Volume 8 Number 3

Summer 1999

Feature: Fears for Vojvodina

Eastern Europe After Kosovo
     NATO Membership, Humanitarianism, and Nationalist Interests: Hungarian Politics during the Kosovo Crisis
     Laszlo Nemenyi

When Hungary, along with Poland and the Czech Republic, was officially inducted into NATO, on March 12, there was already a strong possibility that NATO would take military action against the Milosevic regime. In an interview on March 10, Minister of Foreign Affairs Janos Martonyi announced that Hungary would be prepared to send a medical unit and an engineering corps to Macedonia, but, if NATO initiated a military strike, that Hungary would not participate. He added that allowing NATO the use of Hungarian airspace would not constitute participation in hostilities, noting that the allies understood Hungary's 'delicate situation' and certainly did not expect it to send fighting troops (Nepszava, March 11, 1999). The delicate situation Martonyi referred to concerned Vojvodina, Serbia's northernmost province, which is home to some 350,000 ethnic Hungarians. Vojvodina, a province of two million inhabitants, was a part of Hungary before the Trianon Peace Treaty (1920) of World War I. Like Kosovo, it was stripped of its autonomy in 1989. Its population is slightly more than 50 percent Serb and 17 percent Hungarian, the remainder being Croat, Romanian, and Slovak.

On March 24, after NATO decided to launch its bombing campaign, parliament approved a measure to allow 'reconnaissance, war-, and supply planes, as well as helicopters, participating in the NATO action to enforce compliance with UN decisions concerning the solution of the Kosovo crisis, the use of the airspace and the air fields of the Republic of Hungary, as well as of their service and control facilities, without limitation for the purposes and the duration of this action.' According to the Constitution, the measure required a two-thirds majority for adoption. The parliament ratified the measure with an overwhelming majority. Only Istvan Csurka's extreme right-wing Hungarian Truth and Life Party (HTLP) voted against it. (There were also a few individual abstentions, mainly within the ranks of the Socialist faction.)

Although not so overwhelmingly as parliament, the public also favored the NATO intervention. According to polls conducted after March 24, 60 percent of eligible voters approved of the air strikes. Later, public support eroded, slipping below 50 percent. In any case, the nearly unanimous vote in parliament papered over deep differences in Hungarian opinion. For starters, opposition to the air strikes was far more significant than the vote in parliament would suggest. Second, neither the groups supporting nor those opposing NATO's action were internally unified; both those for and those against were motivated by diverse considerations specific to the ideological makeup of several groups of protagonists.

As for the ruling party-the Federation of Young Democrats-Hungarian Civic Party-an article written by Zsolt Nemeth, the state secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, illustrated the government's thinking when it decided to support actively the use of military force against Serbia (Napi Magyarorszag, April 8, 1999). Nemeth explained that national interests, viewed narrowly, did not argue for Hungarian participation. But Hungary had duties as a NATO member, and the government approved of, and had to stand up for, the principles underlying NATO's decision. He added that regional stability, which the NATO action would hopefully ensure, would benefit ethnic minorities and was, for that reason too, in Hungary's interest. In the same newspaper on the next day, historian Adam Szesztay-a frequent author of progovernment columns-cast more light on the government's stance. After describing the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians, he wrote: 'At the same time it would be pointless to hide that Hungarian society and its political elite were not motivated solely by humanitarian feelings when they lent their support for the decision to go to war, which we too consider a sad necessity. An important role was also played, here, by concern for a suppressed minority's self-determination. To what extent will the West focus on the long-term interests-and that means, stand up for the self-determination-of every ethnic group in Serbia after the war? If it will not, that will be a great disappointment to Hungary, a new NATO member.'

The government did its best to remind the public that it was urging the West to take Hungarian interests into account. After the air strikes began, Prime Minister Viktor Orban announced he had been promised that the parts of Vojvodina dominated by ethnic Hungarians would not be bombed. If this promise had indeed been made, it was soon broken. Somewhat later, Orban stated that NATO would react promptly and forcefully should the Serbs try to take revenge on Vojvodina Hungarians. On April 26, Nemeth proclaimed that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had drawn up a conceptual design for southeastern Europe, justified by the 'historically new geopolitical situation.' The conceptual design aimed, first, at the restoration of Vojvodina's autonomy, and, second, at 'individual and territorial autonomy for Hungarians.' At a NATO workshop in Budapest, on June 21, Orban emphasized, yet again, the need for a comprehensive settlement for the entire region. He reminded NATO representatives of Hungary's deep concern for the fate of Vojvodina Hungarians. Furthermore, he expressed the worry that Serbian refugees from Kosovo would be settled in Vojvodina, altering the province's ethnic makeup and thus diminishing the ability of Vojvodina Hungarians to protect their interests. By and large, the FYD-HCP's partners in the governing coalition were faithful to the official line. If the Independent Smallholders' Party (ISP) sometimes deviated from the line rhetorically, it was more because of their lack of sophistication than because of substantive ideological differences. Minister of Defense Janos Szabo (ISP) basked in the limelight and played the role of a passionate tough-talking warlord. His state secretary, Janos Homoki, declared in parliament that all Serbs were extremists and deserved to be punished by NATO. Zsolt Lanyi, a leading ISP politician, wondered aloud whether Vojvodina could become an independent state.

