Histoire de la nation hongroise

Catherine Horel's book represents the most radical attempt on record to reorganize components of a 'standard' national history of Hungary, yielding a highly conceptual and novel synthesis.The experiment was conducted-one would assume-in order to escape the drabness of a bird's eye narrative that had been told one too many times, but also to make an important point about this history.Horel, who is a leading expert on Central European, especially Habsburg and post-Habsburg intellectual, social, and cultural history while also the author of a well-regarded monograph on Mikls Horthy, is certainly the right person to attempt such a reconstruction of Hungary's 'national story' .Commanding a vast reservoir of knowledge about the country and the broader contexts of its history, she skillfully connects chronologically distant events and processes in the non-linear narratives that make up her book.The emerging image is not only unusual and far from boring-it is genuinely insightful: documenting the anxieties and obsessions of modern elites with nationhood, territory, and sovereignty, Horel succeeds in making a convincing case about how to interpret the dilemmas of belated modernization and nation-building, fragmented, non-sovereign experiences of statehood, and pervasive intercommunal conflicts that frame the past of not only Hungarians, but those of most East Central European peoples, as well.The insecurities that plague the nation-building efforts of Hungarian elites in the modern period have historical antecedents.As a prelude of what is to come, Horel offers an observation early on in her book about three uncertain, pliable relationships across the centuries that-unlike in Western European states-failed to achieve stable, institutionalized forms (p.10).Uncertainty about territory (where do our lands end? how secure are we in their possession?), about the state-nation nexus (whose state is it?that of a dynasty, an ethnically defined nation, or a political community or that of several political communities?), and even about the boundaries of

Art · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics