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THE NATIONAL IDEA AS AN INTEGRATION IDEOLOGY
Hungarian nationalism has emerged, the inventors of this idea could exploit
not only the “ordinary” international (mostly French or German) patterns
of nationalist discourse, but these above-mentioned traditions of Hungarian
proto-nationalism, that is, the Hungarian estate nationalism.
Perhaps the difference between the estate nationalism and present¬
day nationalisms can best be highlighted by the example of premodern
Transylvania (Erdély). Here there were three estate nations:
- “the Hungarians” (that is, the community of the noblemen),
- “the Saxons” (the traditional name of the local Germans, living in autonomy)
- “the Székelys (Szeklers)” whose language was Hungarian too, but they had a
particular legal status, and they lived in autonomous territorial units just as the
Saxons did.
The most populous ethnic group in Transylvania, namely the Romanians had
no estate nation, and the first claim of Romanian nationalism was to gain
the status of the fourth Transylvanian nation. After this endeavor’s failure
in 1791, and with the inspiration of the changing international discourse, the
Romanian intellectuals turned to the ethnic nationalism of all Romanians.
This was one of the two paradigmatic ways to make a nation around the
turn of the 18" and 19" centuries. Ethnic nationalism emerged typically
where there was not an own state, as in the Polish or the Irish case, or where
the ethnic group lived in several countries as in the German or Italian case."
The other way resulted in a type of state nationalism, which was, with some
simplification, the generalization of the privileged groups’ status to the
citizens of the state, (at least, in theory) independently of ethnicity. That was
the case, for example, with France!! or the United States.!? At this conference
I have to formulate very cautiously because there are many experts on these
topics, but probably most of the nationalisms in Latin-America could be
classified as state nationalisms.
Perhaps the lecturer is biased, but he regards the Hungarian Kingdom as
a special case. The country had a relatively stable state frame and borders
in the Middle Ages from about 1000. From 1526 to 1848, Hungary was a
part of the Habsburg’s “composite monarchy”,'* but the country was neither
Romanian nationalism seems to be the product of a combined situation — although I am not
an expert on this terrain.
According to Hobsbawm, this was true at least at the beginning, but at the end of the 19"
century French nationalism began to be “ethnicized”.
African Americans until the 1860s and Native Americans until the 1920s were not regarded
as citizens of the United States. The women were regarded as citizens by their father or
husband — although there were a lot of “anomalies”.
12 Mark Cornwall: The Habsburg Monarchy, in T. Baycroft - M. Hewitson (eds.): What is a
Nation? Europe 1789-1914, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, 171-191.