Adherence to the official government line held true for the two progovernment dailies, Napi Mag-yarorszag and Magyar Nemzet. Both confined them- selves to explaining government policies and intentions, as well as attacking leftist critics of the government for undermining national unity in difficult times.

Outside parliament, the progovernment camp, which includes right-wing nationalists who have more in common with Csurka's HTLP than with the governing parties, fervently participated in the government's ideological war against the opposition parties, the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP) and the Alliance of Free Democrats (AFD). Because of their deep-seated suspicions of the West, the nationalists' gut reaction was to reject NATO's campaign and to attribute ulterior motives to the West, although they were hard-pressed to give specifics. (After some hesitation, Csurka concluded that NATO's action was aimed at protecting Israel's strategic interests.) At the same time, it was their government-the government that they fiercely defend against socialist and liberal infamies-that had asked parliament to approve of assisting the NATO effort. The nationalists' own ambiguous cackling was further complicated by a genuine ambivalence toward the underlying conflict. With whom to identify? With the Serbs, who were undergoing their own Trianon? Or with the Kosovar Albanians, who are a large, oppressed national minority, like the Hungarians in Transylvania or Vojvodina? One characteristic attempt to resolve the conflict was to attack the West viciously, especially the US, while striking an apocalyptic chord, stating that the government had no choice but to support the air strikes. Meanwhile they urged the government to stand up for Hungarian interests, including those of the ethnic Hungarians in Vojvodina.

On April 15, the weekly Magyar Demokrata, the mouthpiece of the nationalist and anti-Semitic right (which also occasionally includes pieces by government politicians), wrote: 'The Serbs also know that Americans are the stupidest, and, therefore, most conceited creatures on Earth. That is why the Serbs paint the word Ôtarget' on their T-shirts in English. For Kosovo, and for just about everything one does not like, the coming age is to be blamed. The coming age is defined by American culture; it is more monstrous, more mendacious, and crueler than the most monstrous, most mendacious, and cruelest Hollywood action movie. A blockbuster.'

But attacks against the West coming from the right soon subsided and support for NATO could be detected (just as the leftist objections against the bombing campaign surfaced). By the end of April, this change of heart was also obvious in the HTLP's stance. The government allowed NATO planes to fly attack missions from Hungary and insisted that this was covered by the parliamentary decision of March 24-'use . . . without limitation' was just that: use without limitation. But the HSP insisted that additional parliamentary approval was necessary. Prime Minister Orban succeeded in averting a new vote in parliament, and the HTLP, which had voted against the original measure, agreed this time with the prime minister. As Csurka explained, his party did not want to complicate the government's situation.

The HSP had voted almost unanimously for the March 24 measure allowing NATO to use Hungarian airspace. Leading Socialist politicians, among them, former prime minister Gyula Horn, came out strongly in defense of NATO's action and Hungarian participation in the action. Nevertheless, the HSP sometimes proved to be less than unwavering in its support for NATO. In early April, it pressed for a parliamentary resolution that would have professed friendship with the Yugoslav people. The draft resolution died in the foreign-affairs committee. It was rejected not only by progovernment committee members but also by the AFD, which argued that such a resolution could be misunderstood as an attempt to demarcate the official Hungarian position from that of NATO. In late April, after the Socialists had questioned the meaning of the March 24 measure, they eventually relented and grudgingly approved of air missions originating in Hungary. But they continued to insinuate that the government was going beyond what was agreed to in the March 24 measure and was acting illegally. After the air strikes ended, the HSP sought to make an issue out of which armaments the Hungarian peacekeeping contingent, 250 strong, could carry in Kosovo.

