Falsifiers, Deniers and Deceivers II - 06/25/2013

I confess to experiencing a sympathetic déjà vu vis-à-vis Professor Francis Bowen when Mr. Tismaneanu, instead of addressing my arguments and evidence regarding the reality of Romanian defiance and the concrete impact of its “separate course” as reflected in the internal documents of the USSR, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, claims ever more stridently that the Romanian communist leadership “never ever tried to go beyond the limits permitted by the Kremlin.” (Tismaneanu 12/5/13, contributors.ro) Although Soviet Central Committee documents regularly described Romania’s “special course” as inflicting “serious damage” upon Kremlin policy within the alliance, within the socialist community, and globally, Mr. Tismaneanu continues to insist adamantly that Moscow only considered Romania “a sometimes annoying mosquito” and that the Kremlin never perceived any “major geopolitical risk or an alternate model of socialism” in Romania’s independent policy. Let me address these claims in reverse order.

            Moscow did in fact express repeated concern that Romania, together with China, would set up a alternate socialist model that would compete with the USSR, at least from 1965 and throughout the 1970s, and the translated Soviet documents that discuss this obsession can be found in Cold War International History Project Working Paper #65 on the website of the Woodrow Wilson Center. (CWIHP Working Paper #65, www.wilsoncenter.org, 12/2012) In May 1968 Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Grechko stated unequivocally that the Soviet alliance could not survive Romania’s departure. (Matthew J. Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (2003)) My source for this, by the way, is today senior analyst for Russia and Eurasia in the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

The USSR suffered a major geopolitical loss because of Romanian mediation of US-Chinese relations – which in turn shifted the balance of global forces. As President Nixon stated to his National Security Council in August 1969, “We have always assumed that the Chinese are hard liners and the Soviets are more reasonable. [But] Ceauşescu says that the Soviets are tougher and more aggressive than the Chinese. We must look at China on a long term basis.” (US State Department 14/8/69, history.state.gov)

Romanian mediation between Egypt and Israel was also instrumental in the Soviet “loss” of Egypt, which both the CIA and KGB concluded was the strategically most important state in the Middle East at the time. (KGB report cited in CIA, 12/1/86, foia.cia.gov) Moscow was not able to recover from either loss for the rest of the Cold War. So much for the Romanian “mosquito” and its inconsequence for European and global politics.

            In light of the above, there would seem to be little evidentiary basis for Mr. Tismaneanu’s claim that Communist Romania “never ever tried to go beyond the limits permitted by the Kremlin.” However, let’s suspend credulity and entertain the possibility a moment longer. The most plausible argument for such a claim is the fact that Romania never left the Warsaw Pact alliance before the collapse of communism. But was this because of lack of Soviet permission? Romania was never offered an alternative military alliance. And the one it did have, as objectionable as it was to Romanian leaders and policy, did in fact also constrain its partners, and did grant it access to some of their inner councils.

Would complete security isolation, surrounded by an alliance that was clearly antagonistic to it, have served Romanian interests better? I do not think so. Neither did any of the responsible Romanian leaders. But then, reasonable people may differ. In any case, as I try to show in Extorting Peace: Romania and the End of the Cold War, 1978-1989, and especially in its last five chapters, by remaining within the Warsaw Pact and exercising its influence upon alliance and Soviet military policy, Romania was able to accomplish much for which Europe and the US should be grateful.

After 1963 the notion that the Kremlin could control Romanian behavior was discredited within both intelligence and academic circles in the United States and Europe. The notion reemerged sporadically but with no effect on US policy during the 1970s, and became a serious proposition only with Romania’s international isolation during the latter 1980s. In other words, the claim of Kremlin control over Romania behavior was made credible only because no one bothered to examine it seriously any longer; just as a closer look today readily reveals the flimsiness of new raiment on that old emperor.

I find the arrogance of those who insist that the US was gullible and naïvely manipulated by communist leaders in Bucharest into perceiving a Romanian independence that did not exist stupefying. Do not misunderstand me. I have my own catalog of what I consider to be egregious policy choices that the United States is making or has made in the recent and more distant past. But that is not our subject here. And, frankly, I am much more comfortable critiquing the policy choices of states other than my own (so sue me.)

