Submitted Papers

Good Neighbors Make Better "Strangers": Hungarian-Austrian Tourism and the Legacies of Empire

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
My paper proposes to examine continuities and ruptures between post-Habsburg Austria and Hungary through the lens of tourism between the two countries in the interwar period. In their endeavor to package “Austria” or “Hungary” as attractive commodities, tourism promoters struggled to define who it was, precisely, that they were marketing them to. The very vocabulary of the tourism industry at this time blurred the lines between domestic and international tourists. Both were denoted, ambiguously, by the word “stranger,” leaving uncertain (at least on paper) the relationships among the imagined Tourist, his/her “home” nation, and the place he/she was visiting.

My paper will explore how the quest to lure the “stranger” both sustained and was reliant upon certain habits laid down during imperial times: cross-border traffic between Austria and Hungary, the symbiotic rivalry of Budapest versus Vienna, and attempts to rekindle Habsburg-era “friendship” between Austrians and Hungarians. Despite (mostly one-sided) competition between the two capitals, not to mention the violent hostility that marked the two countries’ separation in the early postwar years, the 1930s marked an “era of good feelings” between them, especially after the imposition of the Austrian Ständestaat in 1934. This was particularly evident in tourism promotion on both sides of the border, which cast Austrians and Hungarians as special and reunited friends, invoking the old imperial “partnership.” In these ways, tourism allows us to see how the breakup of the empire fundamentally reframed, but did not destroy, the economic and cultural networks of the successor states.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Andrew Behrendt is Academic Advisor at the Center for Russian and East and Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as NewsNet Editor/Program Coordinator for ASEEES. He is a historian of modern east-central European culture, specializing in the history of media, tourism, consumerism, and nationalism in Austria and Hungary. He completed his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in April 2016. His next project, provisionally titled “Operetta Empire,” will explore the media world of the Habsburg Monarch and its successor states from 1848 to the dawn of the television age. Contact: 4417 W. W. Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 aeb72@pitt.edu

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Painting the Past with Paper: A Demonstration of the Value of the Pictorial History Genre for Hungarian Diaspora Studies

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In commemoration of its 125th anniversary in December 2017, America’s first Hungarian Roman Catholic parish, St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church in Cleveland, recently prepared an anniversary book. Such publications are often consulted by historians investigating Hungarian diasporic communities because of the key role that churches played in the ethnic identity maintenance of immigrants and their descendants. Due in large part to the fact that these works are intended for a popular audience, the historical sketches within them typically lack the scholarly rigor of professional historical research. Attempting to meet the needs of the local popular audience while offering material that aligns more closely with the standards of academic history, a pictorial history featuring items from the parish’s museum and archives was added to the book.

Unlike most pictorial histories, this text consists largely of scans of printed materials and other ephemeral items organized into themes that showcase the various religious and secular functions that this church, once the nation’s largest Hungarian Catholic congregation, had served. By surveying a selection of the fifty scans and their accompanying descriptions, each image’s ability to distill historical insights about topics ranging from pre-Vatican II American Catholic culture to the bicultural identity that developed in Cleveland’s Hungarian neighborhood between waves of immigration, becomes apparent. Because of the many benefits offered by this format’s structure, I offer it as a model for other Hungarian-American organizations looking for a creative way to digitize holdings from their collections and recount their pasts while considering the perspectives of historians.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Nicholas Boros is a pre-service high school mathematics teacher completing his final semester of a post-baccalaureate teacher licensure program at Cleveland State University. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 2015 from Cleveland State University, where he triple majored in linguistics, comparative religion, and mathematics. His research interests include language maintenance and the historical development of diasporic religious communities. ngboros@yahoo.com

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Ervin Sinkó and Hungary: A Story of Unrequited Love

