Abstract
Relatively little is known about what is probably one of the most frequent, yet often dubious attempts in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe to expand the official list of minorities that have been made by non-recognised groups in Hungary since the early 2000s. Moreover, there had also been several unsuccessful attempts even before the adoption of the country's 1993 Minority Act. Therefore, the major aim of the research is, after outlining the main features of the historical and political background, to present and analyse the attempts which aimed at achieving minority recognition, especially those made after the adoption of the minority law. In doing so, it examines the conceptualisation tendencies, the notions and conditions that applicants must meet, and the operationalisation practices that prevailed. Overall, the Hungarian case illustrates well that not all minorities considered as existing socially - based on self-identifications and objective criteria - meet the substantive and procedural legal requirements of the law. In other cases, both the declared individual affiliations and the existence of a group and of separate objective elements of identity are still challenged and the subject of professional and political debates.
1 Introduction
Despite Hungary's linguistically and ethnically rather homogeneous composition at the end of the 20th century, the more general nature, aims, motivations and instruments of the country's minority policy have been the subject of recurrent public and academic debates since the late 1980s.1 The latter include issues raised by the provisions of Act 77 of 1993 on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities,2 and more recently by those of Act 179 of 2011 on the Rights of Nationalities3 currently in force, as well as by the practical operation of the system of minority self-governments (MSGs), the Hungarian variant of non-territorial cultural autonomy.
Most of the debates focus on the relationship and consistency between the country's policies targeting domestic minorities and those expressed outwards towards ethnic Hungarians abroad before the regime change, beginning as early as 1920, and especially after 1989. On the other hand, the questions of how to define the foundations of the political community and harmonise the different approaches to the concept of civil and ethnic nationhood and citizenship also remain heavily disputed. In this respect, most relevant authors seem to accept the argument that domestic policy on minorities has always been rather subordinate to foreign aspects of the issue. Meaning that the only reasons for the introduction and adoption of the 1993 Minority Act and the establishment of MSGs were, for some authors entirely, and for others at least in part, political considerations related to the situation of Hungarians living beyond the borders and the policies of neighbouring countries, and the desire to set an example and exert pressure outwards. On the other hand, especially since the 2000s, the debate has also focused on the extent to which the cultural autonomy and minority rights envisioned by the law are in line with the interests and needs of the country's most populous minority, the Roma, and with the goals of achieving the desired socio-economic integration and combating discrimination.
Compared to the above, much less attention has been paid to the fact that the official list of 13 recognised minorities has remained unchanged since the adoption of the 1993 Act, although some attempts, most prominently those by the Bunjevcis and the Jewish community, have provoked serious public debates. While in the Central and Eastern European region, due to the specificity of the legislation, since the early 2000s probably the most frequent, yet often dubious attempts to expand the official list have been made by non-recognised groups.4 Moreover, there had also been a number of attempts made even before the adoption of the law in the early 1990s, attempts which ultimately failed to bring communities within the personal scope of the legislation.
Therefore, the aim of the present study is, after outlining the main features of the historical background as well as the international context of group recognition, to present and analyse the attempts which have aimed at minority recognition after the adoption of the 1993 Minority Act. In doing so, it will examine the conceptualisation tendencies, notions and conditions that applicants must meet, and the operationalisation practices that have prevailed. In sum, the Hungarian case illustrates well that not all minorities considered as existing socially based on self-identifications and objective criteria meet the substantive and procedural legal requirements of the law. In other cases, both the declared individual affiliations and the existence of a group and of separate objective identity elements are still questioned and the subject of professional and political debates.
2 The historical and international background of group recognition
Hungary's rich historical traditions of ethnic diversity have been often illustrated by the statement of the lawyer János Csaplovics from the late 1820s, claiming that Hungary was ‘Europe in miniature’, referring to the fact that it contained ‘nearly all European peoples, languages, religions, occupations, and cultural levels, as well as ways of life, customs, and traditions.’5 Over the next century and a half, however, that degree of diversity was significantly both reduced and transformed, mainly as a result of the natural or forced assimilation of minorities, the border changes after the First World War, the deportation of a large part of the German population after the Second World War, the Hungarian-Slovak population exchange, the discrimination faced by the Southern Slavs and Roma, the socio-economic changes of state socialism, and the more recent migration processes. Among them, the most decisive change was that which occurred with the dissolution of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Monarchy when, because of the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920, the country lost two thirds of its former territory and one third of its population. While by the beginning of the 20th century, the proportion of those claiming Hungarian as their native language was just over 50%, in 1920 the share of non-Hungarian native speakers fell to 10%.6 At the same time, more than 27% of ethnic Hungarians, ca. 2.7 million people lived outside the borders in the neighbouring countries.7
Both historically and today, in tackling their internal diversity, states still have a wide margin of manoeuvre in determining which groups, based on which criteria, may become recognised as minorities on their territories, and in practice which of a variety of political considerations can be combined with the individuals' self-identification and ‘objective’, professional-scientific criteria. Ultimately, group recognition is always a dynamic process, the result of a political decision, influenced by both the nature of the claims and the ethno-political environment.8 The situation is complicated by the fact that in multi-ethnic Central and Eastern Europe, both historically and today, there have been numerous examples of interference and manipulation of group identities and boundaries from above, against the background of often rival state- and nation-building projects, national integration and assimilation efforts.9 It is thus possible that some minorities living in various, even neighbouring countries, are not recognised everywhere. In the case of the failed attempts in Hungary, it is worth noting that, for example, Macedonians are recognised in Croatia, Serbia and Romania, Italians in Slovenia, Croatia and Romania, Russians in Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia and Romania, Bunjevcis in Serbia, but that also, for example, Turks in Croatia and Vietnamese in Slovakia have gained official minority status, not to mention the fact the neighbouring countries also recognise Jews as a national minority. However, this does not necessarily entail that Hungary should recognize these communities as official minorities.
