1 Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia. Parallels of and comparisons with the Successor States customarily offered the best and most exploited arguments to support Hungarian views.

2 Hungary, whose structure combined one of Europe's geopolitically most coherent, though ethnically heterogeneous, regions in the basin of the Carpathian Mountains, was one of the earliest stable political establishments in Europe. It took the distinct form of a centralistically-organized political state as early as the beginning of the tenth century, with its unity more solidly established than that of most of the contemporary Western States. It was traditionally multinational; almost from its beginning it had been an organic composition of different nationalities whose number multiplied (after the liberation of devastated and depopulated Hungary from the Ottomans by the seventeenth century) through wholesale colonization under the Habsburgs. AH these various peoples were bound together by the common tie of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen, first Christian king of Hungary (998-1038).

3 The majority people's right to leadership in statecraft was never (as it hardly could be) challenged by any serious critic. What was vigorously objected to was exclusive ascendancy.

4 The most important works of reference expressing the classic Hungarian view for the interwar period and published in foreign languages are the following: Flachbarth, E., L'histoire des nationalites en Hongrie (Bibliotheque Hong. Clermont Ferrand, 1943)Google Scholar; also the essays by the same author on the recent development of Hungarian nationalities rights, entitled “Les minorites ethniques,” and “Die Nationalitaten” published in the collective volumes Visages de la Hongrie (Paris, 1938) and Ungarn, das Antlitz einer Nation (Budapest, 1940), respectively. The Hungarian political view of the question has been summed up by Count Stephen Bethlen in The Treaty of Trianon and European Peace (London, New York, Toronto, 1934).Google Scholar For the conditions before 1920 one may find interesting facts in the publication of the Hungarian Ministry for Foreign Affairs entitled The Hungarian Peace Negotiations. The following works published in English by Hungarian authors also contain references to the problem in question: Teleki, Count Paul, The Evolution of Hungary and Its Place in European History (New York, 1923)Google Scholar; Eckhart, F., A Short History of the Hungarian People (London, 1931)Google Scholar; Kosary, D. G., A History of Hungary (New York, 1941).Google Scholar

5 This law, fountainhead of most Hungarian nationalities legislation, was introduced by the great nineteenth century Hungarian liberal political philosopher and statesman, Baron Joseph Eotvos (1813—1871), Minister of Education in 1848, and between 1867 and 1871. The theoretical merits of this law were universally recognized and praised by contemporary and later critics.

6 Macartney, C. A., Hungary and Her Successors, 1919–l937 (Oxford, 1937), pp. 451–52, by permission of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London.Google Scholar

7 The substance of this paragraph is condensed from Emil Neugeboren, “Die Nationalitatenfrage im Ungarn der Vorkriegszeit,” Ungarische Jahrbiicher (Berlin, 1938), XVIII, 11–27.Google Scholar

8 Post-1918 Hungary had to absorb about half a million Hungarians who were forced to leave her lost territories, a large proportion of whom made their new residence in the nation's capital. The political pressure of these refugees was evidently heavy, all the more so since two of interwar Hungary's most influential prime ministers, Count Stephen Bethlen and Count Paul Teleki, were themselves refugees from Transylvania, and their kinsmen and homeland were subjected to one of the Successor States, Rumania. Besides, almost every Hungarian politician and official had either his origin or at least deep-rooted family ties in the detached territories, a circumstance that cannot be overlooked in reviewing Hungarian attitudes.

9 The best-known advocate of the foreign critics was Britain's Seton-Watson, R. W., who expressed his views in numerous works, e.g., Racial Problems in Hungary (London, 1908)Google Scholar; The Southern Slav Question (London, 1911); History of the Czechs and Slovaks (London, 1943)Google ScholarPubMed; History of the Roumanians (London, 1934)Google Scholar. His views were passionately debated and refuted in Hungary.

10 Disapproval of Hungarian practices from other than national minorityoriginated sources appeared seldom before 1918 in Hungary itself, due partially to the general opposition such criticism would have met. By far the best known of this group of critics, however, is Professor Oskar Jaszi (one-time minister of nationalities in the Hungarian revolutionary government of 1918–1919), who analyzes the problem chiefly from the socio-political angle. See his A Nemzetisegi Allamok Kialakuldsa es a Nemzetisegi Kerd.es (Budapest, 1912); also his later works written in exile, as: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary (London, 1924)Google Scholar; The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago, 1929)Google Scholar. Also significant is the work on Hungarian nationalism by another severe critic who himself belonged to the Rumanian ethnic group in Hungary, Popovici, A., Die Vereinigten Staaten von Grossoesterreich (Leipzig, 1906).Google Scholar

11 Orders 4,800 ME, and 110,478 VKM.

12 Classification of the nationalities in Hungary was on the basis of the mother tongue, the latter being defined as the language that is “spoken best and most customarily.” Since the actual interpretation of this basis often lacked impartiality, this criterion of the mother tongue was in itself objected to by the critics.

