Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

aristocratic, Estates-based ‘natio hungarica’ determined the nature
of Hungarian society practically up to the Year of Revolution,
1848/1849. However, this older understanding of nation has, in a
certain sense, also remained part of modern historical memory.
Whether manifest through acknowledgement or denial of Hungary’s
historical constitutional law, this understanding has played and still
plays a role in forming the modern national consciousness of
Slovaks and Magyars, as well as of other nations in Hungary’s pre-
Trianon territory. I shall return to this question later in my paper.
Nowadays we most frequently think of a nation in the political, the
civic or the cultural and ethnic sense. A political nation is generally
understood to be all the citizens of a given state; to paraphrase the
words of the French man of letters, Ernest Renan – understood in
this way, a nation submits to daily plebiscites about its own existence.
Such a political, or civic, understanding of a nation has asserted
itself in France, Great Britain and practically the whole of
Western Europe, as well as, of course, North America. On the other
hand, in Eastern Europe, the concept of a nation means an ethnic
nation; a nation is understood primarily as a cultural and ethnic entity
with a common language. At the same time, emphasis is placed
on cultural, linguistic and ethnic individuality, on deep-rooted traditions,
particularly about the character of the people, and on history,
often expressed in a shared historical mythology.
The factor that could be viewed as the most important in an ethnic
and cultural conception of national identity is a subjective one: ethnic
awareness, which the Slovak ethnologist Michal Kaľavský has
described as a sense of the originality of one’s ethnic group – a
feeling which cannot be reduced to that of any other social group.
It is a strong belief on the part of an ethnic community in its own
uniqueness, a shared desire to live together as an ethnic community
with its own aspirations, which differ from the aspirations of
neighbouring ethnic groups.
According to the Slovak ethnologist Gabriela Kiliánová, apart from
a sense of differing from other nations, national identity also includes
a feeling of belonging to a nation – that is, identification with
one’s own nation on the basis of deep-rooted criteria: shared
values, symbols and representations. Those who belong to a given
nation have a personal awareness of a lived process of self-reflec-
172