International organisations can only draw attention to possible arbitrary, unjustifiable discrimination between groups. In this respect, Hungary, together with several other European countries, follows the approach that compliance with the legal definition and subsequent official recognition of the minority is necessary for the group and its members to be able to exercise the minority rights provided in the law. This has been criticised, however, by the Advisory Committee of the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, which has argued that the formal, prescriptive criteria and identity markers are too exclusionary, contrary to the principles of the Framework Convention, which the country has ratified, and may be too rigid and far removed from reality and from individuals' self-identification. Moreover, they may reinforce the assumption and prejudices that the group in question is a static and homogeneous entity. In the view of the Advisory Committee, therefore, a distinct minority group is the result of the individuals' free self-identification (Article 3), which has been considered a cornerstone of international minority protection, and of acceptance by society. Therefore, the group must be guaranteed access to minority rights, i.e. the latter must not be dependent on official recognition.10 In other words, the existence of a minority does not arise from legal recognition but must be a social fact even before that. Free self-identification must be guaranteed to all persons belonging to a minority, but this must be far from arbitrary, and must be subject to certain objective criteria, which may only be questioned in rare cases of bad faith. Consequently, in its latest, fifth country report on Hungary in 2019, the Advisory Committee called for a much more flexible, open and constructive approach, a review of the legal conditions for minority recognition and regular dialogue with those, especially the Bunjevcis, who wish to be covered by the law.11 Meanwhile, the situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that Article 5 of the Framework Convention lists four basic elements of minority identity (religion, language, tradition and cultural heritage), adding the statement of the OSCE's 1991 Geneva meeting of experts that ‘not all ethnic, cultural, linguistic or religious differences necessarily lead to the creation of national minorities.’12
Given the above, it is obvious that the possibility of formal legal-political recognition should only arise in the case of groups that can be established beyond any doubt to exist. Otherwise, it is far more likely to be a case of a misunderstanding of the aims and intentions of the law or outright abuse of minority rights, which has also been suspected in more than one initiative over the past two decades in Hungary. Moreover, the conditions imposed by the minority law have also been the subject of numerous criticisms, including that it is less and less reflective of social reality. It is particularly striking that while the law aims to preserve the identity and protect the rights of communities classified as traditional historical ones with long-standing ties with the state, there have been significant migration processes among various minorities, with a higher than national average proportion of foreign-born and non-Hungarian citizens. Therefore, in this respect, there are ‘new’ minorities within the ‘old’ ones, so the law is not very well adapted to the changing social realities and to the impact of the migration trends that have increased with the EU accession.13 There is no doubt that the current law, unlike the previous one, no longer mentions citizenship among the criteria for belonging to a minority, but some rights can only be exercised by Hungarian citizens belonging to recognised minorities, such as the right to participate in the elections of MSGs.
In addition to formal legal-political recognition, Benedict Anderson in his much-cited work has also highlighted how modern-day censuses are important instruments of nation-building, minority recognition, categorisation and the drawing of group boundaries.14 Modern censuses not only largely shape identity politics and provide the basis for the exercise of certain numerically bound minority rights, but thereby they also contribute to the production of boundaries and the internal homogenization of groups. By constructing the delineation of categories, they come to be considered as legitimate and existent. Furthermore, by ranking categories, including some and excluding others, they also convey a sense of value in relation to identities.15
When briefly reviewing the questionnaires of the Hungarian censuses between 1920 and 1990, with variations, but with a more or less continuous presence of recognised minorities (Germans, Romanians, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs and Slovenes), several examples of minorities could be found in the pre-printed categories that have not been officially recognised throughout the last century or so. On the other hand, the disappearance or merging of some response options has led to the exclusion of groups that were not recognised after the change of regime. Pre-printed response options for the mother tongue question were the first to be included in the 1930 census, which also had Ruthenian, and together with Bunjevci and Sokci as separate categories. In 1941, Bunjevci and Sokci were listed separately, and Yiddish, Hebrew and Gypsy were added. In the nationality question (ethnicity), which was then introduced, Ruthenian, Bunjevci, Sokci, Jewish and Gypsy were similarly included. In 1949, Ruthenian, Bunjevci, Sokci and Jewish were removed from the list of possible responses to the mother tongue question, but Slovene was added to the list, as was Vend. For ethnicity, only Ruthenian and Jewish were excluded, but Vend was added. In 1960, for both mother tongue and nationality, only Slovak, Romanian, German, Croatian, Serb and Gypsy, as well as ‘other Southern Slavs’ remained, in addition to Hungarian. In 1970, when only the mother tongue question was asked, the Southern Slavs were already listed under a common heading with the collective names of Serb, Croat and other Southern Slavs. In 1980 and 1990, only the recognised minorities were included under nationality, i.e. compared with 1960, the Roma disappeared from this category but remained under mother tongue.16
3 The evolution of the legal framework and the main attempts at minority recognition made before 1993
In the extremely complex, political, economic and social transformation processes of the fall of the Communist regime, Hungary had to put its minority policy towards domestic minorities, which had been in place since the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, and had by then clearly fizzled out, on a new political and legal-institutional basis. The symbolic and practical embodiment of this was the comprehensive amendment of the relevant provisions of the constitution in 1989–1990, which recognised minorities as state-building factors, entitled to a series of collective rights, including the right to establish MSGs. Contrary to some efforts, however, the constitution did not specify which minorities were recognised by the state as such entities. The other important milestone of the changes was the 1993 Minority Act, which laid down a formal definition and list of recognised groups. One of the most important issues in the long preparation of the law, which had already begun in 1988, was precisely who should be covered by the new legislation at both individual and community level, and what legal solution the legislator should use to delimit the population in question. There was a perceptible tension between the various positions, which, for various reasons, sought to open up the circle of potentially affected persons, to allow both individuals and communities to identify themselves as minorities, and the more restrictive position, which sought to list communities officially and even to register those with minority ties, in order to focus primarily on fiscal planning.
