Photo of Viktor Orbán © The Estonian EU Presidency 2017 and used courtesy of CC 2.0.
It is well worth reading Viktor Orbán’s speech on the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon, which was last Thursday and I didn’t even notice until it passed. Let’s start with this passage towards the end, which needs little comment.
“The world is changing. The changes are tectonic. The United States is no longer alone on the throne of the world, Eurasia is rebuilding with full throttle, the frames of our European Union are crackling, and now it hopes to save itself with a salto mortale. The ground is trembling under the feet of our eastern neighbour. The Balkans is also full of questions to be answered.
“A new order is being born. In our world, in our lives as well, great changes are banging on our gates.”
The Treaty of Trianon was one of the Paris Peace Conference treaties with the defeated Central Powers after World War One, which included the famous Treaty of Versailles, but also the treaties of Neuilly (with Bulgaria), St Germain (with German Austria), and Sevres (with Ottoman Turkey but ripped up by Atatürk by force of arms). Hungary lots two-thirds of its territory, nearly all of which had an ethnic majority of another nationality; but it also lost about three million Hungarians.
Hungary has lost another million in the since 1980 through a collapsed birth rate and high emigration; it is not hard to see the desperate desire for a bout of natalism that young Hungarian women seem reluctant to supply.
“At times they gave soldiers to defend the nation, at other times they gave armies of nation-building craftsmen to the country.”
This is contentious language even within Hungary. But the Hungarian liberal-left cannot simply wish its way out of dealing with the great national disaster that was Trianon. Budapest’s Mayor, Gergely Karácsony, the nearest thing to a credible rival that Orbán possesses, ordered a minute’s silence last Thursday. He spoke of the fate of his mother, trapped in what was now Romania in 1920 with his elderly great-grandparents, after his grandparents fled to the newly shrunken core Hungary. The elders, despite caring for a small child, were put to forced labour. Hungary is full of such stories and such myths, not only of the time after 1920 but the time after 1945.
But the silences are as revealing as the topics for comment, for Horthy’s regency is swept under the carpet, neither glorified nor condemned but simply not discussed; unmentioned too are the five months of murderous madness under the Arrow Cross Party. For others must always be the architects of Hungary’s problems.
“Finally, the thousand-year-old historical Hungary was stabbed in the back by the conspiracies in Budapest. His army was paralyzed and disbanded, the only statesman capable of rescuing the nation was assassinated, the country was handed over to our enemies, the government to the Bolsheviks.
“The West raped the thousand-year-old borders and history of Central Europe. They forced us to live between indefensible borders, deprived us of our natural treasures, separated us from our resources, and made a death row out of our country. Central Europe was redrawn without moral concerns, just as the borders of Africa and the Middle East were redrawn. We will never forget that they did this.”
There are the usual hard-right tropes about stabbed backs; but also an anti-colonial cri-de-coeur that wouldn’t be out of place at a BLM rally. Nationalist, conservative, Christian (with all the zeal of a new convert), and increasingly anti-Western; Orbán rails against Trianon, but presents no way of undoing it. Instead, he sees a Eurasian future for Central Europe, far from the duplicitous West.
“And when we thought that neither the arrogant French and British nor the hypocritical American empire could sink deeper than this, they could still do so. After World War II we were thrown to the Communists without heartache. The reward of the Poles, the Czechs and the Slovaks was the same as our punishment. May this be an eternal lesson for the peoples of Central Europe!”
Decades of Soviet occupation are passed over in a sentence and blamed on the West. The villains of Orbán’s piece are the British, the French and the Americans. The Romanians, Slovaks, Croats, Ukrainians, and Serbs who benefited from Trianon’s terms are fellow victims of Western duplicity and hypocrisy; they should learn the lessons Orbán teaches. No mention of how to square their equally robust sense of national pride with Hungary’s, no honesty that Trianon is irreversible even with military action. The Greater Hungary of the Ausgleich era is no more retrievable than the Hungary of King St Stephen. And yet Hungary has endured for a thousand years; it can endure for a thousand more, says Orbán.
“We see hundreds of wandering tribes of the great steppe disappear and perish in the dust of history. We see that we Hungarians have neither disappeared nor perished, but have established our homeland in the ring of Latin, Germanic and Slavic peoples, preserving our unique quality. We opened our hearts to Christianity, heard the word of God, heeded it, and made it the foundation of our state.”
Nationalism is on the rise today for the same reason it was in the last years of Imperial Hungary; the old order is visibly senile and starting to crumble at the edges. Hungarians experience the collapse of yet another old order just a generation ago; two empires of the mind and soul gone in a hundred years, and a third perhaps about to follow. Post-modernity taught us to be suspicious of metanarratives. Collapsing the liberal myth doesn’t lead to peace, love, and socialism; it just means people don’t know whom or what to trust until a new order emerges.
At a time when people don’t know whom to trust, it becomes very easy to put all trust in those who look and sound like oneself. Western Liberalism and Socialism in their various forms tried to tell us that nation and nationality were at best abstract constructs and matters of chance, at worst oppressive and warmongering. Yet Hungary remains a strange ethnic island in the middle of a land-ocean, its difference marked out by the strangeness of the names of places in which Hungarians live, from Dunaszerdahely in Slovakia’s Danube Valley to Szatmárnémeti in Transylvania. It will survive, Orbán tells his supporters, even when England is no longer England and France is no longer France. Orbán speaks for the many eastern Europeans who look west and see not a model but a collapsing civilisation, as unable to manage coronavirus as it is to manage its borders; as deluded about human nature and the ways of the world as their last imperial rulers, who too promised a rational and scientific way towards a bright future for humanity, and whose empire collapsed in the blink of an eye.
