PSCRP-BESA Reports No 39 (March 6, 2024)
The defeat in World War I and the collapse of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a catastrophe for the Hungarian national movement, from which it has never recovered. As a result of the Austro-Hungarian agreement of 1867, the Kingdom of Hungary received under its direct control a territory of almost 280 thousand square kilometers (apart from this, the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia and the autonomous city of Fiume were subordinate to the Hungarian crown). In addition to Hungarians, the Kingdom of Hungary was inhabited by Slovaks, Romanians, Germans, Serbs, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), against whom an aggressive policy of Magyarization was pursued โ that is, first of all, the spread of the Hungarian language, related to the languages of Khanty and Mansi, the aborigines of Western Siberia, and radically different from the languages of all surrounding European peoples. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the territory of Hungary was reduced to 93 thousand square kilometers. Millions of ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside its borders โ in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Austria.
Just before and at the onset of World War II, Hungary attempted to reclaim its territory. In 1938, as an ally of Nazi Germany, Hungary regained territories with a predominantly Hungarian population in southern Slovakia and western Transcarpathia. In 1939, it occupied and annexed Carpathian Ukraine, which had declared its independence in the remaining territory of Transcarpathia. In 1940, on the basis of the so-called Vienna Awards, it regained part of the territory of Transylvania, which had been part of Romania during the interwar period. In 1941, having joined the war against Yugoslavia, it regained part of Vojvodina and Prekmur Slovenia. However, the defeat of the Axis powers meant that Hungary returned to the borders defined by the results of the First World War. At the same time, Transcarpathia, which belonged to Czechoslovakia in the interwar period, was annexed by the USSR in 1944 and incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR as Zakarpattia Oblast. Thus, the territory adjacent to the border with Hungary, compactly populated by ethnic Hungarians, became part of Ukraine.
Since the Hungarian population that found itself within the USSR spoke neither Russian nor Ukrainian, and the Hungarian People’s Republic was within the sphere of Soviet influence, the Soviet authorities maintained a system of education in the Hungarian language in Hungarian ethnic minority communities and created Soviet media in this language. Thus, independent Ukraine inherited from the USSR a Hungarian population that was virtually unassimilated and retained a high level of national consciousness. At the same time, the share of Hungarians in the population of Zakarpattia Oblast tends to decrease due to a higher birth rate among Ukrainians and the migration of some Hungarians to Hungary (according to the 1959 census, Hungarians made up 13.6% of the population of Zakarpattia, while according to 2017 data the number dropped to meager 7.3%).
According to the Ukrainian estimate of 2017, 95 thousand Hungarians lived in Zakarpattia Oblast (according to other sources this number reached about 150 thousand). They constitute 76.15% of the population of Beregovsky district, 33.36% of the population of Uzhgorod district, 26.17% of the population of Vinogradovsky district (these three districts are immediately bordering Hungary), as well as 12.69% of the population of Mukachevo district, bordering Beregovsky district and Uzhgorod district. This creates conditions for irredentism, so it is not surprising that the ideas put forward by Transcarpathian Hungarians since the 1990s โ to create a Hungarian territorial autonomy that would include the above-mentioned districts where Hungarians are in the majority โ were rejected by the Ukrainian authorities .
The interests of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia are represented by the Party of Hungarians of Ukraine (KMKSZ) and the Hungarian Democratic Party of Ukraine (UMDSZ). It is telling that in the run-up to the 2015 municipal elections, a partnership agreement was reached between these two parties, with Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjรฉn acting as a mediator in the negotiations between the two.
Revanchist ideas occupy a prominent place in the domestic Hungarian political discourse. One example of these ideas was the law granting simplified acquisition of citizenship to foreign Hungarians, passed by the Hungarian Parliament in 2010 with 344 votes in favor, 3 nonvotes and 5 abstentions. This law was initiated by the Fidesz party, headed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbรกn. It should be borne in mind that while for the majority of foreign Hungarians (citizens of Romania, Slovakia and Austria) obtaining Hungarian citizenship is primarily a symbolic act of belonging to “their” ethnic state, as the borders between Hungary and the EU member states are open, for the minority โ namely for Hungarians from Serbia and Ukraine โ obtaining Hungarian citizenship is attractive in a purely practical sense, as it opens the borders of the EU countries. Transcarpathian Ukrainian politicians immediately saw this decision of the Hungarian parliament as a threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty.
However, at first the Ukrainian authorities did not take any action to weaken the influence of Hungary in the communities of Transcarpathia with predominantly Hungarian populations. This resulted in a situation where they turned into an “extension of Hungaryโ, in a certain sense. A considerable share, if not the majority of their inhabitants became Hungarian citizens, which actually opened the border for them. The people watch Hungarian rather than Ukrainian television. Young people go to Hungary for their studies and employment. Anyone who has visited these settlements can ascertain that one can hardly hear Ukrainian or Russian speech in their streets, Ukrainian signage that is not duplicated in Hungarian is very rare, and the Hungarian flag often is โ or was, until very recently โ displayed next to the Ukrainian flag on public buildings.
The situation began to change in 2017, when Ukraine adopted the law “On Education”, providing for the transition to the state language in all schools of the country, including Hungarian schools, starting from the fifth grade (an exception was made for Crimean Tatar schools). It has not been possible to practically implement this decision with regard to Hungarian schools in Transcarpathia so far due to objective (a significant part of Transcarpathian Hungarians have little or no command of the Ukrainian language) and subjective reasons (neither parents of Hungarian students nor teachers of Hungarian schools in Transcarpathia want to switch to teaching in the Ukrainian language). However, it has dramatically worsened relations between Hungary and Ukraine. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry officially announced that Hungary would block Ukraine’s admission to the EU.
It seems that the Ukrainian authorities did not properly assess the consequences of adopting this law. As there are also Romanian and Polish language schools in Ukraine, the adoption of the law has also caused discontent in Romania and Poland, although the governments of these EU member states have not gone as far as the Hungarian government in their reaction to it.
The Ukrainian authorities, who do not recognize dual citizenship, have started making attempts to prevent the issuance of Hungarian passports to Transcarpathian Hungarians. In 2018, Ukraine declared the Hungarian consul in the Transcarpathian town of Beregovo, Jozsef Bacskai, persona non grata precisely for issuing Hungarian passports to local Hungarians. In 2019, Ukrainian security services brought charges of separatism against Lรกszlรณ Brenzovics, the leader of the KMKSZ party and a former Verkhovna Rada deputy from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, which forced him to seek asylum in Hungary .
After the beginning of the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine, Hungary became a conduit of Russian influence in the EU in everything related to the policy towards Ukraine . Russian propaganda, in its turn, began to express its sympathy for Hungarian claims to Transcarpathia. The most striking move in this direction was Russia’s transfer to Hungary of 11 Ukrainian POWs of Hungarian nationality bypassing Ukraine.
At this point, it appears that tensions between Ukraine and Hungary related to the situation of the Hungarian ethnic minority in Transcarpathia are by no means over. It seems that it could be significantly eased if Ukraine is accepted by the EU with the opening of borders and harmonization of Ukrainian legislation with EU norms concerning the rights of linguistic and ethnic minorities.