How a steppe confederation became a European state

Where the Hungarians came from

The Hungarians took possession of the Carpathian Basin between 862 and 895, arriving from the Pontic steppes as a confederation of seven tribes under a centralised steppe leadership, and the Principality of Hungary was established in the late ninth century by Álmos and his son Árpád.

That origin is the reason for everything unusual about the country. A steppe confederation settled permanently in the middle of Latin Christendom, kept its own language, and then adopted the religion and the political forms of the region it had settled in, which left it inside Europe and unrelated to any of its neighbours.

The settlement was of a basin rather than of a stretch of open country. The Carpathians enclose the whole area on the north and east, the Danube runs through the middle of it, and the Hungarian state has occupied some portion of that single geographical unit continuously since the ninth century.

The conversion followed within two generations. Hungary was recognised as an Apostolic Kingdom under Stephen I, who according to later Hungarian tradition was crowned with the Holy Crown of Hungary on the first day of the second millennium in the capital city of Esztergom, with the crown sent by Pope Sylvester II.

What the Mongols and the Ottomans did

Hungary was invaded by the Mongols in 1241 and the Hungarian army was defeated disastrously at the Battle of Mohi, after which King Béla IV fled the field and the kingdom suffered a major blow through 1241 and 1242.

The recovery from that produced a kingdom that reached its height in the fifteenth century. The library of King Matthias, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, held the greatest collection of chronicles, philosophy and science in Europe at the time apart from the Vatican's, and it was destroyed in 1526.

That date is the second catastrophe and the larger one. Events between 1490 and 1526 created the conditions for the loss of independence: internal conflict, a peasant rebellion led by György Dózsa in 1514 that was crushed by the nobility, and an Ottoman Empire expanding into a weakened neighbour.

After the Ottoman victory the kingdom was divided and a divided nobility elected two kings, and Ottoman forces continued to expand until 1556. The country spent the following century and a half split three ways, between Ottoman rule, Habsburg rule and a semi-independent Transylvania.

One consequence of Ottoman rule was religious. The Turks were indifferent to which Christian denomination their Hungarian subjects practised, so a majority of Hungarians under Ottoman rule became Protestant, largely Calvinist, because Habsburg counter-Reformation efforts could not reach them.

The three-way division lasted long enough to become the country's basic political geography. Transylvania in the east held a Hungarian princely court and a measure of independence between the two empires, the Habsburg strip in the north and west held the nobility that would later govern, and the Ottoman centre held the plain and the old capital.

The reconquest came in 1686, two years after an unsuccessful attempt, when an army of the Holy League of over 74,000 men including German, Croat, Dutch, Hungarian, English, Spanish, Czech and Italian troops retook Buda. What replaced Ottoman rule was Habsburg rule, and a series of anti-Habsburg uprisings followed.

What the reform generation wanted

Hungarian nationalism emerged among intellectuals influenced by the Enlightenment and Romanticism during the period of reforms between 1825 and 1848, and it grew rapidly.

The language was the centre of it. Magyar replaced Latin as the official language of the country, which sounds like an administrative detail and was the whole argument: a nobility that had conducted its politics in Latin for eight centuries decided that the peasants' language was the national one.

On 15 March 1848 mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda enabled reformists to push through a list of Twelve Demands, and the Hungarian Diet used the wider revolutions in the Habsburg lands to enact the April Laws, a comprehensive legislative programme.

The war of independence that followed was defeated by Russian and Austrian forces together, and General Artúr Görgey surrendered in August 1849. The Austrian marshal Julius Freiherr von Haynau became governor and on 6 October ordered the execution of thirteen leaders of the Hungarian army.

Eighteen years later the same empire made terms. Military defeats including Königgrätz in 1866 forced internal reform, and the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 created a dual monarchy in which Hungary governed itself in most respects. The half century that followed built the Budapest that exists now, with the parliament, the avenues and the bridges laid out for a state more than twice the size of the one that would inherit them.

What Trianon removed

Austria-Hungary collapsed after the First World War, and the subsequent Treaty of Trianon in 1920 established Hungary's current borders, with the loss of 72% of its historical territory, 58% of its population and 32% of its ethnic Hungarians.

Those three figures are the ones that matter and they measure different things. The territorial loss went to Romania, to the new Czechoslovakia and to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The population loss included large non-Hungarian populations that had been governed from Budapest. The third figure counts Hungarians who woke up as minorities in other states.

The sequence leading there was rapid and violent. The monarchy collapsed politically in the autumn of 1918, the First Hungarian Republic was proclaimed on 16 November 1918, and most of the territories eventually ceded came under foreign occupation between November 1918 and mid-January 1919. Transylvanian Romanians declared union with Romania on 1 December 1918.

