We should not hold up Viktor Orbán as an American model, but neither should we interpret him without regard for his nation’s history and culture.
We should not hold up Viktor Orbán as an American model, but neither should we interpret him without regard for his nation’s history and culture.
I find many of the American debates over Viktor Orbán to be tiresome. On one hand, Orbán is close to the best leader one could hope for within the parameters of Hungarian politics; consult the history of his predecessors if you disagree. Hungary has the misfortune of having been — as an independent state and, previously, as part of the Austrian Habsburg empires — on the losing side of the Cold War, the Second World War, the First World War, and most of the major conflicts of the preceding four centuries. In the three decades since the end of the Soviet empire, it has often found itself on the losing end of intra-European debates. For good reasons, Hungarians have neither the faith in their leaders nor the trust in their neighbors that Americans or Englishmen have. That also explains much about Hungarian skepticism about the cause of its Ukrainian neighbor. Orbán reflects more of the democratic will of his country than his foreign critics are willing to acknowledge.
On the other hand, any sensible American should see that Orbán is obviously not a good role model for any American politician, partially because he reflects a nation and culture that are not our own. Hungary remains a comparatively poor country, and Orbán has done little to improve its economic standing. The results of his well-meaning social policies have been mixed at best. His foreign policy is often at odds with American interests. He has treated press freedom and other civil liberties in ways Americans would rightly find intolerable. It would be a bad bet for any American conservative to lash himself to defending every aspect of Orbán’s rhetoric.
Blood and Soil
The latest polarizing argument is about an Orbán speech that railed against making Hungary a “mixed-race” culture (this being an English translation of his remarks). Our old friend Rod Dreher, who is a well-intentioned and devout believer in Orbán’s cultural project, has become a strident defender of the Orbán government, to the point of being all but an official spokesman. Dreher points to a fuller official translation of the speech as well as his own apologia. A sample of Orbán remarks, with emphasis added:
There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe. Now that is a mixed-race world. And there is our world, where people from within Europe mix with one another, move around, work, and relocate. So, for example, in the Carpathian Basin we are not mixed-race: we are simply a mixture of peoples living in our own European homeland. And, given a favourable alignment of stars and a following wind, these peoples merge together in a kind of Hungaro-Pannonian sauce, creating their own new European culture. This is why we have always fought: we are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.
This is why we fought at Nándorfehérvár/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and — if I am not mistaken — this is why, in still older times — the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers. Today the situation is that Islamic civilisation, which is constantly moving towards Europe, has realised — precisely because of the traditions of Belgrade/Nándorfehérvár — that the route through Hungary is an unsuitable one along which to send its people up into Europe. This is why Poitiers has been replayed; now the incursion’s origins are not in the East, but in the South, from where they are occupying and flooding the West.
This might not yet be a very important task for us, but it will be for our children, who will need to defend themselves not only from the South, but also from the West. The time will come when we have to somehow accept Christians coming to us from there and integrate them into our lives.
Dreher argues that Orbán’s use of “race” is really about religion and culture: Orbán sees the current moment in European history as reenacting prior struggles for control between European Christendom (which was often divided into many squabbling states and statelets) and the politically-unified imperium of Islam. There is clearly a good deal of that going on here, and as I have written at length before, it is entirely legitimate for people to express concern at concrete harms to their own way of life caused by demographic changes to the place they live. That said, I do not pretend to have enough linguistic or cultural fluency in Hungarian to parse the distinctions so finely. Moreover, in the real world, people do often treat race, ethnicity, religion, and culture as proxies for one another, which creates problems if (like me, and like many American conservatives) you see culture and religion as important and legitimate categories, but race as a problematic and frequently artificial one. So, I will not attempt to inquire further into the purity of Viktor Orbán’s heart in an American framework.
It is, however, vital for Americans neither to project our own views of race and culture onto Hungary, nor to import a Hungarian sensibility on these matters into our politics and culture. Hungarians have sound historical reasons to see the nation-state of Hungary as inseparable from the Hungarian people, to the point that the nation has no reason for existence if its people cease to be Hungarian in culture, language, and national self-identification. Their reasons are not our reasons, their history is not our history, and their ways are not our ways.
It is sometimes said that America is unique in the world; it was founded as an idea, not a people — or, more modestly, an idea with a people, not a people with an idea. This is something of an exaggeration: Americans from colonial times through the first half-century of the early republic saw themselves as a people dominated by one group (Anglo-Saxon Protestants), drawing on a particular cultural, political, religious, and civilizational heritage for their principles. Nonetheless, the American founding was purposely defined in universalist terms, and while Americans from the beginning argued over what groups should mainly populate the country, there was always at least an ideal (even when not honored in practice) that anyone could become an American.
It would be a better world if every nation was like this, and it is desirable for every nation to move incrementally in that direction. But it is simply not realistic to expect every nation to throw overboard its own entire history and culture. For many nations, that is the only reason why they exist as nations, and that existence was the result of a long twilight struggle in which much was endured and much was sacrificed.
The Long Road to the Hungarian State
Consider Hungarian history. The old medieval kingdom of Hungary was swallowed up by the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, and only liberated by the end of the 17th century in order to be incorporated into the Habsburg empire (then known as the Holy Roman Empire). Neither of these multinational, quasi-theocratic empires prioritized Hungarian interests, and no separate Hungarian state existed between the mid-1500s and 1919.
