Hungarian Minority Research Articles

Problematyka narodowościowa Rusi Zakarpackiej

Nationality Problems of TranscarpathiaThe article discusses ethnic diversity and the changes which took place in Transcarpathia in the 20th century. First, the author presents the historical background for a statistical-demographic analysis. He points to the peripheral location of the region and the fact that it often changed its political affiliation. Thus, for a period of almost a thousand years the province was included within the borders of Hungary; between 1919 and 1939 it became part of Czechoslovakia, and after a four-day long period of independence (14–18 March 1939) it was again incorporated into Hungary between 1939 and 1945. After World War II it was part of a Soviet republic, and since 1991 it has been included in the independent state of Ukraine.Each of these periods brought far-reaching demographic and ethnic consequences. The population of Transcarpathia consisted of Slavic people of Ruthenian origin, mostly Greek Catholics. The inhabitants of the province were subjected to Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Russian influences and believed in different options, such as pro-Ukrainian, pro-Russian, or separatist, i.e. Ruthenian. These issues are discussed in detail in the article and thoroughly interpreted by the author. He also points to the fact that the territory of Transcarpathia was inhabited by numerous ethnic minorities. The Hungarian minority has always been the most important, both in the past and in the present; today it is concentrated in the south of the province. In the past, Jews and Germans also constituted sizeable minorities, while Romanians and Slovaks were always of marginal significance there. The final part of the article presents the scale of the separatist tendencies which may have dangerous political consequences in the future.

Weaponizing Language: Linguistic Vectors of Ethnic Oppression

AbstractAs part of a larger project studying language conflict, this paper documents ways in which the oppression of language use on the part of a dominant language/ethnic group is instrumentalized as a tool to inflict gratuitous societal pain and punishment upon nondominant ethnolinguistic groups and their individual members. Our arguments will be illustrated primarily by three contemporary cases: (1) the Uyghur minority in the PRC, (2) the Kurdish minority in Turkey, and (3) the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. This article also seeks to provide an example of ways in which important empirical questions in the political science/international relations literature might be more fully addressed with the help of linguistics, which is a focus of our ongoing language conflict project.

Autonomy à la carte: The creative claiming tactics of the Hungarian minority in Romania

ABSTRACT Through a detailed case-study of the Hungarian minority in Romania, this article better understands the non-secessionist, non-violent claims to autonomy of ethnic minorities and the discursive framework in which claims operate. Analysis of policy documents and elite interviews demonstrates how ‘autonomy’ claiming is not only conducted explicitly. Rather, it also occurs creatively through a discursive word-play technique utilized by different minority actors which substitutes ‘decentralization’, ‘regionalization’ and ‘self-governance’ for ‘autonomy’. However, to elites across political persuasions, and unlike differentiations in the scholarly literature, these terms mean the same thing. Moreover, different minority actors have a preferred discourse for claiming: ‘historic autonomists’ favour strong, explicit and symbolic claims while ‘modern autonomists’ support a strategic and creative claiming tactic. These findings of the creativity of autonomy claiming discourse can be extended to other ethnic minorities seeking institutional recognition via non-violent means.

THE EXAMINATION OF CONCEPT OF «MORALITY» IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE FROM A COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

