The past decade has seen mass emigration of Hungarians from Serbia to the kin-state and Western European countries. This has resulted in new ways of understanding what it means to belong to the community, both empirically and in terms of theorizing it, and both for those in Serbia and those abroad. This article claims that there are virtual platforms where members of this ethnic community (re)create their identities, and that this happens through relating to certain common themes. For this reason, I analyze the common themes of two humorous Facebook pages – namely, rurality, food, language use, ethnic others, and crossing borders – popular among Vojvodina Hungarians. The article argues that these elements of identity connect members of the community who live in Vojvodina and those who have emigrated to the kin-state or diaspora. Therefore, in order to unpack the complex dynamics of identification of a national minority community with high diasporic tendencies, an approach that connects the above topics to the concepts of community, nostalgia, home, minority, and borders, and in more general terms the lens of national minority and diaspora studies is needed.

Applying a historical institutionalist theoretical perspective to the ethnic minority policy domain, the article attempts to explain why state policies toward minorities may be difficult to reverse once introduced. Focusing on a case study of the cultural status of the Vojvodina Hungarian minority in Serbia, the article attempts to find out the forms taken by self-reinforcing dynamics associated with minority-related policies, once they are de-institutionalized. The paper deals with the evolution of the concept of Hungarian cultural autonomy in Vojvodina in the context of the transition from the socialist framework of minority rights protection, applied in the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina under the 1974 Constitution, to the system established by the Law on National Councils of National Minorities and the Statute of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina adopted in 2009, after the interim period of state centralization in the 1990s. The Vojvodina case study exemplifies the costs faced by governments aspiring to reverse these policies and allows the identification of path-dependent factors behind the collective action processes related to the main principles of these policies, and conditions that allow these principles to outlive the abolishment of respective institutional arrangements, persist across radical political and social changes over time, and re-emerge at later historical stages, in new institutional settings.