A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Historica 2. (Szeged, 1999)

ROMSICS Ignác: Társadalmi és politikai feszültségek Magyarországon a XX. század első felében

IGNÁC ROMSICS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PRESSURES IN HUNGARY IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Many people in Hungary call the two to three decades preceding World War I "the Period of Contempt and Peace." There is a reason for this: between 1867 and 1914, there were no wars in Hungary, though numerous armed uprisings were taking place in the Balkans during this time. Indicators of economic progress were quite impressive, since the GDP per capita tripled for the years between 1867 and 1913, increasing by 2.5%. At the same time, it would be a mistake to overrate the reliability of the data. Despite the relatively fast progress, Hungary remained one of the underdeveloped countries on the eve of war. Its per capita national income was 69% of the European, 37-38% of the British, 48-51% of the German and 72% of the Finnish averages. Hungarian society was not able to show any degree of considerable transformation, nor has it become entirely bourgeois. Although the proportion of those making a living from agriculture continuously declined, it was still up to 62% in 1910. Thus, the transformation of the traditional social structure had not yet begun. The numerous elements of the traditional social composition, the quality of life and the norms of behaviour continued despite the new social class and its way of thinking. As a result of this duality, the years of the fin de siècle could have been called the "incontempt-peaceless period" instead of the "time of contempt and peace" because there was a shortage in distributable goods, a historically established multicultural social composition and finally, a considerable degree of seriousness and insecurity existed in internal affairs. As a result of the territorial arrangement of the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty, Hungary transformed from a multicultural state into a virtually homogeneic nation. The percentage of those whose mother tongue was other than Hungarian decreased from 46% (1910) to 10% (1920). This decline still continued later on, though on a smaller scale. The percentage of the minority population shrank to 8% by 1930. Thus, the situation of the minority was no longer a problem for internal affairs, that is, Hungarian society and politics, since there were still other matters of concern. In addition, a new dilemma arose in foreign affairs, the significance of which approximated that of the pre-war concern for the situation of the minorities: the problem of the 3 million person Hungarian minority which found itself outside of the newly set borders. Hungarian political leaders of the period, Hungarian society and the minorities all thought of this separation as an interregnum and strove for reunification. It is a well known fact that this was achieved for the most part between 1938 and 1941. The Peace Treaty of 1947 reestablished the original borders of 1920. Therefore, the matter concerning the minorities reemerged as a problem in foreign affairs and along with other autonomies which existed at the beginning of the century, it remains one of the central matters of concern for Hungarian society and politics even today. For decades, writers of Hungarian history after 1945, called the Horthy-regime fascist and later semi-fascist, that is, dictatorial Fascism. This is obviously false. The most important features of the Fascist or national-socialist totalitarianism were not apparent in the Horthy regime. At the same time, it cannot be called a parliamentary democracy either, since it excluded significant elements of society from the struggle for political power, not to mention other restrictions. Therefore, we believe that between the two world wars, the Hungarian state and system of government could most specifically be described as a type of authoritarian political system.