The presented paper deals with the concept of morality in a political context. The aforementioned concept was examined within a cognitive linguistic framework and from a cognitive pragmatic perspective. After familiarising ourselves with the literary sources concerning the present topic, newspaper articles relating to politics and published on Transcarpathian Hungarian news portals were analysed. The aim of the analysis was to demonstrate the role of context in conceptualisation. In the course of the research, the authors were also curious about whether or not the concept of morality is understood differently in our everyday lives and when talking about politics, and which related concepts appear when talking about morality in a political context. In order to give answer to questions, fifteen newspaper articles on political topics were put under investigation. The articles involved ideas such as criticising and blaming the Ukrainian society and Hungarian minorities as well as power and social relations. In the course of the research, passages of the articles regarding concepts of morality were identified. As a second step, metaphorical linguistic expressions were systematized and compared with previous research findings to shed light on the relationship between conceptualization and context. The theoretical background of the research was mainly based on the works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, ‪Zoltan Kovecses, Albert Widdowson. In order to identify which linguistic expressions were metonymic and/or metaphorical, the Metaphor Identification Procedure VU was followed, which is an improved method of the metaphor identification procedure developed by the Pragglejaz group (2007). The results of the study confirmed Lakoff's (2002) theory that people’s conceptions of morality are related to patterns of political thinking. In addition, the views of cognitive pragmatics that moving from context to language, its influence on our conceptualisation can be demonstrated were also supported.

Взаимоотношения Венгрии с государствами Вишеградской группы (2014–2021)

The article examines main directions of the development of cooperation between Hungary and the states of the Visegrád Group from 2014 to 2021. On one hand, Hungary builds its relations with Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in the context of the decisions taken within the framework of the Visegrád Group, on other hand, through bilateral cooperation. The author notes that Hungary is confident in its ability to defend its interests more effectively in the EU and beyond, using the format of the Visegrád Group. V. Orban’s government seeks to maximize the expansion of political and economic cooperation between the states of the Visegrád Group. Nevertheless, Hungary’s increased interest in developments related to the situation of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia complicates contacts between Budapest and Bratislava. The article emphasizes that the position of Hungary coincides with the positions of its partners in the Visegrád Group on most issues on the international agenda (migration crisis, EU development prospects, assessment of Ukrainian and Belarusian events, accession to the EU of the states of the Western Balkans and Turkey). At the same time, Hungary’s policy does not always find understanding among other members of the Visegrád Group due to Hungary’s close relations with Russia and a tough stance on Ukraine’s language policy. Nevertheless, Hungary will strive to maintain a strategic partnership with Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, including by intensifying contacts in the field of defense and security.

ЭЛЕКТОРАЛЬНЫЙ РЕГИОНАЛИЗМ: СЛУЧАЙ ДЕМОКРАТИЧЕСКОГО СОЮЗА ВЕНГРОВ РУМЫНИИ

The article analyzes the dynamics of the regionalism strategy of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians of Romania (UDMR), representing the interests of the Hungarian minority, in the 1990s-2010s. The study uses official policy documents and manifestos of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, official electoral data, materials of coalition interactions and parliamentary debates, along with materials from the Manifesto Project Database. The results of the analysis show that the strategy of the regionalist party is transforming: from the rigid and consistent ethnolinguistic regionalism of the 1990s-2000s, in the 2010s the party is shifting to a more flexible adaptive strategy, which is a synthesis of moderate regionalism and competent positioning of the party as a coalition partner with a centrist social-economic agenda. The regionalist agenda is used by the party during the years of electoral activity, which serves as a tool for achieving institutional opportunities for participation in the national political process (shared-rule). The UDMR intention to expand the party's political subjectivity is not the main aim but the tool and opportunity for lobbying the interests of the regional community. The turn of the Hungarian regionalists from a strategy of confrontation with the Romanian unionist parties to a strategy of bargaining and cooperation is also the result.

Memorialization of the "liberators" in Transcarpathia during the period of preventive Sovietization (1944 – 1946)

