The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  But there was another side to the statistics. Nearly all the increases, both absolute and relative, in the Magyar-speaking element in the country had taken place in the central areas, especially Budapest and its surroundings, and it had been due, partly, to the Magyarization both of the formerly German populations of the towns and of some of the smaller non-Magyar (German and Slovak) rural islets; in large measure also to the immigration, which came from two main sources: the Jews, who as they moved south-westward exchanged Yiddish for Magyar, and the overspill from congested peripheral districts, chiefly in the north, come down to find employment in the State services or, on a humbler level, the factories of the prosperous centre. The children of these Slovak and other arrivals Magyarized automatically, almost imperceptibly.

  But Central Hungary was by large majority Magyar already. The effects of the attempts to extend the Magyar area outward were practically nil. The non-Magyar pupils in the State schools in the peripheral areas who spent their school years learning a few scraps of Magyar – and very little else – promptly forgot them on leaving school. Where a commune changed its ethnic character, this was due to quite other causes, and the changes were by no means always favourable to the Magyar element. A Magyar writer who investigated the question in 1902,76 reported that during the Liberal period the Magyars had gained only 261 communes from the non-Magyars, while losing 465 to them. Their chief gains (89) had been at the expense of the Slovaks; their chief losses, to the Roumanians and Germans. Of all the nationalities in Hungary, the Ruthenes had lost most communes (217) but most of these losses had been to the Slovaks, not the Magyars. The Magyars had lost next most, then the Serbs (87 losses, 4 gains); this largely owing to a declining birthrate.77 The Roumanians had gained most communes – 362 gains, 64 losses – then the Slovaks (253 gains, 106 losses), then the Germans (188 gains, 116 losses).

  Emigration had some effect on the national totals and proportions, for in Hungary, as in Austria, it began in the districts in which rural congestion was most acute. Thus when it began on a large scale, it came chiefly from the Slovak districts, and the Slovak contingent was percentually the largest up to 1913, and the Magyar, percentually the smallest. In absolute figures, however, the Magyars had passed the Slovaks in 1905, after which they accounted for about one-third of the annual totals.78 Emigration, however, hardly affected the ethnic map, provided that density was disregarded, for it left no spaces to be filled, or not, at any rate, by non-local elements.79 Broadly, therefore, the ethnic frontiers in the West, North and East had remained stationary, on almost the exact lines on which they had been stabilized at the end of the impopulatio: only in a few, exceptional cases did the growth of a Magyar-speaking town on the linguistic frontier alter the local balance. Behind the main lines, the losses suffered by the Magyar element at least balanced its gains; here, exactly as in Central Hungary, small local minorities were being swallowed up by the local majorities.

  Thus the potential danger to Hungary’s territorial integrity presented by the non-Magyar ethnic character of its periphery had not even diminished, much less disappeared. It would do so only if Magyarization conquered the periphery of the country, as it had the centre; or if Hungarian policy succeeded in winning over those non-Magyars whom it failed to assimilate linguistically to an activist attitude towards the State; and this would have to be activist indeed if it were to defeat the demands made by Hungary’s neighbours, on the basis of national determinism, if the integrity of the State were threatened by outside forces.

  For a considerable period it looked as though Hungary might accomplish even this, at least with most of the Nationalities. The Transylvanian Saxons had, as was their wont, conducted such an austerely self-regarding policy and had ended by achieving for themselves a position so special, that a long footnote is the only appropriate way of describing it.80

  But Hungary’s other middle-class Germans, without exception, had taken a different line. They were only too glad to pay the entrance fee which admitted them to business or professional careers in which industry, method and sobriety (in all of which they excelled) were sure to earn enviable rewards: the sons or grandsons of any German burgher or Swabian peasant who had left his village were usually completely Magyarized. If any member of them felt irresistibly German, he emigrated; among those who stayed in Hungary there was, up to 1918, no trace of a German national movement, and when the Deutscher Schulverein, after its foundation in 1881, began to occupy itself with Hungarian conditions, the Swabians repudiated it unanimously and vigorously.81 The same could be said of the smaller and weaker nationalities, the Sokci and Bunyevci, the Armenians, the West Hungarian Croats and Slovenes, even the Ruthenes, and almost up to the close of the century, i had been true also of a large part of the Slovak intellectuals.

