In the Bucharest Daily News, a little item pops up: the Hungarians want the Romanians to pass a minority status law.

Yawn. What else is new?
Oh. Yes. That EU thing.

Speaking in Targu-Mures on Saturday during a two-day visit to Transylvania, Szili Katalin also spoke about cooperation between Hungary and Romania in view of the latter’s upcoming EU accession.

Ms. Szili sounds very much as if she’s trying to play hardball, or as hardball as Hungary, with its ridiculously weak international position, can play.(FN1) One can see that Hungary would be interested in the position of Hungarian minorities involved… but why should anybody else care?

The answer to that is what I like to call “the moral ironies of history.” And the chapter of history to which we need to look is the Treaty of Trianon. For those of you unfamiliar with it, and who don’t have the time to hit the link, the crux of the matter is that the Kingdom of Hungary was dismembered in order to provide a living example of the Principle of Self-Determination of Peoples so favored by Woodrow Wilson. It is generally accepted by Hungarian scholars that at least some of this was inevitable, particularly regarding the then-banate of Croatia. The geographical division, unfortunately, as have so many instances where outsiders dictate territories, left much to be desired, and put borders right through populations, sometimes separating villages from their wells and towns from their churches. It also left at least one ethnic group, long on history but short on military power, completely out in the cold.(FN2)

A quick peek at the map provided in the Wikipedia article will demonstrate quite clearly just how much was(FN3) at stake for all concerned. This issue has poisoned East-Central European politics since 1918, and continues to be an issue to this day, particularly in Transylvania, where Ceaucescu and the Romanian State’s official embrace of the “Daco-Roman Continuity Theory” (itself promoted due to the outdated, insane-to-modern-ears idea that whichever people has the more ancient claim to a land should have the right to rule it). has been used to justify repressions and an officially-sanctioned rewriting of the historical and archaeological record (ed. – more the pity intellectually, as the actual history of the region is not only vastly more complex, but, in typical fashion, also significantly more interesting than either the ideology or its counter-ideologies). More importantly, it was the primary reason for Hungary’s entrance into World War II, with all that entails. Let a Hungarian insist upon the injustice of Trianon to this day, and his neighbors’ reactions are likely to be “they just want their land back.” And in some cases they’re right. Any quick search on the web concerning “historical Hungary” will easily pop up irredentists who prefer to shove Hungary’s own history of minority relations under a rug and who see no problem inflicting new ethnic cleansings in order to “repair” the damage of a previous one.

In other words, in terms of understanding politics in East-Central Europe and the Balkans, ethnic minority status is the two-ton rotten elephant in the room, the issue that everybody’s sick of, yet nobody can figure out how to escape, because Europe has, with rare and horrifying exception, abandoned the sort of bare-fisted power plays that used to define these issues.(FN4)

Nobody is willing to back away from the Principle of Self-Determination now that it’s been the norm for three full generations. One of the fastest ways to make a man your enemy is to try to wipe out his culture, but it’s surprisingly easy to add a single thread to a culture’s tapestry, and Self-Determination is a thread that nobody’s willing to lose: the stakes for that are so high as to make the issue simply inconceivable… thus the “moral ironies of history,” with its world-wide repercussions. Not to put to fine a point on it, but without the implementation of Trianon, nobody on the international scene would have had the intellectual gunpowder to even begin standing up for East Timor in the 1990s.

The irony here is that EU accession, with its convenient single passport and lack of internal borders, could wipe the issue from the entire region… if full membership were to be achieved for Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, etcetera.(FN5) The potential for diluting crisis is every bit as large as the original EU’s charter proposes, and therefore well worth putting up with the inevitable Brussels-enforced economic misery, with its centrally-mandated price and tax “harmonisations.” Unfortunately, even putting aside Turkey’s status for the moment, enlarging the EU has many, many issues, not least the degree to which the “transitioning” countries are able to emerge from “transition” into something resembling “situation normal.” For Romania and the Balkans to obtain second-class membership such as Hungary’s, with a still-functioning border dividing it from Austria, would do little to defuse the issue, however… thus the zombie-like lurching of the dead horse everybody’s tired of beating, but whose stench is simply an unpleasant fact of life in the region.

The stench of an issue that will finally, hopefully, soon be put to rest without being held hostage to large-scale realpolitik.

Footnotes:
———————–
1. Make no mistake: that may sound mild to American ears, but in the more subtle and oblique manner of speech one uses in the polite circles of East-Central Europe, this is deadly-serious rhetoric.
2. The Rusyns of the northeast Carpathians, about whose existence most of the world is complete ignorant (and whose historical memory of the Hungarians is quite bitter).
3. And theoretically could be given the admittedly-unlikely return of widespread irredentism.
4. It’s an outsider’s confusion and an insider’s waking nightmare. Few NATO members of the time were aware that bombs being dropped at the Novi Sad bridge in Serbia during the last Balkan War were actually being dropped on a primarily-Hungarian region, while the men of that area hid on their rooftops in order to avoid Chetnik roudnups… the Chetniks themselves being defined in recent times by ethnic cleansings committed under the Croatians in WWII.
5. I have not gone into the well-known and very serious problems inherent to the Balkans here, but the same issue bears upon nearly the entirety of Southeast Europe.