Culture
There is a huge blank in my knowledge, as far as Hungary is concerned. My notes start in the 800 ADs, and then they skip to World War I. So my apologies for that. One of the many cool things about doing this whole “Country of the Week” thing is that I get to see what I don’t know, and the obvious gaps. I have no idea what Hungary was like in between the 10th century and the 20th century, and that’s a pretty huge freakin’ gap.
Here are a couple of general points about Hungary:
It has always been more European than Eastern. This has to do partly with topography (as I discussed yesterday); the western side of Hungary is completely open to Europe, and has borders with Austria, a definite gateway to the West. Compare this with a country like Romania, or Bulgaria … completely blocked into the Balkans, with borders with Russia or Turkey, and you will see what a huge difference geography has made.
Hungary had always been way more influenced by Habsburg Austria than by Ottoman Turkey.
Hungary has a large Calvinist population, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Hungary also has a large Catholic population. Robert Kaplan describes the interesting (and potentially volatile) relationship between these two faiths, and also how these faiths have manifested themselves in Hungary in areas like economic development:
“In the mid-sixteenth century Debrecen [a city in eastern Hungary] was a hotbed of the Reformation, and Catholics were forbidden to settle. Here, a Calvinist college was established and local Calvinists made a pact with the ruling Moslem Turks to provide for the town’s security. But the so-called Prussian work ethic did not invigorate the Calvinists of Debrecen. ‘In eastern Hungary, Calvinism has been mere conservatism and fatalism, yet another element of ethnicity surrounded by religious walls, proscribing innovation,’ Laszlo Csaba, a Hungarian economist and social critic, had told me in Budapest. It has always been the Catholic areas of Hungary that displayed economic dynamism. (Csaba had added that the ‘Prussian work ethic,’ based partly on Protestantism, was also misunderstood. ‘The Prussian work ethic was not entrepreneurial, but fitted to bureaucracy and mass industrialization. It functioned only if somebody else supplied the jobs and told people what to do. In a postindustrial entrepreneurial age,’ he continued, ‘don’t expect the formerly Prussian parts of Germany to be economically impressive. Budapest and the rest of Hungary are closer to Catholic Munich than to Prussian-Protestant Berlin, and in a new Europe of region-states, the region oriented toward Munich may be stronger.’)”
Now, this is just me personally, but a paragraph like that completely turns me on. I can read it 10 times in a row, and I have, and still feel like I have only scratched the surface of what is going on. I have my eye jammed up against a tiny hole in the wall, trying to see the whole world beyond. And I have only that paragraph to go on. It’s thrilling.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about Hungary’s role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before the Berlin Wall ever came down, Hungarians were already dismantling the empire in their own country. In a very sneaky and entrepreneurial way. Very cool.
