Minority Affinities? The Sources of Fascist Appeal for Hungarian Minority Elites and Organizations

Egry, Gábor (2025) Minority Affinities? The Sources of Fascist Appeal for Hungarian Minority Elites and Organizations. In: Transnational and Transatlantic Fascism, 1918–2018 The Far Right in East Central and Southeastern Europe. Central Asian, Russian & Eastern European Studies . Routledge, pp. 81-102. ISBN 9781003329398

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on why fascism appealed to a not insignificant part of the Hungarian minorities before and during WWII. While Hungarian minority politicians complained – not without reason – about the ethnic discrimination they suffered and argued that their ethnic groups could not adhere to anti-democratic ideologies for this reason, important minority politicians became active members of fascist parties after Hungary regained some territories. To explain this seeming paradox, I argue that the most important link with fascist ideologies was the similarity in how both Hungarian minority intellectuals and fascists reimagined the national community in an anti-liberal form. Ideas of national renewal, individual duty to the nation and anti-individualism were core tenets for both that created space for real affinity between minority politicians and fascist ideologies. While it did not make fascism a dominant current among Hungarian minorities, it made it easy to present minority visions of the community as fitting to fascist visions of the new Europe, and generated space for the instrumental use of fascist ideas too.

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