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The writer and poet Ervin Sinkó was born in Szabadka in 1898 but spent only the first 21 years of his life within Hungary. As a participant in the Soviet Republic of 1919, he was a in danger of arrest had he returned to the country during the Horthy regime. Nor was he willing to return to live in Hungary under the Rákosi or the Kádár regimes. Instead, he lived his life as a Hungarian writer beyond Hungary's borders as an outsider in Austria, Yugoslavia, France, and the Soviet Union. He finally settled in Yugoslavia after World War II where he became the director of the Department of Hungarian Language and Literature at the University of Novi Sad. His marginality was exacerbated by his Jewish origins, from which he was also alienated. As a writer, the Hungarian language and the humanistic strain of its culture that it embodied, formed the basis of his identity. This presentation will examine Sinkó's attitudes towards his exile and marginal status, and evaluate what kind of loss it meant to him as well as to his motherland. The presentation will focus on the following episodes in his story. Why did Sinkó need to evade extradition from Yugoslavia after World War I? Why did he fear meeting members of the Jewish congregation in Szabadka in the early 1920s? How did he react to the Rajk trial? What did he say about Hungary in 1962, when he returned there for a short visit?


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
George Deák was born in Hungary and emigrated to the U.S. in 1957. He earned his PhD in History from Columbia University in 1980. His dissertation dealt with the early history of the National Association of Manafucturers (GyOSz). He abandoned the field of history for thirty years, working as a computer programmer and manager. He returned to the field in 2011 to teach as an adjunct instructor at University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Most recently, he has translated and edited Ervin Sinkó's The Novel of a Novel, Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935-1937, which is due to be published by Lexington Books in the summer of 2018. deakgy62@gmail.com

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Contested Subjects Across Cold War Frontiers: Hungarian Refugees from 56'

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Although the Cold War has often been depicted in terms of bipolarity, and disconnection, more recent scholarship has sought to underline the various ways the Iron Curtain was in fact a porous boundary. Thus, I have set out to demonstrate in this paper the ways the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 functioned not only as a moment of political upheaval within Hungary itself, but also as a moment of contact between West and East. Mainly, I argue that Hungarian political refugees became contested subjects in the wider Cold War. For propagandists on both sides of the Iron Curtain they often functioned as props in broader ideological contests. Their intermediary and profoundly liminal status made them valuable commodities in the Cold War contest, but also rendered them potentially subversive and destabilizing. As such, they played central roles in challenging Cold War imaginaries, but they were also employed to re-inscribe psychologically satisfying narratives which had been temporarily disrupted by the Revolution. Thus, confronted with the destabilizing trans-border experience of the political refugee, Western and Hungarian ideologues sought to re-inscribe onto these contested bodies pre-conceived notions of the Cold War “other.” Instead of amending their existing imaginaries to agree with reality, they sought to resuscitate older Cold War fantasy. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s pithy maxim bears mentioning here: “When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse.” Using primarily newspaper articles from the time, but also cinematic and satirical sources I answer two interrelated questions in this paper: 1) how Hungarian political refugees challenged imaginary conceptions of the Cold War “other” by the mere fact of their origins, and 2) how governments on either side of the Iron Curtain sought to reassert ideological control over the destabilizing issues raised be refugees?


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Taylor Gombos is currently a Ph.D. student in History at New York University, working with Larry Wolff. He studys Modern Central and Eastern European history as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states, with a special interest in Hungary. Thematically, he is interested in Cold War imaginaries, and the history of science and technology. Before coming to NYU, Gombos completed an MA in “Central European History” at Central European University in Budapest and spent another year teaching in Hungary. Prior to his MA at CEU he completed an interdisciplinary MA in the “Social Sciences” at the University of Chicago. tjg353@nyu.edu

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The Media Campaign of the UN Institutions for Assisting the 1956 Hungarian Refugees

