DOI 10.38145/2021.1.155 

The centuries following the foundation of the Christian kingdom of Hungary by Saint Stephen did not leave later generations with an unmanageable plethora of written works. However, the diversity of the genres and the philological and historical riddles which lie hidden in these works arguably provide ample compensation for the curious reader. There are numerous textual interrelationships among the Gesta Hungarorum by the anonymous notary of King Béla known as Anonymus, the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum by Simon of Kéza and the forteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle consisting of various earlier texts, not to mention the hagiographical material on the canonized rulers. For the historian, the relationships among these early historical texts and the times at which they were composed (their relative and absolute chronology) are clearly a matter of interest, since the judgment of these links affects the credibility of the historical information preserved in them. In an attempt to establish the relative chronology, philological analysis is the primary tool, while in our efforts to determine the precise times at which the texts were composed, literary and legal history may offer the most reliable guides. László Veszprémy has very clearly made circumspect use of these methods in his essays, thus it is hardly surprising that many of his colleagues, myself included, have been eagerly waiting for his dissertation, which he defended in 2009 for the title of Doctor of Sciences, to appear in the form of a book in which the articles he has written on the subject since are also included.

Veszprémy aims to shed light on “the most critical questions of medieval Hungarian chronicle research.” However, the focus of his discussion is the Gesta Hungarorum by the anonymous notary of King Béla III and the early chapters of the fourteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, which narrates events from the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Later developments in the Hungarian chronicle tradition after the middle of the thirteenth century, such as the aforementioned Gesta by Simon of Kéza, fall beyond the scope of his analysis, though the author very clearly would have a great deal to say on the subject.

The first section of the volume offers ample testimony to one of the greatest virtues of Veszprémy’s method. It provides an overview of the beginnings of and later developments in Hungarian historical literature against the backdrop of medieval European historiography. The rich tradition of history writing in Europe was available only to a limited extent to the first Hungarian readers, as indeed the analysis of the Pannonhalma library catalog demonstrates. However, demand for and interest in historical works date back to the eleventh century, even if the desire to revive the heroic pagan past (or rather, to construct it) was only fulfilled by the work of Anonymus around 1200. One could mention, as evidence of this early interest, the Pozsonyi Évkönyv (‘Annals of Pozsony’) and the annals of the Somogyvár Formulary, the latter of which Veszprémy discusses only briefly. Based on the layout of the pages of the codex of the Pozsonyi Évkönyv, Veszprémy came to the possible but not entirely compelling conclusion that the earlier material of the annals was edited and clarified in 1114, which unquestionably would fit into our understanding of the impetus given to writing practices in Hungary and the surge in interest in history under the reign of King Coloman the Learned.

It is common knowledge that the earliest foreign sources on which Hungarian historiography drew were the Annals of Altaich and Regino’s Chronicon. We do not know, however, when the two narrative works came to the attention of Hungarian chroniclers. While news of the Annals of Altaich (which show a pro-German bias) may have reached Hungarian historiography already in the eleventh century (at least by 1108), during the long armed confrontation between the Holy Roman emperors and the Hungarian kings, the first Hungarian author to make use of Regino could hardly have been active before Cosmas of Prague (†1125), who was the first historian in the Central European region to have access to the Chronicon.

These questions lead us to one of the most important assertions made in the book. The Hungarian chronicles contain a great deal of unquestionably authentic information concerning the eleventh century, though critical analyses of style have suggested time and time again that the narrative was composed or written down in the twelfth century, particularly in the case of the Gesta regis Ladislai, which offers an almost epic account of the struggles for the throne between King Solomon and his cousins, the dukes Géza and Ladislaus (the future Saint Ladislaus I). This is also the section which bears the most affinities with the court romances of Western Europe. Veszprémy seeks to resolve this riddle with the suggestion that in the eleventh century only historical notes were taken, the trace of which may have been preserved in the entries of the Annals of Pozsony. As the brief annalistic entries could hardly have grown into the vibrant narratives found in the chronicles, Veszprémy argues that these historical notes may have been more ambitious writings which covered longer periods of history, while they did not aspire to offer a unified account of Hungarian history. This hypothesis unquestionably offers an explanation for one of the fundamental questions of early Hungarian history writing, though it is perhaps made slightly less persuasive by the fact that Veszprémy, who has a thorough knowledge of the larger European context, makes no mention of any generic parallels which might explain why the individual historical notes were even created or what the intentions of the authors may have been.

After his discussion of the admittedly complex beginnings of Hungarian historical literature, Veszprémy turns his attention to the text of the fourteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle, which preserved many earlier works, including the abovementioned Gesta Ladislai regis and the Gesta by Simon of Kéza. The next few chapters examine the problems concerning the sections of the text which deal with the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Central to his discussion is the issue of authenticity, or in other words, the exact time at which the parts in question were composed. Veszprémy offers an informative analysis of the influence of Gregorian Reform on Hungarian literature. Saint Ladislaus embodies the vision of the ideal ruler at the time, who becomes king thanks to his Christian idoneitas, though quite against his will. Of particular interest are the chapters of the chronicle which, as we can conclude on the basis of a comparison with the Gesta of Anonymus, had undoubtedly been written before the anonymous notary was active (ca. 1200), i.e., the chapters concerning the Battle of Mogyoród and the Battle of Kerlés. Instead of using the vague expression ancient gesta (“ősgeszta”), which one often stumbles across in the modern historiography, Veszprémy consistently writes about a pre-1200 chronicle redaction. This conscientiousness about terminological precision constitutes an example worth following.

The next section focuses on Anonymus’ Gesta Hungarorum, the study of which has certainly been one of the motivating forces for the rise of medieval studies in Hungary over the course of the past 250 years. Veszprémy’s interest was captured by the rhetorical models of the work, which was composed in the decades following the death of King Béla III, and other elements which offer indications as to when it was written. Earlier, Veszprémy identified several citations which are from a Latin novel about the fall of Troy entitled Excidium Troiae. The work was not extremely popular, but it was definitely used in schools. Now, Veszprémy has managed to determine that the version used by the anonymous notary resembled the text preserved in the Brussels manuscript of Guido Pisanus. This constitutes one more clue in the relatively long list on the basis of which Veszprémy concludes that Anonymus probably studied in Italy (though he does not rule out the possibility that he stayed in France, a notion which is often found in the secondary literature). Elements which indicate the period of the writing include the mention of the Black Sea, formerly known in the West only as Pontus, which appears in Anonymus as Nigrum Mare. As the expression was first used in western sources only in 1265, the occurrence of the term here used to be considered as one of the few reasons for a later dating of the relevant chapter of the Gesta (to the late thirteenth century). Veszprémy and Orsolya Csákváry, his coauthor, now point out that this name already appears in the Scandinavian saga literature in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, though the term may well have made its way to Hungary considerably earlier, during the golden era of ties between Scandinavia and Byzantium in the eleventh century. Veszprémy arrives, after a similarly exciting investigation, at the conclusion that the fate of the only surviving codex of the Gesta Hungarorum may be intertwined with the fate of the Turkish-language manuscript Tarih-i Ungurus, or History of the Hungarians, which has a considerable textual link to the Hungarian chronicle tradition.

The third major section of the book contains case studies which concern reports on Hungary found not in Hungarian sources but rather in sources from abroad, such as Adémar de Chabannes and the Bavarian traditions of Scheyern. Among these studies, only the one on the European sources of the Hungarian Hun tradition which is very clearly tied to the subject indicated in the title of the book. Veszprémy very clearly feels that the association of the Hungarians with the Huns and with Attila predates Anonymus. This association, however, could hardly have stretched back to the period before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin and rather should be attributed to intellectuals familiar with the German Attila tradition, who traveled in great numbers to the Kingdom of Hungary in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

László Veszprémy’s book thus offers an engaging intellectual adventure, and as far as the content is concerned, the reader will not be disappointed. The organization and editing of the book, however, at times leaves something to be desired. I myself was somewhat annoyed that Veszprémy discusses some of the more significant problems (such as the relationship between Anonymus’ Gesta and the earliest textual layers of the Illuminated Chronicle) in isolation, following the structure of the studies that had been published earlier as articles. The book is not always sufficiently didactic, a problem which is also related to the manner in which the boundaries between the various studies have not been adequately transcended. This will make the book more difficult to use as a handbook on early Hungarian historiography. True, that was not Veszprémy’s goal, but given the source material in the book and the new findings which are presented, the specialist readership will undoubtedly hope to use this beautifully published book in this capacity.

Dániel Bácsatyai
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Earthly Delights, Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900. Edited by Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2018. 534 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.160 

The absence of modern writing on Eastern European food history is sometimes rather conspicuous. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to find that Brill has recently published a volume titled Earthly Delights, Economies and Cultures of Food in Ottoman and Danubian Europe, c. 1500–1900, which is part of its Balkan Studies Library series. The volume, edited by Angela Jianu and Violeta Barbu, contains 17 studies by various authors spanning 534 pages and comes with color illustrations and a general index at the end. The collection starts with the editors’ introduction, which is well written and informative. There are also brief biographies of the participating authors, a short historical chronology of the Balkans starting from 1456, and notes on translation and transliteration.

The project was divided into five thematic parts, each containing two to five studies. The first part focuses on the Ottoman world, the second deals with ingredients and kitchens, the third shifts its attention to trade and food supply, the fourth discusses local cookbooks, and the last part examines the issue of representation, in other words how Balkan food, cooking, and (in)hospitality were perceived by foreign observers.

The essays in the collection generally speaking fall into two categories. Some authors strove to present the reader with an overview of a broadly outlined topic, like Moldavian or Wallachian cuisine in the early modern era, while others delved deep into the details of one particular theme, e. g. when and how olive oil replaced butter as the primary source of fat in Turkey. In the following paragraphs, I briefly comment on each study and then share a few general remarks.

After the excellent introduction by the editors, the first study written by Suraiya Faroqhi from Istanbul Bilgi University deals with the gradual introduction of olive oil into Turkish cuisine. It presents an interesting perspective, demonstrating that the dominance of olives was not as absolute as one would have expected in this area based on what we know about ancient Roman and, later, Italian cuisine. It also introduces the topic of cultural resistance, when Faroqhi explains that the relative reluctance of Turks to use olive oil as a staple of Mediterranean cuisine might have been caused by its popularity among Greeks.

The next study, by Hedda Reindl-Kiel, provides a well-written overview of the sources available on Early Modern Eastern cuisine, including a seventeenth-century Persian cookbook, shopping bills, and lists of food distribution from the sultan’s court. This last item is particularly illuminating, and Reindl-Kiel demonstrates how food distributed in the upper echelons of Ottoman society surpassed simple nutritional functions and gained an important symbolic value. As reports written by contemporary European observers, such as the one by the Habsburg ambassador to the High Porte, Heøman Èernín of Chudenice (1576–1651), suggest, foreigners often misunderstood the distinctive role of food in Turkish society.

Özge Samancı’s chapter on cuisine in nineteenth-century Istanbul lists a broad variety of foodstuffs utilized in early Turkish printed cookbooks, the oldest of which appeared in 1840. Margareta Aslan’s work contains a discussion on the history of food in Transylvania with particular focus on Turkish influence. She points out some interesting comparative differences in food culture between Romanians, Turks, and Hungarians (e. g. the use of sweeteners in certain contexts or diverging preferences for various spices in the Balkan regions). The first part of the collection comes to a close with an essay by Olivia Senciuc dealing with the attractive theme of coffee and tea in eighteenth-century Moldavia and Wallachia. Perhaps Senciuc’s most interesting conclusion is the realization that despite the constant Ottoman political, economic, and military influence, the wealthy boyar families began to consume coffee relatively late, only in the second half of the seventeenth century, which coincided with the adoption of caffeinated drinks by upper classes in the other regions of Central and Eastern Europe.

The second section of the book, titled “Ingredients, Kitchens and the Pleasures of the Table,” opens with Kinga S. Tüdõs’s study of early modern festivities in Transylvania. For a readership particularly interested in Hungarian culture, this is perhaps the most relevant passage, as Tüdõs brings into focus the Hungarian group of east Transylvanians, called Székelys. Tüdõs’s extensive use of inheritance inventories resembles similarly oriented research on the cultural history of the dining customs of the early modern noble classes, which became a subject of considerable interest in Bohemia in the 1990s and early 2000s.1 The study draws heavily on the manuscript cookbook of Princess Anna Bornemisza (1630–1688), which prompts me to suggest that it might be beneficial to compare this source with a collection of three mid-seventeenth-century handwritten cookbooks attributed to the Czech nobility and preserved in the National Museum and Strahov Library in Prague. These Czech collections are nearly contemporary to Anna Bornemisza’s cookbook and reflect a similar socioeconomic background.

The following study by Maria Magdalena Székely draws the readers’ attention to another historical region, the principality of Moldavia. Székely does not rely exclusively on the scarce written historical records, but also introduces information gleaned from archeological, archaeobotanical, and archeozoological sources which provide an additional perspective. Székely’s work offers a comparative analysis of early modern food culture in Moldavia, which will help other Central and Eastern European historians better contextualize their own research. Violeta Barbu, the author of the next study on early modern food culture in Wallachia, uses an equally broad approach, basically providing a textbook-like delineation usable by any historian searching for comparisons with findings in their own research. Like Székely, Barbu also makes creative use of the sources, for example Rituale Romanum.

From the conceptually broad studies, we move back towards microhistory at the beginning of the third part of the collection. It begins with a paper by Enikõ Rüsz-Fogarasi describing food supply in the Romanian city of Cluj in the early modern period, in which Rüsz-Fogarasi builds on her previous interest in the history of hospitals in Transylvania. This text is valuable for its focus on a comparatively early period (1550–1650), but it also shows how challenging it is to work with relatively scarce written sources. Analogically, Mária Pakucs-Willcocks’s study focuses on a single Transylvanian place as well, the city of Sibiu. Her paper therefore works very well in comparison with the previous chapter. Pakucs-Willcocks begins with an examination of import fees and other legal contexts for trade with the Ottomans and later delves into detail when discussing the individual types of food. I would highlight her attempt to shape often limited sources into series of data, systematically tracking certain commodities.

While the two previous studies dealt with trade more or less exclusively in Transylvania, Gheorghe Lazãr’s paper shifts the focus to trade in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Wallachia. Lazãr divides his interest between what he calls “the big retail trade,” which means the export of horses, cattle, and grain and “the small trade,” referring to the import of luxury goods. Both are equally valuable, but quite distinct from the perspective of writing about the history of food culture, as they offer testimony to differing socioeconomic realities.

The fourth section of the book, which is also the shortest, consists of two chapters examining historical Balkan cookbooks. First, Castilia Manea-Grgin describes two early modern handwritten collections of recipes: “Compendium on the Preparation of Day-to-Day Dishes,” owned originally by Miklós Zrínyi (1620–1664), and the slightly more recent “Book in which Dishes of Fish, Crayfish, Oysters, Snails, Vegetables, Herbs, and Other Dishes for Fast and Non-fast Days are Written, In their Due order.” The origin of this second manuscript is uncertain, but it is likely a seventeenth-century source possibly linked to Constantin Cantacuzino, who served between 1675–1677 as the Great Steward to the Wallachian princes. It is worth noting, however, that the analysis avoids the food-related parts of both collections, focusing instead on related topics, such as the management of orchards, gardening, and viniculture. Nevertheless, the study is still quite useful for food historians, because these topics are related to the history of nutrition, and Manea-Grgin also provides a thorough examination of the foreign influences she was able to detect, particularly in the Romanian collection.

In the following article, Stefan Detchev writes about the oldest printed cookbooks in Bulgaria, which were published in the 1870s. As this is a very modern topic, it is well outside my area of expertise, but I imagine that a comparative study with other cookbooks of the period, for example, might yield interesting findings related to the birth of modern femininity in the Central and Eastern European context.

The introductory study of the last section was written by Andrew Dalby, the prolific British historian of food, who examines several travelogues written by foreigners about their stays in late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Romania. Although mostly focused on modern history, this chapter does occasionally delve into much older, seventeenth-century reports by William Lithgow, John Smith (of Pocahontas fame), Robert Bargrave, and Edmund Chishull. Dalby’s text is an excellent read and very entertaining, though it does present (understandably) an exclusively outsider’s perspective of the Balkans, as Dalby does not read local sources.

Fortunately, Angela Jianu, the author of the following chapter, addresses this issue in her analysis of travelogues from the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Dalby, Jianu provides feedback on information published by the travelers mentioned in her paper. She also pays careful attention to concepts like “commensality” and “otherness” in the Balkans, which she describes as a region “in-between” the East and the West. The penultimate study by Anna Matthaiou draws on a plethora of information concerning modern food culture in the Balkans, while also commenting on its fractured nature. This study chronologically extends well into the twentieth century and provides interesting insights into the construction of Hellenized “national” cuisine and the homogeneity versus the diversity of local traditions.

Finally, Andrei Oiºteanu draws the readers’ attention to the Jewish tavernkeepers in Romania with an emphasis on prejudice and stereotypes associated with the life of this minority in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. His chapter also brings up broader contexts and is worth reading for those interested in Judaic history from the seventeenth century to the twentieth.

Overall, Earthly Delights presents an intriguing and critically important collection of studies. The volume is well organized, and the shortcomings to which a reviewer might draw attention are only minor. There are a few typographical errors, but not more than one would expect in such large project. I particularly appreciate the fact that most of the studies were written by authors with clear links to the Balkans and not by foreigners theorizing about the region. This is necessary due to the difficult linguistic landscape of the region, as shown for example by the painstakingly documented trilingual toponyms in passages related to Transylvania.

For foreigners like me, the study highlights certain issues inherent to Balkan historiography. For example, I find it interesting to observe the propensity of Romanian historiography towards the French theoretical tradition of the Annales school. In Czech historiography, this source of inspiration is filled mostly by German scholars and, recently, the growing importance of English historical writing.

Another general observation I would make concerns the relative lack of written sources, which became more abundant only after the mid-seventeenth century. It can be partially supplemented by archeological and archaeobotanical findings, but I suspect that this form of research requires levels of funding which are not yet readily available in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps the most striking feature is visible particularly in the final chapters, where readers are continually reminded of the Protean nature of the Balkans as a simultaneously backward, static place where time stands still (and good inns are hard to come by), while it was also a place of tumultuous change in a “melting pot” of cultures, nationalities, religions, languages, and political interests. The editors appropriately reflect on this phenomenon in the introduction when they claim that globalization and multiculturalism are not modern inventions, as regions like Transylvania were faced with similar challenges centuries before these terms became fashionable, contentious issues for present culture wars. Overall, Earthly Delights is an essential read for any historian of food, especially a historian focusing on the seventeenth century and later periods.

Karel Černý
Charles University
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Estates and Constitution: The Parliament in Eighteenth-Century Hungary. By István M. Szijártó. Translated by David Robert Evans. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2020. 350 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.166

Readers interested in the history of Austria, the Habsburg Monarchy, and its successor states may have become accustomed to the high academic quality of the series Austrian and Habsburg Studies (edited by Howard Louthan and published by Berghahn Books in association with the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota), which covers a wide range of themes in fields from ethnic conflict and nationalism to fin-de-siècle culture and women’s history, to mention only a few of the subjects which have been covered since 1996, the year in which the first book in the series was published. István M. Szijártó’s new book (the 30th title in the series) fits perfectly in this trend both because of its subject and by virtue of its complexity and rigorousness. Szijártó’s outstanding monograph offers an admirable example of a work of scholarship on complex problems in the somewhat “exotic” history of early modern East Central Europe which both conforms to the local (in this case, the Hungarian) historiographical tradition and meets the standards of the Anglophone academic world. In the case of the latter, credit is also due to the excellent work of the translator, David Robert Evans.

Szijártó’s endeavor is unique in the sense that he attempts to bring close to non-Hungarian readers the history of the Hungarian Diet, a topic which has been “grievously neglected in international scholarship,” to use the words of Robert John Weston Evans from the back cover of the book. This is not to say, however, that the subject has been entirely ignored in recent non-Hungarian historiography. One could mention, perhaps first and foremost, the monograph by Jean Bérenger and Károly Kecskeméti, Parlement et vie Parlementaire en Hongrie 1608–1918 (Paris, Honoré Champion Editeur, 2005). Yet Estates and Constitution offers more than a work written in the traditional vein of parliamentary history in its narrower sense. To support this statement, it is worth taking a look at Szijártó’s earlier works in the field to understand their evolution and determine their places in relation to one another. This is all the more important, since Szijártó himself felt it necessary to point out at the beginning of his work that his book is “the product of almost three decades of research” (xi).

The first significant fruit of Szijártó’s long-term research project was his 2005 monograph A diéta. A magyar rendek és az országgyűlés, 1708–1792 [The Diet. The Hungarian estates and the parliament, 1708–1792] (Budapest, Osiris), which became the fundamental work in the field. Although attention was paid to the social historical background (first and foremost to the fundamental role of the bene possessionatus nobility, the prosperous landowning gentry in the counties, and, later, the Diets) both in this monograph and in Szijártó’s subsequent collection of studies, entitled Nemesi társadalom és politika: Tanulmányok a 18. századi magyar rendiségről [Noble society and politics: Studies on the history of the estates in eighteenth-century Hungary] (Budapest, Universitas, 2006), in his later works, Szijártó offered more thorough and nuanced discussions of the social-historical aspects of institutional change. In his 2016 book A 18. századi Magyarország rendi országgyűlése [The Diet in eighteenth-century Hungary] (Budapest, Országgyűlés Hivatala) and in his 2017 DSc thesis Emberek és struktúrák a 18. századi Magyarországon: A politikai elit társadalom- és kultúrtörténeti megközelítésben [Individuals and structures in eighteenth-century Hungary: The political elite from the perspective of social and cultural history], he provided a thorough analysis of the roles of the bene possessionatus nobility and the career paths of political actors. However, in these works, the change of perspective became manifest on another level, namely in Szijártó’s growing interest in questions concerning cultural history and the history of political discourse. In fact, these latter aspects come to the fore in Estates and Constitution, too, which is a “modified, extended, and restructured” version of Szijártó’s abovementioned 2016 book in Hungarian (p.xi). In a sense, Szijártó’s recent monograph in English can be seen as a concise account of the main findings of this long-term research project, adjusted to the extent necessary to specific circumstances arising from the situation when a scholar aims to speak to a “global” audience about historical problems rooted in chiefly “local” contexts.

The structure of the book is quite user-friendly, and although its primary character is that of a monograph, it could also be used as a handbook. It has been broken into three sections, each of which is divided into chapters, which again have several subsections, most of them a few pages long. Broadly speaking, each of the main parts covers a fundamental aspect of eighteenth-century politics and is written from a specific analytical viewpoint. In the first part (Chapters 1–2), the principal structural elements of early modern Hungarian politics and the machinery of the Diet are outlined; in the second (Chapters 3–7), the parliament is presented as a functioning institution and the main locus of political practice; in the third (Chapters 8–10), some aspects of the political discourse and social-cultural history are in the foreground, alongside the historiography of the early modern parliament.

