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Diaspora 12:1 2003 The Hungarian Status Law: A New European Form of Transnational Politics?1 Michael Stewart University College London Late in the evening of Sunday 21 April 2002, the incoming Hungarian prime minister, Peter Medgyessy, took the stage at his Socialist Party headquarters to accept, informally, the mandate of the electorate. Announcing his intention to form a liberal–socialist coalition government, Medgyessy told his listeners that after a bitterly fought second round of an election that had deeply divided the electorate, he would be the prime minister for all 10 million Hungarians. A few moments later the defeated prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in the course of his resignation speech, had this to say about his outgoing conservative government: We have supported Hungarian culture to a degree not yet seen and we have begun the process of national reunification, so it is not, as you heard just now from the seat of another party, it is not that the future of Hungary lies in the 10 million Hungarians but in the 15 million Hungarian nation. Let me repeat, so that it can be heard everywhere where it should be heard: the future of Hungary lies not in the Hungary of 10 million but in the Hungarian nation of 15 million. (“Orbán Viktor”)2 To anyone unfamiliar with the political myths of Hungary it might seem odd that on the very night of a national election the winning candidate for prime minister should so carelessly lose 5 million of his people, or that the loser should claim to know about an extra 5 million. In fact, by the following morning the socialist winner had found the 5 million again, reassuring a newspaper reporter that he “also feels responsible for 15 million Hungarians” (“Medgyessy”). Since the “change of system” in 1989, such rhetorical uncertainty has often figured in the Hungarian political game. This was particularly so in spring 2002, thanks to the outgoing government’s successful, but controversial, introduction of a law that was intended to resolve the “status” of these 5 million now-yousee -them-now-you-don’t “Hungarians”—citizens of states that neighbor Hungary, who themselves (if they were rather elderly) or whose xxxxxxxxxxxx 67 Diaspora 12:1 2003 ancestors, prior to 1918, had lived within the Hapsburg empire but who, since the land settlement of the Treaty of Trianon, have not been linked by relations of citizenship with the Hungarian state.3 The law in question started life as a “Bill on the Status of Hungarians beyond the borders” (since it attempted to define, once and for all, the “status” of these citizens of other states vis-à-vis the Hungarian state) and passed through a phase as a “Bill on Benefits for Hungarians living beyond the borders” before finally passing into the statute book as the “Law concerning the Hungarians who live in neighboring states.” In all these guises it was, in some sense, a piece of “transnational” legislation, intended to regulate relations with “non-nationals.” After intense debate in various forums, it was passed with an overwhelming 93% of the votes in the Hungarian parliament on 19 June 2001 and registered as Law LXII of 2001. While it certainly counts as a response to a set of long-standing claims and grievances advanced by “Hungarians beyond the borders ,” not even its greatest advocates would deny that it has brought a remarkable degree of controversy into Hungarian foreign relations, both with neighboring states and with the European Union, which Hungary joins in May 2004. As a result the law has, as I write in June 2003, only just been revised, possibly not for the last time; and, if one is to believe international press commentary, this is by no means the end of the troubles that Hungary will have brought on itself (see “Bajok lesznek”). The claim of Law LXII’s authors and supporters, which finds an echo as well in some of the academic commentary it has already generated (see especially Fowler), is that it introduces a novel approach to the problem of a diaspora’s relations with its “kinstate .” The former prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, declared in March 2000 that...

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