Hungarian Foreign Policy and the Magyar Minorities: New Foreign Policy Priorities

Abstract

In the wake of the 1989 revolutions in East Central Europe, two parallel developments took place in rapid succession. On the one hand, strong national sentiments accompanied by a desire to set up independent nation states emerged in the countries neighboring Hungary. At the same time, the ethnic Magyar minorities, long excluded from participation in the political life of those countries, gained the ability to establish their political movements, to enter candidates in local and national elections, and to elect their own deputies in the national parliaments and local governments. On the other hand, the fate of the Magyar minorities and the guaranteeing of their rights became one of the central elements of Hungary's foreign policy in bilateral relations with its neighbors. Budapest also embarked on a major effort to make the minority problem an international issue and to achieve some form of international legal codification for minority rights. These simultaneous and, in part, contradictory developments and goals placed several dilemmas before Hungarian policy-makers that, three years later, have yet to be resolved.