  At the time of the Compromise the Slovaks still possessed a handful of combative national leaders. As we have said, none of these had got into the 1865 Diet, but three got elected to the 1869 Parliament as representatives of the Slovak National Party, with a programme of realizing the 1861 memorandum. There was also a rival movement, the ‘New Slovak School’ (Nová Skola Slovenska) which aimed at reaching some compromise with the Magyars. But the Magyars, whose painful experience had convinced them that the Serb and Roumanian national movements, however nefarious, were realities with which policy must reckon, could never be persuaded that Slovak nationalism was anything more than an aberration, which they also believed to be curable. Government pressure was applied against both parties, whose rivalry also split the Slovak vote, and neither got any candidate into Parliament in 1872. Thereafter the Nová Skola disintegrated altogether, and the National Party decided to adopt ‘a policy of abstention’ which had much the same effect. Meanwhile, the full weight of Magyarization was being turned on the Slovaks, in accordance with Grünwald’s advice, more completely than on any other nationality. Their three Gymnasia were, as we have said, dissolved in 1874, their cultural association, the Slovenska Matica, in 1875,82 and the number of elementary schools with Slovak as language of instruction sank from a peak of 1,971 (in 1874) to half or a third of that figure.

  Other factors, too, were weakening the Slovaks’ resistance. The Czech politicians under the Feudalist politicians then leading them, had lost interest in them. Emigration overseas, which was very high in the 1880s, and 1890s,83 carried away many of their more enterprising members. Sväty Marton (Szent Martón) survived as a sort of national centre, but one little frequented, and the famous description by a chauvinist Hungarian writer of the secondary school as a sausage machine into which Slovak boys were fed at one end, to emerge Magyars at the other, had much truth in it. A high proportion of the Slovak intelligentsia did Magyarize, and those who achieved eminence in their chosen vocations, among which the Church was a favourite, usually became as devoted to their adopted nation as any Magyar of the blood.

  The Serb national movement, too, became less active with time. It had started with a swing in the first years of Dualism, when memories of the lost Voivody – gilded by a somewhat deceptive afterglow of memory – were still vivid, and relations with the Serbian Principality close. Unlike the other Nationalities, the Serb politicians did not boycott the Hungarian Parliament, and the speeches of the vigorous and outspoken leaders whom they sent to it, Svetozar Miletić and Michael Polit, caused frequent uproars.

  Passions became further inflamed when the Eastern crisis broke out in 1876. Miletić and the old fire-brand, Stratimirovićs, began collecting money and recruiting volunteers to help Serbia against the Turks, and a nationalist society, the Omladina, carried on a vigorous agitation which had in it an irredentist element.

  Now, however, the Government intervened. The leaders were arrested, and Miletić sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, whence he emerged a broken man. The Omladina was dissolved. The Government had already won an important success in 1875, when the Patriarch Masirević having died, it had succeeded in imposing the election of its own candidate, Ivacskovics, to the vacancy, and
securing the support of the other Serb Bishops for a policy of rapprochement. Now the waves subsided. The Government allowed the Serbian Matica to continue in being (and it became in fact the cultural centre of all Serbian life) and the unchallenged autonomy of the Serbian Orthodox Church provided a regular inflow of young educated men. Thanks to these advantages, there was practically no real assimilation.84 But the external feelings of the day were unfavourable to the Serbs, as they were to the Slovaks. The Serbian intelligentsia, other than the priests, emigrated largely to Serbia, where they filled many of the higher places in the young State; and Serbia was then almost an Austrian satellite, and irredentism was not encouraged there. The Serbs of Croatia had reconciled themselves with Hungary85 and of the two Parliamentary parties which divided their franchises, the Liberals, who favoured a modus vivendi with Hungary, were the stronger.86

  This left only the Roumanians as almost entirely resistant, and even among them, opinion was not always uniformly uncompromising. The Roumanians from the Partium, whose leaders Vincentiu Babes and Alexandru Mocsonyi, were among the most important figures among all their politicians, never quite lost hope of reaching a reasonable accommodation with the Hungarian Government, and even in Transylvania the great Archbishop Şaguna preached ‘activism’ while he lived.