The HSP's slow breaking of ranks with the government occurred for several reasons. First, it was due partly to the intense hostility between the government and the Socialist and liberal opposition and partly to the HSP's desire to distinguish itself from the government. The Socialists criticized the government's 'hawkish' position-as they characterized it-simply because it had been taken by the government. Second, speculating on the possibility of NATO's failure, the HSP wished to hedge its bets by emphasizing the importance of negotiations. Third, a relevant minority within the HSP (members of the Leftist Gathering, an official faction within the HSP), as well as members of the intellectual circle around the party, are only weakly, if at all, committed to Euro-Atlantic politics. Their criticisms mixed pacifist appeals with calls to adhere to international law, but they also made utterances similar to those aired by the communist Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party. This party of hard-line communists, which missed the parliamentary threshold in the last two elections, labeled NATO an aggressive military bloc and professed sympathies with the Milosevic regime.

The liberal opposition party, the AFD, turned away from the HSP, its former coalition partner, and backed the government's position on NATO. No AFD politicians took part in peace demonstrations, as did some well-known socialist politicians. But the AFD also disagreed with one aspect of the government's policies and objected to it vehemently; specifically, its position on Vojvodina. The divide between the two parties came about this way: soon after the air strikes began, Csurka opined that the Versailles peace system was in shambles, and, therefore, rethinking the question of Vojvodina was justified. Rethink he did. A few weeks later he displayed a map depicting the annexation of northern Vojvodina by Hungary. The socialist and liberal opposition parties demanded that the government distance itself from such 'irresponsible statements.' The government did so but not as decisively and straightforwardly (although Csurka's idea about border revision was rebuked forcefully enough) as the opposition would have liked.The FYD-HCP does not question that it should strive for the restoration of Vojvodina's autonomy and for the best possible deal for the Hungarian minority-the more autonomy the better. For them, it is only a tactical question of how forcefully to push for this aim diplomatically. At the beginning of the air strikes, the government thought that the Vojvodina problem was not the question of the moment. Later, it tried to put the Vojvodina problem on the international agenda, and it may have succeeded.

AFD and HSP criticized this for several reasons. Fear of Western disapproval was certainly one of them, though the Socialists and the liberals may have been mistaken concerning this. But they oppose forcing the concept of Vojvodina's autonomy on the Serbian majority for more-principled reasons, too. As Deputy Tamas Bauer (AFD) argued in Nepszabadsag (May 22, 1999), the Hungarian minorities living in neighboring countries had to find their own place in the societies of those countries, and international pressure to achieve a desired arrangement would prove counterproductive. He added that territorial autonomy promoted ethnic separatism and strengthened those politicians who peddle ethnic animosity. Autonomy, in this sense, did not address the fundamental question of how minority Hungarians could live, work, and participate in social and political life, as Hungarians using the Hungarian language, but was rather a politics of symbolism and would only provoke the majority society.

With this, Bauer accused the government of employing Csurka's logic and, thus, supporting NATO's action for the wrong reasons. The reason to support NATO, Bauer argued, was the young Hungarian democracy's commitment to the Western world. But, then, the question arose: Was the West right to bomb Yugoslavia? This was the issue over which intellectuals-usually described as liberals or social liberals close to AFD-were increasingly divided. Critics of NATO were pitted against those who considered the military intervention a moral duty of the democratic world. This debate, which still continues, was remarkable for its utterly ill-tempered nature. Participants, who started from very similar political and moral premises, routinely questioned each other's moral and intellectual competence.

This segment of the intelligentsia is often attacked for being too close-knit, too homogeneous, and too aloof from and out of touch with the rest of Hungarian society. The core figures belonging to this group were those who had, in the past, protested against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, signed a solidarity declaration with the Czechoslovak Charter 77, were driven into internal or external exile by Janos Kadar's regime, were instrumental in AFD's formation, and formed the Hungarian Democratic Charter in 1992 to protest the alleged antidemocratic intentions of the conservative government then in power. Their commitment to Western democratic values-as compared with figures on the far left and the far right-is undisputed. Nevertheless, they display even less willingness to make peace with each other than the two sides in the Balkan war. The weekly HVG mockingly pointed to this in an article, on June 12, 1999, titled 'War of Birds,' referring to the 'hawk' and 'dove' monikers and AFD's well-known dove logo.This debate was triggered by the writer Gyorgy Konrad, a Hungarian intellectual par excellence. In a speech at Freiburg University, he came out against NATO's air strikes. His speech was published first in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, then in Nepszabadsag, and it provoked sharp responses. One of the sharpest responses-to a similar Konrad speech-was given by Peter Nadas, who did not so much defend NATO as he questioned the credibility of Konrad's position. (Both of these essays are printed below.) Among those liberal intellectuals who supported NATO were the philosopher Agnes Heller, writer Imre Kertesz (an Auschwitz survivor), and aesthetician Sandor Radnoti.

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Laszlo Nemenyi is a journalist and regularly contributes to HVG, a weekly devoted to politics and economics. He is also a contributing editor for Beszelo, a political and cultural monthly.

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