Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

MÓNIKA BAÁRthe state and the church were different: the state should secure the realmof order and justice, while the church has a spiritual vocation. These attitudes,combined with his adoration of the French revolution, suggest thatHorváth’s relation to religion was rather peculiar. However, in Hungary,a considerable part of the liberal intellectuals of the Reform Era wereeducated in ecclesiastical schools and seminaries and, for many of them,the bounds of priesthood were just formal. Indeed, very often the first promotersof new ideas, such as Darwinism or even atheism, were clerics.Horváth presented a vivid picture of how the ideas of reformers andconservatives conflicted. For instance, in the case of the emancipation ofserfs, a reformer criticized the argument of the representative of Árvacounty who thought that “if the people have survived without this law foreight centuries, they will survive for a few more years.” But, and Horváthagain cited one of the reformers, this was a strange argument, from whichinteresting conclusions could be drawn. Following this, one can claim thatif this world could do without Christianity for a few thousand years, itwould have survived without it in the following millennium. Our ancestorswere pagans for centuries, but we do not condemn them for adoptingChristianity. For eight centuries, the peasants lived without civil rights, butit was indeed useful to introduce those laws. 18The problem of nationalities, which arose from Hungary’s peculiarposition – not only a nation subjected to Austria, but also one to which othernationalities were subjected – received considerable attention in Horváth’swork. It is widely held that the problem which arose from the conflictinginterests of the Hungarians and other nationalities was underestimated byHungarian politicians in the Reform Era. This certainly seems to be the casein Horváth’s writings. He did not tackle this issue in the 1830-1840s, andonly some minor remarks in his later works, asserting that the heterogeneityof the people hindered the development of trade and industry inMedieval Hungary, show that he was aware of this problem. With hindsight,more emphasis is put on this matter:The Hungarians, however, busied themselves with the questions of theirown reform movement, and for a long while they did not even realizehow quickly and successfully Panslavism had developed in Europe, especiallyamong those nationalities who lived in the borderlands of Hungaryunder the protection of the Hungarian constitution. 19In the 1860s, Horváth’s stance towards the nationalities echoed Kossuth’sprinciples professed in the Reform Era, i.e., that nationalities onlyhad a chance of obtaining political freedom and material developmentunder the protection of the Hungarian nationality. His explanation for36