One of the more unexpected topics raised in Vladimir Putin’s long-winded monologue on obscure European history during his February interview with Tucker Carlson was Ukraine’s small Hungarian minority population. For most Americans who tuned in, it was likely the first they had ever heard of it. For Hungarians, however, it is far from a bit of inconsequential trivia.
Transcarpathia, Ukraine’s westernmost oblast, may be several hundred miles from combat in the east, but Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his conservative ruling Fidesz party have made a point of bringing it to the forefront of international discussions of the war in Ukraine. Ethnic Hungarians have called the region home for a millennium. Budapest charges that Ukraine is threatening their survival, violating rights of a vulnerable minority community in the name of a unified Ukrainian identity. The Hungarian government has consistently maintained that the situation of the Hungarians in Transcarpathia must improve before it can consider lending greater support to Ukraine. And it has the veto power in the EU to back up its stances, making it a thorn in the side of the pro-Ukraine vanguard in the West. It has called for peace negotiations, blocked military funding for the war, and resisted Ukraine’s EU and NATO accession bids. As the war drags on into its third year and the world grows increasingly eager to see its end, such seemingly small wedge issues may rise in prominence.
The Hungarians of Transcarpathia straddle a narrow strip of land along the Hungarian border. The region has changed hands four times since the turn of the last century, belonging at various points to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine. For centuries leading up to the First World War, however, it formed part of the Kingdom of Hungary. At the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the Allies doled out two-thirds of the territory of Hungary, including Transcarpathia, to neighboring states. It left millions of ethnic Hungarians outside the Hungarian state. It is a stroke of historical misfortune that haunts the Hungarian psyche to this day. In World War II, the desire to regain lost lands—many of which had nearly entirely ethnic Hungarian populations—motivated the Hungarians to side with Nazi Germany. It worked, if only fleetingly, as borders redrawn along ethnic lines in Transcarpathia and other majority-Hungarian areas were in place from 1942 to 1945.
Seventy years later, the existence of the Transcarpathian Hungarian population continues to be a cause for tension. Nothing has done as much damage to the Hungarian-Ukrainian relationship in recent years as the disputes over the seventy-one Hungarian-language schools in the region. Ukraine’s 2017 law on education included provisions aimed at limiting the use of any language other than Ukrainian in schooling. It allowed for fully non-Ukrainian education only up to fifth grade and required that high school graduation exams be completed in Ukrainian for every subject. Many Hungarians in the region worry about what this legal change will mean for the future of their community. Opponents insist that Hungarian children have a right to use their native language even though history left them on the Ukrainian side of the border.
“We couldn’t even imagine not thinking, learning, and teaching in our mother tongue,” says Berta Mironova-Katona, principal of a Hungarian-language high school in the town of Velyka Dobron. “It seemed impossible that the language of private communication between our schools should not be Hungarian, that our events and celebrations should not be held in our mother tongue.”
Many Hungarians in the region see education as a vital means of saving their culture at a time when the Hungarian mark on their homeland, for a variety of other factors, is already fading.
“If you get rid of Hungarian from your schools, if you get rid of Hungarian from the streets and cultural events, and you make Hungarian a language that is solely spoken in the households, then it’s going to kill a national identity [in the] short-term,” says Balázs Tárnok, a minority rights specialist at the University of Public Service in Budapest.
The 1959 Soviet census showed a population of 150,000 Hungarians in the region. Ukraine’s most recent census, taken in 2001, showed roughly the same number. In recent decades, that stability has given way to a population collapse, however, as many ethnic Hungarians have left Transcarpathia, the poorest oblast in Ukraine not occupied by Russia, in search of better opportunities in Hungary and beyond. The 2022 invasion only accelerated the trend. As Hungarians drain out through the western border, Ukrainians have flocked in, fleeing war-torn regions for the relative peace of western Ukraine.
The rapid decline of the region’s Hungarian presence has made the issue all the more urgent for the ruling Hungarian party Fidesz, which claims a responsibility not only for the Hungarians within the modern borders of Hungary, but to all ethnic Hungarians throughout the Carpathian Basin. It is a duty that has been outlined in the Hungarian constitution since the transition away from communism, notes Tárnok, the minority rights specialist quoted above.
“In Hungary—and generally Central Europe—when we [have] talk[ed] about ‘the nation,’ fundamentally, we didn’t mean a physical nation, but [a] cultural nation,” he says. “So regardless [of whether] you’re a citizen of [another] country, you belong to the Hungarian nation, and members of the Hungarian nation are responsible for each other, regardless [of] where they live.”
