Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, Dieter Stiefel, Alice Teichova (Hrsg.): Sonderband 9. „Zarte Bande” – Österreich und die europäischen planwirtschaftlichen Länder / „Delicate Relationships” – Austria and Europe’s Planned Economies (2006)
Ágnes Pogány: The Changing Image of the Economie Role of Austria in Hungarian Public Discourse
THE CHANGING IMAGE OF THE ECONOMIC ROLE OF AUSTRIA IN HUNGARIAN PUBLIC DISCOURSE ÂGNESPOGÂNY Department of Economic and Social History Corvinus University Budapest I think there were no historians in Hungary in the 19th and 20lh centuries who did not profess the colonial or semi-colonial dependence of 18,h century Hungary at least in a part of their lives. 1 am sure no one among us would take this view today.1 The aim of my paper is to analyse the ways Austro-Hungarian economic relations were evaluated in Hungarian public thinking in the period following the Second World War. I would like to show how and why the image of Austria’s economic role in Hungarian development had changed. Unfortunately we have no reliable account of Hungarian public thought from these years. In my paper I analyse therefore the image of Austria in Hungarian economic history writing and in the political discourse from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Two dominant discourses Until now two dominant discourses have emerged in characterizing economic relations between Austria and Hungary. Both use metaphors. The first demonstrates Hungary as the colony of Austria, the second shows Hungary as a part of the economic community of the Habsburg Empire. Both metaphors appeared first in the 18th century and proved amazingly long-lived. They defined the ways of thinking about this question in Hungary for two centuries. Both metaphors were present parallel with each other in Hungarian public thinking before 1945. After World War II the general historical approach became monolithic. Until the 1960s the metaphor of Hungary-is-the-Colony-of-Austria had dominated public discourse concerning Austro-Hungarian economic relations. After the 1960s the Economic Community metaphor replaced the colonial one and began to organize the image of Austria. In the text I will call them Colony-Metaphor and Community-Metaphor respectively. * 17 Heckenast, Gusztâv: A magyarorszâgi ipar a XVIII. szâzadban és a bécsi gazdasâgpolitika. (Hungarian Industry in the 18th Century and Economic Policy of Vienna). In: Törtenelmi Szemle 17 (1974) Nb. 4. p. 502-506. here 502. Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs/Sonderband 9 225
