Zsolt Nagy. Great Expectations and Interwar Realities

Zsolt Nagy’s Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941 is a welcome addition to recently published research on interwar public diplomacy. At the time, efforts to engage societies and elites of foreign countries, with the aim of making them more amenable to the foreign policy agenda of the state conducting such activities, were spreading through a slew of transnational learning processes. Nagy’s book is a valuable first attempt to gauge the inspirations, resources, and processes behind the Hungarian decision—in the wake of a lost world war and a disastrous peace—to join competing Habsburg successor states and engage in “cultural diplomacy” with ever more commitment. Notwithstanding the groundbreaking analyses that later chapters offer, the opening of a book is a disappointment. Following an insightful but somewhat unstructured introduction about how World War I propaganda morphed into public diplomacy in the interwar period, chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to a survey of Hungarian politics and political imaginaries of the period. These fall short of what could be expected, given the focus of the volume. Nagy does not make clear how the analyses he offers here relate to the subject of cultural diplomacy, and at times these sections read like an intellectual history primer. As important as Hungarian poet Endre Ady was, his poetry does not merit sustained attention in this context. Not even Gyula Szekfű’s observations on Hungarian group mentalities and the work on “national characteristics” (85) done by his Geistesgeschichte-inspired circle add much to the subject of the book (see, especially, 87–94). Similarly, mini-biographies on important political leaders such as Pál Teleki and István Bethlen seem superfluous, as they are but a recapitulation of literature available in English without direct relevance (44–50).

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