One of the main strengths of the book is its primarily holistic outlook. Szijártó presents institutional, social-cultural, and intellectual issues as different aspects of one and the same history. If one reads the analyses carefully, one gets a detailed picture of their complex interrelations, at least in the context of the eighteenth-century parliamentary history of Hungary. In addition, Szijártó’s essentially holistic approach goes hand in hand with his highly sensitive insights into grassroots level phenomena. Big processes and large structures are handled in close relation to the dimension of human agency and everyday practices of parliamentary life, and individual occurrences are never treated as mere illustrations of general tendencies. This feature of the book seems to be all the more important, since the mutual interdependence of these two dimensions becomes manifest on various levels throughout the analyses. Accordingly, the most common narrative structure of the subsections is a sequence consisting of a general account of the overall trends, followed by a thorough analysis of the most relevant cases supporting, nuancing, or modifying the original statements. Of course, this manner of writing history is only possible on the basis of a vast corpus of historical sources, and indeed this can be seen as the backbone of the whole work.

Chapter 1 provides a summary of the most crucial elements of eighteenth-century Hungary’s political system. Szijártó pays particular attention here to the dualism of king and estates, which made eighteenth-century Hungary an estate polity (Ständestaat), and he emphasizes the paramount importance of the tractatus diaetalis, the process of negotiation between the two sides of the political chessboard (pp.12–17). The long-term functioning of the Diet as the main locus of the bargaining process between king and estates demonstrates that the power of the latter proved much more durable in Hungary than in other parts of the empire, since the Habsburgs felt it necessary to convoke the Diet in the country “even after a hiatus of five, ten, or even twenty-five years” (p.18). The historical fundament of the Hungarian Sonderweg, as Szijártó stresses several times in the book, was the Rákóczi War of Independence and the compromise between crown and country which came in its wake, codified in the Treaty of Szatmár, which “stabilized the position of the Hungarian estates, restoring the dualism of king and estates of the previous era” (pp.2, 98–99). The significance of the separate path taken by Hungary became manifest during the War of the Austrian Succession, in the course of which the Hungarian estates remained loyal to Vienna and, as a result, Hungary (unlike the Hereditary Lands and the Czech provinces) was left out of the centralizing and rationalizing reforms of Haugwitz, which “represented a turning point in the political development of the Habsburg Monarchy” (p.99).

After portraying the main institutional factors of the workings of the Diet in Chapter 2, Szijártó goes on to outline one of the main findings of his book, and he demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, a profound change took place in the political agenda of the parliament, leading from confessionalism to the emergence of the dualism of king and estates dominated by constitutional questions. Religious issues, after dominating the debates in the 1710s and the 1720s, were (at least until 1790) omitted from the discussions of the Diets. Denominational divisions lost their former importance, and the defense of different aspects of noble privileges came to the foreground in parliamentary politics. As the investigations in Chapter 4 show, this process made it possible for the estates to take a strong line against the ruler in questions concerning the size of the yearly contribution (contributio) and the nobility’s exemption from taxation. The new situation induced the decrease of the level of polarization within the estates and gave rise to a new form of antagonism vis-à-vis the crown, narrowing the possibility of compromise between king and estates considerably. In Chapter 6, this sharpening of divisions between crown and country is also demonstrated on the level of the political decisions of the deputies, displaying the process in the course of which “oppositionality and government loyalty” became “mutually exclusive choices” (p.171).

The main social-historical component of this process was the emancipation of the well-to-do gentry, the bene possessionatus nobility from the aristocracy, which came to dominate the political life of the counties in the course of the first half of eighteenth century. In the background of this process, which is described in Chapter 9, we find the dissolution of the old networks of familiaritas between the aristocracy and the lesser nobility and the takeover of the power of the landowning prosperous gentry in the counties. The breaking up of the system of patron-client relations resulted in a significantly higher degree of social and political independence of the bene possessionatus nobility. On the institutional level, the growing significance of the well-to-do gentry manifested itself at first at the county assemblies, where it became the leading political force.

However, several aspects of the institutional development of the Diet in the eighteenth century (most importantly the decision-making mechanisms and the increase of the importance of the county deputies, as shown in Chapter 7) make it clear that the bene possessionatus nobility was able to reassert itself on the level of parliamentary politics as the predominant political factor. Undoubtedly, the “noble-national” movement in Hungary in 1790 was part of this process: in fact, it can be seen as an attempt by the well-to-do gentry to reshape the political system of the country according to its own interests and values, aiming to convert its local dominance in the counties to real political power on the “national” level.

At this point, the relevance of the perspective of intellectual history, from which Chapter 8 is written, becomes clear. Through textual analyses of various sources, Szijártó verifies his thesis concerning polarization between king and estates as the “central tendency of politics” (p.263) on the level of political discourse as well. Szijártó demonstrates inter alia the rise of the term “constitution” in the political parlance of the Diets, a process that can be seen as a main element of the conceptual foundations of nineteenth-century developments in political discourse and in the politics of grievance in general.

Henrik Hőnich
University of Public Service, Thomas Molnar Institute for Advanced Studies
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Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism. Edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher. New York–Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. 416 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.171

At the height of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Jarosław Kaczyn˙ski, head of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, explained his strong anti-immigrant position by claiming that the Polish nation had a historic mission to defend Christian Europe from enemies who wanted to destroy it. He has also used this argument to justify homophobia and attacks on women’s rights. Similar claims resound across Eastern Europe. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has made similar claims about Hungary, as has Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša for Slovenia. Pro-Western Ukrainians intent on joining the European Union also see their country as a bulwark protecting Europe, albeit against a different enemy: Russian imperialism. In each case, nationalist leaders look back in time and translate histories of wars fought against Bolsheviks, Ottoman armies, and Tatar invaders into myths of heroic martyrdom in order to cast themselves at the center of present-day struggles to define where Europe is and what it should mean to those who live there. Eastern Europe today abounds with visions of nations vying with one another to be the rampart of Europe, a bastion protecting a continent surrounded by enemies. Why are these myths so ubiquitous? And what gives them such power?

The urgency of these questions today makes Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism, edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher, especially welcome. The fourteen essays in the volume analyze examples of rampart or bulwark nation myths in a variety of contexts, ranging across the region from Russia and Ukraine to Hungary and Romania and in time from the late fifteenth century to the present-day. A helpful introductory essay by the editors frames the entire volume, highlighting the power of these myths to create meaning through the cultural imagination of space. Bulwark discourses abound, they write, “where it is necessary to strengthen identity and culture, to define a society in demarcating it from Others and to imagine a territory” (p.11). They suggest that competition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to define imperial spaces as national space made Eastern Europe especially fertile ground for this kind of myth-making, imparting fantasies of national sacrifice and civilizational defense with a cultural power still felt across the region today.

Many of the essays in this volume illuminate the ways in which visions (and narratives) of borderlands and border security are so often shaped by beliefs in a civilizing mission. In her own contribution, Heidi Hein-Kircher shows how the city of L’viv (Polish: Lwów) was imagined in late nineteenth-century travel guides as an outpost of Polish civilization surrounded by barbarism. Echoes of this theme can be found in other essays, for instance Paul Srodecki’s comparison of anti-Bolshevik ideology in interwar Poland and Hungary, Philipp Hofeneder’s account of Polish and Ukrainian history textbooks in Habsburg Galicia, and Steven Seegel’s fascinating analysis of maps and the politics of mapmaking in East Central Europe. Volodymyr Kravchenko explains that bulwark myths were largely absent from Ukrainian national discourse until the late nineteenth century, when historian Mykhailo Hrushevskyi made this trope a staple element in the national historical imagination. By contrast, several essays—Stephen Norris’s on the complex afterlives of artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s famous painting Warriors and Kerstin Jobst’s on the cultural construction of an Orthodox Crimea—reveal how Russian imperial ideology legitimized itself through historical myths about the origins and early history of Slavic Orthodoxy. These studies show that the bulwark myths so central to the cultural geography of Eastern Europe were not always imagined in opposition to enemies from the East. Sometimes the threat came from the West.

Other contributors highlight the sacral power that modern nationalist bulwark myths drew from older languages of religious threat. Kerstin Weiand locates some of the earliest instances of a pan-European bulwark discourse in late fifteenth-century speeches made to the Imperial Diet by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, councilor to Emperor Frederick III and later Pope Pius II. In them, he called on Christian Europeans to unite against an implacably savage Ottoman Muslim enemy. His warnings, which circulated in print form throughout Europe, found especially receptive audiences in Poland and Hungary. Centuries later, nationalists in both countries would refashion this history into dramatic myths of resistance and martyrdom on the eastern marches of European civilization. But this ideological transformation was not peculiar to Catholic societies. According to Liliya Berezhnaya, the Russian Orthodox monks of the Pochaiv Lavra monastery remade their collective memories of conflict with an expanding Ottoman Empire into a vision, updated for the nineteenth century, of Orthodoxy under attack from Jews, Polish Catholics, and a host of cultural ills coming to Russia from the West. Zaur Gasimov proposes that the religious origins of modern bulwark myths were even more malleable, showing in his essay how émigré Turkic intellectuals from the Soviet Union imagined Atatürk’s Turkey as a (non-Christian) bulwark defending Turkish and Turkic culture from Communism.

This collection reflects the diversity of bulwark myths in Eastern Europe. It has less to say about causes: why do bulwark myths spring to life at some times and lie dormant at others? The volume also leaves readers to draw their own connections between bulwark discourses in Eastern Europe and myths of civilizational defense at work in other places. Today, no less than in Piccolomini’s age, calls to defend the bastions of Christian civilization resound throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. As this volume shows so well, bulwark myths persist in many places. Rampart Nations is an excellent guide to a problem that shows no signs of going away.

Paul Hanebrink
Rutgers University
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The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe. Edited by Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 367 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.174

Over the course of the last thirty years, we have seen a growing amount of research in the field of cultural nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe. Most of these endeavors have aimed to examine, within multidisciplinary frameworks, the complex political, economic, and social roles of the various kinds of cultural activities in the area of great empires and “small nations.” The Matica and Beyond is indeed the twenty-first book in the National Cultivation of Culture series published by Brill.

The book is a collection of fifteen works written by cultural historians from all over Europe. The fifteen texts result in a surprisingly consistent volume, as the essays are methodologically and thematically very similar, and they draw on an array of exciting new sources and offer similarly engaging conclusions. The editors of the book, however, faced challenges in combining the essays to form a meaningful whole.

As far as the geographical range of the studies is concerned, the book consists of six manuscripts dealing with cultural organizations in the Habsburg Monarchy, whereas the rest of the papers deal with other European associations, though these organizations and associations all had the same essential purpose: to enhance national and ethnic awareness among members of a certain nation.

In the introduction, Joep Leerssen presents the structure of the book and explains the extent to which the phenomenon of Matica has been investigated or marginalized both politically and in the scholarship. Leerssen also calls attention to significant similarities and links in the national movements under discussion and the surprisingly important role of the Maticas in linguistic turns and geopolitical changes.

The first essay, Zsuzsanna Varga’s “The Buda University Press and National Awakenings in Habsburg Austria,” is about the roles of publishing in strengthening national consciousness and identity among Slavic peoples. Varga examines numerous books written in vernacular languages and spellings, especially works by Serbs, who played a leading role in the struggle of the Empire’s Slavic nations for autonomy and independence.

Magdalena Pokorna provides the first essay in the collection that offers insights into a Matica’s activity. Pokorna offers a detailed discussion of one of the crucial Maticas for the Slavs, the Czech one. It is nicely complemented by “The Slovak Matica, Its Precursors and Its Legacy” by Benjamin Bossaert and Dagmar Kročanova. Due to the different political circumstances, these two Maticas did not have similar operational policies, but they did have the common aim of establishing stronger connections with the other Slavic nations (Croats, Poles, Serbs, Slovenians, Bulgarians, etc.) in order to achieve greater cultural and national independence in opposition to the dominant German culture. The fourth essay is a short overview by Miloš Řezník of actions taken by Lusatian Serbs, Ruthenians, and Czech Silesians. Řezník offers insights into the ways in which regionalism and nationalism often collided.

Marijan Dović offers an essay on the work of the Slovenian Matica, in which he explains how this organization was not just a place for book publishing, but also for self-education and common thinking about issues like the school system and the media culture.

Daniel Barić discusses the emergence of the Dalmatian Matica and how it later became part of the Croatian one. Barić claims that “the first maticas were founded in the South Slav area in a time of redefinition of the nation, hence there were competing terms in use” (p.119). He also states that “the multiple engagement of the Croatian maticas mirrors the efforts made to cultivate and celebrate a distinctiveness within a multicultural environment” (p.134). Ljiljana Guschevska’s essay on Macedonian societies details how intellectuals struggled to form a multilayered Macedonian identity.

The essay entitled “Language, Cultural Associations, and the Origins of Galician Nationalism, 1840–1918” deals with the strengthening of language identity, which was meant to be a source of power in boosting nationalism. Philippe Martel offers another example of a struggle for more powerful nationalism through language use in an essay focusing on the “Impossible Occitan Nation.” Martel foregrounds the absurdity of the idea of Occitania due to language and identity anachronisms.

In the Netherlands, in contrast, the rule was one language, two states, and many nations. The essay “Educational, Scholarly, and Literary Societies in Dutch-Speaking Regions, 1766–1886” by Jan Rock deals with three main types of organizations and clubs: philological, intermediating, and non-governmental. These clubs strengthened the language identity of different communities in Netherlands. The author also perceives the similarities with the model of governing the Maticas, although “one major difference lies in the political contexts and therefore in the nature of governmental support” (p.204).

The struggle for independence among the Welsh sought cultural and linguistic autonomy rather than political autonomy. Marion Loffler, in her contribution to the volume, presents a nuanced comparison of Welsh cultural nationalism with the aspirations of Slavic people and explains the major differences between pan-Slavism and pan-Celticism. Similarly, Roisín Higgins emphasizes the importance of newspapers in strengthening the Irish nation. She relates the Young Ireland movement with the Illyrian one which began to rise to prominence in the middle of the nineteenth century in Croatia.

Jörg Hackmann focuses in his essay on the roles of school associations in the rise of national consciousness. Through school associations and struggles for language rights in the gymnasiums in bigger, linguistically mixed cities such as Riga, Tartu, and Jeglava, the Estonians, Latvians, and Germans tried to resist the russification of their communities.

Iryna Orlevych presents the activities of a crucial organization which was responsible for cultivating a sense of national consciousness in Austrian Galicia. During almost a century of its existence, Matica was a very powerful pillar of the Church and an important element of Galicia’s cultural identity. Later, it lost its fundamental role (to strengthen cultural identity) and became a political organization of the Russian Empire.

The last paper in the book deals with specific aspirations of Tatars, among the most marginalized people in the Russian Federation. The author of the paper, Usmanova, examines Tatarian cultural and educational opportunities in Russia, touching on all the obstacles to a possible strengthening of the Russian Tatars’ identity.

In a slightly complex conclusion, Alexei Miller claims that “the Maticas and comparable organizations were part of the history of European peripheral nationalisms, but they were also a part of the history of Empires” (p.362). Therefore, as Dović formulates it, Maticas were the “heart in the body of the nation and [...] literature was its blood” (p.104).

The Matica and Beyond: Cultural Associations and Nationalism in Europe is definitely a unique and successful scientific project which has the novelty to give a detailed overview of the activities and roles of cultural organizations, such as the Matica itself, in Central and Southeastern Europe. It unquestionably constitutes a contribution to the secondary literature which will be of interest to historians, sociologists, and scholars of culture, since it concerns a very dynamically developing field and draws attention to an array of intriguing topics, such as the role of individuals in these organizations and the complex relationship between regional and national identities. The volume is particularly interesting in part because of the way in which it treats key moments and the Maticas’ key roles in the so-called national awakenings among Slavic nations. Some papers would definitely have been more interesting if they had been accompanied by explanatory figures. Overall, the book offers an overview of and insights into the ways in which the Maticas and many other associations, such as councils, clubs, cultural and art societies, and political parties, acted in order to strengthen regional and ethnic components of nations in Europe. The book successfully fulfills its ambition to emphasize in a multidisciplinary way the importance of cultural associations in the political and social histories of “small European nations.”

Ivan Brlić
Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar
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Genealogies of Memory 2020 – The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives. Conference report.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.178

Organized by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), the conference entitled Genealogies of Memory 2020 – The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives took place in the form of eight sessions between November 4 and 26, 2020. Due to the ongoing pandemic, instead of an in-person event, the organizers conducted the conference online, streamed via Zoom and Youtube, thus making it accessible to a wide international audience.

The most important goal of the conference was, according to the website of ENRS, “to assess the current state of Holocaust memory research” in the light of increasing globalization, as well as various new trends. Through seven key topics and a final roundtable discussion, the speakers explored issues connected to the interaction of universal and local Holocaust memory and ethical questions related to them. Each session started with a keynote address, which was followed by presentations by young and established scholars and the observations of a commentator.

The first session, which addressed the practical ethics of Holocaust memory, started with Piotr Cywiński’s (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum) keynote, in which he delineated the development and major turning points of Holocaust remembrance. The following four presenters highlighted certain episodes and practices of the memorialization process, such as the role that Raul Hilberg, eminent scholar of the Holocaust, played in the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Olof Bortz emphasized that Hilberg wanted to make the museum’s exhibit as authentic as possible, which generated tensions between different views on how to present the past and thus contributed to the discussion on commemoration.

The second session was dedicated to the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of documents compiled by the Oneg Shabbath group in the Warsaw ghetto, which is considered “the earliest historiography of the Holocaust.” Keynote speaker Omer Bartov (Brown University) linked the Ringelblum Archive to the main topic of the conference by discussing four factors: the increasing importance of history writing from below, local histories, the Holocaust as a first-person history, and the benefits of these new approaches. According to Bartov, the term “industrial killing,” which is so often applied to the Holocaust, is problematic because it obscures the fact that in many cases the victims stood face to face with the perpetrators before they were killed. Research on these atrocities and the relations between Jews, their neighbors and the Germans, as well as individual experiences can further an understanding of the nuances and dynamics of the Holocaust.

Bartov’s points were supported by the following presentations, which discussed various characteristics of the Ringelblum Archive. Katarzyna Person, for instance, focused on the situation of women who were forced to become prostitutes in the ghettos and the assessment of their role by the historians of the archive. By placing a relatively small group in the center of the investigation, Person could provide a more detailed picture of their agency, the difference between sexual barter and rape, and the specificities of how they were written about in the archive.

The third session, which dealt with “borderland memories,” began with Éva Kovács’s (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute) keynote lecture. Kovács explored and compared various spaces of remembrance: a private Holocaust museum in Rwanda, an exhibition about Srebrenica in Budapest, and the efforts to uncover mass graves of Holocaust victims in Minsk. She then elaborated on the intertwining local and transnational memory, touching on idealized or suppressed local remembrance too. The following panel presentations also addressed the topics of landscapes of memory and remembrance culture, among them the project description of Nadja Danglmaier and Daniel Wutti. The educational project aimed to integrate the common cultural history (including the Holocaust) of Carinthia, a border region between Austria and Slovenia, into school curricula on both sides of the border.

The session “Overlooking the Local Dimensions of the Holocaust,” which raised questions concerning linguistics and translation, started with a keynote lecture by Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Minister of Culture of Lithuania and an academic, about the diaries of Jewish children in Vilnius. Three of the panelists then discussed Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah. Dorota Głowacka, for instance, explored the mistranslations in the movie’s languages: Polish, Yiddish, German, French, and how this implicitly conveyed an image of anti-Semitic Poles who were ignorant of Jewish culture. Roma Sendyka’s presentation, on the other hand, suggested a possible solution to this problem, namely the re-translation of the Polish bystanders’ lines.

The fifth session addressed current shifts and methods in Holocaust studies, such as avantgarde environmental history, as discussed by keynote speaker Ewa Domańska (Adam Mickiewicz University), which aims to reveal the complex relationship between the events of the Holocaust and their environment and thus to construct holistic knowledge. In her presentation, Hannah Wilson presented three objects connected to survivors of the Sobibór death camp and how the meaning of these objects changed from generation to generation.

Jackie Feldman of Ben-Gurion University delivered the keynote for the sixth session. Feldman touched on the digital turn, the end of the age of the witness and the ways in which various technological solutions may alter the existing memoryscape. Liat Steir-Livny’s presentation on the short film Eva.Stories was strongly linked to this topic. The movie, which is a compilation of Instagram stories, managed to foster interest among masses of young people, and Steir-Livny analyzed the components of its success.

The topic of the seventh session was the connection between global and local memory, to which Daniel Levy of Stony Brook University provided an adept background in his keynote address. The entanglement of national, cosmopolitan, and global memoryscapes was also tackled by Agnieszka Wierzcholska, who discussed the difficulties that emerged when she was pressed to satisfy the expectations of both Polish and German audiences with her research on social relations in pre-war and post-war Tarnów.

During the final roundtable discussion, Éva Kovács, Ewa Domańska, Daniel Levy, and Jackie Feldman summarized the core issues of the conference, raising new questions and discussing new trends and possibilities in Holocaust research. All in all, the conference offered a rich variety of topics examined by some of the most eminent researchers, and it offered young scholars opportunities to talk about their research. Since the sessions were recorded, they are still available both on the Youtube channel and the Facebook site of ENRS. Thus, those who missed the original event can still listen to them. This can be recommended not only to Holocaust scholars but to anyone interested in contemporary history.

Borbála Klacsmann
University of Szeged
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Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-Building, the Fate of Minorities. Edited by Sabrina Ramet. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. 360 pp.

DOI: 10.38145/2021.1.181

The volume, published in the series “Routledge Studies in Modern European History,” brings together ten internationally renowned scholars to discuss the challenges that interwar Europe faced. The preface positions it in the wake of other all-embracing volumes looking at interwar Central and Eastern Europe, the most recent examples being Josef Rothschild’s East Central Europe Between the two World Wars (1974), and Ivan T. Berend’s Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (1998). Recent years have witnessed the emergence of new scholarship drawing inspiration from entangled history and looking at continuities in the post-imperial areas, as well as the impact of nationalizing policies on the processes of democratization. Nonetheless, these trends do not seem to have exerted much influence on the structure of this volume, which is articulated through national unities.

Sabrina Ramet uses the first chapter to clarify the aims of this effort: to trace the roots of the failure of democracy in East Central Europe, as well as the impact of this failure on the statuses of minorities, looking at both domestic (instability and political violence) as well as external factors (the economic crisis and the expanding role of Nazi Germany).