With the transition to democracy, it became untenable that the largest Roma population did not enjoy the same status as other recognised minorities, while new, previously unrecognised, including even disputed and divided communities, claiming recognition, and new organisations wishing to represent these minorities, emerged in parallel with them. In addition to the question of which communities existed and how they should be recognised, and who should be able to exercise minority rights, there was also a dispute as to whether minority rights should be guaranteed to non-Hungarian citizens with minority ties within their groups.
Until the comprehensive amendment of the constitution in 1989, the only list of officially recognised minorities was the policy of the state party of the time, which ‘… considered Germans, Slovaks, Southern Slavs (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes) and Romanians as nationalities. In today's Hungary, Gypsies are considered an ethnic group; Jews are defined as a distinct group primarily in terms of religious community.’17 Thus, during the Communist period, only the former group of minorities were granted certain minority rights, albeit to a limited extent – and the recognition of the Gypsies as at least an ethnic group could only come about from the late 1970s. Following a 1977 policy guideline advocating the need to preserve their minority identity, a party resolution of April 1979 stated, somewhat ambiguously that ‘the Gypsies living in our country should not be considered a nationality, but an ethnic group that is gradually being integrated into our society and assimilated’.18 Subsequently, in the first half of the 1980s, the point was also reached at which integration was increasingly accepted alongside assimilation, with the possibility of preserving minority traits and values.19 Among the other communities not previously recognised as official minorities, the Bulgarians could already build on the Association of Bulgarians of Hungary, whose roots go back to 1914, the Poles on the József Bem Polish Cultural Association, which has been in operation since 1958, the Greeks on the Cultural Association of Greeks of Hungary, founded in 1982, and the Armenians on the Armenian-Hungarian Friendship Society of Armenia, while among the Rusyns and Ukrainians there were no such organisational precedents.
During the formulation of the 1993 Minority Act, in early 1991, the main organisations of traditional minorities and the Roma created the Roundtable of National and Ethnic Minorities in Hungary as an umbrella organisation that played a decisive role in the drafting of the law in the following years. By the summer of that year, associations of other minorities, as well as the National Association of Hungarian Jews joined the Roundtable. The latter was founded in December 1990 with the aim of recognising the Jewish community as a minority.20 Already after the establishment of the Roundtable, in May 1991, the Organisation of Hungarian Rusyns was set up with the primary aim of having the Rusyns recognised as a minority in the forthcoming law,21 and soon became a member of the Roundtable. After the signing of a joint declaration by Hungary and the Ukrainian SSR ‘on the guarantee of the rights of national minorities’, the Ukrainian Rusyn Cultural Association of Hungary was founded in July 1991, with the aim of ‘uniting Ukrainians and Rusyns settled in Hungary’.22 However, interestingly enough, the latter association had not yet joined the Minority Roundtable when the decision about the inclusion of Ukrainians was made.
During the preparation of the law between 1988 and 1990, the list of officially recognised groups proved to be the dominant idea, even if it differed slightly in the various drafts, and the formulation of the freedom to choose identity was also expressed in the documents. In order to alleviate the tension between the two, it was decided to include the enumeration not in the law but in a separate parliamentary resolution. The 1990 law on the representation of minorities in parliament, which was subsequently repealed, also fitted into the logic of listing communities, which would have covered ‘the part of the Gypsy, Croat, German, Romanian, Serb, Slovak, Slovenian and Jewish communities that declare themselves to be a national-ethnic minority on the basis of the most voluntary basis.’23 The concept of national and ethnic minorities was first formulated by the Minority Roundtable in its draft law of spring 1991, following the Caportorti definition.24 However, the view of the Ministry of Finance that uncertainty over the number of legal entities was a threat to the enforceability of the law proved to be influential in shaping the scope of the law. The ministry considered it unacceptable that the only barrier to cost escalation was the common sense of the population. It considered it inconceivable that any group of people, at any time, could declare their claims to the establishment of anything from kindergartens to universities, museums and printing presses, or to the state subsidies needed for all these. The ministry therefore called for at least a list of minority groups and their native languages as a solution.25
However, the plans of the Ministry of Interior in early 1992 caused much controversy by defining the concepts of national and ethnic minorities separately, and by including a list of the former. According to the proposed taxonomy, Bulgarian, Croatian, German, Romanian, Serb, Slovak, Slovene and Ukrainian communities met this definition, while the version adopted by the government meeting on 6 February added Greeks, Poles and the ‘Rusyn (Ukrainian)’ ethnic group to this category – further highlighting the confusion surrounding the recognition of Rusyn and Ukrainian identities in Hungary.26 The idea was that the Roma were the main ethnic minority that would have not enjoyed the same level of minority rights.