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The present paper is based on documents from the archives of the UN itself (New York, Geneva), the Dag Hammarskjöld Collection of the Swedish National Library (Stockholm), the UNHCR Archives, the archives of International Committee of the Red Cross, (Geneva) and of the NATO (Brussels), and from those of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris, Nantes. We could regard as a rather new phenomenon the active and powerful participation of the Department of Public Information (DPI) of the UN Secretariat and the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the support of the fundraising efforts of the world organization UN. The press campaign developing in November-December 1956 extended to both the printed and the audiovisual media, placing the emphasis on the latter. I intend to present the versatile efforts described in a huge number of press announcements and the dramatic photos spreading all over the world press about the escaping and Austria receiving the Hungarian refugees.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Gusztáv Kecskés D. is a senior research fellow of the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History (Budapest). He received his PhD (history of the international relations) from the University of Paris III, Sorbonne and University of Pécs in 2003. He has conducted extensive research in the archives of European great powers and international organizations. He has published books about French-Hungarian relations (2013) and French foreign policy towards East Central Europe in the 20th century (2004), Hungary and the United Nations (2006) and the international reception of the 1956 Hungarian refugees (2014). kecskes.gusztav@btk.mta.hu

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Hungarian Diaspora Policy Since 1990

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
My paper focuses on the history of Hungarian diaspora policy since the democratic transition of Hungary, and how this policy is being interpreted by the organizational leaders of the Hungarian diaspora communities. I use the term “diaspora” in the sense of emigrant communities; thus, Hungarian minorities in the countries neighboring Hungary do not form a part of the research. The paper submitted constitutes a part of my doctoral dissertation.
After the democratic transition in 1990, the issue of Hungarian minorities in the neighboring countries dominated Hungarian kin-state politics, but diaspora communities received only incoherent, sporadic attention and support from Hungarian governments. On the other hand, educational and cultural relations have been developed on non-governmental platforms, such as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Balassi Institute, and the Hungarian Scout Association.
The paper discusses the intensified phase of Hungarian diaspora policy after 2010 in more detail. Diaspora policy is interpreted within the wider framework of kin-state policy, as well as in the general domestic political sphere. The institutional, legal, discursive, and practical items of diaspora policy are examined in the paper. Besides the descriptive and analytical approach, I also work with empirical data. I conducted 23 semi-structured interviews with organizational and community leaders of the Hungarian diaspora from all over the world about how they receive, interpret, and evaluate Hungarian diaspora policy. The empirical research provides a new approach for researching diaspora policy, as previous researches only used state-focused, top-down theoretical frameworks.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Eszter Kovács holds two BA diplomas: in International Studies and in English and American Studies. She graduated from Central European University’s Nationalism Studies MA Program and has another Master degree in International Relations from Corvinus University of Budapest. She is enrolled in the Doctoral Program in Political Theory of Pázmány Péter Catholic University. Her field of research is Hungarian diaspora- and kin-state politics, and the Hungarian diaspora in the US. She currently works as a junior researcher at the Institute for Minority Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. kovesz87@gmail.com

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The Comparison of the American (1776) and the Hungarian (1849) Declarations of Independence

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
One can find many interesting similarities between the two documents regarding their composition, langugae and conditions of drafting and approval. Here and now I wish to emphasize only one of them. Jefferson and Kossuth used very similar argumentation and language regarding the "domestic"insurrections" provoked by the kings of Britain and Hungary. The Virginian was talking about the movements of African American slaves to join the British army, while Kossuth was talking about the insurrections of the national minority groups against the Hungarian governemnet. Kossuth new well the final version of the American document, but not the original draft of Jefferson.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Csaba Lévai (1964) is an associate professor in the Department of History of the University of Debrecen. He was educated at the University of Debrecen and the Loránd Eötvös University of Budapest. He teaches 18th- and 19th-century history. His research interests are the history of the British colonies in North America and the history of the American Founding period. He has a special interest in the political thought of the American Founding fathers and in the history of slavery in revolutionary North America. Lévai was two times visiting research fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies (Monticello), and a visiting research fellow at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington (Mount Vernon). He was also a visiting Fulbright scholar at the University of Virginia. His publications include a collection of writings by the American Founding Fathers in Hungarian; The Republicanism Debate. A Historiographical Discussion of the Intellectual Background of the American Revolution (L’Harmattan, Budapest, 2003, in Hungarian); American History and Historiography. A Collection of Essays (L’Harmattan, Budapest, 2013, in Hungarian). He also edited Europe and the World in European Historiography (University of Pisa Press, Pisa, 2006, in English), and with Mary Harris Europe and Its Empires (University of Pisa Press, Pisa, 2008, in English). csabalevai@freemail.hu

