Hungarian American Coalition News, 1999 (8. évfolyam, 1-3. szám)
1999 / 3. szám
Kocsis, Károly and Eszter Kocsis-Hodosi, Ethnic Geography of the Hungarian Minorities in the Carpathian Basin. Budapest: The Geographical Research Institute, Research Centre for Earth Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1998. Pp. 1-241. ISBN 963 7395 84 9 (2,800 forints) Károly Kocsis and Eszter Kocsis-Hodosi have again provided an outstanding sourcebook for researchers of Hungarian minority communities in East Central Europe. Their coverage is compact, precise and effectively documented with excellent maps, tables and figures. The book is also based on a clear and elegant English translation. Finally, the timing could not come at a better time, as the inter-ethnic hostilities and conflicts in the region again occupy center stage. Although Hungarian minorities have not been at the center of most of these conflicts, they play a key role in efforts to stabilize the region. As the people with the most to lose they have been at the forefront of democratization and economic reform. As Kocsis and Kocsis-Hodosi point out in their introductory chapter Hungarian minorities constitute the second most numerous minority people in Europe, second only to the Russians. In two states (Slovakia and Romania) they constitute the largest minorities, while in Yugoslavia they are second only to the Albanians. In total numbers the over three million Hungarians in minority status provide a larger population cluster than the total population in 87 different countries in the world, including states like Mongolia and Libya. The book focuses on the Carpathian basin where almost all of the Hungarians are located. To historians this will come as no surprise, since historical Hungary included the entire Carpathian basin until the Treaty of Trianon (1920). Kocsis and Kocsis-Hodosi weave together the demographic profile with the territorial and topographic land base. The result is a fast-paced historical synthesis of the settlement of the central part of Central Europe. In addition to the fifty-three supplemental black and white figures and maps, and the thirty-six excellent population tables, the book includes a multi-colored ethnographic map of the Carpathian basin and most of East Central Europe as far south as the Greek, Macedonian and Turkish borders. Even by itself this ethnographic map is worth the price of the book. The organization of the book is also logical and well conceived. After the overview in chapter one, it devotes a separate chapter to each region of the Carpathian basin under the control of the successor states to historic Hungary. Chapter 2 is devoted to Slovakia, and the subsequent chapters to Transcarpathia (Ukraine), Transylvania (Romania), Vojvodina (Yugoslavia), Croatia, Transmura region (Slovenia), and Burgerland (Austria). Excellent explanatory footnotes supplement the text whenever new or unfamiliar concepts, regions or peoples are discussed. The book also includes a “Geographical Register” (pp. 205-241) in the languages of the dominant peoples who inhabit these lands today as well as the historic Hungarian place names. The register is divided to coincide with the chapters covering each region. Furthermore, the names appear in Hungarian and Slovak or Hungarian and Serb for “hydrographic names”, “relief names”, “historical regions”, as well as settlement names, according to the Hungarian alphabetical order. Here I would like to point out that this section would be more useful to the international scholarly community if the alphabetization would be reversed. Thus, in Transylvania the current Romanian names should be alphabetized and the historic Hungarian names should follow. Of course, for scholars in Hungary the present set-up is more convenient, but information should be more accessible to scholars in the United Kingdom or the United States since this is the English version of the book. I highly recommend this book to all foreign policy specialists, in government and academia, who have to deal with East Central Europe and inter-ethnic relations. It should be on the shelves of all research libraries that deal with this region and it should be in the hands of all human rights activists who wish to inform the rest of the world about the fate of Hungarians in Transylvania, Vojvodina, Slovakia, or elsewhere in the Carpathian Basin. Andrew Ludanyi Ohio Northern University 7 • Hungarian American Coalition News • Special VOJVODINA ISSUE • October 1999