  But a larger party among the Transylvanian Roumanians had decided, as early as 1868 (after another mass meeting at Balászfalva, held on 15 May of that year) to demand cancellation of the Union and restoration of Transylvanian autonomy. When they saw that they were unlikely to get the support, or the allies, to realize this, they decided to follow the fashionable policy of ‘passivity’, i.e. of boycotting Parliament. When Şaguna died in 1873, ‘activism’ collapsed, and its opponents were left in undisturbed possession of the field in Transylvania. In 1876 they established a National Committee to direct their policy, and in 1881, constituted a National Party, with a programme the main item of which was the demand for Transylvanian autonomy, although it asked also for remedy against the many administrative and cultural grievances under which, as it justly complained, the Roumanians were suffering. It remained, however, in passivity, an attitude which led most Hungarians – to whom Transylvania was still a remote and semi-foreign land – to believe that Roumanian national feeling was declining, like Slovak; but the contrary was the case. The consciousness of their basic ethnic oneness has, as we have said elsewhere, always been peculiarly deep among Roumanians, and it was only natural that when, in 1866, the Regat achieved the status of an independent Kingdom, the picture of Transylvania united to that kingdom, and its Roumanians elevated from the position of a despised and often ill-treated minority to that of the local master-race, should have dazzled many. Even those who were not yet consciously irredentist felt their pride and confidence in their people enormously stimulated by the achievements of their brothers across the Carpathians.

  National feeling in the Regat was, moreover, now being cultivated, as never before, by a young generation, recently emerged from the High Schools, and calling themselves Junimists.87 The Junimist movement did not preach active irredentism, for as it happened, its leaders were largely men trained at German Universities and Austrophile in politics. But its nationalism was of the type which transcends frontiers and class barriers, and it sowed a seed which the Francophile Liberals were to reap; and in Transylvania it found devotees, of whom one was outstanding, a brilliant and fanatical young journalist named Slavici, who was a radical in every respect.

  In 1884 Slavici began publishing a new journal, the Tribuna, and under his influence the Roumanian national movement took on a renewed activity. The tactical point at issue was whether the Party should or should not openly announce that it had lost hope and faith in any Hungarian Government, and appeal directly to the Monarch for redress, which, in the view of many of them, could be achieved only through abolition of the Dualist system. Owing largely to Mocsonyi’s opposition, the proposal was rejected in 1886 and again in 1891, and in both years the Party’s programme was reissued unaltered. Meanwhile, however, the relations between the Roumanian nationalists and the authorities were growing more embittered. Proceedings were instituted against Slavici and his sympathizers, and when the Court in Nagy-Szeben refused to convict the defendants, Tisza had the cases transferred to Kolozsvár, where the juries were ultra-chauvinistic. At that point the case of the Hungarian Roumanians was suddenly spotlighted in two causes célèbres. In 1891, the students of Bucharest University published, in Roumanian, German, French, English and Italian, a ‘memorandum’ on the grievances of their kinsmen in Hungary. The Magyar students of Budapest issued an ‘Answer’ to this, and to that again Roumanian students (this time Hungarian subjects) answered with a ‘Réplique’. The Court of Kolozsvár sentenced the principal author of this, a certain Aureliu Popoviciu, to four years’ prison (which he avoided by escaping to Roumania), and the printer to a year.

  The appearance of the Memorandum at last tipped the scales in Transylvania, and in 1892 the National Committee drew up its own Memorandum, which a deputation of three hundred carried to Vienna. Francis Joseph refused to receive them, and the Hungarian Government prosecuted fifteen members of the Committee, sentencing them to terms of imprisonment up to five years. The next month, the Party itself was dissolved. The chief effect of the crisis was, however, simply to eliminate the moderates, who dropped right out of politics. The Party carried on under various transparent aliases, and the entire national movement came under the unchallenged control of the extremists; to all of which the Government found no reply except more repression and more Magyarizing legislation.