Following the rejection of the controversial draft, the concept of minority was supplemented by the requirement of a 100-year (three-generation) historical presence. An agreement was finally reached in May 1992 between the government delegation and the representatives of the Minority Roundtable on this and on an expandable list of minority groups and their mother tongues. The Roundtable succeeded in obtaining the inclusion in the law of the 13 minorities it represented, except the Jews, who were replaced by the Ukrainians.27 It was clear that the Jewish association in the Roundtable was not supported by any of the other Jewish organisations, denominational or secular, and the vast majority of Jews in the census defined their affiliation as a religion. Religious attachment was also emphasised in the resolution of the June 1992 General Assembly of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, which was noted by the National Association of Jews.28 In the case of the Ukrainians, however, it was interesting to note that their organisation, the Ukrainian Rusyn Cultural Association, was still not a member of the Roundtable, but its Rusyn members had left in the meantime. The organisation itself had subsequently changed its name to the Ukrainian Cultural Association of Hungary at the end of 1993, because of the legal listing in the adopted law.
The parliamentary negotiation of the draft law, which took place in 1992–1993 resulted in a compromise between the parties. This final phase only changed the personal scope by moving the list from the beginning to the final provisions of the law to mitigate the contradiction between the taxonomy, the definition and the free choice of identity,29 but the requirement of 100-year continuity, criticised by several MPs, remained unchanged. Another issue that arose during the parliamentary phase, in relation to legal personality, was the possible inclusion of Hebrew, where parties had expressed a willingness to expand the language list.
However, this agreement in May 1992, considering the experience of the period since then, has frozen the group of 13 minorities. This did not mean, however, that other groups had not attempted to come within the personal scope of the law before the 1993 Minority Act was passed. Lithuanians and Seklers had asked the Office for National and Ethnic Minorities,30 and a month before the law was passed, the Bunjevci Cultural Association ‘Neven’ protested against the planned personal scope of the legislation to the Parliament's Committee on Human Rights, Minority and Religious Affairs.31 Compared to them, the Alliance of Italians of Hungary, founded in late 1991, lobbied much more intensively: the organisation has set out a wide range of objectives for what it claims is ‘one of the oldest autochthonous groups’ with a history of more than 700 years. It put the number of its members at 800 and estimated that the number of Italians and people of Italian origin living in the country was between 10,000 and 330,000,32 although the 1990 census identified only 164 people whose mother tongue was Italian. After several meetings, the Minority Office finally took the position that it was not really an organisation, but rather a circle of friends.
The Alliance of Vends of Hungary, formed in late 1992, made the argument that the Slovene ethnic group living in the country, traditionally called Vend, was not Slovene.33 The organisation demanded minority recognition for the ‘hidden, oppressed and forgotten’ community, which it claimed was the ‘oldest ethnic group in Hungary that had not yet been assimilated’.34 In contrast, according to the Alliance of Slovenes of Hungary, those behind the Vend minority initiative were in fact already assimilated Slovenes from the Hungarian-Slovenian border region. However, none of these attempts were successful.
Overall, only those communities managed to gain legal recognition in the 1993 Minority Act that were either already recognised before 1989–1990 (Croats, Germans, Roma, Romanians, Serbs, Slovaks, and Slovenes) or those which, as previously non-recognised groups, became members of the Minority Roundtable with their traditional or more recently established organisations (Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles, Rusyns, and Ukrainians). In addition, although there was a political willingness to recognise the Jews as a minority, this did not correspond to the will of the majority of Jews. Ukrainians, whose organisation – together with the Rusyns – was formed only after the first democratic elections of 1990, replaced Jews as the 13th recognised community, but unlike the Rusyn association, the Ukrainian one was still not included in the Roundtable when the decision was made about their recognition in 1992. As to the other early attempts, by the 2000s both the Italian and Vend associations had ceased their activities, although the Bunjevcis, Italians and Seklers still attempted to achieve recognition after the law was passed.
4 The main pillars of the legal framework
all ethnic groups resident in Hungary for at least one century are nationalities which are in a numerical minority amongst the population of the State, are distinguished from the rest of the population by their own language, culture and traditions and manifest a sense of cohesion that is aimed at the preservation of these and at the expression and protection of the interests of their historically established communities.35
The definition is based on both objective and subjective elements: the former include the fact of being established in the territory of the state, the existence of long-standing links with the state, numerical minority and linguistic, cultural and traditional characteristics, while the latter involves a sense of identity, and a desire to preserve one's own identity. The next pillar of the personal scope is the list of languages used by minorities, which includes ‘Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian, Polish, German, Armenian, Roma/Gypsy (Romani and Boyash) (…), Romanian, Rusyn, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene and Ukrainian, and further, also the Hungarian language in the case of the Roma and Armenian nationalities.’36 Finally, the last pillar is the official list of minorities: ‘Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian, Polish, German, Armenian, Roma, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene and Ukrainian are considered as nationalities.’37 In this regard, the significant changes which are evident when comparing the two laws are that the 1993 Minority Act still referred to ‘national and ethnic minorities’ and to Roma as Gypsies, while the 2011 Act has changed the official terminology to ‘nationalities’, including Roma, and has recognised Hungarian as a native language for both Armenian and Roma communities, in addition to their Armenian, Romani and Boyash languages.