In the second chapter, M. B. B. Biskupski investigates the two alternatives with which the Polish leadership was faced, the one represented by Józef Piłsudski, who envisioned a large and inclusive Poland, and the other, a vision of a smaller and nationally homogeneous Poland, championed by Roman Dmowski. Biskupski, who regards these views as respectively “civic patriotism” and “ethnic nationalism,” blames external factors, which led to a downsizing of Poland’s geopolitical perspective and made the federalist option unfeasible. Chapter three, by Sabrina Ramet and Carol Skalnik Leff, focuses on interwar Czechoslovakia, the only country in the area whose political system is usually praised for its democratic nature. Nevertheless, its major weakness was what the authors describe as the “securitization of democracy” against external enemies. In this context, both the Slovak population and minorities (the German, Hungarian, Jewish, and Ruthenian communities) found themselves in a position of subalternity and unevenness. In chapter four, Béla Bodó examines the Hungarian case, focusing on both minorities within the country and Hungarian minorities abroad. While revisionism remained a central issue of foreign policy, minorities enjoyed diverse statuses, ranging from that of the Germans, whose fate was increasingly entangled with the relationship between Hungary and the Third Reich, to the Jews, who were subjected to early anti-Semitic legislation which culminated in the late 1930s. The roots and the idea of the “ethnic privilege” enjoyed by the “state-forming nation” in Romania are central to the chapter written by Roland Clark (chapter five). Clark offers an overview of the social, ethnic, and religious context of the country, which included Transylvania, bringing into the country significant Hungarian and German minorities, and saw antisemitism across the political spectrum. As Clark argues, interwar Romania established itself as an exclusionary type of democracy, which drew on the idea of homogenization of minorities. In chapter six, Christian Promitzer explores the case of interwar Bulgaria, retracing its political evolution from the first postwar years of the Agrarian bloc, marked by land reform, to the following shift towards authoritarianism, albeit not fascism, as the later head of the Communist Party, Georgi Dimitrov, would have claimed. This was reflected in the attitude towards the Turkish minority, which was characterized both by increasing discrimination and an attempt to forge an alliance with its most conservative sectors in order to marginalize Kemalism. This marked a difference between the treatment of the Turkish minority by the Bulgarian state and the treatment of Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks, whose assimilation was actively pursued. Promitzer also shows that the contemporary influx of Bulgarian refugees was directly connected with increasing pressure on internal minorities. In chapter seven, Stipica Grgić offers a focused discussion of the Yugoslav state, whose weaknesses and disparities in standards were laid bare in its process of unification. In the background of the rising tensions between centralist and federalist strands as well as widespread instability, non-Slavic minorities experienced pressure, enacted also through the land reform, but they nonetheless tried to establish agreements with government parties. In chapter eight, Bernd J. Fischer offers insights into the turbulent interwar years in Albania, with the ascent to power of King Zog, who created an authoritarian power in a (mostly unsuccessful) attempt to achieve modernization, unity, and stability. While minorities did not represent a troublesome issue for interwar Albania, the existence of an ethnically Albanian population outside the border of the state conditioned both domestic and international relations. The only thematic contribution (Chapter nine) to the book, authored by Robert Bideluex, focuses on peasant parties across East Central Europe. Rejecting the image of backwardness often attached to the agricultural world in Eastern Europe, Bideluex argues that, should they have risen to power, peasant parties would have pursued an alternative (and more human) pattern of development in respect to both liberal capitalist and communist forces. The afterword to the volume, written by Stefano Bianchini, traces similarities and differences among the case studies and positions the political threads of the region in the interwar period, with an initial minimalistic approach to democracy, which included fair elections but not a real democratization of society, and a gradual shift toward authoritarianism, which accelerated after the beginning of the global economic crisis in 1929.

The effort to put together such a comprehensive volume is noteworthy, though the contributions could have been further harmonized. Moreover, the book acknowledges, with uneven efficacy, the entanglements between domestic and international factors in the treatment of minorities in East Central Europe, which, for the first time, found a theoretical protector in the League of Nations. Furthermore, it shows the social background of the authoritarian drive which led to the demise of democracy in the region by the end of the 1930s.

Nonetheless, the reader might get the impression that, in some of the contributions, nations are regarded as pre-existing entities and multinational states are deemed to fail as not founded on consensus. A further contextualization within the wider European context would have shown that the crisis of democracies was hardly exclusive to the Eastern part of the continent. Furthermore, a deterministic view of the fate of Eastern Europe seems to emerge from time to time, reenforced by the fact that the only country geographically located in Eastern Europe which did not turn to socialism after the Second World War—but shared many features with its neighbors in the interwar period—Greece, is excluded from this analysis. While several contributions stand out for clarity and represent recommended reading for students, specialists might have aspired to some more coherence and transnational insights within the volume. However, the volume is timely in analyzing from a historical perspective two issues that still challenge contemporary Europe: the dialectic between liberal democracy and authoritarianism and the relation with the Other.

Francesca Rolandi
Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences
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Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. Edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 352 pp.

DOI 10.38145/2021.1.184

Recently, a small yet growing number of researchers have been working on the transnational history of the socialist countries during the Cold War. Their studies make clear that the socialist countries after the 1950s were far from isolated or autarkic and that these countries developed various transnational connections with the Global South and other parts of the globe. However, while they shed light on various concrete cases of these interconnections, it is often not easy to situate these findings in a larger picture of postwar globalization. The present volume edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung makes an important contribution to the scholarship, not only by illuminating various aspects of the East-South interconnections, but by also synthesizing these case studies into a wider history of “alternative globalizations.”

The book consists of an introduction and fourteen essays on political, economic, and cultural aspects of the Soviet and Eastern European connections with the Global South. Many contributors do not adopt the simplistic view of the Cold War as a mere binary confrontation between the two camps and instead depict the story of the East-South entanglements in connection with the activities of the Western counterparts. Furthermore, they often do not regard these relations as a one-sided transfer of socialist modernity from the developed East to the Global South and point out various unintended or surprising impacts on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The introductory essay by the three editors deserves particular attention, since it integrates the essays of the volume and situates the interactions between the Eastern and Southern peripheries in a broader process of postwar globalization.

The first essay, by Mark and Yakov Feygin, offers a well-written overview on the rise and fall of the alternative, anti-imperialist visions of global economy presented at the fora of the United Nations by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s. As Mark and Feygin show, while the socialist countries initially advocated these visions, their adherence to economic bilateralism, the halfway commitment to them, and the accumulating debts to the West fundamentally weakened such visions. The provocative yet stimulating essay by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony also focuses on Soviet economic relations with the Global South in the 1950s and 1960s, but from different standpoint. According to Sanchez-Sibony, none of the visions of an alternative modernity were the main motive behind the Soviet economic entanglements with the Global South. Rather, these entanglements were motivated by the desire to increase economic exchange with the outer world in the margins of capitalist globalization. While these two articles differ widely from each other on the role of socialist modernity, they are, in fact, mutually complementary and are of special value in that they both further a rethinking of the processes and characteristics of postwar economic globalization.

On a more concrete topic of the interconnections, Alena K. Alamgir and Christina Schwenkel explore Vietnamese labor migration into Eastern Europe. The Vietnamese labor program was initially designed as a means to help Vietnam, but as the economic crisis and labor shortage in Eastern Europe deepened, it became a source of a cheap workforce in the receiving countries. Massimiliano Trentin also examines the attitudes of non-Soviet actors by investigating East German policy in the Middle East. He points out that because of its rivalry with West Germany and its own economic interests, East Germany sometimes behaved autonomously in the region.

As to the cultural relations with the Global South, Łukasz Stanek investigates the interactions between Eastern Europe, West and North Africa, and the Middle East in the field of architecture. To deal with their “weak” bargaining positions, Eastern European actors in West Africa and the Middle East behaved flexibly, which made them highly instrumental for local elites in these areas. Marung examines Soviet Africanists’ activities concerning African agricultural problems. The failure of the Soviet agricultural model in Africa urged these scholars to rethink Soviet agricultural policy at home. The impact of transnational relations on the domestic politics of the socialist countries was also examined by Kalinovsky. He analyzes the interrelations between the Soviet policies in its own South and in the Global South, and he concludes that the Soviet attempt to instrumentalize the regions of Central Asia and Caucasia as a showcase for development in the Global South backfired. In fact, it revealed the weaknesses of the model and encouraged resistance against the regime in these Soviet republics. Maxim Matusevich focuses on the strained relations between the Soviet authorities and the African students at Soviet universities. Whereas the Soviet authorities wished to educate African students about socialist modernization, in practice, these students often emerged as educators of their fellow Soviet students. These interesting case studies make clear that socialist entanglements with the South were not a simple diffusion of a certain model, but the developed socialist countries were also influenced and reshaped by the South.

At the same time, it should be noted that the transnational approaches by the socialist countries, like every other such endeavor, had its limits. In the case of socialist globalization, the actors from the East often did not show great interest in thinking and acting within a global framework, preferring instead to maximize their own interests. For example, Bogdan C. Iacob presents an interesting case of Balkan scholars’ encounters with the Global South in UNESCO. Using the UNESCO project as a platform for their cause, these scholars emphasized the shared experience of Western European colonialism in the Balkan region and the Global South. But since their aim was Eurocentric rather than transregional, they lost momentum in the global arena. Such limits were also present in the transnational relations cultivated by the oppositional movements in Eastern Europe. Kim Christiaens and Idesbald Goddeeris examine transregional collaboration between the Polish Solidarność and the oppositional movements in the Global South and conclude that the engagement of Solidarność abroad remained limited in scope, as its reserved attitude toward the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa suggests. Adam F. Kola approaches the limitedness of the Eastern European intellectuals’ internationalism from a different perspective. He examines the reason why Polish intellectuals in the late socialist period avoided postcolonial discourse in emphasizing the “Soviet colonization” of Poland.

While these essays analyze the Soviet and Eastern European entanglements with the decolonizing countries, the essay on Sino-Soviet competition over the Global South by Péter Vámos broadens the scope by introducing the Chinese factor to the discussion. In response to the Chinese attempt to forge a worldwide anti-Soviet coalition, the Soviets coordinated the policies of bloc countries vis-à-vis China in an attempt to isolate it globally. Hanna Jansen examines the intellectual thaw under Khrushchev and the activities of Soviet Orientalists in the context of Sino-Soviet disputes. Quinn Slobodian focuses on East German grassroots internationalism, which emerged as a result of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

The book thus covers geographically and thematically wide-ranging topics of global interconnections that emerged after decolonization in the 1950s. The introductory essay provides a good reference point to position these cases within a wider framework of postwar globalization. On the whole, the book enhances our knowledge of the socialist postwar global entanglements with the Global South, and it will be of use and interest to readers who are curious to know more about the subtle, as yet lesser-known aspects of globalization.

Jun Fujisawa
Kobe University
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DOI 10.38145/2021.3.581

DOI 10.38145/2021.4.800

Vrijeme sazrijevanja, vrijeme razaranja is the third volume in the series Biblioteka povijest hrvata, published by Matica hrvatska in 2019. This series eventually will consist of seven volumes in Croatian covering the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands from late antiquity until the late twentieth century. The first volume was published in 2015 and the third, which covers the period of the late Middle Ages, in 2019. The third volume of the series has twenty-three authors (five more than the first one), who are the most prominent scholars in their fields, which include history, legal history, economic history, church history, and historiography, and the authors belong to the younger or middle generation of Croatian historians. The volume begins with a preface written by editor Marija Karbić, who highlights that the book covers a turbulent period of the Croatian history characterized by integration and disintegration. This period included the rise of Venetian authority in the coastal territories, continuous conquests by the Ottoman Empire, and turbulent periods when some of the Croatian lands were part of the Kingdom of Hungary. According to Karbić, the volume aims to follow the path of the first book in the series in its structure and topics. She also highlights that the volume follows the path of two previous Croatian history projects, “Hrvatska i Europa” and “Povijest Hrvata.”

This volume, like the first volume of the series, thematically can be divided into three parts. The first part is a general overview which offers different perspectives on and approaches to the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands. It also deals with fields that are usually less frequently discussed, and it offers new approaches alongside the traditionally popular topics. The first two studies, which were written by Borislav Grgin, give an overview of the political history of Croatia in the late Middle Ages (pp.3–23 and 25–38). They are followed by Ante Birin’s chapter on the history of the Croatian nobility (pp.39–54). Damir Karbić then discusses the characteristics of the late medieval Croatian peasantry (pp.55–61). The last chapter, which is about the general social history of the Croatian lands, was written by Gordan Ravančić, who offers a look at urban communities and society (pp.63–77). Following these discussions of social topics, Sabine Florence Fabijanec examines the economic aspects of Croatia, including farming, forestry, viticulture, fishing, trade, commerce, and finance (pp.79–98). Her chapter is followed by two chapters on the continuous Ottoman conquests, both of which were written by Ivan Jurković. The first chapter discusses the migration caused by the Ottoman conquests in the Balkans (pp.99–113) and military history and defense campaigns against the Ottomans (pp.115–33). Zrinka Novak and Zoran Ladić deal with church history and religious life in late medieval Croatia, including the history of the different orders, ecclesiastical organization, and social questions (pp.135–161). Nella Lonza then examines various legal developments (pp.163–77), and Sandra Ivović and Meri Kunčić deal with the intellectual and cultural history of the period in question. Zoran Ladić and Goran Budeč discuss some aspects of the history of the families and private life as the final part of the first thematic unit (pp.213–33).

The second main part of the volume reflects the historical and cultural regionality of Croatia. It deals with territories of Medieval Croatia, including lands that are part of present-day Croatia but were separated in the Middle Ages and territories that are culturally, socially, and historically closely connected to Croatia. The first two chapters, by Marija Karbić and Stanko Andrić, deal with northwestern and northeastern Croatia separately (pp.235–54, 255–304). Both chapters are structured in a similar way. They show the history of the regions in different periods of the Hungarian Kingdom and deal with urban, social, and church history. The following chapter, by Marija Mogorović Crljenko, deals with Istria and the Kvarner Gulf (pp.305–26), followed by a chapter on Gorski kotar, Lika, and Krbava by Ivan Jurković (pp.327–39). The late medieval history of Dalmatia is divided into three parts. Irena Benyovsky Latin offers an account of the history of northern and central Dalmatia (pp.341–59), and Zrinka Pešorda Vardić writes on the golden age of Dubrovnik (pp.361–90). The third part, by Ivan Majnarić, is about Kotor (pp.391–400). The final chapter of the second part, by Ivan Botica, deals with the territory of Bosnia and Hercegovina (pp.401–42).

The third and final section of the volume (which is also the longest section) provides geopolitical context, as it deals with the countries and empires that had close relationships with either the Croats or the territories of present-day Croatia or held any parts of it. Marija Karbić discusses Hungary (pp.445–62), followed by Kornelija Jurin Starčević’s examination of the relationship between Croatia and the Ottoman Empire (pp.463–80). Jadranka Neralić deals with the relationships between Croatia and the Papacy between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries (pp.481–502). Lovorka Ćoralić analyses Venice’s role and advances in Croatia (pp.503–20). Borislav Grgin examines Croatia’s ties to southern Italy and Spain (pp.521–29). Robert Kurelić deals with Croatia’s relationship to the Holy Roman Empire (pp.531–44) and Austria (pp.545–59). Damir Karbić analyses the history of the Czech territories and Poland (pp.561–69), and, finally, Vjeran Kursar deals with the Balkans (pp.571–97). After the final unit, the volume includes an index of people’s names (pp.599–616) and an index of geographical names (pp.617–36).

The volume is a continuation and the outcome of a huge project started in 2015. The authors of the volume are among the greatest experts in their fields, and they have composed one of the finest syntheses of Croatian history. Their work and the sedulous work of the editor offer new perspectives on Croatian history, with chapters written about topics that to a large extent have eluded discussion, though they fit well into present trends in international historiography. The division of the book also offers new perspectives. It helps further an understanding of Croatia’s regional diversity and the varying histories of the regions of the country, and it also puts the history of Croatia and the Croatian lands into an international and regional context. The volume includes impressive studies, and it will appeal not only to the community of historians, but also to the wider reading public. Furthermore, it constitutes an important addition to the materials available for educational purposes. This volume, like the first book in the series, is a modern historical synthesis, and as such, it provides an excellent example on which new projects on other Central European countries can draw.

Judit Gál
Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities
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Dalmatia and the Exercise of Royal Authority in the Árpád-Era Kingdom of Hungary. By Judit Gál. Budapest: Research Centre for the Humanities, 2020. 228 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.803

Coloman the Learned, king of Hungary (1095–1116), was crowned king of Croatia and Dalmatia in 1102. Within three years, he occupied the most important cities of northern and central Dalmatia, thus unifying Hungary and Croatia into a union that lasted till 1918. The monograph under review, this valuable contribution to common Hungarian-Croatian history, analyses the southernmost part of the Kingdom of Hungary, or more precisely, Dalmatian cities and their place within the kingdom in the first two hundred years through the lens of the exercise of royal authority. Although several aspects of this relationship have been dealt with by Hungarian and Croatian historians, Judit Gál’s monograph has two major strengths. First, it is a modern original work based on hundreds and hundreds of hours of diligent archival work accompanied with intelligent comparative analyses of both national historiographies. Second and no less important, it is a highly analytical, yet comprehensible piece of scholarly work written in English, or in other words, it is accessible to a comparatively wide audience.

The book begins with a concise but very useful discussion of the socio-historical and geopolitical background. On the one hand, there was a relatively young and quite active Kingdom of Hungary which managed to extend its influence on the Adriatic although, on the other side, the doge of Venice had adopted the title duke of Croatia and Dalmatia in the late eleventh century, at the time when the Byzantine Empire was occupied with other affairs in the east. Dalmatian cities, those precious ancient (apart from Šibenik) urban shells in that frustratingly narrow coastal strip beneath the mountainous region in the north, have always had special status and a degree of autonomy which they mostly maintained within the Kingdom of Hungary.

The study is pursued here in two major chapters, constructed and intertwined around the role of royal authority. The first one is dedicated to the church, which played an essential role even in the secular life of Dalmatian cities. When addressing ecclesiastic affairs, Gál focuses on the three most important aspects: the changes in the structure of the Dalmatian church and the role played by Hungarian rulers in its modification; the personalities of the prelates of Dalmatia and changes in their roles; and the role played by royal and ducal donations to the church in the exercise of royal authority. The kings of Hungary did not have permanent local representatives in Dalmatian cities, so the archbishops of Split were Hungarian kings’ right hands, administrators with an extended reach. Dalmatian bishops and archbishops served as symbolic representatives of royal authority who promoted royal policies in their cities. Split archbishops, who inherited the metropolitan status of ancient Salona and were primases of Dalmatia, connected their city with the royal court and helped manage local affairs and promote the kings’ foreign-policy interests.

In the second chapter, Gál examines aspects concerning the exercise of Hungarian royal authority related to secular administration and urban communities. First, she analyses the privileges granted by the kings of Hungary to the cities of Dalmatia. She then examines the roles of the representatives of Hungarian royal authority: the dukes of Slavonia and the bans of Slavonia. She concludes with a discussion of shows of royal power and authority, mostly displayed through royal and ducal visits to Dalmatia. Her analyses of rulers’ show of power reveal that these visits were in fact complex performances with practical and symbolic functions. King Coloman made his visits to Dalmatia, during which he was accompanied by his splendid retinue consisting of Hungary’s highest-ranking secular and ecclesiastic dignitaries (as well as their Dalmatian counterparts), according to a regular schedule: every three years. Other kings traveled less frequently, never managing to follow this pattern, while the dukes of Slavonia mostly travelled to Dalmatia shortly after acquiring their titles. The bans became increasingly powerful after the Mongol invasion of 1241–42, but the overall Hungarian royal authority deteriorated after King Bela IV died (1270), and the local oligarchy, especially the Šubić clan, gained more influence in Dalmatia.

There are four very useful appendices at the end of the book. The first is on “Iohannes Lucius’ Collection of Historical Manuscripts,” which Judit Gál probably knows better than anyone else at this point, at least among the younger generation of historians from both sides of the Pannonian border. The second is the list of “Dalmatian Toponyms in Various Languages.” The third is the list of “Hungarian Kings’ and Dukes’ Donations to Dalmatian Churches” (1102–1285). The fourth and final appendix is a list of “Hungarian Kings’ and Dukes’ Grants of Privileges to the Cities of Dalmatia.” The book ends with four other additions: two indices (of personal and geographical names) and two sets of historical maps. The first set presents the city maps of Zadar, Biograd na Moru, Šibenik, Nin, Split, and Trogir in the period of Árpád kings. The second shows Dalmatia in 1105, 1180, 1205, and 1298, and it also includes a map of the Catholic Church in Croatia (as of 1298).

Gál spent a substantial amount of time in the Archive of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb and the Archbishopric Archive in Split, and she has made admirable use of the sources she found in both. She came to Zagreb as a MA student, and she brought with her an infectious enthusiasm, good knowledge of Latin, and an ever-improving ability to use Croatian scholarly literature. Dr. Damir Karbić, the director of the Historical Department of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, quickly realized what a promising scholar she was, and showing his usual hospitality, he made sure that she had the proper guidance through Croatian institutions. But all other credit goes to her for her dedicated, disciplined, old-fashioned hard work in the archives. This book is not the only fruit of the many years she spent pursuing research. She has also written numerous scholarly papers, digitized material, and made fresh discoveries in the undeservedly forgotten yet very valuable collection of sources. Historians of Central Europe in the Middle Ages cannot help but be impressed by her achievements, and it is worth noting that Gál, who only completed her PhD in 2019, is still at the beginning of her academic career.

Mirko Sardelić
Department of Historical Research Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
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Katonabárók és hivatalnok grófok: Új arisztokraták a 18. századi Magyarországon [Soldier barons and office-holder counts: New aristocrats in eighteenth-century Hungary]. By Tamás Szemethy. Budapest: MNL–BTK TTI, 2020. 479 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.806

Tamás Szemethy’s book, analyzing the emerging Hungarian “new aristocracy” of the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of social history, is based on a PhD thesis defended in 2020 at Eötvös Loránd University under the supervision of István Szijártó. Szemethy is one of the most promising members of a circle of young social historians who are gathered around Szijártó’s “school” at the Department of Social and Economic History of Eötvös Loránd University. Szemethy’s doctoral thesis was finalized and turned into a book within the framework of the research group “The political culture of the Hungarian estates’ system (1526–1848)” (NKFI K 116 166), coordinated by the National Archives of Hungary and the “Integrating Families” Research Group of the Institute of History of the Research Centre for the Humanities (LP2017-3/2017), supported by the “Momentum” (“Lendület”) Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The main goal of the book is simple: to validate or refute the topos of the “dilution of the Hungarian aristocracy” in the eighteenth century, which Szemethy considers a persistent commonplace in Hungarian historiography. The volume raises some crucial questions concerning the so-called “new aristocrats,” i.e., those who earned the title of a Hungarian baron or a count as plain nobles, characterizing it as a social group to establish his chosen research methodology. His main inquiry concerns the framing of the group, the careers of its members, and other factors preceding the elevation of their ranks, as well as possible explanations as to why the ruler decided to bestow on them a new rank. Finally, Szemethy also considers the typical career moves of the group.

