Hungarian Studies Newsletter, 1981 (9. évfolyam, 27-30. szám)
1981 / 27-28. szám
ARTICLES í7 PAPERS Adler, Philip. “Nation and Nationalism among the Serbs of Hungary 1790-1870,” East European Quarterly 13 (Fall 1979) 271-285. The author argues that the late flowering of nationalism among the Habsburg Serbs was due to their unique position. Descendants of migrants into counties of Hungary and into Slavonian and Bánát military districts had earned some privileges from the Habsburgs for service against the Turks. These Serbian Privileges, granted by Leopold I in the 1690s and reconfirmed by Maria Theresa gave them extraordinary religious, cultural, and political autonomy. But the Privileges had been issued to the “Illyrische Natio”, /sic/defined as “all adherents to Orthodoxy in Hungary outside the bounds of Transylvania.” This religious qualification was to delay the development of secular nationalism. The problems of the Serbian leaders did not really arise from a clash of ethnic consciousness but rather, from the changing perceptions of their own role. Neither the able and active Metropolitan Stevan Stratimirovic (1790-1836) nor the emerging secular middle class thought at this time of rejecting the Privileges that guranteed them a degree of autonomy. Relations with the Hungarian Court chancellery were generally good, and while the Romanians did increasingly demand a larger share of the common ecclesiastical offices and wealth, they were for the most part regarded as “wards of the Serbian hierachy.” Thus, it was not until the 1860s that a serious challenge was presented to the “basis of nationhood as ... a polyethnic, confessional community in which the sacral and civil authority was united and mutually re-enforcing.” It was the commitment to this principle which seems to be responsible for both opposition to the language reforms of Vuk Karadzic and the reluctance to respond to Romanian demands that, more than any other factor, served to un ite the Romanians and to move them toward the idea of an ethnic nation~a feat largely accomplished by the 1840s among the Bánát Romanians. The period of neo-absolutism (1851-1860) resulted in the emergence of secular national leaders, fostered by Vienna’s effort to undermine the Hungarian state. A political party did emerge by 1869 whose goals strikingly illustrate the duality of Serbian national consciousness at BOOKS (Continued) booklet first describes the four ideological pillars of the Third Reich, and how the branding of Gypsies and Slavs as inferior human species was a natural outcome of basic Nazi tenets. Then it describes in separate chapters the victimization of some 10 million Gypsies, Poles, Ukranians, Belorussians, prisoners of war, and slave laborers. Eliminated were some 65% of those declared Jews by Nazi definition; 35% of European Gypsies (the elimination was 100% in such places as the Lowlands); 20% of Poles; 15% of Ukranians; 25% of Belorussians, not to mention members of the political opposition in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and in the Reich itself. As long as political and ideological adversaries can be labelled as enemies and peoples of other cultures can be branded as biologically inferior, and the “legitimate” objective of a government or system is the annihilation of enemies, there is little if any hope that murders of “undesirable persons" will be forestalled in the future. The author received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia U. NO. 27-28, SPRING, 1981 HUNGARIAN STUDIES NEWSLETTER this time. While the 1869 sabor [diet] espoused the positon of 1790, the National Liberals dropped the program of a separate province under Serbian control and recognized the multiethnic character of the region, calling for full equality to all nationalities and the proportional representation at all levels. The National Liberals soon became the leading force, and their program served as the point of departure for Serbian political activity in Hungary until World War I. The author is at East Carolina U. (EMB) □ Boba.lmre. “The 'Bijelo-Brdo Culture’ and Ethnic Changes in the Danubian Basin in the Ninth Century” in Rapports du III® Congres International d’Archeologie Slave, Bratislava 7-14 Septembre 1975. Tome. 1. Veda-Vydavatelstvo Slovenskej Akademie Vied, Bratislava 1979, pp. 105-107. Present-day Slovakia was occupied after the fall of the Avar rule by a Slovene population from the south. These were known as tót with no corresponding name for their land as Tótország. But “territories south of the Drava were known throughout the Middle Ages as Tótország" says the author, “and this name was used officially for parts of Pannónia Secunda until 1918.” Hungarian dictionaries written before 1800 offer the following equivalents for Tót: Sclavonicus, Dalmatics, and lllyricus. The Latin equivalent of Tótország was Slavonia. It may be inferred, therefore, that the Tót people of Slovakia must be the descendants of the Sclavi from Slavonia, Dalmatia, Illyria, who occupied the northern part of the Danubian Basin in the ninth century. The medieval expression ‘Slovenin’ developed into ‘Slovak’, just as the expression ‘Polanin’ became ‘Polak’. The author is prof, of history at the U. of Washington. □ Benda, Kálmán. “Hungary in Turmoil, 1580-1620”, European Studies Review 8 (July 1978) 281-304. The end of the 16th century and the early years of the 17th century were marked by a disillusionment in Europe. In Hungary this feeling was intensified by the tripartite division of the country into the royal Hungary of the Habsburgs, the Principality of Transylvania, and the Turkish occupation zone. It is believed that the approximately four and a half million people of King Matthias Corvinus’ Hungary had been reduced by approximately one quarter during the last one hundred years. In the early years, the ratio of the nobility to the general population was 5% to 6%. As the years progressed, more and more of the poorer nobles moved into the cities. This gave the richer nobles a greater share in running the country. This development had its advantages, for it provided a group relatively independent of the vicissitudes of war, who were able to carry on the work of the country on the military, political, and cultural levels. Some sectors of the population suffered losses up to 90% and the material ruins were even greater. Religious differences added to the division between the ruler and the population in the Habsburg-held lands. While the Calvinist nobility dominated politically, the Catholic hierarchy continued to fill state offices. This led to frequent bitter opposition between the able nobility and the court aristocracy. The struggle developed into a constitutional one by the first decade of the 17th century, and in the Diet of 1608 the Habsburgs brought ecclesiastical demands by means of political concessions. In contrast to the emergence of national absolutism in the western countries, the power in Hungary went to the aristocracy. Yet, this victory “was the lesser evil because it still remained a better representative of the interests of the country and its people than an alien dynasty which never 7 T
