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

guage. And if there was something missing from that tradition, or if
it was too narrow, it could still count on emphatic support from the
leading strata of society, even from the state itself. This aspiration
was found – obviously to varying degrees and with varying levels of
success – in all the nations and nationalities of the old Hungary,
and was one of the fundamental factors influencing internal conditions
in the Kingdom of Hungary from the era of reform in the first
half of the 19 th century, peaking in 1848/49 with revolution and the
subsequent battle for independence. This national ambition was
later to continue throughout the whole period of fifty years from the
Austro-Hungarian Compromise in 1867 to the demise of the old
Hungary in 1918. Yet, only the Magyar ethnic group, in forming a
modern nation, was able to fully exploit the Hungarian state and all
its structures during the process of national integration; other ethnic
groups (with the exception of the Croats) did not have any such
opportunities.
From the point of view of numbers, the Magyar ethnic nation was
merely the largest ‘minority’ ethnic group; nevertheless, its social
and political elite dominated the country even before the start of
the modern civic era, acting as the defining element of the Estatesbased
aristocratic ‘nation’ and going on to mould the civic nation
from what were clearly the remains of feudalism. Thus, to all intents
and purposes, they ‘naturally’ appropriated the whole history of the
Hungarian state, along with historical constitutional law and other
state traditions stemming from it. Smaller ethnic groups in the country,
or rather, their leading strata, were compelled to struggle for ‘a
place in the sun’ for themselves and their ethnic group; their awakening
into modern nations was from a much more disadvantageous
position. Thus, through its ruling elite, the Magyar ethnic group
made itself into the dominant ‘state nation’. Other ethnic groups,
smaller and weaker from every point of view but with ambitions to
mature into a modern nation or nationality, strove to acquire at least
autonomous constitutional legal status; but until 1918, only the
Croats – whom I have already mentioned – with their constitutional
legal tradition from the old Kingdom of Croatia, managed to do so.
This struggle could not fail to connect with historical or ‘historicized’
arguments on all sides, arguments that were nevertheless directed
towards planned political goals and strengthening one’s own national
identity. It is first and foremost a matter for Hungarian histo-
175 Milan Zemko