Nagy, Zsolt Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 380 and also ‘expose world views, aspirations, professional self-awareness, and ideological and aesthetic attitudes’ (p. 280). Photographs, architectural plans and documents illustrate the text appropriately. As for Kelly’s title, I am not sure that these places of worship can easily be described as ‘Socialist Churches’. At least when they were in the hands of religious communities, such communities would mostly have baulked at the idea that their places of worship were ‘socialist’, while the state would scarcely have welcomed them as part of its political establishment that this implies. Was the Soviet Union indeed ‘socialist’? But this is a minor quibble. Kelly has ranged widely to find materials recounting the fate of one Soviet city’s places of worship and thought hard about the competing impulses that destroyed some and left others standing in varying states and under various usages. The book illuminates a neglected aspect of the history of a city and its life, and of the religious communities that sought to survive under an uncongenial regime. London Felix Corley Nagy, Zsolt. Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941. Central European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2017. xvii + 341 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00: €58.00: £50.00. Not many Western readers will have any great expectations of a book about the disparity between revisionist propaganda and political reality in Hungary after the First World War. The subject of frontier revision has a prominent place in the historiography of Central Europe, and there is no shortage of books in English on the futile Hungarian endeavours to alter the territorial settlement, which contributed to major foreign policy failures on the country’s part. Yet, true to one of the endorsements on its handsome dust jacket, this scholarly volume does provide ‘a fresh look at Hungarian revisionism’. Rather than focusing on the official conduct of Hungarian diplomacy, the author examines the oblique attempts by an authoritarian regime to change negative foreign perceptions of a country and its people, with recourse to ‘munitions of the mind’: cultural production, image projection and public diplomacy. Admittedly, much of the analysis by Zsolt Nagy dwells on Hungary’s efforts to elicit sympathy from the United States. By comparison, the treatment of British-Hungarian cultural relations is somewhat cursory, as is the discussion of the reception accorded to Hungary’s propaganda by France, Italy and Germany. In a few respects, the monograph has the feel of a published doctoral thesis. The mini-conclusions at the end of the five chapters read formulaically REVIEWS 381 and disrupt the narrative flow. The engagement with academic argot, such as ‘image cultivation’, ‘nation-branding’ and ‘perception management’ (p. 2), may also rile some readers. More fundamentally, the application of so overused a political science concept as Joseph Nye’s ‘soft power’ to an early twentiethcentury case study of Hungarian foreign policy seems misplaced. After all, how much power — soft or hard — could a small defeated, isolated successor state of the Habsburg Monarchy be said to have? In any event, these minor shortcomings do not diminish the value of this incisive original work. The author gives detailed coverage of Hungary’s ‘cultural-diplomatic campaign’ (p. 3), which sought to improve the place of this vanquished, dismembered country in the post-war international order. Nagy concentrates his attention on ‘the intersection of diplomacy, national identity construction, and cultural production’ (p. 2), arguing that the selling of a positive national image beyond Hungary’s borders was seriously hampered by uncertainties concerning Hungarian cultural identity. A measure of these uncertainties is that prominent members of the Magyar intellectual elite were still openly debating what it meant to be ‘Hungarian’ on the eve of the Second World War. Clearly, it was never going to be easy to educate public opinion abroad about the merits and true European character of Hungarian culture whilst opinion makers at home were unceasingly at odds. Whether this was an element in the eventual failure of the revisionist strategy is another matter altogether. Foreign perceptions of Hungary and of Hungarians were barely influenced by the ill-tempered internal squabbles between urbánus and népi writers, to...