Some have subsequently criticised the concept of minority used in the law, in which the most controversial element is undoubtedly the requirement of one hundred years of historical presence. The legislator intended to envisage continuous residence in Hungary over several generations, as in Germany, but the choice of duration seems arbitrary in the light of the classification of the recognised minorities. The question arises as to when the 100 years should be counted from, or whether it is necessary to define this at all, and the concept of minority is not sufficient without the duration. The argument against the period highlights the fact that the descendants of members and communities of certain recognised groups at the end of the 20th century did not live in the territory of then historical Hungary 100 years before the year in which the law was adopted and came into force. For example, most of the Greeks arrived after the Second World War and are not descendants of those merchants who were present after the 16th century and who had largely assimilated by the 19th century. A significant number of Armenians also arrived in the 20th century, but they were admitted to the ranks of the recognised groups by the ‘right’ of Armenians who had settled in Transylvania from the 17th century, were sympathetic to Hungarian political aspirations and later became highly assimilated in linguistic and cultural terms. Following the logic of the law, the inclusion of Ukrainians, many of whom had settled in the country as Soviet citizens, would also seem doubtful. Further questions are raised by the classification and use of languages, which cannot apply to citizens who do not know a minority language and who claim to be Hungarian speakers but consider themselves minority members. Earlier, the unified category of the Roma language was also problematic, and there was no reference to the fact that most of the Roma are native Hungarian speakers.38 However, even if these criticisms were well-founded, it cannot follow that other ethnic groups that do not meet the legal criteria can claim the right to minority recognition.
However, the legislator left the possibility to extend this scope: if an additional minority meets the objective criteria laid down in the law, at least one thousand voters declaring themselves to belong to the particular community could submit a popular initiative, firstly to the President of the Parliament, and then, according to the comprehensive amendment of the Minority Act in 2005,39 to the President of the National Election Committee (OVB, now NVB). Overall, the essence of the procedure is that the minority must already exist socially at the time of its legal recognition, and the parliament will only declare the actual existence of a minority if it fulfils the above legal conditions.40 Another new element, which was first applied to the Hun initiative before the amendment came into force, was that the OVB was obliged to request the opinion of the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) on the existence of the legal conditions.41 After 2010, the fourth amendment to the Fundamental Law stipulated from 2013 that the conditions for recognition as a minority are regulated by a cardinal law, in this case the 2011 National Minority Act.42 According to its current provisions, one thousand Hungarian citizens who claim to belong to a given minority and who have the right to vote in local elections for municipal representatives and mayors may initiate their declaration as a national minority. The President of the MTA must still be consulted during the procedure. However, ultimately the Parliament decides whether to support or reject the initiative. In the event of a negative decision, no further application may be submitted within one year.43 However, no constitutional complaint may be lodged with the Constitutional Court for a review of a negative decision by the Parliament.
5 Initiatives by non-recognised minorities after 1993
The official list of the 13 national and ethnic minorities recognised in the 1993 Minority Act has remained unchanged since its adoption. However, especially since the early 2000s, there have been several attempts to add a new minority to the list, most of which have failed to collect the required minimum of one thousand signatures (Table 1). Two groups did not even attempt to collect signatures. The first was the initiative for the recognition of Transylvanian Hungarians as a minority in Hungary, which was presented at a meeting of the parliamentary subcommittee on the amendment of the minority law in 1999. The most notable media hack was the initiative launched in August 2008, in the wake of the war in South Ossetia, by a group of students coming from the Jászság region and staying in Budapest. They called themselves the Jasz National Democratic Movement, with the aim of adding the Jasz people to the list, but the necessary documents were deliberately submitted incorrectly.44 By the end of 2024, six initiatives had only succeeded in reaching the parliamentary stage with the required number of signatures, but apart from the two Bunjevci attempts, the Huns, Seklers, Russians and Scythians were not supported by the Parliament. Four of these initiatives (Bunjevci, Hun, Jewish, Russian) were also mainly dealt with by the Constitutional Court, which had to decide whether the OVB was already obliged to examine the existence of the legal conditions, and at which stage of the procedure it had to ask the President of the MTA for his opinion.45
The most significant attempts aiming at the extension of the list of minorities (1993–2024)
| Year | Minority | National Election Committee decision | Constitutional Court decision | Parliamentary decision | Notice |
| 1999 | Transylvanian Hungarian | Discussed by the ad hoc parliamentary sub-committee on the modification of the minority law. | |||
| 2001 | Aegean Macedonian | 1/2001. (7 May) OVB resolution | |||
| 2004–2005 | Hun | 122/2004 (2 September), 3/2005 (4 January) OVB resolutions | 3265/2012 (4 October) AB decision | 32/2005 (27 April) Parliamentary resolution | |
| 2005–2006 | Jewish | (38/2005. (20 October) OVB resolution | 2/2006 (30 January) AB resolution | ||
| Russian | 44/2005 (1 December), 84/2006 (9 March) OVB resolutions | 27/2006 (21 June) AB resolution | |||
| Bunjevci | 221/2006 (18 April), 491/2006 (7 September) OVB resolutions | 60/2006 (20 December) Parliamentary resolution | |||
| 2007–2008 | Italian | 25/2008 (8 January) OVB resolution | |||
| Jasz people (Jassy) | Could not be placed on the agenda of the OVB. | ||||
| 2010–2011 | Bunjevci | 3/2010, 2/2011. OVB resolutions | 148/2010 (14 July) AB resolution | 28/2011 (26 May) Parliamentary resolution | |
| 2017–2018 | Sekler | 94/2017, 996/2018 NVB resolutions | 27/2018 (31 October) Parliamentary resolution | ||
| Russian | 115/2018, 1028/2018. NVB resolutions | 26/2018 (31 October) Parliamentary resolution | |||
| 2022 | Ciganos | 395/2022, 428/2022. NVB resolutions | |||
| 2023 | Scythian | 55/2023. NVB resolution | 31/2023 (14 December) Parliamentary resolution | ||
| 2024 | Vietnamese | 484/2024. NVB resolution |
Based on their characteristics and the compliance with legal requirements, primarily a long-term, continuous presence in the country or identity characteristics, initiatives both before and after 1993 can be relatively well divided into various categories (Table 2). This categorization resonates well with the initiatives themselves, where the emphasis was also placed on different elements, mostly historical continuity or specificities different from those of the majority and other minorities. Thereby, the first group includes relatively new communities that have kin-states and where neither the individuals' self-identification nor objective identity traits are questioned (Lithuanians, Italians, Russians, Macedonians, and Vietnamese). Although in some cases, they may have had historical antecedents, the continuous, organised presence required by law is less demonstrable, so in their case, it was mostly the required historical continuity that was in doubt.