In 1944 – 1946, during the preventive Sovietization of Transcarpathian Ukraine, the local communist authorities initiated radical changes in its symbolic landscape in order to influence the collective memory of the population. The result of this policy was the appearance in the region in 1945 of monuments in honor of the Heroes of the Carpathians (soldiers of the Red Army), who died as a result of active hostilities in October 1944. Officially, the perpetuation of the memory of the fallen Red Army soldiers took place as a manifestation of the people's initiative of the local population in gratitude for the liberation from fascism, including from the “centuries-old Hungarian slavery”. However, archival materials and oral historical research prove that this process was an element of the traditional Soviet policy of memory, initiated by the command of the 4th Ukrainian Front. As a result, a number of memorial resolutions of the People's Council of Transcarpathian Ukraine were adopted in a short time. As a result, the graves of the Red Army were enlarged, fundraising was organized among the population, and the construction of monuments to the fallen liberators was started and successfully completed in all regional centers of the region. The peculiarity was that the installation of monuments in honor of the Heroes of the Carpathians took place long before the end of the Great Patriotic War / World War II, which was not observed in other territories of the Ukrainian SSR. One of the other paradoxes was that, so, the representatives of the Hungarian minority of the region demonstrated their appreciation for their "liberation from Hungarian domination".

Difficulties in Reading Comprehension of Hungarian Primary School Students in Slovakia

Abstract Our study aimed to assess the level of reading comprehension, one of the cornerstones of education of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, and to answer the research question of what kind of deficits need to be addressed in the development of reading comprehension. The research was conducted with the participation of students from primary schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction in Slovakia. In our study, we shed light on the problems found in cognitive reasoning, accurate interpretation of information and complex reading comprehension. The extent to which the development of new cognitive schemata caused problems for the studied groups was also investigated. In several cases, the responses were not based on textual information, but only on the respondents’ existing schemas. The results also show that it was a problem for the learners to answer both the multiple-choice questions and the open-ended and explanatory questions.

Stefano Bottoni. Orbán: Un despota in Europa.

Stefano Bottoni. <i>Orbán: Un despota in Europa.</i>

Minorities as citizens: The legal advocacy of language rights by the Hungarian minority in Romania

AbstractThis article investigates the assertion of language rights through legal mobilization by the Hungarian minority in Romania, thus examining this emergent kind of mobilization aimed at the claiming of rights, often rights recognized by law, but not enforced in practice. This incongruity between rights on paper and their execution provokes interethnic rivalry for the visibility of language and culture, in which the exclusive ownership of sovereignty is marked by the dominance of national language in physical spaces coined as ‘linguistic territoriality’ (Csergő, 2007), fostering parallel, monolingual public spheres. Applying Rancière's theory to the case of the Hungarian minority in Romania, it is argued that civil society activists' legal mobilization initiatives are a manifestation of ‘politics’ in the Rancièreian sense as they challenge the distribution of public spaces along ethnic lines through pushing forward their integrative vision of the same spaces—thus ‘seeking the litigious distribution of places and roles’ (Rancière, 2003, p. 201).

Change, Crisis, Perspective, and Identity in Two Novels by Rózsa Ignácz

Abstract For Hungarians who remained stuck beyond the borders after WWI, finding themselves in a foreign country from one day to the next, the historical trauma of the Trianon Treaty occasioned intercultural tribulations never experienced before. What the resulting Transylvanian literature discussed here is concerned with, however, is not what Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural trauma theory calls “the trauma process”, “the spiral of signification” (Alexander 2004, 11). Rather, it is concerned with “the indelible marks” “the horrendous event” left “upon group consciousness […] changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander 2004, 1). This literature displays a rich array of the management strategies of minority identity. Earlier I devoted a book to the identity types that ensued from those strategies (Dani 2016a). The present work is based on that monograph and moves on. This time I wish to focus on the key figures of two Rózsa Ignácz novels (Anyanyelve magyar and Született Moldovában) to demonstrate the complex identity patterns that an erosion of minority native language and culture, so destructive to identity, yields. The road that the Hungarian minority travels leads through a succession of active and reactive changes, crises, and modifications of perspective in the maze of minority versus hegemonic intercultural relations.1

Transylvanian Jewish loyalties in interwar Romania

ABSTRACT This study seeks to answer the question as to how the concept of loyalty may be applied to describe the relationship of Transylvanian Jews, on the one hand, with the Romanian state, and, on the other hand, with the Transylvanian Hungarian minority, between 1918 and 1940. The first half of the study traces the conceptual framework for the analysis and describes the meaning of the concept of loyalty between the two world wars. The study then presents the Romanian state’s policy toward the Jews. The last chapter examines the declarations of loyalty made by the Transylvanian Jews in the interwar period.