Methodologically, the author commits himself prosopography, one of the auxiliary disciplines of social history, arguing that it can provide a qualified set of data which enables one to arrive at findings concerning the main tendencies of the group in question and general changes in the eighteenth-century social elite. Szemethy tries to define what he means by this in the first chapter, which could be treated as a practice-oriented contribution to this field of historical auxiliary sciences. According to this, not only has prosopography been separated from the traditional genre of archontology, but its advantages and disadvantages have also been considered. Referring to the work of English historian Lawrence Stone, Szemethy mindfully reflects on the limits and difficulties of doing prosopographic research, highlighting the problems of gathering sources that are of adequate quality and quantity, as well as the scarcity of narrative sources (first of all, ego-documents). He also cautions against conflating the typical characteristics of the whole group with those of its few prominent members, e.g., those individuals who held high offices and stirred interest among contemporaries. Based on these considerations, Szemethy constructs a group of “new aristocrats” as the subject of his analysis, zooming in on 91 people from 76 families between 1711 and 1799. He excludes from this group naturalized foreign aristocrats (indigenae) and those who earned the title due to their relatives and not their own career moves. In practice, apart from the chapters on atypical careers, his research is based fundamentally on the classical and more recent genealogical literature on the one hand and on the Royal Books (Libri Regii) on the other, though Szemethy also uses urbarial conscriptions, files from the Austrian State Archives in Vienna (nobility files, etc.), and other archival sources, if to a lesser extent. His style is succinct, clear, and factual, and his chapters are rhetorically well-structured, but the richness of the information provided sometimes makes it rather difficult to read them.

The book is divided into four main chapters and includes an almost 200-page long appendix, which contains all the relevant biographical and career data concerning the members of the group, as well a much shorter list of the high-ranking soldiers who earned the Military Order of Maria Theresa. This well-built database constitutes the backbone of the analyses. The structure of the whole book and the individual chapters is clear and logical, almost didactic. The short methodological introduction is followed by the longer prosopographic analyses of “typical” careers. The subsequent chapter then presents three “atypical” cases, and finally, a conclusion summarizes the achievements of the project.

Within the group of “new aristocrats,” two bigger subgroups, namely the office holders and the soldiers, have been set apart, and the title-donations of lower (baron) and higher (count) value are examined separately. By reason of the changing tendencies, the baronial donations implied different inner periodization and further subgroups: regarding the officials, the two subperiods are 1711–1770 (18 persons) and 1770–1799 (16 persons). In the case of officers, the timeframes are 1711–1758 (10 persons) and 1758–1799 (16 persons). In the first case, the dividing line is grounded in the emergence of a professionalizing office holder, marked by the baronial donation of Károly Reviczky, which approximates the conclusions of a study by Szijártó and Tünde Cserpes on the “high office holders” of the eighteenth century, cited frequently by Szemethy. The second case is much simpler, because the foundation of the Military Order of Maria Theresa definitely marks the beginning of a new period.

Concerning each group and subgroup, the careers, social backgrounds (ancestry, social status), and financial situations of its members are compared. Their financial situations are reconstructed on the basis of the amount of land they owned according to the urbarial conscriptions, an indicator which offers a rough approximation of the wealth of a certain family. However, the urbarial conscriptions indicate only possessions that were burdened by urbarial services. The measure of the current social status and the degree to which the “new aristocrats” could be said to have been integrated into the traditional aristocracy is assessed based on the connubium, i.e., the marital strategies of people recently elevated in position and their children from the perspective of the social and legal statuses of their spouses.

The subgroup of soldiers who earned baronial titles before 1758 is similar to the officials of the same period. In other words, most of them were elevated from wealthy noble families. After 1758, in contrast, several soldiers of humble backgrounds rose to the new aristocracy as well. However, the estimated wealth of the so-called “soldier barons,” based on the urbarial conscriptions, of the period was much less on average than the wealth of the officials. While the meritocratic elements of selection became significant among the soldiers in the last third of the century and this criterion (merit) also began to by more frequently applied within the central bureaucracy of the period, it remained only a subsidiary reason for bestowing a baronial title on officials. Regarding officials who earned a baronial title, Szemethy also points out that the father’s career was a factor only in a few cases of title donation, while the legal status of wives and mothers could also contribute to a certain extent to the rise of the nobility into the layer of aristocracy.

A subchapter focuses on those who earned the title of Hungarian count, making up the top elite of the emerging new aristocracy. As Szemethy points out, the Habsburg Monarchy had neither a unified aristocracy nor a unified nobility. Thus, the Austrian provincial, imperial, Transylvanian, Bohemian, and Hungarian title donations were all available at request at the same time, though at different prices and representing varying contents and values. The Hungarian titles were of the greatest value because of the political rights they potentially provided, i.e., the participation of aristocrats in the meetings of the upper house of the Hungarian diet in person or by proxy. The title of Hungarian count was not only more expensive than the title of baron, but as Szemethy presumed and has verified, it required a more successful military or civilian career, in addition to wealth and ancestry. From the group of 91 people, 28 became counts, and a third of them earned their title in two steps. As the author points out, most of them belonged to wealthy noble families with mid-size and large-size estates, and a significant number of them acquired their lands by themselves. While the number of official and soldier barons was balanced in the period, in the case of counts, only those who had a successful official career could advance, and only five soldiers were given this rank, who also needed to earn a significant land donation. Because of these reasons, until the end of the period under study, the subgroup of counts formed a more exclusive and prestigious circle than the barons within the new aristocracy and the group of magnates in general.

In contrast to the quantitative analysis in the second section, which is dry but rich in information, the third part focuses more on narrative methods and careers and elevation in rank of three persons considered “atypical.” These chapters originally were intended to complete and contrast the prosopographic analysis of the group of new aristocrats. However, each of them could be read as a micro-historical essay in itself. Zooming in on the three atypical careers, Szemethy shows further sides of his talent as a historian by examining other problematic questions and using new types of sources. In the case of István László Luzsénszky, Szemethy focuses on the role of the patron-client relationship between the ambitious nobleman and clergyman Luzsénszky and his influential patron, Imre Csáky. In doing so, he relies on their highly formalized “functional” correspondence, based on a method used by Heiko Droste. Szemethy points out that the elevation in rank was an outcome of the accumulation of Luzsénszky’s family inheritance as wealth and as socio-political symbolic capital. Reconstructing the case of György Farkas Chiolich, the author tries to track a charge of cradle-snatching against the bishop of Zengg-Modrus. He proves that Chiolich took steps to earn an aristocratic title in addition to his prelateship in order to accumulate more power and authority not only among the clergy, but also among laymen. Finally, the third case study focuses on Mihály Manduka, later known as Mihály Horváth, an ambitious Greek merchant of non-noble background who rose to become a figure of the Hungarian nobility and, a few years later, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, of the aristocracy as a baron. The chapter affirms the findings of renowned urban historian Vera Bácskai, according to which Horváth should be regarded as an “ennobled burgher” rather than as a “new aristocrat” who embraced the identity and ethic of the landowning nobility. Consequently, he could be considered one of the predecessors of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs.

In his concluding remarks, Szemethy, on the one hand, points out that the efforts of the Viennese court to make talented military officers more visible by bestowing titles on them led to a kind of “dilution” of the Hungarian elite. On the other hand, he calls attention to the fact that, of the officials, those who received a baronial title belonged to the wealthy and were able to reach the required standards. The new counts remained an exclusive group the members of which could assert themselves better in the environment of the traditional aristocracy. Szemethy summarizes his findings as follows: “[I]t would be more accurate to consider the social changes of the second half of the eighteenth century not simply as the dilution of the elite, but rather as its transformation and complementation with new elements.” All things considered, Szemethy has drawn a persuasive image of the eighteenth-century “new aristocracy” based on the method of prosopography, complemented in some cases with the inclusion of different kinds of primary sources, as well as some more innovative ways of analysis. Nevertheless, I cannot help but make a few critical remarks concerning some aspects of his undertaking which follow mainly from Szemethy’s presuppositions and the inflexibility of his method.

First, with regard to the treatment of primary sources, two significant shortcomings have to be mentioned. Szemethy did not research and use family archives systematically or extensively. Furthermore, his research on the practices of the chancellery and the changes it underwent over the course of the century is also flawed. Szemethy was frank about this, claiming that his “research in family archives yielded disappointing results,” and he mentions as an example the Luzsénszky family archive and the lack of narrative sources, first and foremost private family correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. Nonetheless, the conclusions he draws are hardly convincing, and they are even less so if all the related families are considered. Due to the lack of narrative sources, he is unable to demonstrate how “new aristocrats” considered and represented their own social status within the public sphere or what attitudes emerged in the narrower and broader social environment towards them. The contemporary set of the positive and negative topoi concerning new aristocrats should have been analyzed too, irrespective of their factual content. With regards to the former point, the case study of the Luzsénszky–Csáky relationship offers the possibility of narrative analysis, and with regards to the latter, the same is true of the “pilot study” on Gábor Draveczky in the first chapter. As for the practices of the chancellery, it would have been fruitful to consider the requests that did not result in title donations, particularly regarding the Military Order of Maria Theresa.

Second, while the starting date of the study, 1711, is unequivocally considered the beginning of a new era, marked by the year when Charles III ascended the throne, the ending year, 1799, is rather disputable. In Szemethy’s, his choice enables him to examine the tendencies of the fin-de-siècle in the context of late eighteenth-century military and political history, while the context of Napoleonic Europe provides a fundamentally different framework. The French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars profoundly changed the political and military situation for the traditional powers of Europe, including the Habsburg Empire and thus the Kingdom of Hungary. Nevertheless, the whole period between 1792 and 1815 (or so forth) should have been treated rather in its entirety to show tendencies in progress under the rule of Francis I, marked as “cabinet absolutism.” This would have made it possible to assess the effects of the French Wars on the subgroup of the emerging “military aristocracy.” For example, the case of Dániel Mecséry, who earned not only the Knight’s but also the Commander’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa and thus became a baron still struggled for land donation in vain and died relatively poor. Moreover, he left behind a German autobiography which constitutes a valuable narrative source, in contrast with those on whom Szemethy has focused in his research.

Finally, some remarks should be made with regards to the structure and appearance of the book. The method of presenting factual information, sometimes to a superfluous extent within the main text (apart from the three analyses of the “atypical” careers, where it seems necessary for the reader to be able to follow the text), is to some extent debatable, because the appendix contains detailed biographical data concerning each member of the group. Instead of this, the publisher could have published the tables in the appendix as an online searchable database (which would have been a more concise and economical option). Fortunately, this is also in progress, according to the latest information. Since the subject and name indices are missing from the volume, the use of the appendix and, in fact the whole volume is difficult. Nevertheless, the book can be downloaded for free, which remedies this problem to a certain extent. Notwithstanding these remarks, however, the richly illustrated and attractive book is well-edited and of very high quality.

Ágoston Nagy
University of Public Service
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A Mighty Capital Under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800–2000. Edited by Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim. History of the Urban Environment. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. 282 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.812

This collection of ten papers covers the major urban environmental changes in London over the past two centuries. The British capital was the first global city: the explosion of population growth and the concentration of the population in a smaller area during the nineteenth century presented previously unprecedented challenges. At these times, as was true in many countries in Europe, Central Europe, including the Hungarian capital, followed the technical and scientific innovations introduced in London in response to urbanization. From the 1850s onwards, London made several environmental improvements in order to enhance the living and health conditions of its citizens. Alongside news and publications, word was also spread by the flow of British professionals to Europe. Their role in the major infrastructure projects in Budapest (e.g., the Chain Bridge, the water and sewerage networks, etc.) also makes this volume of studies of particular interest to specialists in the history of Central Europe.

The book is introduced by a substantial editorial foreword, which provides insights into the historiography of urban environmental history followed by a brief overview of the last two centuries of London’s environmental history and the major crises and problems the city faced.

Jim Clifford’s study (“Greater London’s Rapid Growth, 1800–2000”) describes the city’s growth over the last two centuries and the changes that have occurred, drawing primarily on a comparative analysis of maps. Defining (the boundaries of) the city is extremely difficult. The administrative boundaries do not cover the whole of the city’s surroundings, and local government in this period operated quite independently of the (otherwise weak) central leadership. This and the following study, in its concluding remarks, draw attention to the increasingly serious and urgent need to address the continuous risk of flooding as a result of climate change and the city’s expansion. The second paper, by Christopher Hamlin (“Imagining the Metropolitan Environment in the Modern Period”), examines the history of London as an environment, with a specific focus on the human aspect of how contemporary people understood the city as a physical and social medium.

Anne Hardy’s study (“Death and the Environment in London, 1800–2000”) examines the problems we have seen so far from demographic and epidemiological perspectives. Rapid population growth in the nineteenth century presented environmental challenges to housing, and mortality rates were extremely high. The city authorities were unable to cope with these issues until the second half of the century. The problem was linked first to pollution and poverty and, from the middle of the century onwards, more specifically to the quality of air, water, and geographical locations and to periodic outbreaks of epidemics (e.g., cholera and typhoid). Environmental improvements were sought as a solution, and a slow decline in mortality did indeed begin. Contemporary and historical observations have described London as an environmental death trap, but this picture is much worse than the actual situation was. According to Hardy, this could be explained by poor central control, as the various historical studies have always been concerned with the administration of a given local borough, and thus the London-wide context is not really known.

Christopher Ferguson (“London and Early Environmentalism in Britain, 1770–1870”) examines the relationship between early environmentalists and London. The individuals and associations that fell into this category sought to understand the various impacts of urban growth on the environment with the aim of protecting and improving human life and its values. In many respects, they were important predecessors to today’s environmentalists. Although the medical approach of the 1870s focused more on the human body than on the living environment in terms of the development of disease, the spread of the idea of prevention and control led many European cities to focus on environmental hazards in terms of public health.

Finally, a later study in the book by Bill Luckin and Andrea Tanner (“‘A Once Rural Place’: Environment and Society in Hackney, 1860–1920”) also belongs to this thematic unit. This paper is directly linked to Ferguson’s study through its examination of the relationship between sanitation and environmental practices in Hackney, an inner London borough. The paper reviews the environmental hazards associated with health problems already identified in earlier studies. By the 1920s, the influence of the sanitary movement, which linked moral conditions to health, was beginning to fade. This case study also reflects and supports Hardy’s demographic conclusions.

Peter Thorsheim’s study (“Green Space in London: Social and Environmental Perspectives”) looks into the evolution of green space in London and the uses of green spaces over the past two centuries. The notion of sustainability, in which environmental, social, and economic issues are inextricably intertwined, are traced in this study of the history of uses of green space.

Leslie Tomory’s study (“Moving East: Industrial Pollution in London, 1800–1920”) explores London’s industrial pollution problems. The crises caused by industrial pollution in the nineteenth century were not as acute as the epidemics and pollution around dwellings, and they therefore have attracted less attention. Industry representatives also made it difficult for local authorities to regulate industries, and eventually they had to be regulated at government level. The city’s air was gradually cleaner as factories moved eastwards, where they could operate under less regulated conditions, but it was not until the mid-twentieth century that real changes were made in relation to smog.

Two papers in this volume are dedicated specifically to a historical examination of the problem of water supply. Vanessa Taylor’s study (“Water and Its Meanings in London, 1800–1914”) examines the changing meanings and management of water in the long nineteenth-century London. The chapter provides a substantial chronological summary of the history of water supply in London. The paper then thematically reviews the city’s debates about local supply, the relationship between changing conceptions of water and sanitation, and the changing forms and roles of domestic supply in everyday life. Increasing water supply in response to an elevated demand facilitated further population growth in expanding urban spaces. The possibilities and conditions of water availability for urban dwellers improved considerably, but major infrastructure decisions were made over their heads, and the ongoing debates about this in the nineteenth century were linked to London’s governance mechanisms (e.g., the lack of central control and the strength of local government). There were conflicting priorities regarding urban rivers (the public was more concerned with water supply and sanitation, while the administration was basically interested in the function of rivers as a pollution removal system, although it monitored their deteriorating condition over time), but their “natural” state did not yet matter much. The idea of the river as an ecosystem had not yet been raised. The final chapter of the book also expands on the issue of water supply and the urban environmental history of London with a comparative study of New York by Bill Luckin and Joel A. Tarr (“Water for the Multitudes: London and New York, 1800–2016”). As Taylor does in his study, Luckin and Tarr examine the ways in which the growing population was supplied with water. Which proved more efficient, a privately controlled water supply or a publicly funded water supply? New York’s system, established by the 1830s, solved the problem of supply through the use of sources far from the city. The water quality was better, but this meant regular conflicts with the locals, with whom a final agreement was only reached in 1995. In London, the problems of municipal administration were seriously resolved in 1902, when water supply was transferred from private companies to the then Metropolitan Water Board, which significantly improved the situation.

The volume concludes with an extensive appendix of notes and an index to the studies. In the former, the authors have taken care to draw the reader’s attention to a large body of additional literature on the various subtopics. The index is very rich, with names of persons, geographical names, and key terms. It is a particularly useful tool for the sub-topics that are covered by several studies from different perspectives (e.g., London’s administration, different territorial definitions, environmental and epidemiological issues, etc.).

Most of the studies are well structured, and cross-references between the chapters help the reader find links within a given topic. Hamlin’s study, which seeks to examine the global city from several angles, stands out somewhat. It fits in the volume in terms of its topic and ambitions, but it is more of an essay that raises thought-provoking points. Rather than dwell on the classic topics of urban environmental history, these papers offer a glimpse into the history of various complex debates (urban green use, the construction and control of urban space, the many different meanings of pollution and water, etc.). There is also a strong emphasis on the current and future impact of acute problems.

Ágnes Németh
Eötvös Loránd University / Budapest City Archives
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Vielfalt ordnen: Das föderale Europa der Habsburgermonarchie (Vormärz bis 1918). By Jana Osterkamp. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. 531 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.816

In the historiography, the Habsburg Monarchy has long been characterized as the “prison of the peoples” (Völkerkerker), a state which, allegedly, would inevitably have fallen apart because of “nationality conflicts” while it was also (again, allegedly) shaped first and foremost by the issues of “nationality politics.” However, in the more recent scholarship, more emphasis has been put (not least because of the pioneering works of Pieter Judson) on the fact that the Habsburg Monarchy offered a legal framework for different identities and self-localizations, beyond the national cluster thinking, and represented a functioning legal system.

While the micro-historical studies explore the complexity of the local level, Jana Osterkamp has tried to put these local pieces of the puzzle together in a new narrative. Given her legal and historical knowledge, Osterkamp is able to interpret new findings of Habsburg research from a legal perspective.

With her innovative concept of the “cooperative empire,” Osterkamp succeeds in capturing both in historical and legal terms the supranational and proto-federalist character of the Habsburg Monarchy, especially the Austrian half of the empire. She introduces the concept of the “cooperative empire” as a description for legal and political opportunities beside and among the local structures (Jana Osterkamp, Cooperative Empires [2016]). The concept emphasizes integration, equality, and symmetries among the imperial “peripheries.” Therefore, the Habsburg Monarchy can be understood as an interdependence of several centers and peripheries, in which a complex multi-level system was established beyond (and even against) the imperial centers.

This approach allows Osterkamp to make the supranational character and the legal-administrative functions of the Habsburg Monarchy more visible. Statehood was not nationalized in Austria (Pieter M. Judson, L´Autriche-Hongrie était-elle un empire? [2008]), and the Habsburg Monarchy did not grant any single people a constitutionally anchored supremacy because there was no “nation” in the sense of a political nation (Peter Urbanitsch, Pluralist Myth and National Realities [2004]). A very important legitimation function was therefore assigned to the law (James Shedel, The Problem of Being Austrian [2001]. Despite the empire’s ethnic-linguistic, religious, and regional diversity, which would have made neither the hegemony of a nation nor a democratic nation-state possible, all citizens enjoyed the same rights in the Austrian part of the Monarchy, regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation or their professed native tongue.

In her new book, Osterkamp applies the results of federalism studies to the Habsburg Monarchy. She comes to the conclusion that proto-federalist elements can be recognized in the complex structure of Austria-Hungary, which, on the one hand, could not yet clearly come into play at the time (because of crown land interests, nationalisms, and the idea of an Austrian confederation), but which, on the other hand, anticipated a post-nation-state age of the “political.” Osterkamp perceives federalism as a pre- and post-modern idea (p.2 et sq.). In the age of emerging nationalisms and nation-states of the late nineteenth century, this federalist-supranational idea might seem outdated, but especially for the Habsburg Monarchy, the existing structures (such as the crown lands) gave new impulses and meanings while at the same time opening up discourses for new constitutional ideas.

With the concept of federalism, Osterkamp can overcome a state-focused perspective in both historical and legal debates: “Multi-level systems of rule do not have to be sovereign state in their entirety if one wants to examine them as federal systems” (p.10). In this sense, Osterkamp understands federalism as a “vertical division of the state power by different decision-making levels within a long-term existing political order” (p.215, emphasis in original).

The lack of a unified nation does not turn out to be backwardness or a reason for decay, but rather enabled new paths and ideas for an empire that had to legitimize itself beyond the “national”: “The state doctrine of the Habsburg Monarchy could not rely on the central idea of the nation. The place of the nation-state was taken by an enlightened ‘overall state idea’ [Gesamtstaatsideee] oriented towards the effectiveness and welfare of the population, on which Austrian political science had been working since the 18th century” (p.47). The social pluri-culturalism and the imperial-supranational structure corresponded to a formalistic-legalistic understanding of law, which—instead of relying on metajuristic-fictional and emotionally charged categories, such as “nation” or “state” —brought the dynamic processuality and the positivistic formality of the legal system to the fore (Urbanitsch [2004]). The lack of a unified “nation” and even the lack of such a state idea favored a model in which law and administration (as form and function) stood at the very center of state activities. This explains the strongly legalistic tradition of Austrian legal thought, which continued to have an effect after 1918 (and in fact until today) (Ewald Wiederin, Denken vom Recht her [2007]).

Osterkamp gives plurality and supranationality, long considered as deficits of the Habsburg Monarchy, a positive meaning. Although the Habsburg Monarchy could not build one nation (p.121), its constellation enabled a system in which ideologically motivated terms, like nation-state and sovereignty, were not in the foreground. The Habsburg Monarchy yielded a multi-level structure of the administration instead of centralized, one-dimensional governance (pp.87, 214 et sq.). Osterkamp differentiates between various forms of federal structures (administrative federalism, crown land federalism, union of dualism), which she compares with the federalist ideas of the time (trialism, non-territorial personal autonomy, a “United States of Austria,” etc.) (p.413).

Osterkamp’s analysis offers a new explanation for the state structure and cooperation within the Habsburg Monarchy, and it may also explain the discrepancy between the narrative of the “prison of the peoples” and the reality of a functioning (although muddled) administration. Pieter Judson ascribes a certain theatricality to Viennese politics: polarizing debates on the stage, but cooperation behind it, or, as Osterkamp writes: “People talked about each other in public, and in the back rooms with each other” (p.224).

Osterkamp investigates not only the structures existing at the time or the federalist (federalizing) proposals, but also takes into account the reality of proto-federalist cooperation as well, for example among the crown lands vis-à-vis Vienna. Her book also analyses the different compromise models (in Moravia and Galicia), the crown land conferences, the petition practice of the local population (especially in Galicia), the financial equalization between the crown lands and between Vienna and Budapest. Separate chapters are devoted to the proto-federalist agricultural, social, educational, administrative, and health policies.

Jana Osterkamp’s monography thus represents the first attempt to describe the constitutional functioning and the administrative practices of the Habsburg Monarchy as part of her innovative concept (“cooperative empire”) and also with regard to today’s jurisprudential and theoretical debates on supranational, federalist entities (like the European Union). It is an admirable attempt impressive in its findings and insights.

Péter Techet
Institute of Political Sciences and Philosophy of Law, Hans Kelsen Research Centre,
Albert-Ludwig-University of Freiburg / Centre for Legal History Research, University of Zurich
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Milan Rastislav Štefánik: The Slovak National Hero and Co-Founder of Czechoslovakia. By Michal Kšiňan. London–New York: Routledge, 2021. pp. 300.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.819

In recent decades, Milan Rastislav Štefánik (1880–1919) has become one of, if not the, most important Slovak historical figures in Slovakia. Born in Nitra County, he left Hungary in 1898 after completing grammar school, first to study in Prague and then to live in France as an astronomer. He then spent years traveling the world and became a prominent figure in the French scientific and political elite. In 1912, he acquired French citizenship. He joined the French army when the war broke out and used his contacts with members of the political elite to reach Prime Minister Aristide Briand, through Czech émigrés Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, whom he knew from Prague, and Edvard Beneš. Together with them, he quickly won support among the great powers for the post-war liquidation of the Monarchy and the creation of new state structures. Štefánik’s political vision and his diplomatic and military organizational work thus played a major role in the creation of the new state of Czechoslovakia. Tragically, however, Štefánik never actually set foot on the soil of this new state. On his journey home, not far from Bratislava, his plane crashed on landing.

Several impressive papers on Štefánik’s life and work have been published in recent years. One of Kšiňan’s innovations in this already vibrant discourse is that he has created a deconstructionist biography: he deliberately does not follow a linear chronological sequence from birth to death (and does not bring his narrative to a close with Štefánik’s death, but rather ends much later). This method allows Kšiňan to focus on what he considers the most important issues in Štefánik’s life. Given the complexity of Štefánik’s personality and the remarkable turns his life took, it would be almost impossible to organize these penetrating analyses into a straight narrative. Over the course of some 39 years (and especially during the last decade and a half of his life), Štefánik pursued a multifaceted career that was almost unprecedented not only in Hungary, but probably in Europe. This presents the historian with daunting challenges. Within the framework of a single narrative, one has to delve into the inner workings of the French astronomical society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while also considering the subtle shifts in domestic politics in Ecuador, France, Bohemia (or the Czech lands), Russia, England, the United States, Italy, and Romania, not to mention the systems of rules and customs in the French salons, the functioning of the Masonic lodges, and countless other contexts, for without this detailed backdrop, Štefánik’s life and achievements are hardly comprehensible.

After an introductory historical overview intended presumably for the non-Slovak reader, Kšiňan has divided his book into four major themes. It is worth noting that he does not cover Štefánik’s entire life. Apart from a few digressions into some of the events of Štefánik’s youth, he concentrates on the last 15 years of his life, the period between 1904 and 1919, when Štefánik gradually emerged as an increasingly prominent figure in intellectual and political life in France. As Kšiňan himself states in the preface, he is primarily interested in the Štefánik as the “Slovak national hero.” More precisely, he seeks to consider the qualities, networks, relationships, and events in Štefánik’s adult life, between the ages of 24 and 39, that made him such an important figure, so rapidly elevated by the new state to the status of a national icon.

The first chapter, which begins with a discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of social capital, examines how Štefánik created his network of French social contacts before the outbreak of World War I and how he transformed his social and cultural capital into economic capital. Kšiňan also considers how Štefánik used his interests and hobbies (astronomy, photography, a passion for collecting, an interest in the arts) to maintain his social capital. This analysis is important, as it furthers our grasp of how Štefánik was able to convince French decision-makers in the middle of the war to consider the views of two Czech emigrants (Masaryk and Beneš), how he was able to persuade them and Western public opinion to entertain a new vision of the future of Central Europe, and how he was able to balance the interests of Russia and France, powers which initially had different ideas about how to resolve the Czechoslovak question.

In the second chapter, Kšiňan uses Max Weber’s concept of the charismatic leader as a point of departure to explore, through various case studies and micro-studies, how Štefánik influenced his those around him, or in other words, how he used the network of relationships presented in the first chapter. Kšiňan devotes particular attention, for example, to Štefánik’s relationship with women, which was one of the most important elements of this network. From his Prague years onwards, Štefánik, who apparently was not a terribly fetching man, eagerly sought the company of the daughters of wealthy, powerful, aristocratic families with good connections, and he often accepted large donations from them. This subchapter also offers a good example of how Kšiňan, despite his basic premise, maintains a critical distance from the subject of his study. For instance, he makes the following contention: “Štefánik’s flirtations and frequent partings were a consequence of his impulsiveness and fear of being trapped by common stereotypes of relationships. Often, however, he enjoyed the process of seducing and conquering women; he was more of a seducer than a Don Juan. The interest of ladies certainly catered to his egocentrism and narcissism since he always needed to be in the spotlight.” The analysis of Štefánik’s mission to Ecuador is also outstanding. It offers a detailed discussion of the geopolitical context of Štefánik’s secret mission and how his negotiations brought the South American country into the French sphere of interest.

In the third chapter, which follows the most classical format of a biographical narrative, Kšiňan presents Štefánik’s military and political activities during World War I. Unlike many earlier authors, however, Kšiňan does not take the founding of Czechoslovakia as a fundamental goal, i.e., as a goal established at the outset. Rather, he suggests that it was a political innovation which took clearer form during the war years.

The final major section analyses Štefánik’s identity and the political debates after his death, showing that although Štefánik was far from satisfied with the setup of the new republic, he was not fundamentally in favor of Slovak aspirations for autonomy. Rather, he would have strengthened the Slovak presence in a centralist state on the basis of parity rather than Czech dominance. The last two subchapters provide superb micro-examinations of two myths about Štefanik. The first concerns the circumstances of his death, about which conspiracy theories are still common (for instance, that his plane was shot down by Hungarians or that it was mistakenly shot down by Slovaks who, because of its Italian markings, mistook it for a Hungarian plane, or that Beneš had the plane shot down, or that Štefanik deliberately committed suicide). With exemplary thoroughness and critical distance, Kšiňan points out that the circumstances of the crash cannot be clarified because of the negligence of the investigating authorities, and he convincingly refutes various unfounded theories. The second myth concerns Štefánik’s alleged Freemasonry, which is also a popular theory, though one finds no support for it in any sources and there are far more arguments against it than there are for it.

Kšiňan’s monograph, which draws on a vast source base of unprecedented size and new methodological approaches, persuasively rewrites the historical narrative concerning Milan Rastislav Štefanik, calling attention to details which previously were only superficially understood, introducing new topics, and refuting stubborn legends. The book is clearly one of the best biographies of the Štefánik. Kšiňan takes as his point of departure the notion that Štefánik is a national hero, but the book is really about much more than that. It furthers a far more nuanced understanding of who this man, known today as a Slovak national hero, really was.

József Demmel
University of Public Service / Historický ústav Slovenskej akadémie vied, Bratislava
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The Hungarian Agricultural Miracle? Sovietization and Americanization in a Communist Country. By Zsuzsanna Varga. Translated by Frank T. Zsigó. The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2021, 323 pp.
DOI 10.38145/2021.4.823

Zsuzsanna Varga’s comprehensive account of the political economy of Hungarian agriculture during the Cold War exemplifies the international and transnational turn in research on agricultural and rural history. The book is ordered chronologically and consists of seven chapters. After the introduction, which outlines the research approach, chapter one offers an overview of the Stalinist system of socialist agriculture and exports to East Central Europe. Chapters two, three, and four cover the phases of the collectivization of Hungarian agriculture and the retrenchment to private farming from 1949 to 1961. Chapters five and six deal with the transfer of Western knowledge and technology, including “closed production systems” from the USA, after the conclusion of collectivization. Chapter seven evaluates the successes and limitations of the “Hungarian agricultural miracle” in the wider context. In the conclusion, Varga synthesizes the central insights of her study.

Using a rich body of macro-, meso- and micro-level sources (official documents, international press, oral interviews, etc.), Varga explains the shifting route of Hungarian agriculture between the onset of land collectivization in 1949 and its definite abandonment in 1989 within the framework of “transnational comparison” (i.e., the combination of comparative and entangled approaches). She highlights two transsystemic transfers of politico-economic institutions, technology, and knowledge to Hungary: first, the “Eastern transfer,” which transplanted the Stalinist system of socialist agriculture, regarded as an “inner colony” for industrialization, into a pre-socialist mode of farming built on private property and market orientation; second, the “Western transfer,” which transplanted a capitalist production system into a socialist agriculture based on the Soviet model. Varga argues that Americanization was one sort of solution to performance problems caused by Sovietization in the 1960s. By the 1970s, a “hybrid agriculture” had emerged in Hungary that applied the latest Western agricultural technology on state farms and producer cooperatives created on the basis of the Soviet model. The end of food shortages and the growth of agricultural surpluses were labeled as the “Hungarian agricultural miracle.”

Varga clearly shows that the Hungarian agricultural transformation during the Cold War was not a well-paved path but, rather, a rocky road. Waves of state-led collectivization according to the Soviet model were interrupted by phases of de-collectivization that reflected the destabilization of the socialist regime, mediation by its agrarian lobby, and peasant agitation. While the Soviet model was implemented, negotiated, and adapted top-down by the Hungarian state apparatus, the adoption of Western technology and knowledge emerged bottom-up through partnerships of state farms and producer cooperatives with private companies from beyond the Iron Curtain. The resulting division of labor involved large-scale state and collective farms specializing in capital-intensive arable production as well as small private household plots specializing in labor-intensive vegetable, fruit, and livestock production. The study shows institutional and technological transfer between countries with different political and economic systems can increase agricultural performance, provided that actors at sub-national levels gain agency to mediate between systemic imperatives and everyday priorities.

Although Varga does not refer to James Scott’s notion of “high-modernism,” her monograph contributes to the debate on state-led agrarian change in the twentieth century. The emergence of a both Sovietized and Americanized mode of farming in Hungary highlights the limits of top-down development schemes by authoritarian nation states and their technocratic planners as well as the potentials of bottom-up initiatives from the countryside. Rather than state-enforced “high modernism,” the emergence of a Hungarian “hybrid agriculture” indicates a case of “low modernism” that shifts national economic performance through informal and formal institutionalization of sub-national grassroots activities. The creative adaptation of state-imposed collectivization by local actors – which was quite risky, as indicated by show trials against cooperative leaders – is framed in terms of a “successful alternative” to the Soviet model. From the prevailing socioeconomic perspective, this conclusion seems reasonable. However, doubts arise concerning the “successful” and “alternative” character of the “Hungarian agricultural miracle” when one shifts to a socio-natural view. The Western technoscientific package adopted by Hungarian state farms and producer cooperatives as well as the state-enforced Soviet model they struggled with rested on similar agro-industrial imperatives: the replacement of muscle power by machinery and agrochemicals based on fossil energy, the dissolution of the symbiotic relationship between arable and livestock farming, and the shift of both land and labor productivity according to the needs of industrial society. Seen from a socio-natural angle, the transnationally induced modernization of Hungarian agriculture during the Cold War might appear much “higher” (in Scott’s terms) than from a purely socioeconomic view.

This critical comment should not cast a poor light on the rich evidence provided by the monograph, but rather indicates a direction for future research on the “Hungarian agricultural miracle.” The well-researched and well-narrated account of the Hungarian agricultural transformation will be of great value not only for scholars of rural and agricultural history, but also for anyone interested in the international and transnational history of Communist Europe during the Cold War.

Ernst Langthaler
Johannes Kepler University, Linz
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Hungarian Historical Review 10, no. 4 (2021): –802

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Antemurale Christianitatis: Zur Genese der Bollwerksrhetorik im östlichen Mitteleuropa an der Schwelle vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit. By Paul Srodecki. Historische Studien 508. Husum: Matthiesen, 2015. 532 pp.

In 2013, when Paul Srodecki defended his dissertation (which bears the same title as the book published two years later) at the University of Giessen, even he probably did not realize how relevant the theme he had chosen for his work would come to be over the course of the next few years. And yet he may have had some guess. In the preface to the book, he puts the changes which the traditional images of Europe have undergone in context in connection with the expansion of the European Union in 2004. He notes that even in the first years of the new millennium, the governments in Central and Eastern Europe made frequent use of Late Medieval and early modern topoi, such as the concept of “bulwark of Europe and Christianity.”

In addition to the relevance of the subject of the book, it is also worth noting that Srodecki examines the evolution of the topos which figures in his title according to the tradition of the classical German schools of history, first and foremost in the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Poland. His methodology shifts between an investigation from the perspective of the history of ideas and political science explanation patterns. Only rarely does one find arguments based on conceptual or discursive history. Following a thorough explanation of the corpus of sources under examination and his methodology, Srodecki offers eight chapters of varying lengths in which he presents the subject of his research and his findings.

Not surprisingly, he begins with a chapter on conceptual history in which he examines ideological tenets, one by one, and presents the terms he will discuss (antemurale, propugnaculum, murus, and scutum), which reflect traditional warlike rhetoric. In a discussion of the opposition, rivalry, and even conflict between East and West, one cannot avoid offering an overview of the Ancient and Medieval history of the asymmetrical counter-terms. Beginning with Gog and Magog from the Old Testament and concluding with the East–West schism in 1054, Srodecki presents the most important historical nodes, putting his investigation into this larger context. For the bulwark rhetoric (Bollwerksrhetorik) was already present in Antiquity (one need merely consider the citation taken from the Vulgate as a kind of slogan for the book), but it was used with varying intensity in different periods.

Though Srodecki draws particularly heavily on sources relevant to the Hungarian and the Polish Kingdoms, he nonetheless cannot avoid beginning with a discussion of the roles of the Teutonic Order, which he characterizes as a kind of a trailblazer in the spread of the revived trope of the bulwark. In the course of the Crusades, the Teutonic Order rose up as a defender of Christianity. Then, when Andrew II of Hungary had them settle in Burzenland in the course of the wars against the Cumans, they soon again characterized themselves, mutatis mutandis, as the defenders of Christianity, though they were fighting not to liberate the Holy Land, but rather against the pagan Cumans. Srodecki offers a brief presentation here of how this image became a familiar and widely used trope in the kingdoms on the eastern edges of the Western Christian world, first and foremost the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary.

In the use of the bulwark rhetoric (as in the case of uses of other asymmetrical counter-terms), sometimes the same parties who regard and interpret themselves as the embodiments of the allegory disagree among themselves and begin to differ, and a very chaotic warlike situation comes about, particularly on the level of rhetoric. It is, after all, simple to say that a Christian group that forms the bulwark of Christianity is good and the pagan enemy is evil. However, as soon as two groups each of which considers itself the bulwark of Christianity come into conflict with each other, the question inevitably will arise as to which of them is the authentic bulwark of the one true faith. Srodecki discusses this interesting question in the chapter in which he presents the long battles between the Teutonic Order and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in particular between the Order and the Kingdom of Poland up until the first third of the fifteenth century.

Then begins the section of the monograph that really constitutes its spine. The few pages concerning Humanist topoi, the (anti-)Turcicas, and the image of Humanist Europe offers the backdrop for the chapters on the rhetoric in Hungary and Poland concerning the two kingdoms as the bulwarks of Christianity. Srodecki attributes considerable importance in the spread of this topos to Humanist orations and in particular to the work of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who, following the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and then his selection as pope, was ever more impassioned in his efforts to urge common action against the Turks in the name of Christianity and Christian Europe. In the first of the two longest chapters in the book, Srodecki offers an overview of the history in Hungary of the period associated with the rulers of the Hunyadi family from the perspective of the evolution of the trope of a defensive bulwark. While John Hunyadi rose as the “scourge of the Turks” athleta Christi, his son Matthias waged campaigns over the course of his rule not only against the pagan Turks but also against heretics, in other words, the Hussites, or at least Srodecki puts the battles he fought for the Czech crown (i.e. the crown of another Christian people) into this narrative. Srodecki notes the importance of the roles played by Matthias’s court chroniclers (Ransano, Bonfini) in interweaving the political legitimacy of the ruling house and the rhetoric of a defensive bastion into their historical narratives and thereby furthering the acceptance of both in the wider circles. By the end of the chapter, Srodecki has completely separated the crusade fought in the realm of rhetoric and the actual crusades fought on the battlefield, and at this point, it again becomes difficult for the reader to disregard the actual political bearings and implications. The longest and most thoroughly thought-through chapter of the monograph addresses the spread of the antemurale concept in the Europe of the Jagiellonian dynasty. As he did in his discussions of the rulers of the Hunyadi family, here too, Srodecki presents the history of the use of the term alongside the histories of the dynasties and the dynastic battles. The narrative of the history of the two dynasties and the kingdom culminates in the Battle of Mohács. With the fall of the kingdoms, the notion of a defensive bulwark also begins to crumble and fall out of use.

In harmony with the concept of translatio imperii, there were heirs to this rhetorical tradition and enemies of these heirs, but these were relatively small outbursts which flared up in isolated pockets compared to earlier cases. Of them, it is worth mentioning perhaps the denominational conflicts which broke out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Srodecki makes only brief reference to later use of the concept, and quite rightly. He does not undertake in this monograph to examine the defensive bulwark rhetoric in the modern era. What he has undertaken he has admirably achieved, namely to offer an overview and a readable narrative of the history of the topos he has chosen in the Late Middle Ages and the early modern era.

Emőke Rita Szilágyi
Research Centre for the Humanities

Az indigenák [The indigenae]. Edited by István M. Szijártó. Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, 2017. 235 pp.

The volume is based on a conference held on September 19, 2014 at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest by a group of scholars focusing on the social history of early modern and modern Hungary. The conference dealt with a particular group of the society of estates between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the laconic title of the book probably sounds unfamiliar and even enigmatic to most readers, it is worth beginning with a definition. In short, the traditional legal institution of indigenatus served as a form of ennoblement through which someone of foreign origin was incorporated into the Hungarian political nation (natio Hungarica). Originally, naturalization was a royal prerogative, but during a diet, it required the consent of the Hungarian estates as well. Between the legislative sessions, the king was eligible to decide with the collaboration of his Hungarian counsellors. Although the bestowal of the title was an established practice, it was not always used. Foreigners could be settled in the country and naturalized “tacitly,” without the solemn procedure, though this did not mean that they could enjoy noble liberties and privileges.

As István M. Szijártó, the editor of the volume emphasizes, while indigenatus as a legal category is unambiguous, from the viewpoint of social history it appears as a more complex and intriguing phenomenon. As Szijártó points out, the question of who could be considered an indigena was determined not by legal status, but by the political contexts and interests. Consequently, the real starting point for historical research must be the inconsistent practices of the period, i.e. when and why somebody was labelled an indigena, as well as the attitude of the rest of the Hungarian estates towards these individuals. The use of this label clearly served as a form of social and political discrimination until the middle (or rather the end) of the nineteenth century.

As Szijártó writes in his introduction, “far more myths have circulated in Hungarian historiography about the indigenae than actual research endeavors dealing with them.” Fortunately, most of the studies in the volume are founded on genuine archival research, which compensates for the field having fallen into neglect for a long time. Furthermore, though the articles were written by an array of graduate students, early career researchers and experienced scholars, they set an evenly high standard, and some of the younger authors make essential contributions to the field. The time scope of the collection is rather broad, as the first study deals with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the last two with the post-Compromise (1867) years. However, the focal point of the volume is the era of the “constitutionalism of the estates” (as pointed out by Szijártó), i.e. from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. It is not surprising that this question was particularly important in the period of the social, economic, and political ascent of the wealthy gentry (bene possessionati) and the long-lasting political practice of dualism between the king and the estates.

In the first article of the volume, Tatjana Guszarova discusses the process of indigenatio solemnis, the official and solemn naturalization of foreigners at the diets during the reign of the first Habsburg kings. Guszarova presents this act as a means with which the Habsburgs cemented their political position in the kingdom. Article LXXVII of 1550 specified the rules of indigenatio solemnis, establishing the conditions of the process for a long time. By offering an overview of the naturalizations which occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Guszarova demonstrates that the efforts of the Habsburgs in this field proved successful, since they managed to increase the number of Hungarian nobles of foreign origin.

András Forgó investigates a subgroup of indigenae, the members of the prelates and the middle-ranking members of the clergy who were naturalized, with emphasis on the superiors of the monastic orders. Forgó emphasizes that many monastic superiors arrived in the country after the Ottomans had been driven out, and they had been sent to reorganize the monastic centers. However, the Hungarian estates were distrustful towards them and accused them of using the monastic institutions merely for personal gain. Consequently, in the eighteenth century, it became customary for the monastic superiors to make efforts to attain naturalization. Forgó concludes that by obtaining indigenatus, the monastic orders could take the wind out of the sails of the Hungarian estates, even if the operation of the monastic communities remained in foreign hands, headed by an abbot or a provost of foreign origin.

To my mind, the subsequent three studies written by historians who are in the earlier phases of their careers are the most thorough and even trailblazing contributions to the volume. Tamás Szemethy examines the ways in which people managed to become part of the Hungarian aristocracy. There were essentially two means of entering this group: the bestowal of a title by the king (the people who belonged to this category were the so-called “new aristocrats”) and naturalization. Szemethy’s study compares these two subgroups with regard to their number and occupations (soldiers, officials, and clergymen) between 1720 and 1799. He points out the problems of clarifying the separation of the two subgroups and the terminology regarding them. Szemethy’s investigations are based primarily on the Corpus Juris and the Hungarian Royal Books (Libri Regii), though he points out that these sources are not sufficient in and of themselves as the foundations for a proper analysis. By examining the relevant legal sources, one could offer a plain definition of the process of naturalization, but the actual legal practice appears to have been more complex. Szemethy shows that, in addition to the formal process, it was possible to obtain indigenatus in an alternative way. According to Béla Kempelen and Zoltán Fallenbüchl, in the periods between the sessions of the diet, following a proposal by the king, the incorporation of a foreigner had to be announced in a county assembly and reported to the Archbishop of Esztergom, and a diploma had to be issued by the Royal Chancery (Cancellaria Regis). Szemethy emphasizes that while it is possible to define the group of “new aristocrats” legally, in the case of the indigenae, the legal approach should be replaced or at least complemented with social historical analysis.

In comparison to the other contributions to the volume, the approach adopted by Zsolt Kökényesi is an exception. Kökényesi examines the other side of the coin, the ceremony of Erbhuldigung, the solemn pledge of fidelity in Lower Austria in the first half of the eighteenth century. This ceremony was significant, because it was a public act made by an archduke ascending to the throne. The ceremonies meant the formal handover of the Lower Austrian estates, and they were spectacular events. Due to their significance, descriptions of the proceedings and detailed lists of participants were published. After an enumeration of the participants, Kökényesi examines the presence of Hungarians. A Hungarian aristocrat could take part in the Erbhuldigung either as an Inkolat (one who was incorporated into the Lower Austrian estates) or as a foreign guest of the festive banquet. Kökényesi’s study concludes that most of the Hungarian participants in the ceremonies were magnates who maintained good relations in Austria and who wanted to be integrated personally into the upper elite of the Habsburg Monarchy. Thus, their participation in these events can be considered part of a conscious strategy.