I can readily accept the hypothesis that this or that US administration was “fooled” by this or that foreign state or leader on this or that policy. I can even accept the remote possibility that two administrations of the same political coloring may have fallen into the same trap on a particular policy. Although Americans justly pride themselves on the degree and breadth of excellence with which chief executives have surrounded themselves traditionally, we are, after all, only human.

But to maintain that presidential administrations from Kennedy to Reagan (President Reagan during his first term) – which include three democratic administrations and three republican administrations – were all “fooled” by communist Romania would fail the minimal plausibility requirements of the novels currently read by my nine-year-old daughter. Perhaps Abraham Lincoln phrased the bar to credulity on this claim best when he said: “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” You just cannot. And you especially cannot when the party to be fooled possesses the combined intelligence-gathering and analytical capabilities of the United States.

Consider the following, more serious assessments. In March 1968 the CIA concluded that “It is now clear that – beyond the requirements of a simple prudence – the Romanians have never set any particular limits, on what they plan to do; it is the Soviets who must set the limits, or at least try.” The regime in Bucharest, “in fact, considers the USSR in many ways to be the chief obstacle to the achievement of Romania’s national goals and behaves accordingly,” acting “at times in ways which undercut Soviet policies in areas only very indirectly related to the question of sovereignty. (This seems to be the case, for example, in the Middle East.)” (CIA, 21/3/68, foia.cia.gov)

This was not the opinion of some lowly junior analyst that I managed to pull out of a mountain of documents asserting the contrary. It was an assessment bearing the signature of Abbot Smith, the chairman of the CIA’s Board of National Estimates and, arguably, the most senior and influential analyst in the US intelligence community. His predecessor, Sherman Kent, who is rightly considered the godfather of modern analysis by intelligence professionals in the US, considered Romania a de facto partner after it tore a hole in the electronic curtain that had previously blocked Western broadcasts from reaching into the USSR. This was yet another strategic blow delivered by Bucharest that earned it ranking as one of the “main subversive centers” alongside the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Israel, a ranking it preserved in KGB documents as late as November 1989. (CWIHP Working Paper #65, www.wilsoncenter.org, 12/2012)

Looking back over a lifetime of assessing the Soviet Bloc, another senior CIA analyst noted in the 1980s that Romania’s “particularly risky” independence had “successfully redefined the role of a member of the Bloc, maintaining ties that are mostly formal and confining Soviet influence almost entirely to the negative,” while “all of its moves and positions have been swallowed by the post-Stalin Soviet leaderships, which sometimes seem less tolerant than simply outplayed.” According to the retiring career officer, “all the East European states have benefited from Romania’s insistence on (and the USSR’s recognition of) the right of members to assert independent views in Bloc councils.” (CIA, 12/1/82, foia.cia.gov)

Regardless of what political odor the Central Intelligence Agency and its analysts may currently enjoy (or suffer), I would trust their time-tested assessments over those of Mr. Tismaneanu even had I not read the internal Warsaw Pact documents that fully confirm them. Assertions that Romania defiance and opposition during the Cold War was insignificant and had no impact on the geopolitical confrontation between East and West are simply wrong. Such assertions were debunked at the time by reliable intelligence assessment, and their wrongheadedness has been confirmed beyond doubt in the documents of the other Warsaw Pact members that have come to light since the collapse of communism. No amount of denial or negation, and no attempt at deception or prestidigitation will change that fundamental reality.

During the mid-19^th century, Professor Bowen was hindered in the degree to which he could directly respond to his attackers by considerations of professional and social prestige (none of his attackers were academic experts, specialists in the field or, for that matter, university professors.) Joyfully, I am not encumbered by such limitations. Should Mr. Tismaneanu choose to emerge from behind his careful insinuations and engage me directly on the arguments I present, he will find a willing partner in public discussion.

But fear not, dear reader. I will not hold my breath.