The Hungarian government has provided funding to the large Hungarian communities of Transylvania in Romania, Vojvodina in Serbia, Transcarpathia in Ukraine, and others. When Orbán returned to power in 2010 after eight years of majority rule for the Hungarian Socialist Party, the Fidesz government opened up an easy path to citizenship for all ethnic Hungarians throughout the world. The policies have proven popular. Of those who vote from abroad, over 90% voted for Fidesz in the 2022 national election. While Kyiv refuses—to Budapest’s consternation—to recognize dual citizenship, many Transcarpathian Hungarians have obtained Hungarian passports. The citizenship offer has had the unintended effect of accelerating the Hungarian exodus from Transcarpathia, as many have used their new passports as tickets out of Ukraine.
The Hungarians are not the only ones feeling threatened, though. Preservation of language and culture also motivated Ukraine in promulgating the legislation that limits foreign-language schooling. Though primarily directed at the large Russian-speaking minority in the east—the group used by Putin as justification for incursions into Ukraine—the law also applied to the much smaller Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian minorities. Poland and Romania, while not nearly as vocal as Hungary, have also spoken out against the legislation.
Tárnok explains that, before the full-scale invasion of 2022, Ukraine was wary of aiming the legislation directly at Russian-speaking regions for fear of inciting the anger of Russia. Since the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, he says, attitudes toward minorities in general changed.
Education has not been the only minority rights issue that has upset Budapest. A 2019 constitutional amendment on language added to the controversy by promoting Ukrainian at the expense of regional minority languages. It required the use of Ukrainian in public spaces and signage and Ukrainian translation for Hungarian-language events. Distrust developed over symbolic matters as well. In October 2022, for example, the local government in Mukachevo decided to remove a statue of the turul bird, a Hungarian national symbol, at an historically Hungarian castle in the city and to replace it with a Ukrainian coat of arms. Controversy has also arisen over the use of Hungarian flags and the singing of the Hungarian national anthem in schools. All this while Hungarians have been drafted to fight for Ukraine on the frontlines.
While European leaders have not been pleased with what they have perceived as Hungary’s obstructionism on the Ukraine war, they have acknowledged the minority rights concerns as valid. The Venice Commission, an advisory body to the Council of Europe, found Ukraine’s approach to minority rights failed to meet requirements for EU membership, prompting Ukraine to take steps to make changes. This past December, Ukraine approved changes to the Law on Education and the constitutional section on language that received wide praise. The new measures specifically protect minority languages that have official language status in the EU, which includes Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian—but not Russian. The change marks a new, hopeful stage in the dispute.
One party that remains dissatisfied with the changes, however, is Hungary. While acknowledging it was a step in the right direction, Budapest maintains that there is still much to be improved.
Fidesz’s insistence on calling attention to the situation of the minority in Transcarpathia explains, at least in part, Hungary’s lack of enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine in recent years. It is an approach that has put it at odds not just with left-leaning EU members, but also with Poland, a close regional ally that was another important conservative player in the bloc until its election last fall. Budapest frames its actions regarding the Ukraine war in light of the safety of Hungarians, those in both Ukraine and Hungary. This helps explain the nation’s refusal to allow weapon shipments to pass through its border with Ukraine, for instance, as a protective measure, reasoning that the move would open Transcarpathia to attacks from Russia. Hungary presents its opposition to supporting the war effort as an attempt to stand on the side of peace, to avoid unnecessarily escalating a conflict on its doorstep.
Whether the strategy has really benefited the Hungarian minority, however, is up for debate. Budapest’s heavy pressure on Ukraine as it suffers through a full-scale conflict may have done little more than to anger Kyiv, making it less likely to show sympathy to the Transcarpathian community in the long run. And the tough stance has not won Hungary—or Hungarians—any popularity among Ukrainians, struggling for their own future in the fight against Russia. While not the intention of Ukrainian legislators, explains Tárnok, the measures have caused many Ukrainians to grow skeptical of those who do not embrace the Ukrainian language and identity. Even KMKSZ, the Fidesz-aligned ethnic Hungarian political party in Ukraine, signed a letter calling on Hungary to support Ukraine’s EU and NATO accession bids, for the sake of the Hungarian minority.
