Five hundred years ago, on the low-lying plains that run eastwards from the River Danube, near the town of Mohács, an army of 20,000 Hungarian soldiers led by Louis, the 20-year old king, faced an Ottoman army, estimated at 100,000 men, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey. King Louis II of Hungary was married to Marie, who was the younger sister of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, and his brother Ferdinand, Emperor of Austria. Louis and Ferdinand had pleaded with Charles to send more troops to halt the Turkish advance, and had even suggested a temporary cessation of hostilities with the German Protestants, to allow them to recruit a mercenary army to defend European Christendom from the infidels. Charles declined to support his brother-in-law, preferring to concentrate his military resources on his war with France, by which he hoped to secure Burgundy and much of Northern Italy for the Habsburgs. Although Francis I, the French king, was betrothed to Charles’s elder sister, Eleanor, Charles viewed Francis as untrustworthy and referred to him as “the tiresome Turk”.
Despite being heavily outnumbered, Louis II engaged the Ottoman army in battle: he was killed, along with many leading Hungarian nobles, and most of his army. Two weeks later, Suleiman entered the city of Buda and appointed John I, as the vassal King of Hungary, determining that an annual subsidy would be paid to Istanbul. Ferdinand claimed the crown of Hungary for himself, and set about rallying the Christian kings of Europe to form an alliance and raise an army to drive the Turks out of central Europe. His pleas were ignored, not least because most of Europe was more concerned about the territorial ambitions of Charles than of Suleiman. The French, English, Venetians, Milanese, and the Pope all joined together to form the League of Cognac, established to resist the Habsburgs threat, and Buda remained firmly under the control of the Turks. When John I died, in 1540, Ferdinand disputed the succession of the Hungarian crown to his young son, John II, and raised his own army of Austrian and German troops, which was dispatched to Buda to liberate it from Ottoman control. This army, once again around 20,000 in number, was crushed by Suleiman’s troops along the banks of the Danube, and Turkish control of Hungary was once again confirmed. The Ottomans remained in charge for almost 150 years until, in 1686, a Habsburg army finally wrested back control, first of Buda and then the lands to the south and east.
Between 1686 and 1918, Budapest became an impressive central European city, second in importance only to Vienna, second in size only to Berlin. However, in the twentieth century, it found itself once again at the heart of continental wars, fought over by hostile powers, with local rulers reduced to vassalage. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918, for a year Hungary was run by Mihály Károly, who wanted to create a neutral country – “the Switzerland of the east” – but his pacificism was respected neither by his neighbours nor the leaders of the victorious powers, now meeting at Versailles, who were busy dividing up continental Europe. Hungary rapidly lost 75% of its territory. Károly resigned, to be replaced, briefly, by a Hungarian Soviet Republic, led by Béla Kun. This government also lasted only a year, before a Romanian invasion forced them into exile. Eventually, a counter-revolution succeeded, led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, and a series of right-wing governments led Hungary into ever closer ties with Germany, both nations seeking to re-write the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919.
Hungary joined the Axis powers during the Second World War, still hoping to regain much of the territory that had historically been part of the Hungarian Empire. But these hopes collapsed when the German retreat from Russia gathered pace in 1944. Towards the end of that year, Budapest came under siege once again, when German and Hungarian forces were surrounded by the Soviet Army’s westwards march towards Berlin. Over the course of two months, almost 40,000 civilians were killed – roughly twice as many as died at the Battle of Mohács – although not all of these were the victims of the besieging army. Many Hungarian Jews were murdered by members of the Arrow Cross Party, the ultra-nationalist Hungarian militia that ran the city with German approval from late 1944 until early 1945.
At the end of the war, an independent parliamentary government was established, but in 1949 the Soviet Union assumed control through proxy parties and established the Hungarian People’s Republic as a communist run satellite state. In the autumn of 1956, following student protests against the influence of the Soviet Union in Hungarian life, Imre Nagy became prime minister. He promised the democratisation of public life and pledged to follow a Hungarian road to socialism. Like Mihály Károly, he wanted Hungary to become a neutral country, and announced that it would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union sent in troops and tanks and Nagy’s government was crushed. Around 20,000 Hungarian civilians were killed by Soviet troops in November 1956. Nagy himself was arrested and later executed by the new government, at Moscow’s behest. Hungary was under effective Soviet control until 1989.
The brief survey of Hungarian history during the last half-millennium illustrates a more general point about many European nation states. Hungary was caught up in imperial wars for territorial dominance between the Christian Habsburgs and the Muslim Ottomans for nearly two hundred years; but so too were Greece, Bulgaria, and Cyprus. Hungary then became incorporated into the extensive Habsburg empire, centred on Vienna, for more than two hundred years; but so too were parts of Italy, Germany, and Serbia. Then, Hungary became trapped in the middle of the twentieth century power struggle between Germany and Russia; but so too were Czechia, Poland, and Ukraine. And during this period, many other European states suffered major military reversals and periods of external domination: Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium. In other words, despite a strong sense of national identity – based on shared language, history, culture, and cuisine – Hungarians, like most other European peoples, have spent much of their history under the malign influence of foreign powers.
It is this history, I think, which explains the enduring popularity of Viktor Orbán, until recently the Prime Minister of Hungary, who has now lost power after fifteen years in office. Despite the obvious venality of his party and the vulgarity of his character, he was able to tap into a deep and widespread anxiety about the loss of national and ethnic identity, which was a very recent and fragile achievement. Having been dominated for centuries by the Turks, the Habsburgs, the Germans, and the Russians, now, finally, the Hungarians were running their own country in their own way and for their own interests. They had no desire, so Orbán persuaded them, to embrace a generic European culture, orchestrated from Brussels, although they were delighted to have their economy propped up by generous subsidies.
The Hungarians were not unique in voting for an old – and old fashioned – male leader, who championed national traditions over cosmopolitan freedoms, and who built a political system that constrained civic space and historical memory, insisting on a particular (and not very accurate) view of the past. After centuries of imperial domination, it was not difficult to establish a form of electoral domination, whereby the formalities of democratic government are present (political parties and votes) but the substance (democratic will formation in the public sphere) is absent. Similar political trends are currently on show in Slovakia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, and were also present until recently in Poland.
It is important to distinguish the nostalgic national pride of nations that once were great but now are in terminal decline – such as Britain, France, Russia, and, most recently, the United States – from the national pride of nations that have never been great powers, and have only recently achieved a genuine form of national independence. To shout, Make America Great Again is to endorse a foolish slogan, but to shout, Make Hungary Great Again is to make a mistake. Despite the absence of an authentic national story as a great independent Christian nation, Orbán’s success was to persuade large numbers of Hungarians that this fiction was the truth; and, further, to convince them that the EU posed a serious threat to Hungary, seeking the theft of their longstanding national identity.
Béla Bartók’s opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle – first performed in 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was about to collapse – is a powerful but tragic tale, with striking music and lyrics, and has become one of my favourite works. Judith, Bluebeard’s new wife, insists that he open up the seven doors of his castle, each of which reveals something of his character and personal history. Opening the final door, she discovers what has happened to his previous wives, whose fate Judith is condemned to repeat. The moral of the story is that an obsession with the past can lead to a very unhappy future. But then, Bartók had the good sense to escape Budapest before the worst years of German occupation. Sometimes, true patriotism requires us to live honestly in exile rather than remain deluded and in servitude at home.