A brief communist takeover followed, accompanied by a red terror, and then a reaction against it called the white terror, which continued until late 1920 when right-wing paramilitaries were suppressed. Parliamentary elections were held in January 1920 with about 40% of the population eligible to vote, including women for the first time.

The borders were decided in Hungary's absence. The Paris Peace Conference discussed the question between February and April 1919 and made only small modifications later, and Hungary was invited on 1 December 1919. The country that emerged spent the interwar decades as a right-wing state advocating a nationalist Christian policy, with revision of the treaty as its organising foreign objective.

What the Second World War cost

The Kingdom of Hungary joined the Axis, and Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy used the two Vienna Awards to enforce Hungarian claims to territories lost in 1920, which bound the country to the alliance by giving it back what it most wanted.

The arrangement ended when it was tested. Aware of secret Hungarian negotiations with the British and Americans, Hitler ordered German troops to occupy Hungary in March 1944. Soviet forces crossed the border in September 1944, and the announcement of an armistice with the Soviet Union on 15 October 1944 was overridden by a German operation that installed the Arrow Cross regime.

A provisional government was formed on 28 December 1944 under Béla Miklós, and for a period two rival governments each claimed legitimacy while the territory controlled by the Arrow Cross shrank.

The military losses were calculated by Tamás Stark of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at 300,000 to 310,000, including 110,000 to 120,000 killed in battle and 200,000 missing in action or held as prisoners in the Soviet Union. The civilian toll, including the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews after the German occupation, belongs to the same period and was heavier.

What the crushed revolution left behind

The revolution of 1956 against Soviet domination was crushed when Khrushchev sent the Red Army into Hungary on 4 November 1956, and Soviet tanks took the airfields, road junctions and bridges immediately.

Fighting took place across the country and Hungarian forces were quickly defeated, with an estimated 20,000 people killed, nearly all during the Soviet intervention. The repression that followed imprisoned 21,600 people, interned 13,000 and killed 400, and it fell on democrats, liberals and reformist communists alike.

What came after the repression is the part that made Hungary different. In the early 1960s the leadership announced a policy whose motto counted anyone who did not actively oppose the system as an ally of it, inverting the previous formulation, which had counted anyone not actively supporting it as an enemy, and it declared a general amnesty. The cultural climate eased somewhat after 1960, and the country acquired more creative freedom than its neighbours had.

The economic version arrived in 1966, when the central committee approved the New Economic Mechanism to rebuild the economy, raise productivity, make the country more competitive in world markets and create the prosperity that would keep it politically quiet. Two decades of relative domestic calm followed, with minor reforms conceded under pressure from both directions.

How the system ended

The transition to a western-style democracy was among the smoothest in the former Soviet bloc, and it was negotiated rather than won in the street.

By late 1988 activists inside the party and the bureaucracy and intellectuals in Budapest were pressing for change, some as reform socialists and others in movements that became parties. In 1989 parliament adopted a package that included trade union pluralism, freedom of association, assembly and the press, a new electoral law, and in October a radical revision of the constitution.

A central committee plenum in February 1989 endorsed a multiparty system in principle and accepted the description of October 1956 as a popular uprising, which was the point at which the official history changed. In June 1989 the country reburied Imre Nagy, his associates and symbolically all other victims of 1956, and a National Round Table met that summer to negotiate the terms of the change.

The Soviet Union agreed in April 1989 to withdraw its forces by June 1991, and it did: around 100,000 military and civilian personnel with about 27,000 pieces of equipment left, moved in 35,000 railway cars. In a session held between 16 and 20 October 1989 parliament legislated for multiparty elections and turned the People's Republic into the Republic of Hungary.

The first free parliamentary election was held on 20 March 1990 and functioned as a plebiscite on communism, which the reformed communists lost badly. The decade that followed brought a sharp fall in living standards, aggressive privatisation under the threat of state bankruptcy, and governments that alternated as voters punished each in turn.

NATO membership came first, in the second half of the 1990s, and the European Union agreed in 2002 to admit Hungary with nine other countries, with accession taking effect in 2004.

The two decades between the end of communism and accession were spent doing three things at once: building a parliamentary democracy from a single-party state, converting a planned economy into a market one, and negotiating entry into the western institutions. Each of those was hard on its own and the combination cost successive governments their majorities, which is why the 1990s produced a change of direction at almost every election. Eleven centuries after the arrival in the basin, the country was inside a European structure it had joined by choice rather than by conquest or defeat. Hungary: politics goes into the state that inheritance produced.