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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The question of the national minorities of East Central Europe has again become a major topic of debate, as it was at the Paris Peace Conference 75 years ago. In 1994 and 1995, as the Horn government has attempted to hammer out bilateral treaties with Slovakia and Romania, the Hungarian minority populations have been a subject of public debate. The debate takes place in two forums. The interstate debate revolves around the same problems discussed in Paris; the question of the legal protection of minority rights in states in which the nation was declared to belong to the majority, and the further question of whether rights should be protected on an individual or collective basis. The second forum is that of the larger Hungarian community and concerns the nature and cohesion of the fifteen million Hungarians throughout the world. The implicit question is who actually belongs to the Hungarian community and what should be the relationship between so-called “minority” Hungarians and the Hungarian state.
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39. The 1991 census reported 1.5% as Gypsy, but Bútora judged the actual total to be closer to 5% (ibid., p. 2).Google Scholar
40. Meciar's resistance to requests by the Hungarian-speaking population for permission to record their names in Hungarian in birth registers and to post bilingual signs does not appear to have affected the informal use of such names.Google Scholar
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