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Send us a Planeload! Catholic Organizations and the Resettlement of 56ers

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The recent focus of the author’s multi-year project on Hungarian refugees after the 1956 Revolution has been on religious identity and relief organizations. The refugees were diverse and included many without strong religious attachments. However, voluntary agencies (as they were then called) provided much-needed support during the emergency, especially for resettlement to the US. Catholics were the largest religious cohort among the refugees and provided the most generously funded and staffed agencies as well as most of the resettlement sponsorships required under American law. “Send us a Planeload!” was the title of a story in the Resettlement Newsletter of Catholic Relief Services. It captures the generous enthusiasm of American Catholics for the refugees, which was a blend of the era’s characteristic anti-Communism, identification with the travails of their church under Communist rule, and the dedicated service to refugees of people like Fabian Flynn, Eileen Egan, and James J. Norris. This talk will examine the activity of the Catholic agencies and their contribution to the resettlement process.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
James P. Niessen earned his Ph.D at Indiana University with a dissertation on religion and politics in Transylvania during the 1860s. He has published various studies on Hungarian religious history, libraries and archives, and most recently on refugees from the Revolution of 1956. He is World History Librarian at Rutgers University where he is subject librarian for five academic programs and coordinates collection development for the New Brunswick Libraries, external public member of the Hungarian Academy, and currently serving his second term as President of AHEA. Many of his publications are accessible at http://soar.libraries.rutgers.edu/bib/James_P._Niessen/. niessen@rutgers.edu

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Political Participation, Civic Education and Gamification from Comparative Perspective

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
There is a consensus among researchers that compared to former generations, young peoples’ political participation is changing. Since globalization effects young people both in the USA and in Hungary, there is a need to understand how changing social (youth transition to adulthood) and technical conditions (digitalization) bring changes in the way how young people get information, get interested in public matters and find their ways of political participation.
Online games are recent technological advancement to be viewed as an educational panacea and a force for democracy. Civics education research shows that higher levels of civic knowledge are often correlated with greater civic participation. As such, the civic knowledge gains experienced by students playing online civics education gaming programs should not be discounted since this increase in civics knowledge may increase students’ propensity for civic participation.
Based on interviews and own teaching experience the first part of the presentation brings evidence from US Campus context to show how learning experience from online games (such icivics.org) can be incorporated into action civics in the classrooms.
The second part of the paper aims to find out how experiences from US College context can be replanted into civic education in a new democracy. Online games are a popular in Hungary and they are used for educational purposes (e.g. honfogalo.hu). However in Hungary, civic education is weak and political topics are expelled from classrooms. To show what effect lack of civic education had on Hungarian students’ civic skills and concept about democracy the paper brings empirical evidence from interviews with leaders of Hungarian NGOs dealing with non-formal civic education and from data collected by Active Youth in Hungary Research Group among students enrolled to Hungarian Higher Education.
Although social and political context matters, the presentation argues that online gamification can create platform for students in both countries to study and practice their civic knowledge.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Oross, Daniel PhD is political scientist. He received his PhD in political sciences from the Corvinus University of Budapest in 2015. Since 2011 he is junior research fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Political Sciences. During the 2017-2018 academic year he teaches as a Fulbright Scholar at Hartwick College in Oneonta, (NY). His research interests are political participation, youth policy, political socialization. orossd@hartwick.edu

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Theory, Results and Historical Background of Béla Kovrig’s Sociological Account of Hungarian Refugees of 1956

