HUNGARY

Hungary has always been a bit different. Magyar, its language, is (along with Finnish and Estonian) a member of the Finno-Ugric family, making it unlike other European languages, which are almost all part of the Indo-European family. The Magyars were a terror to Christian Europe in the early 10th century, until stopped by Otto at the Battle of the Lech in 955, an event which marked the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire. Thereafter they settled down on the Hungarian plain, where they remain. In 1000, Hungary was recognised as part of Christendom, when Pope Sylvester II awarded Stephen a royal crown.

For most of the Middle Ages, Hungary was the frontline protecting Christian Europe from the intrusions of the Ottoman Turks. After the disastrous Battle of Mohacs in 1526, the crown (and the mission) passed to the Habsburgs, who held it for the next 400 years. However, Hungary was not like the other lands run by the family, in that there was an extremely large class of petty nobles instead of the normal hierarchichal pyramid. Although many of them did not own land, they did have status, and ruled themselves through decentralised counties. As the Holy Roman Empire declined in the 18th century, and the Habsburgs increasingly tried to turn their collection of disparate territories into a coherent state, Austrian centralism clashed with Hungarian localism. After a Magyar revolution in 1848, the eventual compromise in 1867 was the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary; two realms with a common monarch. The compromise was however unsustainable. In the Hungarian part, other nationalities chafed under the imposition of Magyar rule; while in the Austrian part, other nationalities (Germans, Czechs, Poles) wondered why they couldn't have the same terms as the Magyars.

It took some time for the compromise to founder. But when Austria-Hungary and Germany were defeated in the First World War, the old Habsburg Empire splintered more than any other. Greater Hungary came to an end in 1920 with the Treaty of Trianon, under which the country lost 71% of its territory and 66% of its people. Roughly one third of the ethnic Hungarian population ended up as minorities in Slovakia, Romania and Serbia, where they remain. Both Hungarian nationalism (within Hungary), and anti-Hungarian discrimination (in those countries) are still live issues today.

I gleaned much of the above from two excellent books that I have read this winter. One is A.J.P.Taylor's history of the Habsburgs from 1800 onwards; and the other is Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 1934, aged 18, he decided - as one did in those days - to walk from London to Constantinople. In the first book, A Time of Gifts, he gets to the Slovak-Hungarian border; the second one takes him through Hungary and Romania and on into (what was then) Yugoslavia. Staying mainly in old castles and stately homes, he describes a world of polyglot minor aristocrats, conscious of family ancestry, yet struggling to cope with ending up in Romania, the "wrong" country. The Habsburg idea of different nationalities all living under a benevolent common monarch has been replaced by a harsher kind of nationalism, with penalties for those who are no longer top dog. And an even harsher kind of nationalism looms on the horizon as the 1930's draw to an end.

Hungary is now part of the E.U., an architecture designed to stop those sorts of things. However, as the recent spat over the illiberal aspects of the new Hungarian constitution shows, they are not completely dead and buried. Furthermore, Hungary's "get lost" reaction demonstrates clearly that it is one thing to sign up to treaties, it is another to believe them. Hungary continues to be a bit different from the rest of Europe.

Walter Blotscher