For Attila Demkó, Hungarian security policy expert and head of the Centre for Geopolitics at the Budapest-based think tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium, the changes to Ukraine’s approach to minority rights approved this past December are proof of Hungary’s pressure paying off. “They did it because they had to do it, otherwise Hungary would have fully vetoed [the possibility of EU accession], no matter what.”
Some wonder whether Budapest is really committed to changing the situation for the Transcarpathian Hungarians or is rather using the issue as a political tactic, a cover for other underlying motivations. Since the December law change, Hungary has shifted from speaking about minority rights to speaking about corruption and lack of economic development. Is Hungary shifting the goalposts?
“Just because Hungary has been criticizing Ukraine over minority rights doesn’t mean that they did not have any other concerns over Ukraine’s EU accession,” says Tárnok. “All other member states do have some concerns regarding Ukraine’s EU accession. Why would Hungary be the only one that had only one concern?”
Some also accuse Hungary of having hidden irredentist desires, arguing that its real motive for its tough stance on a vulnerable Ukraine is to recapture its historical territory, perhaps with the help of Putin.
“There is a part of Hungarian society that believes that Russia will give the lost land back,” says Demkó, pointing to Our Homeland, a party to the right of Fidesz with roughly 8% support that has been open about its desire to reclaim Transcarpathia. “That’s a small fringe minority. The majority of the Hungarians accepted the 1945 border, when Transcarpathia was annexed by the Soviet Union.” What most Hungarians are most concerned about, he says, is ensuring the preservation of Hungarian language and heritage.
The futures of Ukraine, the Hungarian-Ukrainian relationship, and the Transcarpathian Hungarian community stand at an historical crossroads. Ukraine is worn down by two years of war that analysts are becoming increasingly pessimistic about. And yet in the meantime it is forging a strong national identity and charting a path for the future independent of Russia. Hungary and Ukraine have done plenty to anger each other, but they have also shown the ability—if only reluctantly—to give each other what they want: military aid for Ukraine, linguistic minority protections for Hungary. The Transcarpathian Hungarians will not have the numbers they once had, but they may have won—with the help of the characteristically stubborn Orbán government—the protections necessary to guarantee a future for themselves.
For Orbán, Hungarian Minority is a Top Priority in Ukraine
A Statue of the Turul Bird
Photo by muppetspanker / AFP, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
One of the more unexpected topics raised in Vladimir Putin’s long-winded monologue on obscure European history during his February interview with Tucker Carlson was Ukraine’s small Hungarian minority population. For most Americans who tuned in, it was likely the first they had ever heard of it. For Hungarians, however, it is far from a bit of inconsequential trivia.
Transcarpathia, Ukraine’s westernmost oblast, may be several hundred miles from combat in the east, but Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his conservative ruling Fidesz party have made a point of bringing it to the forefront of international discussions of the war in Ukraine. Ethnic Hungarians have called the region home for a millennium. Budapest charges that Ukraine is threatening their survival, violating rights of a vulnerable minority community in the name of a unified Ukrainian identity. The Hungarian government has consistently maintained that the situation of the Hungarians in Transcarpathia must improve before it can consider lending greater support to Ukraine. And it has the veto power in the EU to back up its stances, making it a thorn in the side of the pro-Ukraine vanguard in the West. It has called for peace negotiations, blocked military funding for the war, and resisted Ukraine’s EU and NATO accession bids. As the war drags on into its third year and the world grows increasingly eager to see its end, such seemingly small wedge issues may rise in prominence.
The Hungarians of Transcarpathia straddle a narrow strip of land along the Hungarian border. The region has changed hands four times since the turn of the last century, belonging at various points to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine. For centuries leading up to the First World War, however, it formed part of the Kingdom of Hungary. At the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the Allies doled out two-thirds of the territory of Hungary, including Transcarpathia, to neighboring states. It left millions of ethnic Hungarians outside the Hungarian state. It is a stroke of historical misfortune that haunts the Hungarian psyche to this day. In World War II, the desire to regain lost lands—many of which had nearly entirely ethnic Hungarian populations—motivated the Hungarians to side with Nazi Germany. It worked, if only fleetingly, as borders redrawn along ethnic lines in Transcarpathia and other majority-Hungarian areas were in place from 1942 to 1945.
