Historical Reconciliation: Hungarian Lessons

Authors

  • Gábor Egry Institute of Political History, Budapest

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51151/identities.v20i1-2.525

Keywords:

historical reconciliation, entangled history, politics of history, Hungary

Abstract

The article surveys attempts of historical reconciliation between Hungary and its neighbours after 1990. As Hungary’s neighbours are also successor states of the Kingdom of Hungary dissolved in 1918, their entangled history, often marred by violence and mutual discrimination was an important and conflictual issue around the change of regime. EU integration efforts led to attempts to implement historical reconciliation following the German model of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and Aufarbeitung and the Franco-German reconciliation. I argue that the result was ambiguous at best. Political tensions abated with all neighbours but without historical reconciliation. One reason for this failure was the division within the historiographic field that made politics easy to instrumentalize or intervene. Tensions receded more because politics started to abandon a historical argumentation in bilateral relations and tha could be a model to follow for states like North Macedonia and Bulgaria.

Author(s): Gábor Egry

Title (English): Historical Reconciliation: Hungarian Lessons

Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 20, No. 1-2 (2023).

Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje

Page Range: 8-19

Page Count: 12

Citation (English): Gábor Egry, "Historical Reconciliation: Hungarian Lessons,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 20, No. 1-2 (2023): 8-19.

Author Biography

Gábor Egry, Institute of Political History, Budapest

Bionote: Gábor Egry is a historian, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, director-general of the Institute of Political History, Budapest. Author of five volumes in Hungarian and several articles. among others in European Review of History, Slavic Review, Hungarian Historical Review, Südostforschungen. Winner of the Mark Pittaway Article Prize in 2018. His monograph Etnicitás, identitás, politika. Magyar kisebbségek nacionalizmus és regionalizmus között Romániában és Csehszlovákiában 1918-1944 [Ethnicity, identity, politics. Hungarian Minorities between nationalism and regionalism in Romania and Czechoslovakia 1918-1944] received a Honorable Mention for the Felczak-Wereszyczki Prize of the Polish Historical Association. Since 2018 he is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Nepostrans – Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe.

Downloads

Published

2023-12-11

How to Cite

Egry, G. (2023). Historical Reconciliation: Hungarian Lessons. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 20(1-2), 08-19. https://doi.org/10.51151/identities.v20i1-2.525

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 1-2 (2023): Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Identities is published under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Under this license, users of our content must give appropriate credit to authors and source as well as indicate if changes were made, cannot be used for commercial purposes, and, in the instance that it is built upon or transformed, may not be distributed. For Identities, the copyrights allow the audience to download, reprint, quote in length and/or copy articles published by Identities so long as the authors and source are cited. For more information on our license, see the following: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0.