Seeking Representation: The Development of Hungarian Minority Parties in Serbia and Slovakia

Ever since the 1920 Treaty of Trianon there have been sizable Hungarian minorities found in countries neighbouring the modern Hungarian state. Since the fall of authoritarian communist regimes and the rise of political plurality these minorities have sought representation, often through minority parties. This lens of political parties is applied in this article, in order to examine the seeking of representation by the Hungarian ethnic minority in Serbia and Slovakia. The overall development of parties is outlined, the stages of their development is illustrated and each stage is analysed in detail. The main findings are that Hungarian minority representation is incredibly fragmented and dogged by conflict in both countries, involving many splits in parties, with the formation and liquidation of parties common. However, during exceptional times they were able to show a united front to nationalist governments, this was observed in both Slovakia and Serbia. In more recent times conflict has returned to the fore, with the situations somewhat divergent. The high level of conflict within those seeking to offer political representation to the Hungarian minority in Serbia was notable, as was a lack of an end in sight. On the other hand, there were attempts to unite made in Slovakia, although they are yet to experience much success.

THE MAIN FACTORS OF HUNGARIAN-SLOVAK BILINGULAISM

The study briefly describes the bilingual language situation of Hungarian minority communities living outside Hungary. It deals with the fact that for the Hungarian communities discussed, the Hungarian language is the primary identity-forming factor, briefly covering the effects of bilingualism on the language of the Hungarian minorities in the Carpathian Basin. It shows the close connection between language maintenance and minority education, arguing that one of the most important issues for minority education policy is how bilingual development works. The paper analyzes the educational situation of the Hungarian minority communities in the Carpathian Basin and states that the basic condition for the survival of the language and culture of the Hungarian minorities living outside Hungary is adequate minority education.

The Treaty of Trianon as a Source of Instability in the Central-Eastern Europe (Part 3)

The article notes that the Trianon Peace Treaty of June 4, 1920 between the Entente countries and Hungary, as a result of the First World War, turned out to be, like all the other six treaties of the Versailles system, mostly unfair. Forcibly the territory of Hungary decreased by 2/3, the population decreased 2,7 times, a third of the Hungarian ethnic group became part of neighboring states.&#x0D; It is noted that during 1920-2020. In Hungary, there were no powerful political forces of various trends and trends that would recognize the Trianon Peace Treaty as just. At the same time, the ruling political elites of the neighboring states of Hungary considered and still consider the conditions of the Trianon fair. Such opposite assessments of the consequences of Versailles engendered antagonism, making it impossible to reach a compromise between the countries of Central-Eastern Europe.&#x0D; Attention is drawn to the fact that during the domination in Europe of the coalition of countries led by Germany of the Versailles Peace Treaty, including the Trianon, were dismantled, a new order was introduced, in which opponents of Versailles – Germany, Italy, Japan, the USSR, Hungary, Bulgaria. played an active role.&#x0D; It is noted that the winners of the World War ІІ restored the borders of the countries of Germany’s allies in Europe, in accordance with their own geopolitical interests, which corresponded by 70% to the borders established by the Entente after the World War І. The Trianon borders were restored over Hungary by the Paris Peace Treaty of February 10, 1947. The USSR, Great Britain, France and the United States acted from a hegemonic position, were guided by the right of the winner and in many respects imposed on the defeated countries the conditions of the Versailles system were discredited, did not draw proper conclusions and did not build international relations on principles close to justice, but preserved the complicated territorial contradictions of the past with the corresponding treaties.&#x0D; It is indicated that the threat of assimilation and disappearance of foreign Hungarians is one of the main reasons for the revitalization of modern Hungary. Measures to overcome the syndrome of the dismemberment of the Hungarian nation in Central-Eastern Europe have been going on for centuries with little results; The rate of decline in the number of Hungarians in neighboring states over the past century is the highest, so Budapest believes that there is no time to delay the introduction of autonomy for foreign Hungarians, because in the next 25 years the very need for it will disappear through their disappearance.&#x0D; It is emphasized that the level of ensuring the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia especially affects the relationship of Hungary with Ukraine. The improvement of relations between Hungary and Ukraine has minimal chances, since the positions of the parties on the procedure for the application of educational and language laws in Transcarpathia do not coincide.&#x0D; Taking into account the decisive activity of Hungary and the Hungarian foreign communities in 2020 (the century of the signing of the Trianon Peace Treaty on June 4, 1920), it is concluded that this problem will not lose its relevance, but will significantly increase.

