Austria, Hungary stand apart on ‘lost grandeur’ of past

VIENNA: A century after their dismemberment in the aftermath of World War I, Austria and Hungary take two very different approaches to their Habsburg past — one choosing Imperial kitsch, the other a return to strident nationalism.

Both countries were carved out of the Austro-Hungarian empire after its defeat alongside Germany in the First World War. And both were stripped of swathes of territory and millions of inhabitants under the 1919 Treaty of St Germain, concluded with Austria, and the Treaty of Trianon signed with Hungary the next year. But a hundred years on, that upheaval resonates in very different ways in Vienna and Budapest, according to Oliver Rathkolb, director of Vienna University’s Institute of Contemporary History. “In a study a few years ago we asked people in the two countries if Saint Germain and Trianon still meant anything to them. We got two totally different results: In Austria, it had no importance, in contrast to Hungary,” Rathkolb told AFP.

“The myth of Trianon and the dismemberment of Greater Hungary has been promoted for internal political ends even in the communist era, and even more so after 1989,” he says. Nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has even risked the ire of neighbouring governments by cultivating Hungarian minorities on his country’s borders and offering them Hungarian citizenship. Even if many ethnic Hungarians in other countries “don’t quite identify with Orban’s strongman version of democracy, he is able to spin a national fairy-tale that resonates”, says Nandor Bardi, a historian of ethnic minorities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. According to Bardi, “it is no coincidence that he makes keynote speeches — for example the famed speech about moulding Hungary into an ‘illiberal state’ — in Tusnad in Transylvania,” a region of modern-day Romania that belonged to Hungary under the empire.