The “Magna Carta of the Hungarians” and the “Millennial Constitution”: Anglocentrism and Hungarian Constitutional Discourse, 1867-1920

Type of Abstract (select): Individual Presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Centered on the Dualist era (1867-1918), my work examines Hungarian elites’ appeals to perceived “Western” models in order to justify Magyar supremacy and forced assimilationist policies in the Kingdom of Hungary.
In this particular project, I develop my argument via an examination of Hungarian legal-historical discourse. In particular, I look at the ways in which elites framed their own country’s “thousand-year” constitution as the continental “brother” of the land of constitutionalism par excellence, England.
For Hungarian elites, their “ancient” constitution mattered, in large part, because it allowed them to portray themselves as the “English of the Continent.” Perhaps most famously, since the first decades of the 19th-cenutry, elites had emphasized purported links between the Hungarian Bulla Aurea of 1222 and the Magna Carta as proof of similarities between English and Hungarian constitutional development.
More than merely establishing a flattering comparison with the world’s greatest imperial power, this framework fused legal parallels with contemporary race theory to craft a broader justification for Magyar supremacy. In this telling, the Magyars, like the English, were a “natural ruling race,” the only nation in the Carpathian Basin blessed with both the constitutional history and the racial virility necessary to ‘civilize’ the various nationalities of the Hungarian Kingdom.
These discussions, centered on notions of “constitutionalism” and the “thousand-year state,” persisted throughout the Dualist era, and would even serve as a key piece of the Hungarian Delegation’s ill-fated (and ill-timed) argument in favor of territorial integrity at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Tom Szigeti is a PhD Candidate in the history department at New York University. His research field is modern Central and Eastern Europe. His work focuses on the ways in which nationalist policies in both Dualist and interwar Hungary can be understood as attempts at state-building; an attempt, in other words, to take the multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic kingdom, and transform it into a “modern” nation-state. In particular, he is interested in the ways that Hungarian elites’ implementation of what they perceived as “Western” models influenced the development of such policies.