RUSSIAN LEXICAL ELEMENTS FROM MILITARY LIFE IN LÁSZLO VÁRI-FÁBIAN’S NOVEL «CAMP POST»

In Transcarpathia, where the Hungarian minority lives compactly, the situation with the Hungarian military language is such that it does not function either as a terminological vocabulary or as a professional jargon in the traditional sense. This is due to the fact that in the army, official communication takes place exclusively in the state language. According to this fact, Transcarpathian Hungarian men learned military terminological vocabulary depending on the time of service either in Russian or in Ukrainian. Due to the lack of opportunities to use the native language, we cannot talk about the existence of Hungarian army slang during military service. Thus, after demobilization, military terms that appear in the memories of former conscripts, due to lack of knowledge of their counterparts in their native language, are replaced by Slavic elements learned during the service, which are naturally assimilated in the Transcarpathian Hungarian dialects. In the article, on the example of a literary prose work written in the form of memories, an attempt is made to analyze lexemes from army life, which were learned in the language of the Transcarpathian Hungarians.

Primary School Extracurricular Music Activities in Covasna and Harghita Counties

Arts education, including music teaching (Dohány, 2010) in elementary schools is getting less and less importance in our present day education system, accordingly we find quite relevant to investigate the situation of music teaching in Romania among the Hungarian minority educationís elementary classes. This present study would like to map the extracurricular fields of music teaching in Covasna and Harghita counties in Hungarian classes through a questionnaire research made among teachers. Our objective is to investigate extracurricular musical education in elementary classes, where we would like to find out what kind of musical activities exist in this area and how intensively do pupils take part in these activities. The self-made questionnaire was sent out online in Covasna and Harghita counties, based on the teachers ‘database at the end of January in 2020. 78 elementary school teachers took part in this research. All the collected data was processed with the help of a statistical data analysing software, examining the descriptive statistical indicators. The analysis shows that few elementary class students take part in extracurricular activities.Romanian music pedagogy research do not extend to Hungarian minority classes, thus we see it important to investigate the extracurricular activities in counties where Hungarian minorities live.

Jazyk – identita – kultura – minorita (sociolingvisticka analyza situacneho pouzivania minoritneho jazyka na priklade vysokoskolskej slovenskej mladeze v Madarsku)

Language plays an important role between identity, culture and minority relations. The knowledge and use of the minority language by the elite is an authoritative attribute of language position in the whole minority. The education of elites in the Slovak minority in Hungary is determined by minority education (teaching the Slovak language, history and culture). The top of this kind of education is the university study of Slovak studies at several universities in Hungary. Graduates gain the legitimacy to become the intellectual elite of the Slovak minority in Hungary. Sociolinguistic situation analysis shows their relationship to Slovak language and real aspects of its use.