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Béla Kovrig (1900-1962) was a professor of sociology, Christian democratic politician, and a prominent member of public life in interwar Hungary. After confrontation with Communist authorities Kovrig left Hungary in October 1948, and, after a short stay in Italy, emigrated in the United States. He settled in Milwaukee and became a professor of sociology at Marquette Univervsity. Kovrig also actively participated in the American-Hungarian émigré community’s politics. He joined the Hungarian National Committee, the umbrella organization of the Hungarian expatriate community, and helped the work of Ferenc Nagy and István Barankovics.
In 1957 Kovrig started a research among the Hungarian refugees of 1956. He prepared a questionnaire, which was distributed among thousands of refugees in the United States and Canada, and he also made some interviews with certain freedom fighters. He summarized and analized his findings in his manuscript “National Communism and Hungary. The Way of an Idea – A Sociological Account”, which was preserved in the Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette University and finally published in Hungarian (Kovrig Béla: Nemzeti kommunizmus és Magyarország. Egy eszme története) in 2016.
In my contribution I introduce Kovrig’s theory, summarize his results and show the historical context of his researches. My presentation is based on archival and documentary material that can be found at Marquette University in Milwaukee, in Országos Széchényi Könyvtár and in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security in Budapest.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Éva Petrás (PhD), Hungarian historian. She studied at Pécs University with specialization in history and English. She received MA degree in modern history at Central European University (1995). She continued her studies at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy) between 1995 and 2000 and obtained her PhD in the department of History and Civilization of EUI in 2003. As a researcher she worked in Budapest in European Comparative Minority Research Institute (Európai Összehasonlító Kisebbségkutatások Közalapítvány) between 2005 and 2008. Since 2009 she has been working in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára), Budapest. Her publications include studies and monographs in comparative minority research, church history in the twentieth century and recently in the history of the Hungarian state security (check list: www.mtmt.hu/PetrásÉva - Magyar Tudományos Művek Tára/Holdings of the Hungarian Scientific Works) mpetras.eva@gmail.com

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Unintended Consequences of Refugee Aid: Cold War Politics, ‘Freedom Fighters’ and Jim Crow

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
When the Hungarian uprisings of late 1956 sent two hundred thousand people fleeing across national borders in Central Europe, the United States boasted a well-established, decade-old regime of overseas refugee relief and domestic refugee resettlement. Emerging from the intertwined humanitarian and geopolitical crises spawned by the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, the American system of refugee aid that took root in the middle to late 1940s was composed largely of a crisis-driven, ad-hoc series of programs. It employed the human and institutional resources of what I have elsewhere labeled a thoroughly hybrid blend of state and non-state (or “voluntary”) actors.
As elaborated in the first of two central claims my paper marshals, the nature of the U.S. refugee aid system would remain largely unchanged during its engagement with the Hungarian refugee crisis. The imperatives of Cold-War politics in the United States kept the role of the American state muted, particularly regarding refugee resettlement initiatives on U.S. soil, amid concerns that too robust a government role would spur red-baiting charges of government largesse in what were effectively social welfare programs for non-U.S.-citizens.
But as my paper’s second claim describes, the de-centralized, charity-heavy nature of that system came with a price, one a growing chorus of American critics of that system predicted. Poor management of refugee camps in Austria was credited with precipitating suicides and repatriation back across the Iron Curtain. Something similar happened on the American domestic front, as advocates of the U.S. Hungarian Refugee Program demanded the speedy resettlement of the forty thousand “Freedom Fighters” eventually admitted to the U.S., but were left to operate a program with insufficient resources and central oversight, particularly with regards to the state. The final portion of the paper follows the unintended and sometimes fascinating consequences of this confluence of phenomena through the case of one such Freedom Fighter who was unwittingly enrolled at a historically black university in the American Deep South, crossing the Jim Crow color line and sparking regional, national and international controversies that brought the limitations of America’s system of refugee aid into sharper relief.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
An Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, Dr. Stephen Porter’s research and teaching explore the intersection of humanitarianism, U.S. power, and American social and political life over the past century and a half. He is particularly interested in understanding changing conceptions of ethical responsibilities and rights as well as the ways in which a panoply of state and non-state actors have collaborated – productively and otherwise – in innovative strategies to manage humanitarian dilemmas wrought by war, persecution, upheaval, and other disruptive phenomena so emblematic of the modern world order. He has explored these issues in his book, Benevolent Empire: U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World’s Dispossessed (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and through published essays. At the University of Cincinnati, Porter is director of the International Human Rights Certificate, and co-chair of the Taft Center’s Human Rights Research Group. He is a former fellow of the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a PhD in History from the University of Chicago. portersp@ucmail.uc.edu

