Development and Bifurcation of an Institution. The University Voluntary Labor Service and the Compulsory National Defense Labor Service of the Horthy Era. Hungarian Historical Review 4, no. 3 (2015): 542–576. (original) (raw)
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The Origins of the Military Labor Service System in Hungary
The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later, 2016
The Hungarian institution of military labor service inflicted on Jews and members of various other minority groups has been described in scholarly literature as a unique phenomenon. Indeed, whereas most of the Axis countries excluded Jews from their armies, Hungarian authorities compelled them to perform unarmed military service and sent many of them to the frontline alongside combat units, where they perished en masse. These facts rendered the problem of labor service to be interpreted exclusively within the realms of military history and Holocaust studies. However, this complex historical problem has ramifications that might capture the minds of nationalism and genocide scholars as well. Despite certain noteworthy peculiarities, the Hungarian institution of military labor service was heavily influenced by international trends. Still, there have been only scarce attempts to compare the Hungarian system with the policies of other countries. The cases of other Nazi satellites, including Bulgaria and Romania, are of particular significance. The political, economic and social milieu that formulated the policy against various minority groups – and therefore determined the evolution of the concepts of labor service – followed roughly the same patterns. Of course one can cite considerable country-specific differences. However, the national systems with different structural, management and operational schemes served analogous political, economic and social functions. Concepts of military labor service were also influenced by the aspirations of nationalistic political elites about ethnically and racially homogenous nation states and changing perceptions of belonging to the national community. Depriving certain social groups of the right to carry arms was one of the fundamental steps to degrade them to secondary citizens. There was a complex interplay between racist and nationalistic exclusionism in the army and state policies about definition, deprivation of rights and the gradual exclusion from society.
2024
The institution of labour service was a special product of the inter-war period: first as a civil movement to strengthen social solidarity and alleviate unemployment, and later as an auxiliary for national defence. In Hungary, labour service started in 1935 in a voluntary form and operated until 1944, but from 1939 onwards, with the Defence Act, it was put on new grounds and became a mass organisation within the army, discriminating mainly against Jews and partly punitive in nature.
From the vanguard to the margins: workers in Hungary, 1939 to present
2014
This volume is dedicated to the work of the late British historian, Dr Mark Pittaway (1971-2010), a prominent scholar of post-war and contemporary Central and Eastern Europe in general and Hungary in particular. Breaking with orthodox readings on Eastern bloc regimes, which remain wedded to the 'totalitarianism' paradigm of the Cold War era, the essays in this volume shed light on the contradictory historical and social trajectory of 'real socialism' in the region. Mainstream historiography has presented Stalinist parties as 'omnipotent', effectively stripping workers and society in general of its 'relative autonomy'. Building on an impressive amount of archive material, Pittaway convincingly shows how dynamics of class, gender, skill level, and rural versus urban location, shaped politics in the period. The volume also offers novel insights on historical and sociological roots of fascism in Hungary and the politics of legitimacy in the Austro-Hungarian borderlands.
A World Lifted off Its Hinges: The Social Impact of World War I on Hungary
Hungarian Historical Review, 2022
As was true virtually everywhere, World War I brought about significant social changes in Hungary. As a consequence of the wartime mobilization of the economy, the relationship between employers and workers in industry was transformed, as was the relationship between owners of different sizes of estates and farms and agricultural workers in rural areas. In both spheres, groups emerged which were much better organized than before. Some of them were capable of coordinated political action, and the balance of power between them changed rapidly over time. The wartime government tried to ensure continuous coordination and reconciliation of interests between the various ownership and labor groups in agriculture and industry, but it ultimately failed. Beyond the military defeat, this failure was the primary determining factor of the events of 1918–19 in Hungary. By analyzing the group dynamics of wartime society and the wartime economy in Hungary, this paper seeks to outline the social and historical background of the political struggles that came in the wake of the war. It ventures two core contentions. First, the emergence of various agricultural and industrial interest groups and their coordination with one another and with the government in the aftermath of the war constituted mechanisms of integration that had not existed before the war. As a result, the diverse socio-professional groups in Hungary became more integrated into one society within the framework of the state. The second finding contention is that the counterrevolutionary regime that took over in late 1919 was more successful than previous governments had been in establishing a balance between the different groups of owners and workers and learning from previous experience, and this was why it was able, ultimately, to consolidate its hold on power.
The concept of vocational orders in Hungary between the two world wars
The recent study examines the philosophical background and thoughts of Hungarian Christian thinkers on a new state order between the two World Wars in Hungary. On the basis of historical sources and Hungarian literature, the author gives an insight into the political conditions and discussions of this time which emerged from the interpretation of papal encyclicals. The author also takes a deeper look at the theories of Vid Mihelics, Béla Kovrig and especially László Varga S.J. The article focuses on the creation of different organizations of vocational order in Hungary and the governmental attempts to initialize a new political and socio-economic system.
It is not easy to summarize Hungarian antiNazi politics in a short paper. The difficulties with which one is faced do not stem from the political effectiveness of these groups, however, but rather from the fragmentation of antiNazi or antiGerman political forces in Hungary. Methodological questions also arise concerning antiNazism, antiFascism, anti Imperialism and antiGerman attitudes, which terms are commonly used as synonyms, albeit all four have distinct meanings, as we will see (Pócs, 2018, p. 1). Furthermore, the social reception of Nazi Germany was frequently modified in Hungary. During the years of the territorial revisions (1938-1941), when Hitler allowed Hungary to reannex some territories which had been lost after the First World War, 2 the Germanled "New Europe" gained greater acceptance in both Hungarian society and political life; this changed just a few years later, specifically after the defeat of the Hungarian and German Corps at Voronezh (January 1943). From that time on, more and more Hungarians started to worry about the outcome of the war (Juhász, 1983, p. 104). The objective of the present paper is an overview of the most important political forces and intellectual milieus of the country that eventually stood up to German expansionism or to the state ideology of the Third Reich.
A delay in the emancipation of labour: bourgeois paternalism, workers' insurance and labour law in Hungary from the end of the nineteenth century to the Second World War In most countries in early twentieth-century Europe, labour, which had merged into privacy in the liberal configuration of the nineteenth century, distinguished itself as an independent area structured by laws. Along with this took place the social emancipation of the working class and some kind of integration of the labour movement into the political system. One manifestation of this was the development of labour law, as well as the recognition of trade unions and the appearance of workers' insurance or other, non-insurance-based welfare policies. During this process, while a triangle of the interested parties of employers, employees and the government was formed, there took place a transformation by which the handling of problems arising from industrialization was lifted out of the local logic of the former poor relief and entrusted to organizations which handled the issue on an all-society level. These organizations endeavoured to make the people available and manageable by new bureaucratic techniques, thus ensuring the integration of society. However, compared with the earlier bourgeois paternalism this still meant the emancipation of the lower classes of society. 1 In this article I attempt to sketch out the nature of the bourgeoisie's personal, not institutionalized paternalism, which fitted in with the classical liberal view and was characteristic of labour relations in late nineteenth-century Hungary, and to present how the birth of workers' insurance and social security laws and the failure of the development of labour law had preserved this paternalism and transformed it by the inter-war period into some sort of corporate paternalism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, after 1848, the dismantling of the legal structure of feudal society in Hungary was followed by fairly rapid commercial and later industrial development. This took place, after 1867, within liberal political frameworks and,