This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro 

Falsifiers, Deniers and Deceivers I - 05/27/2013

During 1849-1850 Harvard history professor Francis Bowen challenged the accepted wisdom that the Hungarian revolution led by Lajos Kossuth was primarily a struggle for freedom and a democratic republic. Instead, Bowen pointed out, Hungary fought mainly against its own non-Hungarian nationalities – the Slavs, Germans and Romanians (Wallachs). And that fight was brought about by the Hapsburg Empire’s eleventh-hour decree of equal rights for all in the empire that threatened the absolutist privileges of the Hungarian aristocracy, which up to that point enjoyed full legal immunities, paid no taxes, and, regarding the Romanians specifically, denied them any representation in the Transylvanian Diet whatsoever. Bowen further described from first-hand sources General Bem’s campaign of atrocity against the Romanians that “almost exceeded belief” and the self-hating chauvinism of General Damianich, who declared to his co-ethnics that “I come to exterminate you, root and branch; and then I will send a ball through my own head, that the last Serb may vanish from the face of the earth.” (F. Bowen, “The War of the Races in Hungary,” North American Review, 1850: 132; F. Bowen, “The Rebellion of the Slavonic, Wallachian and German Hungarians against the Magyars,” North American Review, 1851: 226)

            Bowen was not combating European opinion as much as the popular opinion of his own countrymen. Swayed by the vision of another new democratic republic in international politics, by the apparent vindication of the still unusual American model, and, not least, by a Hungarian propaganda whose best weapon was Kossuth’s extraordinary eloquence, even the US Presidential Administration – and the Massachusetts State Senate also sitting on the board of Harvard University – briefly made public support of Kossuth and his revolution an aspect of American policy.

Bowen was subsequently attacked as a “falsifier” and “perverter” of historical truth. He was criticized for relying only on sources that supported his argument. There was a concerted effort to discredit him as a plagiarizer of both words and ideas. It was insinuated that he was a front for, or even an agent of, Austria. And he was openly accused of being a proponent of Absolutism – and thus an enemy of American democracy – and an “admirer of Haynau and Metternich,” at the time the bêtes noire of international public opinion. “I do not believe,” stated one detractor, “that there can be found elsewhere in the English language in the same compass, so many blunders, so many falsehoods, so much literary dishonesty.” Bowen was taken to task for opposing “the general opinion, not of this country only, but of the civilized world.” (R. Carter, The Hungarian Controversy: An Exposure of the Falsifications and Perversions of the Slanderers of Hungary (1852); M. Putnam, The North American Review On Hungary (1851))

Bowen’s critics focused much of their attack on his sources, describing one of the most important, “which has furnished him with not less than a dozen of his citations,” as “a production of no value whatever, and not worth noticing.” (Putnam (1851): 343) The work in question – Hungary: Its Constitution and Its Catastrophe (1850) – was derided as “too contemptible for serious notice” and its author alleged to have been “an Austrian agent,” or “an Englishman in the Austrian service (there are hundreds in the [Austrian] army,” or a “paid advocate of Metternich or Haynau.” (Carter (1852): 25) In fact, the source was British constitutional expert Sir Travers Twiss, Fellow of the Royal Society, Counselor to the Queen, professor of civil law and political economy at Oxford University and professor of international law at King’s College London. Twiss was often called upon to aid British Embassies on the thorniest legal issues of international diplomacy.

            Not one to shrink from a challenge, Bowen marshaled more than a dozen German, French, British and Hungarian sources on the topic only to find himself accused of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors (including a “bitter aversion” for the Hungarian language and an “intense hatred of the Hungarians.”) In the course of these attacks his livelihood, and even his life, were threatened. In the last such overt incursion against the freedom of academic expression at Harvard, in February 1951 the Massachusetts State Senate used its position on the Harvard board to remove Bowen from the University’s McLean Chair of history.

Harvard University, led by a president who had occupied the same chair of history immediately before Bowen, held the allegations as unwarranted and entirely spurious. The Massachusetts State Senate was removed from the Harvard Board altogether – never to return – and in 1853 Bowen was rehired and unanimously appointed to the Chair of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, a position he held actively for the next 36 years. Harvard University continues to award an annual Francis Bowen Prize in Moral Philosophy to this day.