In his case study on the 1751 diet, János Nagy looks at the political aspects of naturalization. He analyzes a unique and promising group of archival sources: the requests for indigenatus and the documents produced by the commission of the diet investigating the process. Nagy points out that that the indigenae were self-supporting actors who had legitimate social claims. Consequently, he deals with their role in the debates in the diet, their image in prevailing public opinion, and also how they argued in their requests addressed to the diet. Nagy shows that the strategies they used when they were trying to convince the Hungarian estates differed slightly from the strategies they used in their requests addressed to the king. The requests addressed to the estates applied four basic modes of argumentation: note military merits, note service to the common good, enumerate Hungarian ancestors and relatives, and refer to possession of lands in the kingdom. Nagy contends that, in the context of the diets, labeling somebody an indigena was essentially political.

In the next chapter, Adrienn Szilágyi deals with the indigena-families of Békés County in the first half of the nineteenth century, approaching the question from the standpoint of local society. In Békés County (today in southwestern Hungary), following the expulsion of the Turks, Johann Georg Freiherr von Harruckern acquired two-thirds of the lands as a royal donation. He played a crucial role in local politics, and after his death in 1742, his son Franz followed in his father’s footsteps. However, when the son died in 1775, the male line of the family died with him, and the heirs divided the lands into five parts. Consequently, in the following decades a few naturalized families were able to establish connections in the county. Szilágyi points out two characteristic strategies used by the naturalized magnate families in this specific county: some families were absent and remained affiliated with the imperial center, while others integrated into the life of the county as active agents in local political and economic life.

Béla Pálmány draws attention in his study to the wave of naturalizations during the diets of the Reform Era. He emphasizes that during most wartime diets at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, no naturalizations occurred, but after the Napoleonic wars, many foreigners obtained status as indigenatus. The French Wars and the 13-year break in legislation impacted the number of naturalizations. Pálmány shows that the merits of those involved in the wars were stressed upon naturalization (traditional military merits, office-bearing in the service of the court and country, and as a new element, appeals to various activities undertaken as civilians). During the diets of 1839–40 and 1843–44, the legal-constitutional aspects of indigenatus were also disputed, and with the April Laws of 1848, the significance of the issue decreased remarkably.

Although with the vanishing of the old political system of the estates, the political significance of indigenatus was weakening, the question was still on the agenda because of the personal legislative right of the members of the House of Magnates. The last two studies focus on this period. Veronika Tóth-Barbalics investigates the indigenae of the House of Magnates between 1865 and 1918. The House of Magnates was reformed in 1885, resulting in considerable changes in the composition of the chamber. With Article VII of 1885, membership was now bound to a tax census of 3,000 forints per year and to the constraint of opting, meaning that naturalized magnates had to make a statement confirming that they practiced the right to legislate exclusively in the Hungarian Parliament. The study complements the investigations of Károly Vörös, demonstrating that of the indigena-families which dropped out of the House of Magnates, only a small number found their way back into a legislative body.

Finally, the study of Dániel Ballabás discusses the same period, but from a more comprehensive and problem-oriented viewpoint. His study deals the Corpus Juris as an authentic source on the process of naturalization, claiming that between 1542 and 1840, 594 people obtained indigenatus in total. After delineating the heritage of the previous period, the study investigates the relationship between the indigenae and the changes to the citizenship law in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ballabás also studies the question of membership in the House of Magnates, citing some peculiar arguments against indigenae. As had been the case in the Reform Era, the opposition presented the archetypical indigena as an absent foreigner, unable to support national interests.

All in all, the findings of the studies complement those of earlier studies and refute some long-lasting political and historical myths. The volume provides deeper insights into the field through thorough study of primary sources. It enriches first and foremost our knowledge of the social history of the upper elites of the Kingdom of Hungary, though the praiseworthy presence of both social and political viewpoints notwithstanding, the approach of quantitative social history dominates, while the “interpretive” attitude focusing on the political discourses and legal practices of the age remains in the background.

Ágoston Nagy
National University of Public Service

The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire. By A. Wess Mitchell. Princeton: University Press, 2018. xiv + 403 pp.

This is an ambitious, bright, fluent book. It represents an interdisciplinary challenge for historians. It brings the methodology of strategic studies to bear on the Austrian state as it had grown to great-power status by the early eighteenth century, emerging from the carapace of the Holy Roman Empire and negotiating the extinction of the Spanish line of its ruling family.

“All Great Powers need a grand strategy to survive,” we are told (p.304). So, what was the secret of the Habsburgs’ success in the century and a half after 1700? Mitchell begins with the geographical determinants of their realms: an exposed situation in the center of the continent, but with mountain ranges providing protection and river systems securing internal lines of communication. Mitchell makes repeated references to these factors, although neither Frederick of Prussia nor Napoleon was much hindered by orographic obstacles, while the waterways, even those within the Danube’s hydrological network, were grievously underexploited for a long time. Mitchell stresses how well Austrian governments came to understand their terrain thanks to the unrivalled quality of their cartography (a pity his own maps are so crude, illegible, and generally feeble). Essentially, Austria, as a satiated land power surrounded by threats, adopted defensive military postures. It did not risk its main body of troops unless absolutely necessary. That is also the message of a recent book by Richard Bassett entitled For God and Kaiser, in which Bassett makes the same argument in a more facile and anecdotal way. Mitchell points to the Habsburgs’ successful “sequencing,” as he calls it, of time and space. They needed, on the one hand, barriers and buffers: fortified redoubts in their own border areas or, better still, beyond them, but in friendly hands; and client states, earlier especially in southern German and northern Italian territories, later also in the western Balkans. On the other hand, they needed alliances. In the 22 wars fought by Austria during this period, it almost always (19 times) stood on the side which had more allies.

That involved a balancing act, directed first against France, with support from the German lands, Great Britain, and elsewhere; then the construction of a coalition against Frederician Prussia; then decades of struggle with shifting power groups to resist France again in its revolutionary and Napoleonic mode. For a century from the 1750s, the Habsburgs’ chief alliance was with Russia, but that would prove costliest in the long run. The (for Mitchell willful) alienation of Russia during the Crimean war began the rapid erosion of Austria as a great power, combined as it was with a loss of buffers, a new offensive mentality in the high command, and a neglect of earlier operational prowess (by the 1860s, Habsburg troops in Germany were reduced to using Baedeker guides to find their routes). Emperor Francis Joseph, revered by some as the conserver of the Monarchy, rightly appears here, in a strong final chapter, as its foremost gravedigger.

The broad international backing, or at least neutrality, that Austria long enjoyed has often been attributed to recognition of it as a “European necessity.” Mitchell resists this notion, especially for the eighteenth century. He emphasizes Austria’s agency and the influence on its decision-making of a stream of local military theorists, from Montecuccoli to Archduke Charles and Radetzky. Predictably, Mitchell’s appreciation of Habsburg foreign policy culminates in a rosy presentation of the Vienna settlement and the age of Metternich. He shows (in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger and Paul Schroeder) how a pax Austriaca was secured by the fruitful deployment of international alliances, puissances intermédiaires, and localized low-cost interventions. At this point we may, however, begin to wonder how complete or even accurate this analysis is. What of Metternich’s woeful mishandling of the domestic affairs of the Monarchy? Did not that count towards the strategic reckoning? Yes, but only on the credit side of the ledger: “The greatest geopolitical success of the Metternich system came in 1848” (p.251). In other words, Austria was particularly effective at fighting its own, largely unarmed people. “General Windischgrätz put down the Prague uprising” (p.252): all in a day’s work, no doubt, for an accomplished Austrian strategist. And we are told how well some fortresses held out against the revolution at home (no mention of the fact that others, in the hands of the Hungarian rebels, held out even longer).

Mitchell’s lack of interest in actual governance goes with some carelessness about detail. He uses the doubtful term “Erblände” throughout for the hereditary lands. He names the wrong Schwarzenberg in 1813 (it was Karl, not Felix). Forms like “Clam-Martinez” and “Menningen” (Memmingen), “Württemburg,” “Witelsbach,” and “Freiburg on the Danube” arouse unease. And even in the grand geostrategic scheme of things, Mackinder’s forename was Halford, not “Harold.” Thus, Mitchell cannot be trusted for a full picture of the determinants of Habsburg decline in the nineteenth century. But that is not what strategic studies are about. Rather we may see his contribution as heuristic. It suggests that in the last phase, we can usefully distinguish two Habsburg empires. One was the popular and progressive construction subscribed to by many people of the Monarchy and much rehabilitated in recent scholarship (notably the American school around Pieter Judson). The other was the strategic Austria, the machine for making foreign policy. The people’s empire was aspirational and emergent; the dynastic empire was real and degenerative. From the 1860s onward, the latter’s crisis undermined the former. Revealingly, the Austria-Hungary decades form no part of Mitchell’s story, since from his perspective, the Monarchy by then was already a spent force.

Robert J. W. Evans
University of Oxford

“Engesztelhetetlen gyűlölet”: Válás Budapesten (1850–1914) [“Implacable hatred”: Divorce in Budapest, 1850–1914]. By Sándor Nagy. Budapest: Budapest City Archives; HAS–Momentum Family History Research Group, 2018. 503 pp.

Sándor Nagy, a senior archivist at the Budapest City Archives, summarized the results of his nearly two decades of research in this volume, which is impressive in many ways. Although the question of divorce, prohibitions against divorce, and licensing of divorce under certain conditions has already been actively studied by contemporaries, a comprehensive analysis of the topic has not yet been written. Sándor Nagy’s work fills this gap. Although most of the concrete examples offered in the book are drawn from urban contexts, the volume offers the reader much more. In the first two parts, which come to about 250 pages, Nagy meticulously explores the evolution of divorce in Hungary, including the perceived or real differences between cities and rural settlements. From confession to confession, he examines the room for maneuver that couples who wished to terminate their marriages had, the interaction between social attitudes to divorce, and the evolution of the legal environment. The reader can also follow the process of the secularization of divorce and the consequences of this process. In addition to examining opinions concerning divorce prevailing in Hungary at the time, Nagy also presents and evaluates earlier findings on the topic in an international context or refutes stereotypes that have become widespread in the secondary literature. For example, he explains in detail why statistics show many more divorced women than men in Budapest. He also throws into question the view according to which the degree of urbanization and modernization is directly proportional to the number of divorces. In some cities in Hungary, such as Kolozsvár (Cluj), which was considered more of a mid-city, couples were more likely to divorce than in Budapest or the much more populous Paris. The stereotype that women benefited from the introduction of civic divorce and it helped them to assert their interests is also questioned. Nagy draws attention to the methodological and computational flaws in the data compiled by contemporary statisticians, which confirmed the preconceived notion that the introduction of civil divorce would bring about an increase in the number of cases. The number of divorces, reconstructed by Nagy, on the basis of court sources, does not prove this. Rather, the number of divorces in Budapest declined significantly in 1896, followed later by a steady but slower increase compared to the number of divorces in towns in rural parts of the country.

In the earlier secondary literature, the question of divorce was primarily discussed by historical demographers, but the sources and methods they employed dealt only with a few aspects. By contrast, the court files that Nagy focuses on and also the other related sources (private letters, recollections etc.) he uses, adopting methods from the field of legal history which so far have been neglected, offer a completely new picture. For example, there is a compelling larger chapter on “alternative solutions” (the “ante-room” of divorce), in which Nagy writes about abandonment and concubinage, paradoxically, on the basis of the subsequent court files. Furthermore, in similar detail, he explains how one could become a legitimate or illegitimate child.

Several chapters touch on gender differences, not in general, but usually in terms of social affiliation. One of the reasons for this is that women’s work, the property rights in marriage, and the financial security of women (and their children) played a crucial role in the initiation and continuation of the procedure. Nagy’s investigation of the fates of people involved does not end with the divorce. He tries to follow the parties and determine what happened to them after the divorce, including how they declared their family and social status, whether they remarried, re-divorced, and whether their prosperity was influenced by the dissolution of their unhappy marriage. Particular attention should be paid to the chapter “Relations and Networks,” in which Nagy gives concrete examples of how divorces could “spread” with the assistance of relatives, neighbors and lawyer acquaintances in a particular community.

Nagy deals with the sources with exemplary objectivity, and in the introduction, he notes that the expression “implacable hatred” in the title is a contemporary legal term. Parties needed simply to use this term in order to terminate a marriage relatively quickly without greater complications. Accordingly, we learn less about bedroom secrets and the real-life emotional conflicts of the litigant spouses and instead come to know how the lawyers “trained” their clients, what consensual divorce meant, and what happened to someone who was not trained or who did not listen to good advice.

It is evident from the monograph that it is from the pen of a very knowledgeable, recognized expert on the sources held in various archives, who is familiar with the relevant literature and who has given the subject lengthy reflection and reassessed prevailing ideas on the history of divorce in the period discussed.

Eleonóra Géra
Eötvös Loránd University

Everyday Nationalism in Hungary 1789–1867. By Alexander Maxwell. Berlin–Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2019. 262 pp.

For a few decades, we have been witnessing a reassessment of the workings and the importance of nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe. Innovative scholars rethink the weight of national identity in studies based on solid empirical research and thorough theoretical considerations. The voluminous 2016 book by Pieter M. Judson (The Habsburg Empire: A New History) can be regarded as a summary of these new findings. However, this thought-provoking book does not pay much attention to the Hungarian Kingdom. Hungarian critics of the work have pointed out that the case of Hungary does not fit into many of the tendencies that Judson demonstrates. Furthermore, one has the feeling that in this major work, which provides an impressive critical analysis of national identity and indifference in Cisleithania, Hungary is presented as an “oasis” of the national idea, where it was able to flourish in a way that nationalists from Cisleithania could only dream of. Fortunately, in the past few years, some works have been published which treat Hungary in a way that is worthy of the abovementioned historiographical trend. These works focus not only on Hungarian (Magyar) nationalism, but also on the different minorities in the country and their responses to the challenges posed by an increasingly powerful Magyar nationalism. One thinks, for instance, of the remarkable book by Alexander Maxwell, which is one of the most recent in this trend.

The purpose of the book is to examine the beginnings of nationalism as a lived experience in the Hungarian Kingdom between 1789 and 1867. The work focuses on certain aspects of nationalism that the secondary literature has tended to ignore, namely the nationalization of banal objects and practices of ordinary people, such as national drinks or national marriage customs. The book can be divided into three main parts. The first (chapters 1 and 2) presents a thorough study of terminological and theoretical aspects. The second part (chapters 3 to 7) provides an analysis of the aforementioned nationalization of everyday phenomena. Finally, in the conclusion, Maxwell evaluates his findings from the point of view of nationalism theories, though some discussion of this question is found in every chapter.

Although, as already stated, the book’s main focus is on the nationalization of everyday life, the first two chapters, which offer a consideration of terminological problems, are just as significant and original as the subsequent ones. In the first chapter, Maxwell analyses the word “Hungarian.” He points out that this kind of analysis is essential to any book dealing with the nationalism(s) in the Kingdom of Hungary, though it is worth noting that many substantial works published in Hungary and abroad fail to offer any rigorous discussion of such a fundamental term and use the word as if its meaning were self-evident. This is a grave mistake, in particular given that the term featured prominently in national rhetoric. Maxwell shows how the distinction between Hungarian (signifying all inhabitants of the Kingdom) and Magyar (meaning exclusively the linguistic community) was developed among the non-Magyar communities. This distinction signified a more tolerant approach, as it listed Slovaks, for example, and Magyars as equal inhabitants of their common country, Hungary. No surprise that Magyar nationalists were harshly against this differentiation. Concerning Maxwell’s own usage of the words, knowing that a perfect solution does not exist, he uses the term “Magyar” in cases in which there was a conflict between Magyar nationalists and the other communities. This solution seems to be more adequate than that of Judson, who only declared briefly and bluntly that the distinction between “Hungarian” and “Magyar” made “little intellectual sense” to him, and so he deliberately avoided using the terms “Magyar” and “Magyarization.”

The notion of “nation” is very similar to that of “Hungarian” in the sense that it was an eminent element of nationalist rhetoric, yet several scholarly works use the term as if its meaning were self-evident. First, Maxwell presents the complicated history of how Magyar and “minority” (another highly problematic term) intellectuals defined the notion of “nation” and “nationality” up to the 1868 Nationalities Law. One might regret, however, that he fails to offer a similar analysis of the so-called “Hungarus consciousness,” which is considered in the secondary literature as a widespread form of collective identity that transcended ethnicity and based self-definition on loyalty to Hungary as a territorial unit. Second, Maxwell also examines the applicability of the definitions of nation offered by different nationalism-theorists. Maxwell’s method is highly recommended: instead of using the definition of one particular theorist and superposing it to the nineteenth century, he proposes an empirical research strategy which consists of analyzing the notion as a rhetorical device, putting emphasis on how historical actors themselves interpreted and used the notion of “nation.” This strategy fits into a trend which is gaining prevalence today, as scholars choose an empirical method instead of being absorbed by the overwhelming array of nationalism theories.

With the third chapter, Maxwell arrives to the main object of his work. Chapters three and four proceed from a Marxist inspired base-superstructure model to explain the phenomena of national tobacco and national wine. Maxwell also presents the limits of this model by showing that although economic interest played a key part in advertising these items as “national goods,” the items themselves became cultural phenomena and started a life of their own. To describe this transformation, Maxwell uses the notion of “banal nationalism,” which he takes from the works of Michael Billig, and he adapts this notion to the Hungarian Kingdom. Maxwell also presents the different prejudices concerning the other nationalities’ preferred types of alcohol. The fifth and sixth chapters present elements of everyday nationalism that have gender implications. Maxwell points out that the cult of the “national moustache” meant the exclusion not only of other nationalities but also women. The chapter on national marriages presents how Magyar intellectuals urged their compatriots to choose Magyar women and disapproved of cross-national marriages. Using Carole Pateman’s terminology, Maxwell shows how the rhetoric of national endogamy presented women as collective possessions of the national brotherhood. Though Pateman’s work does not explicitly deal with nationalism, Maxwell considers it useful, as in his view, other gender works do not address nationalism as such, but only its effects on women. The seventh chapter examines national clothing, a topic which is mostly approached from the sociological and gender point of view, neglecting its implications for nationalism. Maxwell, using first and foremost the theory of Grant McCracken, who treats clothing as a sort of language, analyses the spread of díszmagyar (Hungarian national festival clothing for men) and the reaction of the nationalities (mainly Croats) to this trend.

In the conclusion, Maxwell considers what lessons can be drawn from the Hungarian case for nationalism theorists. For we are facing an overwhelming number of nationalism theories which need empirical testing. Maxwell is especially hostile to Anthony D. Smith’s approach, showing that not only is Smith poorly informed about Hungarian history, but his ideas are not even fit to grasp the complexity of the Hungarian case. And he does not limit himself to Smith, but calls into question the notions put forward by all the scholars (Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Gellner among others) who consider nationalism as something which emerged from gradual social transformation. Instead, the history of everyday nationalism turns us to Rogers Brubaker, who has argued that one should see nationness as an event, something that suddenly crystallizes rather than develops. Furthermore, Brubaker’s theory also emphasizes the agency of patriots and the question of reception, an approach which proves more fruitful than the suggestions posed by his predecessors’. Maxwell concludes that Brubaker’s ideas prove the most suitable in dealing with nationalism in an empirical study. It is worth noting that it was also Brubaker’s ideas that helped the notion of “national indifference” gain traction in the secondary literature as a useful concept.

One might argue that, in view of its main sources, Maxwell’s book is more about the idea of everyday nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century than everyday nationalism itself. However, this would be a rather idealistic and even naïve criticism which would reveal a certain inexperience in dealing with the very few available reliable historical sources, which is a burden every historian seeking to study the reception of nationalist ideas in the period faces. Maxwell’s approach offers a solution which is naturally not perfect, but remains one of the best available: the study of national commodities and nationalized practices may be able to bridge “the intellectual history of national ideas and the data available to social historians.”

Imre Tarafás
Eötvös Loránd University

Magyarok a bécsi hivatalnokvilágban: A közös külügyminisztérium magyar tisztviselői 1867–1914 [Hungarians in the Viennese bureaucracy: Hungarian officers in the joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1867–1914]. By Éva Somogyi. Budapest: MTA BTK TTI, 2017. 268 pp.

At first glance a collective biography of Hungarian officers in the ranks of the (in)famous Viennese bureaucracy, the book by Éva Somogyi offers far more than that, namely an empirical investigation of the very functioning of dualist Austria-Hungary. This insight is all the more appreciated, since recent literature concerning Cisleithanian integration and imperial (rather than national) identity would fill libraries, but the roles played by Hungarians in operating the dualist state are rarely investigated. However, the way they conceived their duty as civil servants in the Joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs sheds light on a peculiar kind of imperial loyalty and state patriotism which is often analyzed in connection with their Austrian colleagues but which is implicitly regarded as quasi non-existent in the more nation-state-like Hungarian part of the dual Monarchy. By meticulously uncovering the daily work done by officers to maintain the empire and ensure it prospered, the book makes up for this shortcoming on the one hand and draws a precise picture of how the establishment of the state (which is almost impossible to define from the perspective of its political essence) functioned in practice on the other.

After a short but comprehensive overview of the Viennese administration, Somogyi offers an investigation of the Joint Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then uses this as a foundation for a discussion of the aforementioned aspects. The Ministry was the most specific institution of the dualist state. As the prevailing minister was also president of the Joint Cabinet Council, it was something like a common government of the Gesamtstaat, though needless to say it was not acknowledged as such. This was the institution within the framework of which the multiple interests of the multiethnic empire were reconciled and a livable compromise was found between the two parts of the Monarchy. Members of the staff of this institution who had Hungarian citizenship formed a circle which took part in the exercise of executive political power. As a result, their numbers, roles, careers, visions of Vienna and the Empire, and their national, imperial, and other loyalties and social positions are not only interesting from a mere prosopographical point of view but also help us understand how everyday efforts and dialogues filled out the terms of the Settlement, which at times were vague, with practical content.

Following a presentation of the imperial institutional structure and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within in detail, Somogyi offers another chapter on the backdrop to her story, a chapter which brilliantly depicts the milieu of late-nineteenth-century Vienna, or more precisely what Vienna meant to Hungarians who were engaged in the civil service. Some kind of genius loci existed in the Ballhausplatz, a tradition institutionally cultivated, characterized mainly by an unconditional loyalty to the emperor and a class-identity of gentlemen in his service. Though imperial state patriotism is a commonly used term in Habsburg historiography, it is new to read about a disciplined corps which behaved in lines with its values.

In the fifth chapter, Somogyi provides a thorough presentation of her protagonists. At this point, the monograph truly benefits from the uniquely rich personal files of the Foreign Service, preserved in the Viennese Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv. Based on these sources and other personal sources, such as diaries, letters, family documents, etc., Somogyi reconstructs the walk of life of nearly a hundred bureaucrats. Given Somogyi’s precision and consistency in her use of analytic categories, this work could also be used as a handbook or a database, and it will be exceptionally useful for future research endeavors. Somogyi has also documented the constantly increasing number of Hungarians in the Foreign Service until the reach of parity (in dualist Austria-Hungary, this meant a proportion of 30% Transleithanian officers). This growth was an answer to the need for Hungarian speakers, which was a consequence of the structural and constitutional reforms of the Settlement and also a tool with which the Ausgleich was made more attractive to the Hungarian public. From a methodological point of view, the number of cases allows Somogyi both to draw statistical conclusions and to make her story charmingly personal. While the bureaucrats considered impartiality and detachment virtues, in Somogyi’s book, they take on the personalities of social climbers, misunderstood lovers, conflicted patriots, or spoilt dandies.

