Kötődések hálójában : A nemzeti identitás mintázatai a kisebbségi magyar fiatalok körében a GeneZYs 2015 ifjúságszociológiai felmérés adatai alapján

Abstract

My doctoral dissertation aimed to investigate the national identity of minority Hungarian youth based on the GeneZYs 2015 youth sociological survey. In the early 2000s, the first youth sociological survey (MOZAIK 2001) was conducted on minority Hungarian youth in all four neighbouring countries of Hungary, opening up the scope for comparative studies. No similar quantitative data collection has taken place in the 15 years since then. This gave the 2015 GeneZYs Youth Sociological Survey its particular significance, as it provided a comprehensive picture of Hungarian youth in Transcarpathia, Vojvodina, Slovakia and Romania after almost a decade and a half. My comparative analysis of the four regions is based on this survey. One of the novelties of the analysis was that it also measured the potential impact of the institution of facilitated naturalisation, introduced after 2010, on the dimensions of national identity I investigated. The threefold approach to the web of attachments is another novelty of the analysis. I have tried to outline the attachments and their characteristics and specificities in three of the dimensions of national identity. Firstly, by examining dual identities, which revealed patterns of attachment to one's own nation and to the majority nation in minority situations. Dual attachment is the most common among Hungarian minority youth, with the exception of young Hungarians in Slovakia, and is most closely related to openness to the majority nation/country, and does not conflict with the experience of Hungarian identity. On the other hand, I analysed how the criteria of Hungarian identity have changed in the last decades, especially with regard to the effects of the changed citizenship policy in Hungary. The cultural and political conceptions of the nation, which used to be more sharply separated in minority situations, have loosened and are mixed in the nation typologies of young people. Thirdly, I introduce the concept of a ‘sense of belonging’ to capture the connection of national identity to space, landscape, national self-definition, and the concepts of homeland and country. The analysis showed that in each region, the primacy of local (regional and/or national) attachments remained, with their own regional specificities. This threefold structure revealed the reality and complexity of national attachments in the context of the minority situation, experienced in the naturalness of everyday life.