I feel some affinity with Professor Bowen. While making no claim to his erudition (Bowen, after all, graduated first in the Harvard class of 1833), I recently published two volumes – With Friends Like These: The Soviet Bloc’s Clandestine War Against Romania and Extorting Peace: The Romanian-Warsaw Pact Clash and the End of the Cold War – concerning Romania’s behavior as a state actor within the Soviet alliance, within the wider socialist community, and internationally. In them, I challenge previously accepted wisdom with new evidence proving that Romania was not the Soviet Union’s “Trojan horse” in the West (or anywhere else), that Romanian policies and actions significantly constrained Soviet international behavior during the Cold War, and that the Kremlin “permitted” Romanian independence only the same sense that the Moscow “permitted” the independent behavior of the USA – because it was compelled to do so for lack of any viable alternative and not because it did not desperately desire and actively seek to do otherwise.

In taking on conventional wisdom I was fully aware of the need to provide a broad array of specific cases with thousands (about 5,000) of sourced footnotes in order to prove that a paradigm shift in interpretation was warranted. On this point I stand with Bowen that “questions of fact, when by any means the prejudices of the community have been excited in relation to them, can be settled only by abundance of testimony; and we have therefore summoned into court a crowd of witnesses … whose united and harmonious testimony can leave no doubt upon a mind of ordinary capacity, however unwelcome the truth may be, or how obstinate soever the bias by which its reception at an earlier day was prevented.” (Bowen (1851): 236-237) Indeed, the manner in which cognitive biases operate, and how they operated regarding US-Romanian and Soviet-Romanian relations in particular, is a central theme of my work.

In various attacks which Professor Bowen would have found familiar, I have since been accused of “falsifying” and distorting history. My work, some claim, is “unilateral.” (A. Pavelescu, 3/4/11, wordpress.com) My name, others suggest, has been placed on the opinions and work of others. (C. Vasile, 17/12/11, contributors.ro). And some even claim that I am a front – or agent – of Romanian intelligence, a proponent of “National Stalinism,” and an admirer of and apologist for Nicolae Ceauşescu – the bête noir of international public opinion for much of the last quarter-century. (V. Tismaneanu, 11/05/13, 20/12/11, 30/5/11, contributors.ro)

More imaginatively, I am accused of posing as an American spy (after years of publicly refuting media allegations that I was “the CIA’s antenna”) and as having requested and been granted Romanian asylum from repressive American democracy during the Ceausescu regime – although probably not for economic reasons. (A. Bădin, 18 & 19/10/12, badin.ro)

Of course, any challenge to conventional or accepted wisdom is bound to stir up emotion, controversy and criticism. Such contrary revelations have not only to be proved but to be proved over and over again, in enough specific cases that the new contours emerge clearly, before paradigms and interpretations are changed. There is no mystery or conspiracy here. Paradigm change is admitted only with great reluctance by those who have grown accustomed to the old paradigm, and especially by those who have based their own interpretations and even their careers upon the now obsolete paradigm. What will remain of their work if their orienting foundations are shown to be little more than clay feet?

That said, many of the allegations listed above are obviously intended to distract attention from the books. Their aim is not to engage the arguments contained within them but to refocus attention away from them; and upon anything that can in some way be construed as culpable in the attitudes or behaviors of the author, either discovered or invented. Some detractors have indirectly appealed to US institutions and authorities to join in their campaign by alleging a threat to US interests in Romania, and even to Romania democracy itself, caused by my subversive labors. I have, for example, been accused of seeking to undermine US policy and discredit the CIA.

In 1850-1852 Professor Bowen was subject to a similar offensive involving the misrepresentation of his sources, spurious attacks on his methodology, and allegations of insidious motivation and clandestine agency. One detractor openly acknowledged in a 66 page diatribe that the first 50 pages were devoted to attacking Bowen’s sources and how he used them (and, although not openly admitted, his “dubious” motivations for writing on the topic). (Carter (1852)) The final portions of that diatribe comprised simple denials and reiterations of the initial contention – from the same or similar sources – that prompted Bowen’s articles in the first place.

