Symbolic Geographies and the Politics of Hungarian Identity in the ‘Populist-Urbanist Debate,’ 1925-44 (original) (raw)

Hungarian Geography between 1870 and 1920: Negotiating Empire and Coloniality on the Global Semiperiphery

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2024

Going beyond the conventional approach that locates imperial geographies at either the center or periphery of overseas colonization, this article focuses on coloniality in fin de siècle Hungary to examine the complex negotiation of the colonial project on the global semiperiphery. As a junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary was simultaneously both an object of Western Europe’s orientalizing gaze and an agent of its own civilizing mission on the nation’s periphery and in the Balkans. Adopting a decolonial framework, we investigate how Hungarian geographers fit themselves into the colonial paradigm and examine their shifting and ambiguous relationship to colonial notions. Beginning with the institutionalization of Hungarian geography in the 1870s and ending with the collapse of Austria-Hungary after World War I, we explore this evolving relationship in light of three factors: (1) the attitudes of Hungarian geographers toward Western imperialism in general and Austro-Hungarian imperialism in the Balkans in particular; (2) the diverse perspectives of Hungarian geographers as thinkers embedded in an epistemic community on the global semiperiphery; and (3) their perspectives on ethno-nationalist conceptualizations of national space. Offering critical insight into the history of fin de siècle Hungarian geography, our study also opens the possibility for comparative discussions regarding the semiperipheral coloniality of other broadly similar cases and the decolonizing of semiperipheral geographies and their pasts.

Big Dreams of Small Nations. Territorial Changes After World War I in Hungarian Collective Memory1

Trimarium, 2023

Even though more than a hundred years have passed since the end of the First World War, the Hungarian historical consciousness has still not been able to fully come to terms with the lost war and its consequences, namely the Treaty of Trianon. One important reason for this phenomenon, which many authors consider to be a „cultural trauma”, is that the „Hungarian national space” imagined by Hungarian national activists at the time of the unfolding of Modern Nationalisms collapsed in 1918, as recorded in the 1920 peace treaty and reaffirmed in the 1947 one. From the outset, the space considered by the Hungarian elites as Hungarian overlapped with the similar visions of neighbouring non-Hungarian national movements, and at the end of the First World War the latter’s concepts were realised – at the expense of the Hungarian. The present essay traces the process of the emergence, competition and reorganisation of Hungarian and rival “national spaces” from the 19th century to the present day.

Critical Remarks on the "Sovietization" of Hungarian Human Geography

Social Sciences in the Other Europe since 1945, 2018

This chapter critically engages with recent studies on the “Sovietization” of geography and regional planning in Hungary. It identifies some key theoretical and methodological issues, and proposes directions for new research. The first part argues that current narratives of “Sovietization” as colonization are prone to political revisionism and lack elaboration on the “socialist system,” which is treated as a homogeneous dictatorship with essential traits. These accounts are subjugated to Cold War dichotomies, rely on internalist and essentialist assumptions of “the socialist system,” and in turn disengage with foreign relations and the precedents or comparability of the “socialist state.” The second part considers issues of narrativity, disciplinary history, scientific and ideological discourse, and the geographies of knowledge, and argues for a transdisciplinary approach to “deprovincialize” the “tunnel vision” of the history of human geography. I argue that the relentless focus on ideology, biographies, and political regimes disregards the ambivalence of discourses, the complex interplay of actors, and expert rivalries. It also disregards the general shifts from human to social (economic) geography, from jurisprudence to economic management in state technopolitics, from historicist culturalism to rationalist economic developmentism, from morphology to functionalism, and also the emergence of the settlement network concept, and the development of urban and regional planning. I conclude that accentuating the historical rupture of “Sovietization” ignores important continuities and international trends, and holds the danger of contributing to a self-Orientalized case study of political dictatorships.

Human Geography, Cartography, and Statistics: A Toolkit for Geopolitical Goals in Hungary until World War II

Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2015

After World War I, which resulted in Hungary surrendering approximately twothirds of its territory, strong support was given to "Hungarian Studies" aimed at strengthening Hungarian identity and justifying revisionary attempts. This paper investigates how geography in general, and statistical and mapping methods in human geography in particular, contributed to the revisionist project in interwar Hungary. To put the story in its disciplinary context, the paper begins by presenting the links between power, territorial politics, and geography that have existed in Europe since geography was institutionalized as academic discipline. Second, the paper investigates how geography and political power became intertwined in Hungary in the decades between 1867 and the end of the peace negotiations after World War I. Third, the main section of the paper employs some case studies to explain how human geographers in Hungary deployed some of their central arguments during the interwar period to delegitimize the post-WWI European order and to substantiate the righteousness of Hungarian revisionist goals. Claiming that the new truncated borders of Hungary ran counter to "scientific necessity," interwar geographers presented arguments that were intended to strengthen claims of the nation's physical and economic unity, and to highlight the so-called historical stability of Greater Hungary, a stability that had proved crucial, they argued, to the spread of European civilization. The paper concludes by comparing these arguments with their counterparts in neighboring countries to reveal how a "toolkit" of prefabricated geographical arguments, prevailing not only in Hungary but in international geography at the time, was utilized in various countries to justify what were clearly antagonistic political goals.

From the Guilty City to the Ideas of Alternative Urbanization and Alternative Modernity: Anti-Urbanism as a Border-Zone of City-Philosophy and Cultural Criticism in the Interwar Hungarian Political Thought

Coactivity: Philosophy, Communication, 2017

The phenomenon of anti-urbanism has accompanied the process of modernisation since the emergence of modernity. The city, the modern metropolis played a vital role in this transition from premodern world to modern era. The metamorphosis of archaic structures, including the fields of economy, society and thinking, are inevitably associated with tensions engendering aversion against the city. Anti-urbanism appeared sporadically everywhere, as a continuous tradition, it emerged at two remote corners of the world: in United States and Germany. Hungarian anti-urbanism of the interwar period had been motivated by the shock of the disintegration of the “Historical Greater Hungary”. The motif of guilty city emerged in the atmosphere of scapegoating: Budapest appeared as incompatible with Hungarian national character. These ruminations about the role of city were embedded in a special context mixing city-philosophy, cultural criticism, German-origin crisis philosophy, political philosophy and...