Adolf Merkl on the Form of Government of the Kingdom of Hungary without a King

Abstract

After the People’s Republic and Soviet Republic (1918/19), the new right-wing regime in Hungary restored the monarchical form of government. However, in view of the break of the legal continuity and the absence of a (new) king, this politics turned out to be more of a state ideology than a real legal continuity. The Austrian legal scholar Adolf Julius Merkl published a paper about why the so-called “Kingdom of Hungary” should be regarded as a republic. His main argument was, that the chief of state (ie the regent elected in 1920) did not resemble to a monarch, because the regent did not rule the country for life. Merklʼs paper appeared in a Hungarian scientific journal in 1925 and it has been available only in Hungarian to this day. In his analysis, Merkl refuted the doctrine that Hungary was a kingdom. On the one hand, he applied his own theory about the distinction between monarchy and republic to the Hungarian case study, and, on the other hand, he deconstructed the ideological thesis of the legal continuity by using the methods of “Pure Theory of Law”. The following article tries to contextualize Merklʼs analysis: My Paper paper describes the historical developments and the legal debates in Hungary after 1918 by emphasizing the differences between the “Pure Theory of Law” and the conservative-traditionalist, Hungarian state doctrine.