Thus, declared the critics, there had never been “since the earliest times, any political distinctions in Hungary, founded on difference of nationality,” and Hungary, “never attempted to proscribe the languages of the non-Magyar inhabitants of Hungary, or to impose the Magyar upon them by violence.” (Putnam (1851), p. 293; Carter (1852), p. 54) The proofs offered were the assertions of Hungarian officials and Hungarian aristocrats in Europe and America, which consistently reflected only what was most liberal and generous in Hungarian political thinking at the time. The Romanians/Wallachs, the critics insisted, enjoyed full equal rights and “any misapprehension on this subject that could exist among the Wallachs is only to be accounted for by their extreme ignorance.” (Putnam (1851), p. 332)

The evident failure to comprehend the broad difference between declaratory and implemented policy, between expressed intent and actual behavior, was astoundingly naïve. Bowen’s U.S. critics appear not to have known, for example, that Budapest nullified the application of equal rights in Transylvania as soon as it was decreed by Vienna in 1848 (thereby mobilizing the great assembly at Blaj). Limited to official Hungarian declarations, those critics were compelled to rely on falsifications, simple denials, and (self-) deceptions in campaigning against Professor Bowen, his writings, and the variety of his sources and witnesses.

This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro 

The Necessity of Trianon - 04/07/2013

The relentless repression of non-Hungarian ethnic identities steadily lost Budapest its international supporters during the half-century before World War I. Admirers of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy now became its most exigent critics as they looked beyond the façade of its allegedly enlightened administration in territories populated in the majority by other ethnicities. (R. W. Seton Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, 1908). The situation of ethnic Romanians in Transylvania on eve of the war was bleak. Hungarian authorities met Romanian pleas for relief from political, economic and religious repression, from forced assimilation and from the Hungarian colonization of Romania areas with even more of the same. (Keith Hitchens, Rumania 1866-1947, 1994) Viennese authorities correctly predicted that continued Hungarian refusal of basic rights for the Romanians would bring about the end of the Monarchy.

The Trianon “moment” was interpreted uniformly by Hungarian historiography as an extraordinary injustice and a grevious wound. In fact, the Trianon Treaty redressed one of the most enduring injustices in Europe. For the first time in several hundred years the majority population in Transylvania was fully enfranchised, was relieved of systematic economic discrimination, was permitted religious freedom, and was not subjected the capricious chauvinism of a “master race.”

Nor did Trianon simply reverse the roles of the discriminator and the discriminated. The formerly privileged Hungarian minority was not politically disenfranchised. It did not suffer punitive restrictions on its religious practices. And, apart from the long-overdue Land Reform that also redistributed the property of large landowners in the Old Kingdom, it was not subjected to policies of economic discrimination. (David Mitrany, The Land & The Peasant In Rumania: The War And Agrarian Reform (1917-1921), 1930)

Of course Trianon was imperfect and minority populations continued to exist on both sides of the new border. Of course, equal rights were embedded in the minorities provisions imposed on Romania during the peace negotiations. And of course legacy resentments and individual discrimination persisted. But none of these factors diminish the fundamental innovation of constitutional and legal equality in the region.

Trianon was undoubtedly a wound. But Budapest purposefully kept it open and worried until it became gangrenous, inexorably leading the country back towards ruinous war. With the recovery of territories lost under Trianon as its number one priority, Hungary developed an abiding interest in forcibly changing borders and creating instability amongst its neighbors currently holding those territories in order to facilitate their future transfer.

To this end Budapest actively sought to obstruct any fundamental ethnic reconciliation in the region and especially the development of a common Hungarian-Romanian destiny. On the contrary, Horthy and successive Hungarian governments made it their mission to instill the belief among Hungarians everywhere that Transylvania’s unification with Romania was only a temporary occupation under which the Hungarian minority was subjected to policies of relentless brutality and forced assimilation; demonizing the Romanians and their minority policies in the process. Horthy’s October 1919 instruction stated interwar Hungary’s intentions explicitly: “Until the time is ripe for an attack, pacific relations should be maintained with Romania, yet every opportunity must be used to isolate it diplomatically and an active irredentist organization must continue to exist in Transylvania.” (Gyula Juhász, Hungarian Foreign Policy (1919-1945), 1979)

As incitement of ethnic hatred and instigation of violence became hallmarks of (clandestine) Hungarian policy towards its neighbors, domestic politics also slid towards extreme chauvinism and paramilitary violence. The “White Terror” carried out under Horthy’s largely approving eye by torture and execution squads (the so-called “officers’ detachments”) during 1919-1921, and the proliferation of right-radical paramilitary organizations thereafter, exemplified the problem.