Beginning with the next chapter, the text shifts from political, structural, and ideological questions to strictly social-historical analyses. From generation to generation, a detailed picture is offered of the bureaucrats’ family backgrounds, educations, and lifestyles. We see that although this corps never really lost its aristocratic nature, it became more and more professional as expertise became an increasingly important qualification if someone sought to hold such a position, and at the same time it began to enjoy a prestige comparable to that of the diplomatic body. As family background became less important in career advancement than professional achievements, the seemingly unchanged circle of aristocrats underwent significant changes in attitude. As a result, if the Foreign Service did not turn into a civil institution, it became nonetheless professional and modernized in many ways. This sophisticated social-historical conclusion is one of the many in this book. They all remind us that neither social transformation nor modernization is a simple category in historiographical analysis. Both are the sum of processes of varying rapidity and rhythm.

The next chapter, which deals with the marital practices and constraints of Foreign Service officers, puts the Austro-Hungarian conditions in an international context. Contrary to most of the other European powers, the dualist state did not forbid officers from taking a foreigner as a spouse, as the main Ballhausplatz-tradition was explicitly loyalty to the emperor and not to national interests.

This unconditional loyalty to the dynasty and the ability to represent the Gesamtstaat abroad, regardless of a given bureaucrat’s other ties, was assured by professional education and common culture. Somogyi’s examination of the specific education in which officials in the foreign service had taken part is rich with findings. Indeed, her discussion suggests that national indifference survived not simply in blind spots where national activists exerted little influence. Rather, it was at least in part one element of a deliberately cultivated outlook and political program. It is useful to keep in mind that Hungarians were also part of this project.

Whether this project was successful is the main question of the next chapter and the book in general. To avoid simplistic answers, Somogyi sketches several personal variations and strategies to overcome loyalty conflicts. Reconciling different identities was not always a perplexing challenge. Many of the officers thought that strengthening the Hungarians’ position in the existing institutions was more effective than waging dubious symbolic struggles for more autonomy. The problem was not always as urgent for the different generations of bureaucrats either. Approaching World War I, however, we have to ask the question: was imperial identity a sustainable self-definition in the middle of national conflicts. Was this special elite a narrow and isolated group, or did they represent competent leadership over a multiethnic society? Could the state patriotism of this group have been a viable model for a wider public, or did this elite constitute an exception? Do we have to face the fact that the creation of an imperial identity was a failure, or do we have to seek the reasons for the Monarchy’s dissolution elsewhere? Do multiple identities work in times of crisis, or do they become prioritized and force everyone to choose? One could certainly have read more about these questions, even knowing that it is probably impossible to answer them. Somogyi does not enter into speculation. She remarks simply that she could not find any officer who would not have clarified that his first and most important duty was protecting Austria-Hungary’s integrity during World War I.

Éva Somogyi’s book investigates the most intriguing questions of current Habsburg studies based on micro-level examinations of exciting archival material. Her familiarity with both the institutional structure of the Empire and a number of personal details allows her dynamically to change scopes whenever needed, resulting in a monograph that is both precise and highly entertaining.

As a German translation is in the making, one can hope for a worthy international reception.

Veronika Eszik
Research Centre for the Humanities

Traumatársadalom: Az emlékezetpolitika történeti-szociológiai kritikája [The society of trauma: The historical-sociological critique of memory politics]. By Máté Zombory. Budapest: Kijárat, 2019. 248 pp.

Máté Zombory’s new book consists of an introduction and six chapters, most of which were originally published in different fora between 2012 and 2016 and have been partially revised since. The diverse studies included here share an agenda of dissecting problematic aspects of memory politics while reflecting on the larger political-moral transformation behind the growing impact of memory politics. Ultimately, the book aims to describe and critique what Zombory calls “our dominant moral economy” based on representations of victimhood, which he labels “the society of trauma” (p.38).

The volume as a whole offers testament to Zombory’s theoretical and interdisciplinary proclivities and his wide-ranging erudition, especially when it comes to the secondary literature published in English and French. While the individual studies offer numerous critical insights, they unfortunately also contain some rather misleading assertions and a number of unfounded generalizations.

Partially drawing on Samuel Moyn’s recent reinterpretation of human rights history, Zombory argues that it is on the ruins of future-oriented political experiments promising collective liberation that a new politics of moral sentiments directed at the remembrance and reduction of physical and psychological suffering could develop. As Western societies have transitioned from party-based representative democracies to media-based “populist democracies” since the 1970s, their attention has increasingly shifted to the suffering of innocent and passive victims. As Zombory perceptively notes in this context, the remembrance of the Holocaust may not have been truly globalized, but the moral imperative to recognize victims practically has (p.39).

Combined with the ever more frequent use of concepts suggesting sameness across time, such as memory, identity, and recognition, this new attention to victims, Zombory maintains, has resulted in an increasingly fierce competition for the public recognition of specific victim groups. Drawing on the writings of American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in particular, the original theorist of status competitions which know no upper limit, Zombory presents memory politics as the conspicuous and decontextualized representation of suffering where the public visibility of the sufferings of one’s group amounts to a form of prestige. The result of this is a hierarchical society of trauma, which is a sort of inverted society of the spectacle (Guy Debord).

The volume thereby articulates a more general criticism of reconciliation efforts in so-called “post-conflict societies.” The author maintains that, despite popular assertions to the contrary, conflicts over remembrance cannot be resolved within the “paradigm of recognition”: he points out that, unlike what propagators of reconciliation such as (perhaps most prominently) Aleida Assmann wish to make us believe, conflicts over remembrance are not merely epistemological, but are ultimately of a social nature. Zombory also adds, in a rather one-sided fashion which overlooks the possibility of mutual recognition, that there is something “inherently narcissistic” in the desire for recognition.

The introduction covers previous criticisms which began to be directed at “victim competition” in the 1990s. The first half of the volume (chapters one to three) addresses issues in the history of Holocaust remembrance and aims to dissect the key moral principles that acts of Holocaust remembrance tend to propagate. In the first of these chapters, Zombory covers mainstream approaches to, debates about, and critiques of the turn to remembrance and the rise of transnational discussions of the Holocaust in particular. The subsequent chapter focuses on an even larger and more general issue, the globalization of remembrance. It aims to describe norms, witnesses, and the representation of victims in transnational spaces of remembrance. As in the introduction, these two chapters summarize key arguments of established Western scholars without sufficiently clarifying the author’s contribution (beyond a sharp sociological critique).

If these early chapters essentially amounted to perceptive literature reviews addressed at a Hungarian audience, the third chapter adds an original case study regarding Shoshana Felman’s interpretation of the Eichmann trial and, more specifically, Yehiel De-Nur’s dramatic contribution to it in order to explore how one of its major propagators has applied her theory of cultural trauma. By offering a nuanced reading of Yehiel De-Nur’s (pen name Ka-Tsetnik 135633) various statements over time, Zombory convincingly shows how a dehumanizing depiction of actors may result from the forceful reduction of past subject experiences to the traumatic and current behavior to mere acts of repetition.

The second half of the volume in turn explores the entry of new actors into transnational spaces of memory politics in Europe and the ways in which these authors have adapted what Zombory calls the “moral paradigm” in Holocaust remembrance. Chapter Four reflects on the shared rules of memory competition to argue that, under the unequal conditions of EU enlargement, the political legitimacy of “accession countries” could be increased if they were able to assume the position of victim and present their history as a Leidensgeschichte. Zombory shows, very much in accordance with Jelena Subotić’s new book Yellow Star, Red Star, that the new nationalistic remembrance of communism in Eastern Europe was modelled on practices of Holocaust remembrance and claimed an additional layer of suffering as a regional specificity.

What Zombory unfortunately does not discuss here is that the critical impetus behind European Holocaust remembrance—which, contrary to what he appears to suggest, has not only been about the remembrance of innocent and passive victims, but has also constituted a profound grappling with patterns of exclusion and mass violence in modern society—could be largely lost in such new anti-communist attempts at renationalization made across Eastern Europe. Despite his own critical agenda, Zombory appears to take for granted the absence of such a critical impetus behind current memory cultures.

The last two chapters of the volume offer Hungarian case studies. Alongside chapter three, chapter five offers Zombory’s most detailed and convincing engagement with a specific discussion and debate regarding the recent past. Zombory aims to show that the House of Terror may have been repeatedly and fiercely criticized in Hungary, but both mainstream propagators and critics of this complex, confusing, even confounding initiative drew on shared moral notions. He explains through relevant examples that agreement with the House’s basic intention to commemorate the victims of communism and focus exclusively on the violently repressive nature of past regimes ultimately made it impossible for liberally-minded professional historians to meaningfully contest the conservative-anticommunist reinterpretation of history that the House powerfully displayed. Moreover, the chapter insightfully shows how the House’s creators and representatives cleverly used the process of Europeanization and even the unclear nature of their own project to defend themselves against various accusations and further their radically conservative goals in memory politics. Chapter six in turn draws on some of Zombory’s oral history interviews to discuss how discursive frames and counterstrategies regarding the German past have developed with regard to the German minority in Hungary since 1945.

There is much to admire about Máté Zombory’s critical insights and much to reflect on when it comes to his rather bold theses. He is correct to point out that participation in historical debates has increasingly come to depend on self-identification with victims and that, concurrently, possibilities to question the (over)abundance of political-moral efforts centered around the recognition of victimhood have diminished. He is also right to critique how the oft-declared “duty to remember” has at times yielded reductive-mythical images of the past. Indeed, the moralizing insistence on remembrance may have made complex and properly contextual historical discussions more difficult. These worrisome tendencies call for the kind of courageous scholarly intervention which Zombory’s polemical volume offers.

There is, however, also much to disagree with in these pages. The book repeatedly asserts that memory political interactions revolve around grievances, mutual accusations of non-recognition, and shaming through inequality, though it offers no empirical documentation in support of this claim. Zombory seems to assume, rather unusually and in fact contrary to mounting evidence, that the broader political culture around memory politics is by default non-democratic and political-moral agency aimed at the recognition of victims cannot possibly contribute to the cause of social justice. Rather tellingly, the volume presents an unduly homogenized image of Holocaust remembrance without discussing the highly varied and always contested Holocaust lessons various people have drawn (and which Michael Marrus, among others, has recently studied).

Last but not least, the book’s rather categorical assessment, according to which recent trends to prioritize victim narratives have fueled a solipsistic and narcissistic form of politics, obfuscates the key distinction between the recently emerged and highly specific realm of memory politics and politics as such. Ultimately, Traumatársadalom, insightful and inspiring though many of its claims and arguments indubitably are, aims to explain more than a better focused and more adequately documented exploration of memory political contests would have allowed.

Ferenc Laczó
Maastricht University

Making Ethnicity in Southern Bessarabia: Tracing the Histories of an Ambiguous Concept in a Contested Land. By Simon Schlegel. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2019. 276 pp.

Simon Schlegel’s Making Ethnicity in Southern Bessarabia poses a series of interrelated questions about the growth of ethnic boundaries and the rising importance of ethnicity in southern Bessarabia over the last two centuries. The region has proven a well-suited ethno-geographical laboratory or “nook” for researching how individuals and communities can “belong” to an ethnic minority (or majority). The book is structured chronologically, albeit with several theoretical or thematic interludes, offering a survey of state policies and actors that ruled Bessarabia beginning in early nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia and ending with the Maidan protest movement in early twenty-first-century Ukraine. The first part describes how ethnic categories superseded religious categories in the tsarist state’s synoptic view of its inhabitants. A chapter on Romanian Bessarabia during the interwar period and World War II showcases important new primary sources on the inscription of ethno-national identities through state-mandated but locally issued identity certificates. The following chapter, intended as a “theoretical insertion” or “interruption,” appraises diverging concepts of ethnicity and the ascription of identities and borders so as to better contextualize the previous chapters and set up the next. The book also covers the forty-seven years of Soviet rule in Bessarabia, showing how the shifting concept of ethnicity and language use became preconditions for social mobility; it then details the years since Ukrainian independence, which have been marked by the recurrence of ethnic rhetoric, entrepreneurs, and associations within a system of political clientelism. Schlegel concludes with two more theoretical chapters that function as a kind of coda, meditating on the ways that religion, memory, narrative, and folklore serve as “techniques” or “tools” to delimit ethnic groups and maintain ethnic boundaries. The book highlights the congruence of ethnic boundaries with fluid social boundaries created by local and regional politics, including corruption, clientelism, mismanagement, and economic hardship. Schlegel argues convincingly that putative ethnic differences or boundaries, as well as language barriers and disputes over history, are frequently epifocal to internecine conflicts.

Methodologically, the book is perhaps most at home in the genre of historical anthropology, “in which the readers start out with a tour through local history and then, as the account moves closer to the present find gradually more ethnographic insight, until they find themselves reading an ethnography” (p.31). Drawing on Fredrik Barth, James C. Scott, and the usual suspects in the literature on nationalism and ethnicity, with a passing nod to the Italian microhistorians, Schlegel weaves his social-anthropological case study into a much broader historical examination about the ways present-day ethnic boundaries and understandings of ethnicity are firmly, if not inextricably, rooted in the past. But the book is ever mindful that history, society, and identity oscillate through time and space, in a multiplicity of contexts, continually informing one another.

Most of Schlegel’s fieldwork and archival research was undertaken in the Odessa oblast, not far from the city-municipality of Izmail in southwestern Ukraine, from mid 2012 through 2013. Although the four villages selected for interviews were chosen for their collective ethnic diversity (Ukrainian, Moldovan or Romanian, Gagauz, and Bulgarian), all interviews were conducted in Russian. The archival research was also based solely on the Izmail State Archive. The book contains a handful of maps and images, the latter of which date from the author’s fieldwork in the area. Considering the book’s sweeping chronological scope and historical treatment of four successive regimes, the two-page index of subjects and names is inadequate. And while generally well written—Schlegel is dutiful in his role as a narrator of his own story—the book could have benefited from additional copyediting for punctuation. But these are minor imperfections in a worthy contribution to the scholarship on the region. That the author completed this in under three hundred pages is no small feat.

Self-reflective and both microhistorical and macrohistorical in scope, Making Ethnicity in Southern Bessarabia focuses not so much on ethnic boundaries as actual dividing lines or demarcations but rather on the actors and motivations that create ethnic boundaries. Moreover, it spotlights the techniques used to maintain these boundaries across space and time, from one regime to the next. While historians of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania might gloss over some (if not much) of Schlegel’s wider historical narratives on various states and regimes, they should find fruitful analyses of these topics in the embedded anthropological framing of competing ethnicizing and territorializing paradigms. Experts on Russia and Ukraine might also find rich comparative material in the chapter on Romanian rule, as might scholars on Romania in the chapters on Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian rule, which comprise the bulk of the story. Likewise, anthropologists and social scientists researching this area will benefit from the book’s insistence on situating niche fieldwork and locales in the longue durée. The author’s social-anthropological approach to a historical subject therefore improves what would otherwise be a typical if also peripheral history, while the sweeping historical framework broadens the relevance of what would otherwise be a typical if also peripheral anthropological case study. In this respect, it brings to mind the pathbreaking books by Katherine Verdery and Kate Brown. Schlegel’s contribution is an adroit scholarly treatment of ethnicity and ethnic boundaries in the social, political, and historical palimpsest that is Southern Bessarabia.

R. Chris Davies
Lone Star College, Kingwood

Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945. By R. Chris Davies. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Xxvii + 249 pp.

Using the example of the Csángós, a Catholic group in Moldova, eastern Romania, whose origins and nationality are subject to debate, R. Chris Davies contributes to the historical literature on the sociological phenomenon of ethnicity. Following the path set out by Pieter Judson, Tara Zahra, and Jim Bjork (among others), he analyzes the struggle of national activism to define a group’s nationality and align it with either of the two rival nations. However, he cautiously mainly sidesteps the issue of how individuals really reacted to these attempts and concentrates less on the recently contested notion of national indifference. Instead, he deliberately focuses on the discourses and their sources, situated in the context of a radical change of nationalisms in interwar East and Central Europe. Thus, he presents a story triangulated, with Hungarian, Romanian nationalist, and Romanian Catholic intellectuals, whose efforts were instrumental to the fate of the group.

Davies’ main claim is that the idea of the Romanian origins and subsequent Magyarization of the Csángós, which is today the cornerstone of Romanian arguments in the debate over their national belonging, was canonized not by anti-Hungarian Romanian intellectuals but by Catholic priests among the Csángós themselves (Iosif Petru Pal, Dumitru Martinaş etc.), who feared that if they could not shed the stigma of Hungarian-ness in Ion Antonescus’s violently ethnocratic Romania, the fate of the Csángós would be deportation. In this effort, they found help and support from ultranationalist Romanian intellectuals who promoted a new, biologized definition of Romanian-ness (most importantly the serologist Petre Râmneanţu), and to make this new claim credible, they were ready to align themselves with extreme Romanian nationalism and even sometimes to join the Iron Guard. Thus, through their unholy alliance with materialist scientific practices (like blood group analyses) and mystical political Orthodoxy, which were both at odds with their Catholic faith, these clergymen, were helped by the turn of the tide in World War II. The resulting willingness of the Antonescu regime to present a less ugly face to the Allies changed the stance of the government, which earlier had deprived the Csángós of their citizenship. The regime fended off Hungarian efforts to achieve a population exchange, which would have meant moving the Csángós to enlarged Hungary in exchange for Romanian speakers from the territory of Hungary after the Second Vienna Awards.

To make this admittedly somewhat narrow story more relevant to the secondary literature on nationalism, Davies offers extensive contextualization, including intellectual and political developments in Hungary and Romania. After an overview of the most important concepts and theories, he provides an outline of the political and intellectual conflicts caused in interwar Romania by the efforts of a group of Orthodox intellectuals and politicians to define Romanian-ness as essentially equal to the Orthodox Christian Church. This effort certainly would have affected Catholics and, among them, the Csángós negatively. Nevertheless, as Davies argues, the late 1930s bore witness to a radical break with earlier conceptualizations of Romanian-ness, not least due to the introduction of what was thought to be cutting-edge science (eugenics, blood group analysis, etc.) to the toolkit of definitions concerning individual membership in a nation. Finally, the state endeavored to assign an unambiguous nationality to all of its citizens (and eventually depriving them of citizenship), as it wanted to purge the national body of anything considered (or defined as) alien and reinvigorate it from the source of the alleged authentic ethnic group.

In the meantime, many Hungarian intellectuals tried to cope with the losses of Trianon with a new concept of the nation which promised rebirth and reinvigoration on the basis of the peasantry, the allegedly purest layer of the national stock. Efforts to salvage the Csángós first aimed to prevent their linguistic assimilation and later to return them to the “homeland,” as was done with Székelys from Bukovina. This was part of a larger effort to redefine the people of Hungary in terms of ethnicity. Thus, the conflicting efforts came to a head regarding the Csángós during World War II and resulted in wider acceptance of their Romanian origins by Romanian academia.

Although sometimes the story seems to be a bit narrowly focused, it is highly readable, and it offers an excellent example of the ways in which national activists of all stripes competed for people whom they wanted to put on their account books. The broad contextualization helps to understand how all these efforts were situated within the contemporary milieu and trends, and the focus on Romanian Catholics and the Catholic Church instead of the Hungarian state or clergy actors is welcome, as it adds more than just nuance to the debate. But the characterization of the changes in nationalism at the end of the 1930s seems to gloss over significant affinities between trends in nationalism before and around that time, and it also obscures how policies and ideas were rooted in earlier contexts. Just to give one example, most of the Hungarian policies towards the Csángós were not based on a reconceptualization of the nation, but rather had roots which lay in undertakings of the late nineteenth century, which were later abandoned as inopportune in the context of the friendly relations between Romania and the Triple Alliance. Thus, more traditional ideas of the nation could often be surprisingly easily reconciled with the novel and more radical ones, as they bore affinities and this reconciliation also helped foster political alliances.

Finally, Davies claims that the Csángós are an example of how small groups which seemingly divide can connect and unite states which have been brought into perpetual dialogue over their fates (p.164). While this constitutes a provocative claim which I also find appealing, I do not find much substantiation for it in the case of the Csángós. The Csángós were a minor, almost negligible concern for both states and especially for Hungary for most of the 20 years of the interwar period, and during World War II, there were larger issues at stake and forces in play in bilateral Hungarian-Romanian relations which helped the two states avoid armed conflict. These forces could have helped averting the clash only until Romania switched sides and war with Hungary followed, irrespective of the fate of the Csángós was. This does not diminish the value of this book, which will be of interest to anyone, laymen included, interested in nationalism, obscure people, and the history of Romania and Hungary in the twentieth century.

Gábor Egry
Institute of Political History

The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia. By Zsófia Lóránd. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 270 pp.

Zsófia Lóránd’s The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia is an intellectual history of feminist thought, artistic practice, and activism in Yugoslavia from the early 1970s to 1991. Published in 2018 in Palgrave Macmillan’s series “Genders and Sexualities in History,” it speaks to multiple scholarly audiences. To those interested in the global history of second wave feminism and its relationship to the state and the political left, it offers a challenging view from the semi-periphery. To those interested in the postwar history of political thought, it presents a compelling case for the intellectual prowess and versatility of feminist thought in state socialist Europe. And for those interested in the history of former Yugoslavia, it reconstructs in rich detail the biographies, works, and institutional connections of the members of new Yugoslav feminism, a group critical of the unfulfilled promises of the Yugoslav state in terms of women’s equality.

Several main theoretical and historiographical claims run through Lóránd’s account of the development of feminist thought and practice in Yugoslavia beginning in the early 1970s. First, drawing on the theoretical tradition of intellectual history and especially the insights of the Cambridge School, Michael Freeden, and Lucy Delap, Lóránd analyzes feminism as an ideology. The focus is on concepts, ideas, meanings, and the struggles around them and with other ideologies, most notably Marxism. To Sara Ruddick’s definition of feminism as an acknowledgement that gender divisions are socially constructed, detrimental to women, and should be changed, Lóránd adds emphasis on woman’s agency (p.18), which is at the core of the most recent debates on women’s organizing and feminism under state socialism.

Second, feminism is defined not as dissidence, but as “a critical discourse and a form of dissent” (p.9). Yugoslav feminists worked within the state to challenge one of its core claims, specifically the achievement of equality for women. This positioning distinguished them both from the state’s political mainstream (including the official women’s organizations) and from the Central European dissidents working against or outside the state, publishing in samizdat, or facing direct oppression.

Third, Lóránd works within a multilayered comparative framework which places new Yugoslav feminism in dialogue with the “second wave feminism” of the West but also with other oppositional discourses under state socialism. Most promisingly, her work lays out the conceptual and methodological framework for an intellectual history of feminism and women’s rights discourses in East Central Europe under state socialism. This project has already brought together numerous researchers from the region over several workshops and will result in a collection of source texts translated into English for the first time.

