Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

The Dislocated Transylvanian HungarianStudent Body and the Processof Hungarian Nation-Building after 1918ZOLTÁN PÁLFYThe break-up of the Dual Monarchy in 1918 had decisive consequencesin the field of higher educational policies and practices in East-CentralEurope. In the case of pre-war Hungary, the structure was, even thoughlargely dominated by the Hungarian element, still a multi-ethnic educational“commonwealth.” In the successor states, the course of events almostimmediately led to the nationalization of higher educational institutions.The very existence of universities became a political issue, in the sense thatinstitutions of higher learning were perceived as direct expressions ofnational domination, of ethnic and cultural autonomy, or the lack of it.In the 1920s, the universities in the new “nation-states” lost much oftheir independence to the cause of cultural warfare. Both in Hungaryand Romania, state-engineered nationalism found the universitiesinstrumental in attaining its goals. Besides the social and ethnic compositionof student-populations, individual career-choices and academiccareers themselves were often molded by nationalist goals withina broader political framework.Together with the territories ceded to the “successor states,” Hungarylost two of its four universities. The one in Pozsony (Bratislava) was takenover by Czechoslovakia, while the other in Kolozsvár (Cluj), the secondlargest university in the former Greater Hungary, fell under Romanian sovereignty.In both cases, this meant that many of their academic staff and studentbody emigrated even before the ratification of the Peace Treaty. Also,the take-over was carried out in such a manner that not only the former academicstaff was practically dismissed, but the enrollment or continuation ofstudies for ethnic Hungarians and other minorities was also seriously hindered.Even after the first and largest wave of refugees shortly after the war,Hungarian students from the “lost territories” kept pouring into universitiesof “Trianon Hungary” throughout the 1920s.As the Horthy-regime gained ground in the early 1920s, a shiftoccurred in the activities of the government and the associations whichrepresented the refugees. The regime was marked by a revisionist orientationwhich, given the geopolitical position of the defeated country, was179