Looking to the Past to Survive the Future: The Hungarian Minority in Slovakia

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek &amp; George Soroka. With reference to the Hungarian minority’s overarching concern over its declining population in Slovakia, this article reveals how different elements of the past are activated, remembered, and renegotiated to ensure the minority’s cultural survival. Using elite interviews, party documents, and a detailed analysis of two local newspaper archives in Hungarian, I unpack how memory and politics interact in the post-EU accession period. First, I uncover how political and civil society actors use acts of commemoration as a conduit to circulate certain narratives of the Hungarian minority identity. Through remembering historic Hungarian leaders and events, elites affirm and construct the minority identity, thus enabling its cultural reproduction. The Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian Monarchy period is referred to most frequently with the celebration of national heroes. Events spanning the twentieth century are generally mourned as painful and detrimental for the Hungarian minority. While the acts of commemoration are “soft” measures to ensure cultural survival, Hungarian political actors also desire “hard” guarantees through institutional measures, best encapsulated by their desire for autonomy arrangements. However, the Slovak nation’s own past of claiming autonomy and their eventual secession from Czechoslovakia in 1939 conditions the cultural rules around language and the appropriate vocabulary that Hungarian elites can use. Consequently, Hungarian minority elites appropriate the past strategically in two ways. They readjust their tactics through using different vocabulary to claim autonomy and second, they pursue policy reforms across areas such as education and regional development, thus making the de facto possibility of autonomy more palatable to their Slovak counterparts.

The Treaty of Trianon as a Source of Instability in the Central-Eastern Europe (Part 2)

The article notes that the Trianon Peace Treaty of June 4, 1920 between the Entente countries and Hungary, as a result of the First World War, turned out to be, like all the other six treaties of the Versailles system, mostly unfair. Forcibly the territory of Hungary decreased by 2/3, the population decreased 2,7 times, a third of the Hungarian ethnic group became part of neighboring states.&#x0D; It is noted that during 1920-2020. In Hungary, there were no powerful political forces of various trends and trends that would recognize the Trianon Peace Treaty as just. At the same time, the ruling political elites of the neighboring states of Hungary considered and still consider the conditions of the Trianon fair. Such opposite assessments of the consequences of Versailles engendered antagonism, making it impossible to reach a compromise between the countries of Central-Eastern Europe.&#x0D; Attention is drawn to the fact that during the domination in Europe of the coalition of countries led by Germany of the Versailles Peace Treaty, including the Trianon, were dismantled, a new order was introduced, in which opponents of Versailles – Germany, Italy, Japan, the USSR, Hungary, Bulgaria. played an active role&#x0D; It is noted that the winners of the World War ІІ restored the borders of the countries of Germany’s allies in Europe, in accordance with their own geopolitical interests, which corresponded by 70% to the borders established by the Entente after the World War І. The Trianon borders were restored over Hungary by the Paris Peace Treaty of February 10, 1947. The USSR, Great Britain, France and the United States acted from a hegemonic position, were guided by the right of the winner and in many respects imposed on the defeated countries the conditions of the Versailles system were discredited, did not draw proper conclusions and did not build international relations on principles close to justice, but preserved the complicated territorial contradictions of the past with the corresponding treaties.&#x0D; It is indicated that the threat of assimilation and disappearance of foreign Hungarians is one of the main reasons for the revitalization of modern Hungary. Measures to overcome the syndrome of the dismemberment of the Hungarian nation in Central-Eastern Europe have been going on for centuries with little results; The rate of decline in the number of Hungarians in neighboring states over the past century is the highest, so Budapest believes that there is no time to delay the introduction of autonomy for foreign Hungarians, because in the next 25 years the very need for it will disappear through their disappearance.&#x0D; It is emphasized that the level of ensuring the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia especially affects the relationship of Hungary with Ukraine. The improvement of relations between Hungary and Ukraine has minimal chances, since the positions of the parties on the procedure for the application of educational and language laws in Transcarpathia do not coincide.&#x0D; Taking into account the decisive activity of Hungary and the Hungarian foreign communities in 2020 (the century of the signing of the Trianon Peace Treaty on June 4, 1920), it is concluded that this problem will not lose its relevance, but will significantly increase.