Faith, family and fatherland

Abstract

The chapter examines the development of Hungarian conservatism in the interwar period in its social, political, and cultural contexts. It perceives conservatism both as a vehicle of well-defined social interests and as a separate cultural and political universe, i.e. political culture, with porous boundaries. The chapter examines the relationship between the various brands of conservatism in interwar Hungary, as well as their interaction with other political groups and ideologies. The work challenges both the older, mainly Marxist, interpretation of conservatism, which claims that the conservatives and the various radical-right and fascist groups were natural allies, and the more recent view, which hails interwar conservative parties as the direct descendants of pre-war liberal conservative organisations, and claims that conservatives always kept an equal distance from the radical Left and the radical Right. How the nature of conservatism changed under the impact of the First World War, the unfair peace treaty, the Red and White terrors, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, and, last but not least, the Second World War are the subjects of this chapter.