The Feminist Challenge is organized thematically and chronologically along mediums of critical expression, from the academia to art and literature to popular mass media to activism. Based on published materials, archival sources, and interviews, the chapters balance historical detail, analysis, and participants’ accounts of their experiences. There are inevitable overlaps and frequent cross-references among the chapters, but overall the book structure corresponds to the development of new Yugoslav feminism itself over the course of two decades.

The chapter on feminism in the social sciences and humanities introduces the arguments of (mostly) women working in the academia, who reflected on contemporary feminist ideas in the United States and Western Europe and engaged critically with the mainstream class-based approach to the “women’s question” under state socialism. Drawing on critical Marxism and French post-structuralism, their work resulted in conceptual innovation, most notably the integration of gender and sexism as key terms of the new feminist language they were developing, first in private around kitchen tables and then in public discourse.

In literature and art, feminist discussion revolved around the topics of creativity, motherhood, and the body. Lóránd introduces the concept of “writing of sisterhood” as different from écriture feminine, a major source of theoretical inspiration for feminist literature in Yugoslavia. This “technique of sympathetically reflecting on the lives and fates of other women through one own’s story” (p.107) is identified in works by Irna Vrkljan, Slavenka Drakulić, and Dubravka Ugrešić, among others. Lóránd also grapples successfully with the issue of female artists’ refusal to identify with feminism while nevertheless engaging with deeply feminist issues, as most famously was the case of Marina Abramović.

The chapter on feminism in the popular mass media unpacks the contradictions of publishing feminist texts in popular publications which offered a wide readership but at the same time encouraged self-censorship. The most striking example is that of the debate on pornography carried out in and around Start, a magazine published as a local version of Playboy. Yet another place where the tension between medium and content is apparent is women’s magazines and TV shows, where important feminist issues were brought up in a tamed language and appeared alongside patriarchal views of women’s roles. Genres like advice columns, for example, nevertheless opened up space to discuss private issues publicly, most notably sexuality and domestic violence.

It was precisely around the issues of sexuality and violence that feminist groups were reorganized in the 1980s. The chapter on feminist activism follows the discussions around women’s health and violence against women, the know-how gathered by plugging in to global networks, and eventually the establishing of SOS helplines first in Zagreb and then in Belgrade. “Through the discourse about VaW [violence against women],” argues Lóránd, “the place of feminism was explicitly rethought in a human rights framework,” opening a new era in which “women’s political participation and role in democracies were the focal point” (p.208). Not long thereafter, the landscape of feminist thought and activism was radically reshuffled by ethno-nationalism, war, and the breakdown of Yugoslavia, which is where the timeline of the book ends.

Zsófia Lóránd writes with clarity, nuance, and feminist commitment, and with this book, she offers a fundamentally important work of scholarship which persuasively argues that feminist thought needs to be recovered not just for the sake of historical justice, but also because it reshapes the very view of history that we currently have. The Feminist Challenge must also be praised for its many illustrations, which further ensure that the representatives of new Yugoslav feminism, their works, and their activities, which have been so masterfully presented in this book, are seen, in all meanings of the word.

Adela Hincu
Ilia State University, Tbilisi

Enyhülés és emancipáció [Détente and emancipation]. By Csaba Békés. Budapest: Osiris, MTA TK, 2019. 397 pp.

Csaba Békés’s new book offers a detailed analysis of Hungarian foreign policy in the Cold War, from 1945 until the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. It primarily aims to present a synthesis of Békés’s ideas and arguments that were put forward in his extensive scholarship of the past few decades, but it also introduces new claims on the basis of new source material. Given its ambition to provide a synthesis, the book’s emphasis remains on advancing broad arguments in relation to Hungary’s entanglement with the Cold War, systematically supported by empirical evidence. The manuscript follows a chronological structure and it presents an in-depth discussion of the key events in the history of Hungary’s international relations, starting with the Sovietization of the country after World War II and ending with the gradual collapse of the Kádár regime in the late 1980s. The individual chapters offer invaluable contributions to our understanding of the international dimensions of Hungarian historical events (such as the 1956 uprising and the events of 1989 in Hungary) and the role Hungary played in the shaping of international developments, most importantly the Prague Spring of 1968, the Helsinki Accords of 1975, and the process of détente, in general.

The most laudable aspect of the book is that it brings together—in a coherent narrative—the most important and most original claims and theoretical reflections which Békés has constructed over the years concerning the Cold War and Hungary’s involvement in it. The two keywords that link the various arguments are the concepts that make up the title of the book: détente and emancipation. In the book, Békés proposes a new interpretation of one of the central notions of postwar international history and argues in support of the need for a new periodization of the Cold War. According to the central argument in the book, the process of détente started soon after Stalin’s death in 1953, and it remained the key paradigm that fundamentally shaped international relations until the collapse of the Soviet Union. This proposition breaks with the traditional view in historiography, according to which the emergence of détente was tied to the second wave of de-Stalinization in the early 1960s, and it also refutes interpretations that consider détente to have ended in the late 1970s as a result of international tensions following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In critiquing views that break up the history of the Cold War into multiple phases, Békés claims that the Cold War could be divided into two main episodes. The period between 1945 and 1953 was characterized by blatant antagonism and irrational decision-making, whereas the epoch starting with 1953 (“the second Cold War”) was fundamentally shaped by détente and a more rational and pragmatic approach to international relations. While Békés does not diminish the significance of international crises—such as the Cuban missile crisis or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—he argues that a tacit acknowledgement of the necessity of cooperation after 1953 prevailed over incentives to escalate conflicts further through military means. Interpreting events from this perspective, Békés claims that conflicts within the Soviet bloc never risked subverting the international status quo, and while they provoked tensions, those should be defined as “quasi-conflicts,” as they did not result in the radical reconfiguration of the modus operandi between the two superpowers. The book suggests that there were very few actual conflicts between the Soviet Union and the United States that had the potential to undermine the dominant paradigm of international relations: détente. It is argued, for example, that the antagonism provoked by the Afghanistan conflict merely put détente in a “standby mode.” In other words, the war did not lead to the total abandonment of the policy.

According to Békés, one of the main reasons behind the gradual (and constant) relaxation of tensions was the idea of “active foreign policy” advocated by the post-Stalin leadership in the Soviet Union. The notion triggered the transformation of the relationship between Moscow and the countries of the Soviet bloc, resulting in the slow but steady “emancipation” of the individual countries in the sphere of foreign policy. Khrushchev’s Soviet Union needed allies on the international scene rather more than it needed satellites, and this provoked the gradual decentralization of foreign policy on the peripheries of the Soviet empire. Békés argues that the main forum for negotiations, debates, and conflicts in Sovietized Eastern Europe was the Warsaw Pact. In contrast to traditional perceptions of the military alliance as a tool of Soviet supremacy and control in the region, Békés demonstrates that the organization actually contributed to the emancipation of the various countries and led to the formation of temporary, “virtual” coalitions in the bloc which pursued their own interests, independently of Moscow.

Emancipation and détente are the key themes through which developments in Hungarian foreign policy are interpreted in the period from 1945 to 1989. The book provides detailed and engaging analyses of key events and developments in the postwar era, with emphasis on late socialism in Kádár’s Hungary. The discussion revolves around the topic of agency in “the happiest barrack” and the gradual expansion of Hungary’s room for maneuver and political leeway as a member of the Soviet bloc. Békés convincingly supports his overall thesis with an incredibly diverse range of sources, and he demonstrates that the Kádár regime often took—occasionally remarkably bold—initiatives in the international arena and came to occupy the position of an intermediary in East-West relations in the 1970s and 1980s. Hungary’s mediating role in the Soviet bloc is explored in a chapter on Kádár’s diplomatic efforts to provide a political solution to the Prague Spring in 1968, while the significant growth of Hungary’s international reputation in the late socialist period is analyzed most vividly in the chapter on the country’s contribution to negotiations culminating in the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975.

The book relies on a rich pool of source material to support its innovative and unconventional claims. The discussion is informed by a plethora of secondary sources, published mostly in Hungarian and in English, and evidence supporting Békés’s claims mostly comes from published as well as unpublished primary sources in multiple languages, including English, Hungarian, German, and Russian. Békés has also consulted an impressive array of archival sources, including collections in Hungary, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which contain material relevant to foreign policy and national security.

The extensive discussion of Hungary’s possibilities and constraints in international relations creates a solid foundation for Békés to advance an argument in relation to the multi-faceted (or multi-polar) nature of the late Cold War. Instead of offering a polarized analysis focusing on the theme of antagonism between the socialist East and the capitalist West, Békés claims that Hungarian foreign policy was dependent on three factors. Moscow’s role in shaping developments was inevitable throughout the period, but the book also argues that Hungary became increasingly dependent on access to Western markets and technology in the late socialist period. This dependence led to the adjustment of economic and political priorities and turned Hungary into one of the most ardent advocates of détente. At the same time, international dynamics within the Soviet bloc—conflicting agendas and “virtual coalitions”—imposed significant constraints on, but also provided new opportunities for Hungarian foreign policy.

While the book’s main emphasis is on the emancipation of Hungarian foreign policy after Stalin’s death, the notion of agency remains remarkably absent from the discussion of Stalinism and the Sovietization of Hungary after World War II. Indeed, the concept of Sovietization is not discussed in detail in the book and there is little attempt in the narrative to engage with the term at a more abstract level in light of recent historiography. The meaning of the term, which is remarkably vague in the first place, changed significantly over the course of the twentieth century, and it meant different things at different times. Although Békés proposes a simple typology of Sovietization (quasi-Sovietization and pre-Sovietization), the book does not reflect on alternative typologies suggested by other scholars or on the notion of “self-Sovietization,” which assigns a certain degree of agency to local actors in the implementation of the Soviet model in the countries of the bloc. The somewhat teleological perception of Sovietization in the book could have been refined in conversation with recent works on the subject (most recently, Norman Naimark’s Stalin and the Fate of Europe), which highlight the importance of local politics and local actors in the immediate postwar years. Despite the slight under-assessment of the concept of Sovietization, the book remains an engaging read which offers a number of original contributions to the study of Hungarian foreign policy and, indeed, the history of the Cold War. This is a book that will remain an important point of reference in the future and should find a prominent place in university survey courses on the subject of postwar Hungarian and (East) European history, the history of the Cold War, or more specific courses on the history of the Kádár regime and the history of Hungarian foreign policy.

Balázs Apor
Trinity College Dublin

FEATURED REVIEW

European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History. Edited by Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi. New York–Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. 401 pp.

The social construction of markers on which we rely to interpret the world has functioned as an inexhaustible source of raw material for historians and social scientists. Research in this field has become increasingly prevalent over the course of the past three decades. Space especially has emerged as one of the concepts closely interrogated in a wide variety of research projects. It is a fundamental device of orientation, and its constructed character is masked by its appearance as quintessentially a priori in character, always already “given.” By engaging critically with the semblance of naturalness, research can uncover a multiplicity of knowledge production mechanisms linked to the social construction of space.

There remain, however, aspects of such practices which have attracted limited attention so far, precisely because of the vastness of the material available for study. While notions of national territory and boundary-making have been analyzed repeatedly, regionalization, which in this context means the imposition of supranational divisions over continuities of physical expanse, has remained understudied. Discipline-specific treatises on the academic or political construction and instrumentalization of specific regions abound, but the existing literature has been less inquisitive regarding what may be said in general about the logics of regionalization as recurring modes of knowledge production.

The ambitions of this edited volume include making inroads into this latter, imperfectly charted meta-territory of academic and political language games. The research project organized by editors Diana Mishkova and Balázs Trencsényi adopted two different perspectives with an effect similar to organizing two concurrent expeditions towards the same hard-to-reach summit. The first half of the book presents interdisciplinary analyses of the construction of regionalized spaces in the mode of conceptual history. The concepts investigated here are Western Europe, Scandinavia/Norden, the Baltics, The Mediterranean, Southern Europe, Iberia, the Balkans/Southeastern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. The second part changes the perspective, offering disciplinary case studies of logics of regionalization operating in specific fields of academia (European History, Political Geography, Economics, Historical Demography, Linguistics, Literary History, and Art History). The two parts should ideally lead the reader towards the same destination, offering complementary analyses. These analyses would demonstrate how conceptualizations of space converge around certain ideologically (if not academically) overdetermined regions, on the one hand, and offer the reader a peek into the academic laboratories of regionalizing knowledge production, on the other. The latter would emerge as a meta-study of “how-to” construct regions (regionalizing knowledges), while one expects the former to contain case studies (regionalizing practices) that tie in with the meta-studies.

If one accepts this logic, European Regions and Boundaries may be summarized as an exceptionally rich and productive failure. Failure here does not refer to the quality of either the contributions or the work of the editors. Rather, failure here is a research outcome. It highlights an important imbalance in the production of spatial knowledge with regard to conceptualizing regions which causes the two parts of the book to be more corrective to each other than symbiotic in character. Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century political, civilizational, and geopolitical frames have shaped and often determined the ways in which we think about regions. This is shown in the first half. The second half of the book demonstrates the extent to which these inherited notions of regions that populate even present-day collective imaginaries have either been deconstructed or superseded by critical and reflexive academic work within the individual disciplines. The first half is a reminder of the ideological determinants of spatial thinking, the second perhaps a cautious argument in favor of academia’s potential (at least in some cases) to recast its toolbox by generating novel and ideologically less burdened conceptualizations.

The first half presents a survey of regions as strategic concepts. Some of these regions have been strikingly underutilized in shaping public thinking throughout the Late Modern Era, the notion of Iberia, for instance (discussed by Xosé M. Núñez Seixas). Others have become thick and layered to the point of being impossible to disentangle. This is notably the case with the Balkans/Southeastern Europe (Mishkova), Central Europe (Trencsényi), and most importantly Western Europe (Stefan Berger). The latter emerges as a polyvalent signifier that can enter almost any discourse as a point of comparison, and, accordingly, the notion of the (or “a”) West resonates across almost all chapters. Berger’s perceptive analysis provides a solid footing, but the reader begins to understand the omnipresence of “some” concept of Western Europe only when repeatedly encountering it, with shifting meanings, in the subsequent papers as a point of reference and comparison. In the end, the (nuanced, yet fairly unequivocal) image that emerges is one of the West against the Rest. Dichotomies based on normative contrasts between the meaning of Western Europe and the concept of some other region appear as the rhetorical devices governing the discourses. Relying on these dichotomies, the regionalizing discourses disseminate notions of belatedness or “authenticity”, depending on whether they possess a westernizing or a more autochthonous bent. Regionalization is shown to function (in the clearest form perhaps in Frithjof B. Schenk’s chapter on Eastern Europe) as yet another battleground for the competing ideologies.

Despite the Archimedean position of the “West” in the conceptualization of macroregions, the thickest and most intriguing (hi)story emerges out of a parallel reading of several chapters on the shift in spatial thinking under the aegis of liberal ideology in the nineteenth century. These highly dialogical chapters on Eastern Europe, the North, and Eurasia (by Schenk, Marja Jalava and Bo Stråth, and Mark Bassin, respectively) significantly enrich our understanding of this complex process, which has had repercussions into the present. This is accomplished by drawing liberally on past scholarship, including Larry Wolff’s classic contribution on the construction of Eastern Europe in the “West” (Inventing Eastern Europe [1994]) and also on less frequently cited, yet groundbreaking texts, inter alia by Hans Lemberg (“Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas [1985]) and Ezequiel Adamovsky (Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France [2006]). The chapters offer an exceptionally nuanced account of how the triadic division of Europe was reduced into an often orientalizing East–West dualism in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. As both Jalava and Stråth and Schenk observe, the repositioning of Russia as an Eastern rather than a Nordic power opened up a way to a reconstruction of the concept of the North as a minor region with positive connotations, becoming synonymous with Scandinavia in the process (pp.36, 45–47, and 189–93). At the same time, the mapping of Russia onto the East also “colonized” understandings of Eastern Europe as a zone not only of backwardness, but also of political otherness, under the specter of tyranny (p.194). This added a juridico-political layer which reinforced the already established civilizational cleavage. While the chapters do not explore current European controversies about perceived threats to regional identities in any detail, this tradition of intracontinental othering has already been traced to the present and shown to influence current discourses of political identity in the European Union, most recently by Maria Mälksoo (“’Memory Must Be Defended’: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security,” Security Dialogue [2013]).

If the authors can be faulted for anything, it is perhaps the relative lack of attention given to nineteenth-century reflections originating from the newly constructed “East.” Schenk’s discussion of interwar conceptualizations of East Central European is an important quasi-digression in his text on Eastern Europe, and his subsequent account about region-focused research in the Eastern Bloc is both detailed and conceptually refined (pp.195–97 and 199–203). Adding to these, Balázs Trencsényi’s detailed chapter on twentieth-century notions of Central Europe further enriches the image of intellectuals belonging to a mesoregion (the non-Russian East, rebranded as East Central Europe). They are seen struggling to distance themselves and their homelands from the dominant image of the macroregion under which they have found themselves subsumed, while also increasingly resenting the orientalizing discourse they perceive as developed and deployed by the “West.” What is not discussed in either chapter is the nineteenth-century liberal reaction in the non-Russian parts of the new East, to which Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, and other intellectuals contributed in droves. Before the birth of intellectual discourses about East Central European specificity, such as that of Oskar Halecki, the initial reaction to finding oneself relegated to the zone of backwardness and tyranny was to reject the classification (while acknowledging the fact of backwardness itself) and to construct discourses about belonging to the West by virtue of culture and often constitutional or legal traditions.

The tradition of negating the perennial character of one’s “home” region (Eastern Europe or the East) even made spearheads into Russia through the ideology of zapadniks. Yet, as Bassin’s essay makes clear, Russian spatial thinking was shaped to a far greater extent by the idea of Eurasia. Eurasia represents a rather novel construct when compared with the triadic and dualist Western divisions of Europe, and it was usually deployed, from the late nineteenth century on, as a trope challenging the orientalism inherent in the East/West dichotomy. It replaced (and is still used to replace) the expanse traditionally thought of as the East, providing it with an autochthonous and positive character (pp.211–13). With some of the ideas familiar from present-day Russian neoimperialist thought, the essay also works as a reminder of how Eurasia once enjoyed broad currency also in Western scholarship and spatial thinking in general. In the end, both Russia and its smaller Western neighbours, that is to say both the imperial half and the other half composed of nation-states managed to produce their respective emancipatory discourses. However, Eurasia and (East) Central Europe represent divergent elective affinities symptomatic of the thinking of the intellectuals who promoted and still promote these concepts. One of the chief virtues of the book is that it sheds light on how these identity discourses have unfolded in the interplay of often competing regionalizing logics.

The second part of the volume offers a different background narrative to the social construction of regions. Traditional “allies” of regionalizing discourses, first and foremost history (Stefan Troebst) and political geography/geopolitics (Virginie Mamadouh and Martin Müller), are revisited in discipline-specific analyses which suggest patterns of increasing reflexivity as a mode of “scientific evolution.” With regard to both of the aforementioned disciplines, the texts relate how in recent decades scholarly discourse has tended to move towards critical engagement with earlier entanglements in the production of spatial impositions, or, in plainer terms, with having functioned as a language of power. As the overlaps and synergies with the first half of the tome make evident, these disciplines were indeed responsible for sustaining and refining the bulk of conceptualizations that have structured social thinking about Europe’s regions in the past.

The other disciplines differ from history and political geography both with regard to their impact on collective imaginaries of space and their modes of engaging with intra-disciplinary legacies. While both history and political geography have engaged in the deconstruction of its earlier regionalizing modes, disciplines less impacted by linguistic and reflexive turns and less central to the production of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cognitive maps of European regions have tended simply to evolve away from earlier modes of regionalization. This movement has involved abandoning conceptualizations borrowed from prevailing ideologies and engaging in discipline-specific conceptualizations. Some chapters in the volume are thoroughly historicizing and offer ample insight into this process (for instance the chapter on historical demography by Attila Melegh). Others tend towards academic presentism and highlight the current prevalence of discipline-specific regionalizations (the chapter on economics by Georgy Ganev, for instance). Yet more straddle a medial position (the chapters on linguistics by Uwe Hinrichs, literary history by Alex Drace-Francis, and art history by Eric Storm). Despite this variation, the overarching realization that academic evolution has led to, inter alia, the discipline-specific and increasingly autonomous production and deployment of regionalizing discourse shines through most contributions.

The shared character of this trend nevertheless allows for considerable variation. Historical demography both reflects and diverges from received spatial knowledges, reproducing regional divisions familiar from historical and political thought (as in the case of LePlay), but as a discipline it has also “evolved away” from the traditional patterns of dividing Europe either into a triad or two opposing poles (pp.303–04 and 312–14). At the same time, these legacies have never quite disappeared. In Melegh’s text, they transect the discipline itself. A more traditional approach investigates existing regionalizations and considers whether demography reflects or lends support to them. Simultaneously, a broadly critical stream argues against projecting cultural-ideological regionalizations onto demographic data and vice-versa.

The chapter on linguistics does not reflect this kind of bifurcation. It describes a fairly linear evolution away from reliance on exogenous, culturalist notions of regions towards a procedural (as opposed to substantive) understanding of them. In this latter mode, the existence/operability of a certain regionalizing frame within the discipline is conditional on confirmation by linguistic markers, rather than being accepted as existing a priori. Similarly to the “critical stream” in demography, contemporary linguists (and also economists) have tended towards generating their own, intra-disciplinary concepts, which are less connected to the political and cultural legacies of earlier patterns in regionalizing knowledges.

Despite all of the above, a survey of the volume as a whole demonstrates first and foremost the confluence of research and ideology in the invention of regions. Traditional academic knowledges have greatly contributed to the construction of a value-laden, culturalist lexicon of regions on which most of us still routinely rely in referencing larger European spaces. Both in the humanities and the social sciences, practitioners have mapped onto the globe images of civilizational difference, neatly tucked in behind regional boundaries. The studies included in this selection enable the reader to trace these processes both across disciplines and across specific cases. Continuing and expanding on earlier work by some of the contributors (such as Bassin, Troebst, and Trencsényi), the volume respects the divergent disciplinary histories, paying the cost of this attention to detail and idiosyncrasies with an occasional loss of coherence or dialogue between the individual contributions. This is especially palpable towards the final chapters of the book. The present-day state of linguistics or economics seems to have little bearing on the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century genealogies of regions which the reader encounters in the first chapters. At the same time, this relative lack of coherence highlights the very justified emphasis on the collusion of other disciplines (history and political geography) with political languages of spatial division. Perhaps current regionalizing schemes prevailing in linguistics or economics could also be deconstructed as older onesschemes in interwar history and geopolitics have been deconstructed in this book, i.e. through engagement and self-reflective critique.

This volume accomplishes a great deal even if it stops short of this (i.e. offering a deconstruction of current regionalizing schemes used in linguistics or economics). It analyzes and subverts the late-nineteenth century regionalizing frames by highlighting the ideological contingencies underpinning them and adds to this a survey of contemporary, more reflexive and cautious, less sweeping trends of thinking about regions within the confines of individual disciplines. In this respect, the book amounts to a considerable reflexive achievement, and it is itself part of the cross-disciplinary trend towards the kind of greater academic autonomy its last half-dozen or so chapters aptly survey.

Gergely Romsics
Hungarian Academy of Sciences