who would like to see established in the public law of Europe
a clear distinction between the two conceptions of " nationality " and " citizenship," will also make certain reserves in reading his book. But it is to be welcomed as an urbane, sane and thoroughly courageous contribution to one of the thorniest problems of contemporary politics.
Previous page