The main categories of the attempts before and after the adoption of the 1993 Minority Act
| Main characteristics | Communities and their initiatives |
| Relatively new, migrant communities/circles of friends with rather undisputed self-identifications and objective identity-markers, own kin-states and occasionally with historical precedents | Lithuanians (1992–1993) Italians (1991, 2007–2008) Macedonians (2001) Russians (2005–2006, 2017–2018) Vietnamese (2024) |
| Historical community/category with contested self-identifications and objective identity-markers, no kin-state, often subjects of rival efforts of national integration and/or assimilation | Bunjevcis (1993, 2005–2006, 2010–2011) Vends (1992–1993) |
| Jews as a national minority | 1990–1992, 2005–2006 |
| Roma-related attempt | Ciganos (2022) |
| Attempts related to the ethnocultural Hungarian nation, historical, regional, ethnographic identities, subgroups, memory of historical self-governance | Seklers (2018) Jász people (2008) |
| Romanticized attempts to revitalize ancient, pre-modern, nomadic tribes | Huns (2004–2005) Scythians (2023) |
After the lobbying of the Lithuanians and Italians before 1993, the first attempt to enter the signature-collection phase after the minority law came into force was related to the Aegean Macedonians, who arrived in Hungary as refugees from the civil war in Greece and were estimated to number around 1,600. However, it is questionable in their case whether they could have met the legal requirement of 100 years' residence, and they failed to collect the necessary number of signatures.46
Similarly, a repeated Italian initiative failed to reach the parliamentary decision-making stage during 2007–2008. The Alliance of Italians of Hungary, which was still active in the early 1990s, had by then ceased its activities. In addition, as was noted above, the Office for National and Ethnic Minorities took the view in spring 1993 that this organisation was more of a friendly society, i.e. that any linguistic-cultural minority needs of Italians in Hungary could be met by civil associations. As regards the compliance with the legal requirements, there is no doubt that Italians, or people originating from what is now Italy, were present in Hungary in the Middle Ages. However, in the modern period of national development, a lasting community with Italian language and culture, sufficient organisational, institutional and municipal background and national-ethnic awareness, did not emerge. Only some people, most of them without any knowledge of the language and traditions, have retained some sense of Italian ancestry.
In this category, there were already two initiatives aimed at obtaining the official minority status of Russians. The National Election Committee refused to certify the signature collection sheet of the popular initiative submitted on behalf of the ‘Istok’ Russian Hungarian Association in Budapest on formal grounds, but it was able to certify the initiative submitted on behalf of the Association of Russian Traditionalists in Kaposvár. The latter, however, also failed to collect the required number of signatures, but the initiative launched by an individual more than a decade later was voted on by Parliament, albeit negatively.
There is evidence that a population of Eastern Slavic origin was already living in the Carpathian Basin in the period of the Hungarian conquest. Despite the possible historical antecedents, the presence of a relatively larger number of Russians over several centuries, linked to specific settlements and regions, and detectable over several generations, was rather doubtful within the framework of historical Hungary, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, which were so decisive for the development of modern nations. Moreover, the historical and ethnographic works of this period mostly used the term ‘Russian’ to refer to the Greek Catholic Ruthenian/Rusyn (Ukrainian), or in other words, the ‘Little Russian’ or ‘Hungarian Russian’ ethnic group. Major immigration took place during the 20th century immediately after the First World War, mainly in connection with the Russian civil war (prisoners of war and communists returning with Russian wives and families). This resulted in the formation of an emigrant colony of several thousand people, which included not only Russians but also Ukrainians, Armenians and Jews with links to the Russian cultural sphere. Subsequent phases of immigration were through soldiers stationed and marrying in Hungary after the Second World War, and later marriages to Hungarians studying and working in the Soviet Union, and the construction and operation of the nuclear power plant in Paks. Thus, the vast majority of Russians came to the country because of the migration processes that took place in the 20th century and continue today. Nowadays they have their own cultural, educational and ecclesiastical institutions, including a school and a studio theatre. Various estimates of their numbers generally put the number of Russian speakers at between 5,000 and 20,000,47 while in the latest 2022 census, slightly more than 11,000 people declared themselves as Russian in the relevant questions, and most of these, nearly 8,000, as having Russian as their mother tongue.
The second group consists of those communities whose historical continuity and category with respect to the previous ones is indisputable, but unlike Italians or Russians, they do not have kin-states and their individual self-identifications and possible objective identity traits are somewhat contested, especially because they live in national contact zones and thus in the crossfire of rival national integration/assimilation efforts. Apart from the Vend attempts in this category in the early 1990s, this was the case with the repeated attempts of the Bunjevcis. Even the relevant academic literature is divided on the origin, name, national-ethnic, cultural, religious and linguistic affiliation, relevant forms of identity and possible autonomous entity of the Bunjevcis living in Vojvodina, Croatia, and the south-western part of Bács-Kiskun county in Hungary. Consequently, the professional-academic – and at the same time, political – debates on these issues, which are also significantly demarcated in space and time, cannot yet be definitively closed. The Bunjevcis themselves are also divided: some consider themselves a subgroup of Croats speaking a Croatian dialect, while others reject this and see themselves as a separate ethnic group with their own language.48 In the period of modern nation-building, Serbs considered the group as Catholic Serbs because of their language, while Croats viewed them as part of the Croatian nation mainly because of their origin, religion and use of the Latin alphabet. In Titoist Yugoslavia, the latter became the official position, which was also adopted by Hungary, as was noted above in the case of censuses. However, during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, Serbia began to recognise the Bunjevcis living in Vojvodina as a separate entity, at first in the 1991 census, which Croats saw as an attempt to divide the Croatian minority.