Budapest enlisted Hungarian émigré organizations throughout the world in its irredentist project. At the World Hungarian conference held in Budapest in 1927 the leading Hungarian-American organization pledged its support for territorial revisionism, which it duly honored through uninterrupted lobbying of US administrations. Horthy even managed to recruit British ambassadors to undermine London’s support for Bucharest, and a British media magnate to lobby the Führer to attack Romania. (Neil Tweedie and Peter Day, “When Rothermere urged Hitler to invade Romania,” Telegraph, 1 March 2005) Demonstrating that any and all means were deemed justified in this endeavor, Horthy, who ostentatiously advertised his anti-Communist and anti-Soviet sentiments, also collaborated with Stalin for the division of Romania. (Tatiana Volokitina, Tofik Islamov and Tatiana Poliakova, editors, Transilvianskii Vopros: Vengero-Rumynskii Territorialnii Spor I SSSR, 1940-1946. Dokumenti, 2000)

Throughout, Budapest never accepted responsibility for its centuries-long repression of the majority Romanian population in Transylvania. Failure to fully acknowledge that burden, to examine it in all of its aspects, rendered Budapest incapable of then placing it aside and moving on. Hungarian political elites could hardly set aside the past and move forward when they refused to recognize that the roots of those abusive policies were embedded in state policy still, contaminating the education system and skewing public perceptions.

Instead, Budapest continued pursuing 19^th century policies of brutal assimilation and, when Horthy’s forces entered northern Transylvania in September 1940 they systematically murdered the intellectual and spiritual elite of Romanian settlements. These were not atrocities – the independent crimes of individual officers, soldiers or units disregarding standing orders. They were punitive actions specifically ordered by Hungarian military commanders within a campaign knowingly pursued by the Hungarian political leadership.

If Romanian perspectives were lost in the midst of this campaign, one can imagine the pressures and forces that engulfed individual Hungarian elites with enough foresight to recognize the need for change. Eloquent in this regard was the remarkable protest of Foreign Minister Pál Teleki against the policy of falsely alleging minority abuse as justification for Hungarian military attacks on its neighbors. In his famous April 1941 suicide note the Hungarian foreign minister condemned his country’s leadership for having placed itself “on the side of scoundrels, for there is not a word of truth in the stories about atrocities. Not even against Germans, let alone against Hungarians!” (Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: Fascism in Hungary and Romania, 1970)

That autumn Ivan Héjjas, one of Horthy’s favorite “White Terror” commanders, and Baron Ede Atzél, who headed the “Transylvanian Society for the Evidence of the Population” responsible for monitoring, dispossessing and excluding ethnic Romanians from the regional economy, submitted a plan for the elimination of Romanian ethnicity in record time. Approved by Hungary’s Prime Minister at the beginning of 1942, the plan proposed the same policy that had driven Teleki to suicide, stipulating that “in order to justify official reprisals against the Romanians,” Hungarian commandos “who speak Romanian, dress in national Romanian costumes [and posing] as a Romanian group, would launch terrorist attacks against groups of Transylvanian Germans and against some Hungarian groups.” (23 August 1944: Documents, vol. I, 1984)

The new Hungarian authorities in Transylvania pursued a four-year program of ethnic cleansing against the Romanians. One, it is worth noting, that was not reciprocated by Romanian authorities against the ethnic Hungarians remaining under their jurisdiction. After repeated Romanian appeals – and in accordance with provisions of the Vienna Award/Diktat that transferred northern Transylvania to Hungary – a mixed German-Italian commission of inquiry was sent to investigate in 1941. Another was sent in 1943 at Budapest’s request, apparently as part of a misguided effort to nullify the Hungarian culpability revealed in the first inquiry.

The 1943 commission again identified the problem as the “brutal discriminations against the Romanian population by Hungarian civil servants and private persons,” and the underlying cause as the “fundamental attitude” Hungarian authorities openly expressed that “Romanians, both as a race and a culture, are at a much lower level than the Hungarians and thus cannot pretend to the same treatment with the State nationalities.”  (Vasile Puşcaş, Transylvania şi aranjamentele europene: (1940-1944), 1995)  

The German-Italian commission further reported that, under Horthy’s administration, Romanian-language education was shut down and Romanian educators driven from Transylvania or reassigned into Hungary proper. Entire populations of villages were expropriated and immediately evicted. All Romanian civil servants were fired and those who wished to receive pensions already earned, who desired state employment, or who wanted to be released from military service had first to convert to the ‘Hungarian’ churches (Roman Catholic and Reformed). Romanian names were required to be Magyarized in all official documents. Romanian Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches were denied official recognition and destroyed while Hungarian authorities stood by.

