Recently, Ferenc Laczó (Assistant Professor in History at FASoS) has co-edited a large collective volume titled A Global History of Hungary, 1869-2022 (in the Hungarian original: Magyarország globális története, 1869-2022). In this blog, Laczó sketches the overarching concept of this volume and discusses how it came to fruition.
Writing global histories of single European countries (such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain) or regions (such as Catalonia, Flanders, or Sicily) is clearly en vogue. Our new volume on Hungary is part of a large and growing transnational wave, which started in France and Italy back in 2017; our volume is in fact the tenth one employing the ‘model’ originally developed by Patrick Boucheron and his co-editors. It is also the first adaptation of this manner of writing history to a case in Central and Eastern Europe. This fact has raised some special challenges for us as editors. As I shall aim to show below, it may have also enabled us to develop a few innovative aspects of this transnational trend in a novel direction.
It is worth stating that all the aforementioned volumes have been inspired by the ‘French model’ and are essentially meant as popular scholarship. At the same time, they have been written by leading scholarly experts who were asked to contribute brief and lively chapters. Individual chapters in these volumes begin by describing a specific event seen as illustrative of a larger subject. It is this larger subject that is then analyzed in a concise manner in the rest of the chapter.
To take just a few examples from the Hungarian volume, the chapter by Sándor Révész introduces the foundation of the Esperanto Society in Hungary in 1901 to then reflect on the search for a universal language in modern times; the 1941 publication of the famed A világirodalom története (A History of World Literature) by Antal Szerb provides Eszter Pálfy with an opportunity to reflect on the transformation of literary canons; while communist Hungary’s negotiations with the International Monetary Fund in 1982 allows András Pinkasz to discuss the rise of global finance. As readers have repeatedly remarked to us in recent weeks, this type of book is very convenient for the contemporary reader as it amounts to a colorful and accessible history with their brief professional chapters – which might also help us explain the wide resonance these publications have had across Europe.
My co-editor Bálint Varga and I started brainstorming about the specifics of our planned volume on Hungarian history around September 2020. We spent a few months considering the main subjects and exact proportions, the individual foci and, crucially, the list of potential contributors. Being historians of modern and contemporary times, we have ended up covering – unlike our colleagues in other countries – merely the past 150 years via one hundred chapters by eighty-two contributors in total (a subsequent volume on the preceding millennia of Hungarian global history is currently being planned).
Bálint and I soon came to agree that the main themes of our volume should be as follows: the world economy; political ideologies and types of rule; war and violence; migration; cultures and religions; colonialism, racism, and decolonization; everyday life and consumption; environment and diseases; and – last but not least – stigmatized and marginalized groups. The hundred chapters in the volume all belong to at least one of these categories. We hope and trust that the diverse chapters are thus interconnected with each other in original and suggestive ways and add up to a rather coherent volume.
Having said that, it has been obvious to us from the beginning that our list of subjects cannot be exhaustive – and nearly all readers can immediately come up with a 101st subject that is sourly missing in their view, suggestions which we are always very happy to hear. We have indeed considered including a number of additional topics – such as the Eucharistic Congress of 1938, refugees from the Armenian genocide and the Greek civil war, the collectivization of agriculture, the anticommunist diaspora and the process of decolonization, or the transnational contacts of Soviet-era dissidents – which sadly did not make the final cut.
As editors, we decided to pay close attention to three types of balances in particular: a rather even and fair representation of all major parts of the world and the presence of all ‘major’ and many ‘more minor’ countries; a balance between regional, continental, and global forms of contextualization through which our volume was meant to relativize but not to flatten out the role of Eurocentrism (we rather hoped to foster reflection on Eurocentric perspectives that have so strongly shaped Hungarian culture and politics); and a focus on moments of rupture and innovation while also showing long-term trends and recurring patterns across epochs.
Based on these basic principles, the volume we have just released contains chapters of four kinds. Some focus on the local-national manifestation of global events and trends (such as world wars, global economic crises, or climate change) and the interconnections between transformation on the national and global scales. Other chapters primarily aim to reconceptualize cases through transnational methods and broader global contextualization that have often been studied on local-national or at most regional levels (such as the protection of Hungarian minority populations abroad; the Hungarian rendszerváltás or change of regime in 1989; or the introduction of the neoliberal austerity measures – popularly known as the Bokros package – in 1995).
Still others explore the appearance and impact of phenomena that originated on other continents (such as the local reception of Latin American cultures; investments by companies from East Asia; the stories of those practicing religions which originated in India, etc.). Last but not least, some chapters foreground the roles Hungarians have played in various parts of the world and in various spheres (whether in scientific research in the United States, in engineering projects in Algeria, the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, or in prostitution in Switzerland).
Key challenges in developing a volume with such a global scope had to do with the fact that transnational and global perspectives have not fully entered the mainstream in history writing regarding Hungary (yet); the rather weak institutionalization of transnational and global history writing in the country itself; but also the fact that intra-regional and intra-European references may have appeared much more immediately relevant to a number of the actors we study (and may thus be much more apparent in our historical sources too).
These challenges were practically the flipside of what we perceived as our major opportunity: to produce a fresh and in many ways original reinterpretation of modern and contemporary Hungarian history through the consistent use of transnational and global approaches. To try and realize this opportunity required contributions by representatives of a host of disciplines: next to historians, scholars of anthropology, economics, literature, media studies, political science, and sociology have all made valuable contributions to the final product.
Through its consistent use of the just mentioned methods, Magyarország globális története, 1869-2022 quite consciously tries to offer an intellectually stimulating alternative to narrowly nationalistic visions, which prefer to narrate the history of Hungary and Hungarians as an essentially internal process – and enjoy quite a hegemonic position in the country today. The volume proposes instead that Hungary is a country with multifaceted and substantial transnational connections whose history and society have been intertwined with phenomena from all the diverse parts of the globe. We also insist that Hungary is a Central and Eastern European country which is in many ways semi-peripheral, and a state that has defined its place in the world as a European state in modern and contemporary times and which has thus had numerous links to the processes of colonialism and decolonisation.
The product of 82 contributing authors, Magyarország globális története, 1869-2022 thus offers a creative adaptation of the French model by Boucheron and his colleagues by consciously showing that transnational and global trends have exerted a much greater impact on Hungary than the other way round – and by aiming to reveal that studying a country like Hungary in a global perspective has special insights to offer precisely because the country has in many respects been much closer to the global average than countries like France or the Netherlands.
The narrative of Magyarország globális története, 1869-2022 runs from the era of European imperialism and global hegemony to the multipolar globalization of today – a narrative arc that also provides a strong argument why such a book is needed today in the semi-peripheral parts of Europe whose publics are yet to debate their place and role in global history in more substantial terms. Our hope is that this newly released volume will provide some inspiration, and perhaps also some guidance, to such future discussions – and that a future English translation might also contribute to the ongoing discussions on how to conceive of a global history of Europe.
Ferenc Laczo publishes blog on A Global History of Hungary | FASoS Weekly
[…] this blog for Mosa Historia, Laczó sketches the overarching concept of this volume, discusses challenges in […]