Yet Hungary endured as a nation without a state because it endured in the hearts of its people as a nation. It helped that Hungarian is one of the most unique languages in Europe, marking its speakers as a distinct tribe and presenting a two-way barrier for assimilation.
The need to appease a long train of popular uprisings by Hungarian peasants and feudal lords alike led both the Ottomans and the Habsburgs to recognize Hungary as a distinct political subdivision, which maintained its own institutions and a belief in the continuity of its medieval constitution under foreign rule. When the Habsburg monarch Maria Theresa’s throne was threatened, she went to Budapest as a heavily pregnant teenager and performed the traditional rituals of a new king of Hungary, including a mounted ceremony pointing a sword to each of the four winds and pledging to defend Hungary against all enemies in exchange for the crown of St. Stephen. She won the hearts of the Hungarian nobles, and they helped save her dynasty — but they did not receive a nation of their own in return.
In 1848–49, the Hungarian revolt against the Habsburgs was one of the most dramatic, protracted, and ultimately bloody of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, ending with a Russian invasion to prop up Austrian rule. At the time, the Hungarian nationalist cause was the popular foreign cause of American liberalism, much in the same way that Ukrainian nationalism is today.
Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth toured America in 1851–52 to an ecstatic reception, forging a new model of international celebrity: the exiled freedom fighter. Newspapers preceded his arrival with tales of his exploits, New York plays were based on his life, and Kossuth boots, gloves, cigars, and cups were sold by enterprising American merchants to cash in on “Magyar-mania.” Upon his arrival on Staten Island, the New York Herald called him “the greatest living man.” A county in Iowa was named in honor of him. Kossuth’s eloquence and principles inspired Daniel Webster — then serving as secretary of state — to pen a decidedly sympathetic biography and collection of Kossuth’s speeches in early 1851.
Kossuth was given a hero’s welcome in New York City, Boston, and Cincinnati. He addressed the House in January 1852, only the second such address by a foreign dignitary in American history (the first being Lafayette in 1824). The next month, he addressed the state legislature of Ohio. He met with Whig leaders such as William Seward and the dying Henry Clay, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Cassius Clay, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (then working on her great novel), and literary lights such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In Illinois, lawyer and former congressman Abraham Lincoln was the driving force behind resolutions supporting Kossuth and inviting him to Springfield. The text of those resolutions, while cautioning against American involvement in Europe, give a flavor of how Hungarian nationalism was viewed here at the time:
We recognize in Governor Kossuth of Hungary the most worthy and distinguished representative of the cause of civil and religious liberty on the continent of Europe. A cause for which he and his nation struggled until they were overwhelmed by the armed intervention of a foreign despot, in violation of the more sacred principles of the laws of nature and of nations–principles held dear by the friends of freedom everywhere, and more especially by the people of these United States. . . . The sympathies of this country, and the benefits of its position, should be exerted in favor of the people of every nation struggling to be free; and whilst we meet to do honor to Kossuth and Hungary, we should not fail to pour out the tribute of our praise and approbation to the patriotic efforts of the Irish, the Germans and the French, who have unsuccessfully fought to establish in their several governments the supremacy of the people.
He was the Zelensky of his day, and like Zelensky, he became something of a political football in the United States, sparking partisan and regional divisions (Catholics and Southern Democrats did not warm to him, for different reasons) and drawing controversy by raising money in the United States for war abroad, including a hare-brained scheme to overthrow the government of Haiti. In 1867, the shaky foundations of the Habsburg monarchy after its 1866 defeat by Prussia and the recurrent threat of Hungarian rebellion led it to rechristen its empire as “Austro-Hungarian,” granting Hungary internal self-rule under a dual monarchy headed by Franz Joseph. Its leadership passed to others than Kossuth.
Hungary finally gained its own nationhood after the First World War, when the great liberal cause in Europe (championed by Woodrow Wilson and others) was “national self-determination.” True, Wilson and other proponents were very much products of the racial-category thinking of their own era, which saw each European nationality as a distinct race, but their argument for freeing “captive nations” from multinational empires is one that has survived their era, and was wielded to great effect against the Nazi and Soviet empires. Without the idea of nationalism as a collective right of a distinct people, there would be no Hungary, just as there would be no Poland and no Ireland.
Hungarian nationalism was once again a popular cause in 1956, when yet another Russian invasion crushed a Hungarian popular uprising, and the West looked on with sympathy but without support. Hungarians would not truly have the opportunity to govern themselves free from Moscow until 1989, within living memory for any Hungarian over the age of 40.
Through it all, the nationalism of the Hungarians was preserving nationalism, much like the nationalism of the Irish, the Jews, the Ukrainians, or any number of other peoples who fought for decades or centuries to keep alive the idea of their nation as a community continuous in time, inextricably intertwined with their language and culture, and transcending the vagaries of who governed them and where the legal boundaries were drawn. It is not reasonable to ask the Hungarians to be indifferent to whether Hungary continues to be distinctly Hungarian, any more than it would be to ask the same of the Koreans, the Irish, or the Israelis; if Hungary ceases to be Hungarian, all that would remain of it is lines on a map. Hungarians are all too aware from the history of their part of the world that lines on a map can be redrawn.
The politics of Viktor Orbán do not belong in America. But they are a Hungarian politics for a Hungarian people whose values are informed by Hungarian history. If we cannot co-exist with that, it speaks poorly of Americans’ capacity to live in a world full of nations that are not America.