It was as if Budapest wanted to underscore in the very darkest of colors how just and extraordinarily necessary the Treaty of Trianon really had been.

This blog first appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro

The Statue in the Capital Building - 03/22/2013

One Hundred and Sixty Five Years Ago, Hungarian leader Lajos Kossuth led a revolution that drew the admiration of the Western world. Under the slogans of liberty and equality, Kossuth sought a democratic republic for the Hungarian-administered sections of the Hapsburg Empire, run from Vienna, and the Hungarian struggle was the front-page topic of the international press, including, notably, the journal run by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

            Few countries were so taken with Kossuth and his revolution as the United States of America. The pro-Hungarian bias in America was profound, and almost completely unrelated to ethnicity. They were democrats like us, and they sought to create a republic, as had we. Of course, to the extent that America was an immigrant country and ethnic Hungarians made up some of its population, they were also “us” in fact, but the same could be said for virtually every ethnicity in Europe.

This identification of the USA with Kossuth and the Hungarian cause was strongly reinforced by America’s sense of vulnerability. Barely seventy years old in 1848, American democracy was among the very few republics in an international system still populated largely by Kingdoms and Empires, and knew itself to be so. Indeed, US President Zachary Taylor saw in Kossuth and Hungary the opportunity both to shore up his domestic support and to mark America’s grand entry onto the stage of international politics. The US President even sent an emissary to Europe to recognize Kossuth’s Hungary, which only a combination of natural caution, Austrian espionage, and the rapid collapse of the revolution managed to prevent.

Thus, with the help of official American intervention, Kossuth arrived in New York at the beginning of December 1851, riding high on a wave popularity that few foreign leaders have ever enjoyed, before or since. The Kossuth phenomenon was greatly aided by the coincidental launching of a new daily newspaper, the New York Times, which made of Kossuth’s visit the platform for its debut before the American public. The New York Times followed Kossuth’s every step and every word, describing or repeating all of them in over 600 articles, including detailed description of each plate on the menu of the many multi-course meals in the dizzying number of speaking engagements held for him throughout the country to raise money for the Hungarian cause.

            The extent of the commitment of Washington elites is illustrated by the case of Francis Bowen. The extraordinary Professor Bowen held the Chair of History at Harvard College and ran the most influential American literary journal at the time, the North American Review. Bowen wrote three powerful articles on an aspect of Kossuth’s revolution of which no one else dared speak, entitled The War between the Races in Hungary, The Politics of Europe and The Rebellion of the Slavonic, Wallachian and German Hungarians against the Magyars.  Along with the campaign to discredit Bowen as a “falsifier” of history and “slanderer of Hungary,” and to deny any Hungarian abuse of other ethnic groups, the political pressure from Washington was so great that Harvard was compelled to deprive Bowen of his chair, although he was enthusiastically rehired as Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity on the condition that he no longer write about the unspeakable. According to the head of the Massachusetts Senate at the time, “a man who is not sympathetic to the Hungarian cause was unfit to teach history.”

All of this was possible because, along with democratic and republican aims, America and its Hungarian visitor shared yet one more thing – a canker at the heart of their revolutionary projects. Kossuth sought liberty and equality only for the privileged Hungarian and German ethnic groups (a third group, the Szeklers becoming assimilated with the Hungarian), while the Romanians and Southern Slavs were denied both. Although America was fervently dedicated to liberty and equality it is impossible to ignore the fact that, through the mid-19^th century, those boons were granted only to European Americans.

Native Americans – “Red Indians” – were viewed as dangerous barbarians to be eliminated while “Negroes” were viewed as beasts of burden and consigned to slavery (indeed, President Taylor, who served until July 1850, owned slaves himself). The extent to which American liberalism co-existed with extraordinary racial chauvinism, even amongst the most convinced of liberal democrats, is strikingly illustrated in the 1876 call by the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which replaced the North American Review as the molder of US intellectual attitudes. America’s leading man of letters at the time, William Dean Howells, advocated the “extermination of the red savages of the plains,” and characterized the “red man” as “a hideous demon, whose malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence.”