  Battle was, as it were, joined, and the Roumanians had the better of it. In spite of all the efforts of the Hungarian Government, and of a voluntary society, the ‘E.M.K.E.’,88 Magyarization was negligible. Şaguna’s organization worked admirably, and even the number of Roumanian schools remained almost constant; after dropping a little between 1876 and 1890, it was clearly recovering by 1900. A Roumanian middle class grew up, and if its members attended Magyar gymnasia, they remained Roumanians. A network of Roumanian banks was founded, on the model of the Czech Živnostenská Banka, to help the establishment of Roumanian businesses, and to transfer land from Magyar to Roumanian ownership. The Albina Bank, founded in 1872, opened 152 branches in Transylvania over the next forty years. As Balogh’s statistics, if nothing else, prove (362 communes gained by the Roumanians against 64 lost),89 Transylvania was more Roumanian in 1900 than it had been in 1848.90

  The Hungarian Roumanians were now receiving effective support from the Regat. The publication of the Memorandum had encouraged the Roumanians in 1891 to found a ‘League for the Cultural Unity of all Roumanians’91 which helped to subsidize Roumanian individuals and institutions, nominally only for cultural purposes, but of course, in a spirit of nationalism which saw every cultural advance as a stepping-stone towards future political unification. The League, it is true, collapsed after two or three years,92 but its work was carried on surreptitiously by the Roumanian Government, and politicians, especially those of the Liberal Party, openly urged, in the Press and even in Parliament, that the acquisition of Transylvania should be the first object of Roumanian foreign policy. As early as 1893 Sturdza told the King that ‘the broadest circles of the nation were beginning to see in the Magyars far worse enemies than the Russians and that the feeling was undermining Roumania’s attitude to the Triple Alliance’. The King himself, and his Government, remained loyal to the Alliance, but the ideal of irredentism was by now overwhelmingly strong in the Roumanian public opinion, and only a child could suppose that it was much weaker among the Roumanians of Transylvania.

  *

  Towards the end of the century signs appeared that Slovak and Serb nationalism, too, had not been dead, but only dormant. In August 1895 a ‘Congress of Nationalities’ met in Budapest (Bánffy, oddly enough, raising no objections), and a Roumanian, a Slovak and a Serb delegate (this last, the aged Polit) agreed on a joint programme which repe
ated the old thesis that Hungary’s ethnic composition required that she should be politically, not a national but a multi-national State. They dropped the demand for ‘National’ territories and organizations, but asked that counties, etc., should be delimited on national lines, the language of administration and justice in each to be that of the nationality inhabiting it; also for general, equal and secret suffrage, and various democratic reforms.

  This programme elicited outbursts of unbridled rage from the Magyar chauvinists, and an intensification of Magyarization: four hundred new Magyar State schools were founded the following year. The programme had no further immediate effects, since the politicians even of those nationalities concerned decided not to abandon their ‘passivity’, while the Germans and Ruthenes continued to stand aside. The meeting may, however, be taken as the first sign of that turn of the tide which, ten years later, was flowing forward visibly and purposefully, particularly among the Slovaks.

  Very important, in this connection, was the revival of interest in Slovak affairs which was now setting in in Prague under the influence of Professor Masaryk, himself a man of Slovak stock, although his forebears came from the extreme western outposts of his people, where it had spilled over into Moravia. Under Masaryk’s inspiration some of the young Slovaks who had taken to attending Prague University (in default of adequate facilities in their own country) founded in 1896 a ‘Czechoslovak Society’ (Ceskoslovenská Jednota) to work for the national unification of Czechs and Slovaks, to assist Slovak students in Bohemia and Moravia and ‘to emancipate the life of Upper Hungary from Magyar influence’; also a periodical Hlas (Voice) to propagate their views.