In Hungary, after 1989 most of the local representatives and organizations of the respective population apparently favoured the Croat conception and later created several local Croat MSGs. As noted above, one local association objected to the 1993 Minority Act and some Bunjevcis opted to establish Serb MSGs in the region. In the 2000s, partly as a result of the impact of Yugoslav minority policies and the creation of the Bunjevci National Council in Vojvodina, some local activists tended to support the Serb arguments and attempted to include the Bunjevci in the minority law. In relation to the divided community and its highly politicised identity, the 2006 resolution of the President of the MTA stated that ‘the professional-academic and at the same time political debates on the origin, name, affiliation and relevant forms of identity of the Bunjevci cannot be considered closed.’ However, it also claimed that the Bunjevci community in Hungary does not fully meet the criteria set by law. The academic resolution was subsequently contested by the initiators, who, among others, based their arguments on those derived from the Serbian Academy of Sciences, and assigned most of the blame for the failure of the initiative on the MTA, although it was not supported by the government, the Office for National and Ethnic Minorities nor the Croatian National Self-Government. After his election, the new MTA President, József Pálinkás, responded to the initiators' request with a letter referring to the individuals' self-identification and the official minority status of the Bunjevcis in Serbia, which was thus interpreted by the initiators as a change in the academic position. However, the initiative submitted for the second time did not meet with the support of either the President of the Academy or the Parliament. Given the failure of both attempts, there is no doubt that many people, especially in the border region concerned, consider themselves neither Croatian nor Serb, but there may be several pragmatic obstacles to the official recognition of the Bunjevci minority.49
In a separate category are the attempts to recognise Jews as a national minority before and after 1993, which in this way sought to change the dominant conceptualization framework by shifting the emphasis from religion to nationality, culture and ethnicity. Shortly after the adoption of the law in September 1993, Tamás Suchman, a socialist member of parliament, initiated the inclusion of Hebrew in the list of protected languages by means of an independent motion in the Minority Act, but the list was not amended. More than a decade later, in 2005, the Society for the Hungarian Jewish Minority was founded, whose activists included some of those who had previously been involved in the National Association of Hungarian Jews in the early 1990s. They argued that historical religious and national minority status were not mutually exclusive, because the Federation of Jewish Communities represented only a part of Jewry. However, their initiative, which they hoped would preserve the traditions, culture and language of the Jewish people,50 provoked a lively public debate and ended in rejection, which may have contributed to their failure to collect the necessary number of signatures.
Similarly, the initiative to recognise the so-called Ciganos ethnic group in 2022, which was likely to be linked to the Roma community already recognised in the law, aimed to redefine the existing framework and failed to collect the necessary number of signatures. The term Ciganos (Gypsies) itself was traditionally used from the 15th to 16th centuries in Portugal and later in Brazil to describe the Roma/Gypsy population there and has historically been associated with significant negative connotations. Nevertheless, it is still used today in official documents and academic publications in Portugal, and not least among the Roma communities who define themselves in this way. In Hungary, however, the term Ciganos has not been used and is thus not very well known. One of the most detailed and accepted classifications of domestic Gypsies/Roma was given by Kamill Erdős in the late 1950s,51 which had a significant impact on later ethnographic, anthropological and sociological research. His classification does not include the Ciganos community, nor have the research, censuses and media reports of the decades since then revealed the existence and identity of a Ciganos community with distinct language, culture and tradition, which has existed for several generations and even organised itself into associations. Similarly, there is no evidence of a possible more significant Ciganos immigration from Portuguese-speaking countries.
A separate category is those attempts which, according to the widely accepted view, were initiated by groups which were part of the ethno-cultural Hungarian nation, although they may still have a sense of historical, regional, and ethnographic consciousness and the memory of a former historical self-government (the Jasz and Sekler people). In this group, the Parliament had to vote only on the latter, Sekler initiative. They are considered by the prevailing historiographical, archaeological, ethnographic and linguistic positions to be an integral part of the modern Hungarian nation in the ethno-cultural sense, which is confirmed by relevant sociological and cultural anthropological research and case studies. Seklers are an ethnographic-regional group, separated from the Hungarian cultural nation and forming an integral part of the Hungarian minority in Romania, in whose self-definition and various manifestations, ethnicity and regional culture and tradition play a decisive role. From the end of the 18th century onwards, Seklers considered themselves part of the modern Hungarian nation. After the end of the Hapsburg empire in 1918, Seklerland also became a target of Romanian national homogenisation efforts, which, after a period in which extensive Hungarian language rights were granted in the autonomous socialist province, returned in the late socialist period. After the regime change in 1989, the political vision of Seklerland was mainly determined by the construction and institutionalisation of an autonomous region with a Hungarian majority. The strengthening of the Hungarian sense of identity and the self-expression based on the real and mythical elements of Sekler identity, as well as on old and newly created forms of regional representation, became a permanent element in the politics of memory and history. The development and strengthening of regional attachment are facilitated not only by the feudal traditions and the former historical-administrative separation, but also by the block-like location and local majority of the minority and the specific social and cultural environment associated with it. The close intertwining of Hungarian national and Sekler regional identities thus also marks the external borders of Seklerland as a kind of identity region.