The sharing of both genuinely democratic and deeply chauvinist attitudes by 19^th century US elites and Hungarian revolutionaries explains something of the failure of disenfranchised Romanian majorities to gain a hearing for their plight in the United States. Over the following decades the immigrant-based American republic would find itself compelled to excise this canker, if not all of its consequences. In the aftermath of its failed revolutionary experiment, Hungary would be led down a different path.

Consequently, the lot of Romanians in Transylvania changed very little after the 1848 revolution. In great contrast to the liberation of the serfs in the rest of Europe, Romanians remained under a neo-serfdom barely discernible from their pre-1848 status. British travel author John Paget noted in 1850 that while “the rest of the inhabitants” enjoyed “nearly equal rights” in Transylvania, the Romanians occupied the same place there as did “the native Indians and negroes in America.” Fifteen years later another British author, Charles Boner, who married into one of the ruling Hungarian families in Transylvania, claimed the Romanians to be “a wild horde, without a trace of civilization” that “pillaged, burned, and murdered” and “were little or no better than a tribe of Red Indians.” Hungarian officialdom was no less chauvinistic, shamelessly affirming that “you can yoke [Romanians] like oxen, from whom they only differ in that they can speak.” (Kossuth Hirjlapja, literally, Kossuth’s Newsletter, 24 October 1848)

            When Budapest finally gained greater freedom from Vienna through the transformation of the Hapsburg Empire into the Dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the Ausgleich of 1867, their treatment became harsher still as Hungarian elites attempted to eradicate the Romanian/Wallach ethnicity and assimilate them through ever more forceful measures, justified in the official media with the argument that it was “natural that Hungarians should develop to the detriment of the other nationalities which they conquered and assimilated [and] not at all in the interest of the state that the nationalities’ social status should progress.” (Budapesti Hírlap, No. 345, 1891)  The situation did not improve for the next fifty years, on the contrary, which in large part explains the strength of the desire for unification with the Romanian Kingdom, not only among Romanians but among other non-Hungarian ethnic groups in the region (witness the stand of the
Saxon Pastors Stephan Ludwig Roth and Karl Obert).  

This blog appeared in Romanian translation at Adevarul.ro 

Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Stuggle,” Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung, no. 194, 19 January 1849, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm  

                              

John Paget, Hungary and Transylvania; With Remarks on Their Condition, Social, Political, and Economical, volume II, London, John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1850 http://depts.washington.edu/cartah/text_archive/boner/btoc.shtml.

Charles Boner, Transylvania; Its Products and Its People, London, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1865 http://depts.washington.edu/cartah/text_archive/boner/btoc.shtml.

T. Mills Kelly, “America's First Attempt at Intervention in East Central Europe,” East European Quarterly, no. 1, vol. 9 (Spring 1995), http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17001976.html

Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History, NY, Hill and Wang, 2006

Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press, for Thirty Years: Progress of American Journalism from 1840 to 1870, Hartford, Conn, A. S. Hale And Company, and Chicago, Geo. W. Rogers, 1870, http://archive.org/details/henryjraymondnew00inmave

Elmer Davis, History of the New York Times, 1851-1921, New York, The New York Times, 1921, http://archive.org/details/historyofthenewy008449mbp

Francis Bowen, “The War of Races in Hungary,” The North American Review, vol. 70, no. 146 (January 1850), http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/n/nora/nora.1850.html

“The Kossuth Dinner. Magnificent Banquet. Kossuth’s Great Speech,” The New York Times, 12 December 1851

Francis Bowen, “The Rebellion of the Slavonic, Wallachian and German Hungarians against the Magyars,” The North American Review, vol. 72, no. 150 (January 1851), http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/n/nora/nora.1851.html

Robert Carter, The Hungarian Controversy: An Exposure of the Falsifications and Perversions of the Slanderers of Hungary, Boston, Redding & Company, 1852, http://archive.org/details/hungariancontro00cartgoog

R. W. Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, London, A. Constable & Co., Ltd, 1908, http://archive.org/details/hungariancontro00cartgoog