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The Hungarian Minority in Burgenland, Especially in the District of Oberwart/Felsőőr (Őrség)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Today in Burgenland a small minority of approximately 10,000 people speak Hungarian and an even smaller group of about 4,700 people see themselves as ethnic Hungarians. Besides some Hungarian speaking areas in the north, the main regions where the Hungarian minorities are located, are Oberpullendorf/Felsőpulya and Oberwart. Since Burgenland was part of the Hungarian Kingdom until 1921, it may seem surprising that nowadays not more then 1.8 percent of the population belongs to the Hungarian minority. However, this fact is strongly linked to the history of this region. In the Middle Ages, under the rule of the Árpád’s between the 10th and the 12th century, villages in the western part of Hungary were founded to defend the Hungarian borders. Interesting in this context is the fact that even today this former „frontier-guard-villages” are the core area of the Hungarians today. Since 1526, after the death of King Lajos II. (1506–1526), West-Hungary became part of the Habsburg Empire. Due to the Reformation, the Turkish Wars, the Revolution of 1848, or the compromise of 1867 the ethnic, religious, and economic structure changed dramatically. Since 1921 Burgenland became a part of the Republic of Austria. Consequently, a lot of Hungarians left this region and the situation of the Hungarian minority declined. Linked to this history, the question I want to raise in my paper is: How has the Hungarian minority developed after 1945 in Burgenland in general? And especially in the district of Oberwart, meaning in the two “villages” Siget in der Wart (Őrisziget), Unterwart (Alsóőr) and the city of Oberwart (Felsőőr)?



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Béla M. Teleky studied History and International Relations at the University of Vienna. His Diploma-thesis about the Reformation in Western Hungary was published 2014 and awarded with the "Bischof DDr. Stefan László-Preis". Since October 2014 he is part of the Doktoratskolleg at the Andrássy University in Budapest. His PhD-thesis is about the economic relations between Austria and Hungary in the interwar period. Since October 2017 Béla Teleky is a Research Fellow of the Ministry of Science at the University of New Orleans bela.teleky@andrassyuni.hu

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Reconfiguring Ethnopolitics: post-territorial nationalism and diaspora

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In the last couple of years, Hungarian ethnopolitics has experienced a significant shift, largely due to the nationalist rhetoric of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. We believe this change reflects a turn of Hungarian nationalism into what Ragazzi and Balalovska have called post-territorial nationalism (Ragazzi & Balalovska 2011), where national belonging becomes disconnected from the territory. Post-territorial nationalism thus reconfigures the nation as something global, where it does not matter in which country ‘co-nationals’ live exactly.
The aim of this paper is to examine how the concept of post-territorial nationalism has developed in Hungary and how it is integrated into its ethnopolitics. We seek to answer what is the relation between internal political developments and kin-state practices and how kin-state policy is synchronized with the real demands, needs and challenges of Hungarian communities living abroad. We believe it is because of this new conception of Hungarian nationalism that we witness that Hungarian communities living in other countries are approached by the Hungarian government in new ways, with new policy tools: the offer of extra-territorial citizenship; political campaigns to motivate them to take part in Hungarian domestic politics by voting in legislative elections; or the never before so high state budget allocated to support communities abroad. This paper is based on data from focus group discussions conducted in the Hungarian community of Western-Canada to understand the effects of this new politics on Hungarian-Hungarian relations through a critical case – a most distant and diverse Hungarian community, consisting of immigrants from Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Agnes Vass is an international relations expert with a focus on extra-territorial citizenship and kin-state politics of CEE countries. She is currently working on her dissertation at Corvinus University of Budapest. In 2015 – 2016 Ágnes served as research fellow at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Prior to this, she served as Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Minority Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Currently, she is working as Project Manager in a Budapest-based think tank organisation, where she is responsible for international projects focusing on Central and Eastern Europe. agnesvass87@gmail.com

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