13 Decrees 11,000 ME and 760 VKM.

14 Criticism generally agreed that of the three types of these nationalities schools only the A type matched its name without reservation. The right of the B type to be called a national minority school was often queried, and the C type was not regarded as a national minority school by most of the critics.

15 Germany and Italy, acting as joint mediators, forced Czechoslovakia to return to Hungary a southern strip of Slovakia, the population of which was overwhelmingly Hungarian, and a little later the so-called Carpatho-Ruthenia, which up to 1918 also was an integral part of Hungary.

16 Order 133,200. IX. VKM.

17 Rumania in 1940 yielded about one-third of Transylvania (i.e., the part that had a predominantly Hungarian population) back to Hungary.

18 Order 24,024. VKM.

19 Order 56,600. V.a.E. VKM.

20 Order 204,053. VI. 6. VKM.

21 As against the considerably smaller proportion of the majority people in the Successor States. For example, the percentage of the Czechs and the Slovaks altogether in Czechoslovakia in 1930 was 66.2 percent; the percentage of the Rumanians in Rumania in 1930 was 71.9 percent; the percentage of the Serbs, the Croats, and the Slovenes altogether in Yugoslavia in 1931 was 79.8 percent. Data from Radisics Elemer, A Dunataj (Budapest, 1946), I, 322.

22 See the earlier discussion in this paper.

23 Interconnections with specific (National Socialist indoctrinated) German minorities problems are discussed later in this article.

24 It was the peasantry in Hungary which contained the broad masses of the different national minorities, and the education of this class (irrespective of nationality) only seldom went beyond the primary stage, as was the case nearly .everywhere in Europe. The national minorities within the peasantry were left, as far as their assimilation into Magyardom was concerned, in the words of Macartney (though he limits his statement to the situation existing up to 1918 only) “almost untouched and untouchable.” See Macartney, C. A., Problems of the Danube Basin (Cambridge, 1944), p. 64, by permission of Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

25 See footnote 14.

26 The number and influence of those state officials who came to live in partitioned Hungary, after being mistreated and forced to leave the detached territories on the sole ground of their Hungarian origin, was also not negligible.v

27 A great many of the Roman Catholic churchmen were most consistent in resisting the legislation. They had a specific reason. The non-Catholic churches of the nationalities (chiefly the Rumanian Eastern Orthodox Church, to which almost no Hungarian belonged) identified their religious ends all too often with the national goals and interests of their flocks. And further: the ultimate religious authority of all Catholics is supra-national Rome, while a great proportion of the national minorities in Hungary belonged to churches whose ultimate authority was not supra-national.

28 Budapest preferred to bring up instances occurring in the Successor States, who invariably reciprocated.

29 The Hungarian capital, Budapest (population in 1940 was 1,100,000), was the only big city in the Western sense of the term in the country. It was “the” city, and center of all intellectual, cultural, and political activities.

30 This “qualified willingness” may, in some measure be compared with the insistence of many people in the United States on the acceptance of the American way of life (the means of fusing together peoples of different national extractions) by all of its citizens.

31 Count Paul Teleki held the office of minister of education from May, 1938, to February, 1939, and that of prime minister (for the second time) from February, 1939, until his tragic death on April 3, 1941. He committed suicide in protest against the German assault on Yugoslavia, negating his policy toward that country and ruining his plans for a Hungary which could stay out of World War II.

32 The author relies on his personal experience gained while he was associated with the policy planning staff of the Hungarian Ministry of Education from 1935 to 1940.

33 See the discussion earlier in this paper.

34 Especially for those nationalities who inhabited in overwhelming number certain coherent regions, like the Ruthenes in Carpatho-Ruthenia.

35 The German minority in Hungary was prior to the Hitler era Hungary's traditionally most loyal nationalities group, and its non-peasant part were the most willing and obliging subjects to become magyarized of all minorities.

36 The elder generation of the German minority remained on the whole, despite the vigorous campaigning and agitation of Party agents from the Third Reich, unshaken in its loyalty to the Hungarian State, and indifferent to National Socialist propaganda.

37 In justification of their action, these young dissenters reasoned invariably that they acted so because they could fight their arch-foe, Russian Bolshevism, more efficiently in the, so it seemed to them, invincible German armed forces.

38 On interwar and wartime Hungarian-German relations see also: G. C. Paikert, “Hungarian Foreign Policy in Intercultural Relations, 1919-1944,” American Slavic and East European Review, XI, No. 1, 42–65.Google Scholar

39 The different nationalities would never unite for collective action. Such attempts always failed, much to the convenience of Budapest. Each national minority group tried to attain advantages (or as in the case of the National Socialist German minority, privileges amounting to monopolies) on an individual basis, even if it wasi at the expense of the rest. This lack of collective action also eliminated a strong factor in pressure that might have influenced Hungarian policies. In this sense it certainly can be accounted for as an excuse for inadequacies in Hungarian practices.