Fraternity-Testvériség, 1949 (27. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1949-02-01 / 2. szám

TESTVÉRISÉG

5

AMERICA'S INTERESTS IN HUNGARIAN STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

By Leslie C. Tihanyi

This meritorious study which we intend to publish in four installments is reprinted from the “Documents and State Papers’’, (Vol. I., No. 5), a monthly periodical prepared and edited in the Division of Publication, Office of Public Affairs, as a complement to the Department of State Bulletin. The author, Leslie C. Tihanyi, is an official at the Department of State, born in Győr, Hungary, who was a student of the Franklin-Marshall College in Lancaster, Penna. We are glad to introduce this young scholar to our readers and the Hungarian public at large.

(Editor)

First Installment

HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1848-49

Events in eastern Europe during the nineteenth century were normally not of major interest to the British, French, and American public; however, on several occasions the struggle of one or another eastern European people for independence evoked a remarkably high degree of sympathetic attention and moral support in the Western countries. Conspicuous instances were the Greek War of Independence in 1821- 30, the Polish revolts of 1830—31 and 1863—64, and the Bulgarian rising against the Turks in 1875—76. In each case the element that principally served to locus Western sympathy was the idea of a struggle against great odds for liberty and national self-determination. For similar reasons the Hungarians in their struggle against Hapsburg domination in 1848—-49 were conspicuously successful in capturing the admiration and firing the enthusiasm of the Western public.

The occasion was the Hungarian War of Independence; the cause, the struggle of the Hungarian nation against unconstitutional despotism. But 1848 was a year of universal revolution in Europe, and the fact that, with the whole Continent in revolt, the Hungarians could evoke such great sympathy in England and America was a corollary of three circumstances. The first of these was the series of brilliant Hungarian military victories won over the armies of the Hapsburg monarchy; the second, the continuation of the struggle in Hungary even after the collapse of the other democratic revolts; the third, the intervention of the Russian Tsar, at that time the incarnation of barbaric despotism in Western eyes.

I. The Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Kingdom of Hungary, whose legalistic independence had been acknowledged by the ruling Hapsburg dynasty in 1790, was at least a hundred years behind the political and economic

stage of development then prevalent in western Europe. The reasons for this lag must be sought in the Turkish wars and conquest of Hungary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, after the expulsion of the Turks, in the reactionary character of the ruling oligarchy, the majority of which was content with governing the country on behalf of the foreign (Hapsburg) dynasty as long as its own feudal privileges remained intact.

The slow infiltration of liberal ideas propagated in England, America, and France, and the concurrent intensification of national consciousness ushered in an era of reform, which was making slow progress toward political and economic modernism during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The cause of reform was championed by two factions: one, under Count István Széchenyi, scion of one of the great oligarchical families, maintained that economic regeneration and prosperity must precede political reform; the other, under Lajos Kossuth, a country lawyer who sprang from the class of the impoverished gentry, demanded immediate political changes in the European liberal tradition in order to transform feudal Hungary into a parliamentary nation-state on the Anglo- French model.

This policy was doomed to failure because all the existing realities were against it. Liberal institutions were impossible in a country where the middle class was only in an incipient stage of development; a nation-state could not be organized in a territory inhabited by more than seven nationalities; the achievement of complete independence from a powerful ruling house (one of the pillars of the Holy Alliance against such revolutionary strivings) was a distinct improbability, especially since it would have meant the impairment of the European balance of power. Yet the generation of democratic reformers who were to lead the struggle for these unattainable objectives could be held exclusively responsible for their failure only if they had provoked the revolution of 1848 with the complete plan already formulated in their minds in its final shape. This was not the case. The history of the years 1848—49 in Hungary is that of a liberal nationalistic movement, encouraged by foreign examples, only to be forced on the defensive by a combination of external forces under the impact of which total defeat followes upon a gradual radicalization born of despair and defiance.

At the end of February 1848 the Diet of the archaic Hungarian Estates had been sitting in Pozsony (now Bratislava) for almost four