During the 20th century, a significant Sekler population was settled in the territory of today's Hungary in several periods, especially after the world wars and in the years before the change of regime. The Seklers in Hungary had already established their associations between the two world wars. Among these periods, the resettlement of the regional Seklers from Bukovina to Backa and then to Hungary at the end of the Second World War, which resulted in tens of thousands of Seklers finding new homes in the southern counties of Baranya, Tolna and Bács-Kiskun, and along the Danube, should be highlighted. The latter group makes up the majority of Sekler organisations operating today and they define the Sekler culture of Bukovina as a recognised and worthy part of Hungarian culture.
Finally, the last group of initiatives are those that seek to revitalise and make accepted the notion of a modern national-ethnic minority (Huns, Scythians) of former ancient, pre-modern and often nomadic tribes. However, their intentions to preserve ancient traditions can be rather seen as a misinterpretation of the aims of the Minority Act. Interestingly, the Huns' initiative, which was also linked to a small church and a theological free university, was the first to enter the parliamentary stage after the adoption of the 1993 Minority Act, and both the MTA and the Parliamentary Commissioner for National and Ethnic Minority Rights issued resolutions on it. According to the former, the Huns lacked not only ethnic identity but also archaeological and linguistic relics, while the Ombudsman found a modern national identity lacking. In contrast, the organisers of the Hun minority initiative claimed that they are a historical ethnic group with a continuous history going back 6,000 years, and that their origins in Hungary are linked to the fact that, according to them, about a third of the former Huns remained in the Carpathian Basin. At the parliamentary committee hearing, when asked to present their initiative in Hun language, in line with the legal definition, they stated that ‘the present Hungarian language can be considered a branch of the Hun language’,52 which questioned why they then sought minority recognition.
The Scythian initiative launched in 2023 also belongs to this last category and was not supported by the Parliament at the end of the same year. As a forerunner of this latest attempt, a Scythian national self-government was formed in Veszprém in 2014 as an informal organisation to restore a kind of ancient, sacral order. However, the recent petition was launched by Alfréd Pócs, a doctor and member of the local government in Eger, who expressed virus-sceptical views during the Covid-19 pandemic, rejected mask-wearing, and was therefore dismissed from the Hungarian Medical Chamber and dismissed by the hospital where he worked.
6 Conclusions
In the context of Hungarian minority policy discussed in many respects over the past decades, less attention has been paid to initiatives, both before and after the adoption of the 1993 Minority Act, which aimed at adding new ethnic groups to the 13 officially recognised minorities. Some of the dozen or so initiatives managed to reach the parliamentary decision-making stage, but none of them was supported by the Parliament, so the official list has remained unchanged since 1993. At the same time, the legislation has been criticised for not being adapted to the changing social realities, especially the increasing presence of non-Hungarian citizens with minority ties. Therefore, the present study has aimed to review and analyse these attempts by establishing a kind of classification of the conceptualisation tendencies, concepts, conditions and operationalisation practices that these initiatives have had to face. In the light of these, it took the analysis further by looking at the strategies they followed as well as the elements (historical continuity, distinct identity traits) they emphasised in persuading relevant stakeholders and decision-makers. In the first group of cases, those relatively new communities that have kin-states and where neither the individuals' self-identification nor objective identity traits are questioned (Lithuanians, Italians, Russians, Macedonians, and Vietnamese), put emphasis on their historical continuity and long-established ties with the Hungarian state and people. Others, who lack kin-states and whose objective identity-markers remain contested (Bunjevcis, Vends), have tended to stress - in addition to the importance of individuals' self-identification - their distinct characteristic features. Somewhat similarly, both Jewish- and Roma-related (Ciganos) initiatives aimed to challenge the prevailing dominant forms of categorization regarding these communities and sought to demonstrate their distinct identity features which differ from the rest of the groups in question. Still others, while being widely accepted as parts of the Hungarian ethnocultural nation, made efforts to prove that their objective characteristics are different from the dominant Hungarian ones by particular reference to historical elements (the Seklers, the Jász people). Finally, there were attempts that seemed rather to confuse the modern notion and status of national minorities with an intent to preserve or even re-vitalize ancient traditions (Huns, Scythians). In sum, the Hungarian case not only shows that, as in various other countries, not all minorities considered to exist socially on the basis of self-identifications and objective criteria meet the substantive and procedural legal requirements of the minority law, but also that, in other cases, both the declared affiliation of individuals and the existence of the group and distinct objective elements of identity, are still questioned and subject to professional and political debates.
Acknowledgement
The research was carried out and the journal Special Issue was published in the framework of No. 134962 Hungarian National Research and Innovation Office Grant on Legal approaches to operationalize nationality and ethnicity.
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See link2. Instead of referring to national and ethnic minorities, the return to the term nationalities in the new legislation, which was in official use before 1990, was officially justified as an effort to go beyond the dichotomy of majority versus minorities and to highlight the contribution of the minority communities with their distinct ethnocultural features to the culture of both the Hungarian state and nation. However, the titles of the English translations of the law still tend to use the term national minorities.
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Az OVB hitelesítette a zsidó kisebbség törvénybe foglalását célzó aláírásgyűjtő ív példányát (The OVB has certified a copy of the petition for the inclusion of the Jewish minority in the law. MTI, 20 October 2015). Az Alkotmánybíróság előtt a zsidóság nemzeti kisebbséggé nyilvánítását célzó aláírásgyűjtés ügye (The case of the collection of signatures to declare the Jews a national minority is before the Constitutional Court. MTI, 17 November 2015).