Seventy years later, the existence of the Transcarpathian Hungarian population continues to be a cause for tension. Nothing has done as much damage to the Hungarian-Ukrainian relationship in recent years as the disputes over the seventy-one Hungarian-language schools in the region. Ukraine’s 2017 law on education included provisions aimed at limiting the use of any language other than Ukrainian in schooling. It allowed for fully non-Ukrainian education only up to fifth grade and required that high school graduation exams be completed in Ukrainian for every subject. Many Hungarians in the region worry about what this legal change will mean for the future of their community. Opponents insist that Hungarian children have a right to use their native language even though history left them on the Ukrainian side of the border.
“We couldn’t even imagine not thinking, learning, and teaching in our mother tongue,” says Berta Mironova-Katona, principal of a Hungarian-language high school in the town of Velyka Dobron. “It seemed impossible that the language of private communication between our schools should not be Hungarian, that our events and celebrations should not be held in our mother tongue.”
Many Hungarians in the region see education as a vital means of saving their culture at a time when the Hungarian mark on their homeland, for a variety of other factors, is already fading.
“If you get rid of Hungarian from your schools, if you get rid of Hungarian from the streets and cultural events, and you make Hungarian a language that is solely spoken in the households, then it’s going to kill a national identity [in the] short-term,” says Balázs Tárnok, a minority rights specialist at the University of Public Service in Budapest.
The 1959 Soviet census showed a population of 150,000 Hungarians in the region. Ukraine’s most recent census, taken in 2001, showed roughly the same number. In recent decades, that stability has given way to a population collapse, however, as many ethnic Hungarians have left Transcarpathia, the poorest oblast in Ukraine not occupied by Russia, in search of better opportunities in Hungary and beyond. The 2022 invasion only accelerated the trend. As Hungarians drain out through the western border, Ukrainians have flocked in, fleeing war-torn regions for the relative peace of western Ukraine.
The rapid decline of the region’s Hungarian presence has made the issue all the more urgent for the ruling Hungarian party Fidesz, which claims a responsibility not only for the Hungarians within the modern borders of Hungary, but to all ethnic Hungarians throughout the Carpathian Basin. It is a duty that has been outlined in the Hungarian constitution since the transition away from communism, notes Tárnok, the minority rights specialist quoted above.
“In Hungary—and generally Central Europe—when we [have] talk[ed] about ‘the nation,’ fundamentally, we didn’t mean a physical nation, but [a] cultural nation,” he says. “So regardless [of whether] you’re a citizen of [another] country, you belong to the Hungarian nation, and members of the Hungarian nation are responsible for each other, regardless [of] where they live.”
The Hungarian government has provided funding to the large Hungarian communities of Transylvania in Romania, Vojvodina in Serbia, Transcarpathia in Ukraine, and others. When Orbán returned to power in 2010 after eight years of majority rule for the Hungarian Socialist Party, the Fidesz government opened up an easy path to citizenship for all ethnic Hungarians throughout the world. The policies have proven popular. Of those who vote from abroad, over 90% voted for Fidesz in the 2022 national election. While Kyiv refuses—to Budapest’s consternation—to recognize dual citizenship, many Transcarpathian Hungarians have obtained Hungarian passports. The citizenship offer has had the unintended effect of accelerating the Hungarian exodus from Transcarpathia, as many have used their new passports as tickets out of Ukraine.
The Hungarians are not the only ones feeling threatened, though. Preservation of language and culture also motivated Ukraine in promulgating the legislation that limits foreign-language schooling. Though primarily directed at the large Russian-speaking minority in the east—the group used by Putin as justification for incursions into Ukraine—the law also applied to the much smaller Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian minorities. Poland and Romania, while not nearly as vocal as Hungary, have also spoken out against the legislation.
Tárnok explains that, before the full-scale invasion of 2022, Ukraine was wary of aiming the legislation directly at Russian-speaking regions for fear of inciting the anger of Russia. Since the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, he says, attitudes toward minorities in general changed.
Education has not been the only minority rights issue that has upset Budapest. A 2019 constitutional amendment on language added to the controversy by promoting Ukrainian at the expense of regional minority languages. It required the use of Ukrainian in public spaces and signage and Ukrainian translation for Hungarian-language events. Distrust developed over symbolic matters as well. In October 2022, for example, the local government in Mukachevo decided to remove a statue of the turul bird, a Hungarian national symbol, at an historically Hungarian castle in the city and to replace it with a Ukrainian coat of arms. Controversy has also arisen over the use of Hungarian flags and the singing of the Hungarian national anthem in schools. All this while Hungarians have been drafted to fight for Ukraine on the frontlines.
While European leaders have not been pleased with what they have perceived as Hungary’s obstructionism on the Ukraine war, they have acknowledged the minority rights concerns as valid. The Venice Commission, an advisory body to the Council of Europe, found Ukraine’s approach to minority rights failed to meet requirements for EU membership, prompting Ukraine to take steps to make changes. This past December, Ukraine approved changes to the Law on Education and the constitutional section on language that received wide praise. The new measures specifically protect minority languages that have official language status in the EU, which includes Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian—but not Russian. The change marks a new, hopeful stage in the dispute.
One party that remains dissatisfied with the changes, however, is Hungary. While acknowledging it was a step in the right direction, Budapest maintains that there is still much to be improved.
Fidesz’s insistence on calling attention to the situation of the minority in Transcarpathia explains, at least in part, Hungary’s lack of enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine in recent years. It is an approach that has put it at odds not just with left-leaning EU members, but also with Poland, a close regional ally that was another important conservative player in the bloc until its election last fall. Budapest frames its actions regarding the Ukraine war in light of the safety of Hungarians, those in both Ukraine and Hungary. This helps explain the nation’s refusal to allow weapon shipments to pass through its border with Ukraine, for instance, as a protective measure, reasoning that the move would open Transcarpathia to attacks from Russia. Hungary presents its opposition to supporting the war effort as an attempt to stand on the side of peace, to avoid unnecessarily escalating a conflict on its doorstep.
Whether the strategy has really benefited the Hungarian minority, however, is up for debate. Budapest’s heavy pressure on Ukraine as it suffers through a full-scale conflict may have done little more than to anger Kyiv, making it less likely to show sympathy to the Transcarpathian community in the long run. And the tough stance has not won Hungary—or Hungarians—any popularity among Ukrainians, struggling for their own future in the fight against Russia. While not the intention of Ukrainian legislators, explains Tárnok, the measures have caused many Ukrainians to grow skeptical of those who do not embrace the Ukrainian language and identity. Even KMKSZ, the Fidesz-aligned ethnic Hungarian political party in Ukraine, signed a letter calling on Hungary to support Ukraine’s EU and NATO accession bids, for the sake of the Hungarian minority.
For Attila Demkó, Hungarian security policy expert and head of the Centre for Geopolitics at the Budapest-based think tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium, the changes to Ukraine’s approach to minority rights approved this past December are proof of Hungary’s pressure paying off. “They did it because they had to do it, otherwise Hungary would have fully vetoed [the possibility of EU accession], no matter what.”
Some wonder whether Budapest is really committed to changing the situation for the Transcarpathian Hungarians or is rather using the issue as a political tactic, a cover for other underlying motivations. Since the December law change, Hungary has shifted from speaking about minority rights to speaking about corruption and lack of economic development. Is Hungary shifting the goalposts?
“Just because Hungary has been criticizing Ukraine over minority rights doesn’t mean that they did not have any other concerns over Ukraine’s EU accession,” says Tárnok. “All other member states do have some concerns regarding Ukraine’s EU accession. Why would Hungary be the only one that had only one concern?”
Some also accuse Hungary of having hidden irredentist desires, arguing that its real motive for its tough stance on a vulnerable Ukraine is to recapture its historical territory, perhaps with the help of Putin.
“There is a part of Hungarian society that believes that Russia will give the lost land back,” says Demkó, pointing to Our Homeland, a party to the right of Fidesz with roughly 8% support that has been open about its desire to reclaim Transcarpathia. “That’s a small fringe minority. The majority of the Hungarians accepted the 1945 border, when Transcarpathia was annexed by the Soviet Union.” What most Hungarians are most concerned about, he says, is ensuring the preservation of Hungarian language and heritage.
The futures of Ukraine, the Hungarian-Ukrainian relationship, and the Transcarpathian Hungarian community stand at an historical crossroads. Ukraine is worn down by two years of war that analysts are becoming increasingly pessimistic about. And yet in the meantime it is forging a strong national identity and charting a path for the future independent of Russia. Hungary and Ukraine have done plenty to anger each other, but they have also shown the ability—if only reluctantly—to give each other what they want: military aid for Ukraine, linguistic minority protections for Hungary. The Transcarpathian Hungarians will not have the numbers they once had, but they may have won—with the help of the characteristically stubborn Orbán government—the protections necessary to guarantee a future for themselves.
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