New Hungary citizenship law fuels passport demand

[pampango]

Source: BBC

Many people living in regions that used to form part of Hungary have started applying for Hungarian citizenship. Some Slovak politicians have condemned the new law. Slovakia, like Romania, has a large ethnic Hungarian minority. Officially Romania has about 1.5 million ethnic Hungarians, though Mr Szilagyi put the figure at "nearly two million". Southern Slovakia is home to roughly 500,000 ethnic Hungarians, about a tenth of the country's population. More than 250,000 ethnic Hungarians also live in Serbia.

Hungary ceded two-thirds of its territory under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, after being on the losing side in World War I. That left large Hungarian communities living in neighbouring countries.

Hungary joined the EU in 2004 and has just taken over the EU's six-month rotating presidency.

He stressed that, as EU citizens living in Romania, ethnic Hungarians had the right to move to Hungary and work there well before the new law came into force.



Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12114289

[Igel]

1. Ah, yes.

The consequences of immigration, especially under conditions of empire, after the empire is dissolved. It pays to note the consequences of large pockets of unassimilated ethnically distinct peoples and not let what should be get in the way of what almost always is.

There used to be a rather large Slovak population in Hungary, and quite a few Serbs in Hungary as well. (Czecho)Slovakia was nicer than Hungary. The Hungarians got to keep their language, street signs, etc., in Slovakia. It wasn't easy, there was a bit of assimilation and a lot of discrmination. Still, it was better than it could have been. The Slovaks in Hungary were educated in Hungarian, addressed in Hungarian, and generally told that they would be Hungarian. The pressure on them was much greater than the pressure on the Hungarians in Slovakia.

Some dialect studies were possible on Slovak dialects in Hungary between the wars. After WWII, that was much harder. Couldn't really do them for political reasons until after 1991, by which time there wasn't much left to study.

The Serb populations are a bit more robust. They're also nearer the border and a bit more nationalist. It was fairly easy to study them in the '90s and early '00s. It's gotten hard again, for political reasons. Hungarians are like the Turks (or most other peoples in this regard): They can be oppressed, and suffer horrible anguish; but they can never be oppressors.

In the end, the Hungarians have been rewarded for being intolerant bastards. Many of the rewards have come from the people that say that intolerance is really, really bad--but only current, ongoing intolerance. What's past is past. So if you're going to be intolerant, it pays to not dawdle and play nice.

The Csango population in Romania is Hungarian, but Hungary only sticks up for them when it's in Hungary's interests. Otherwise Hungary all but denies the Csango exists, or is "really" Hungarian, and they look down horribly at the rustic doltish bumpkins. Sort of ersatz Hungarians. How "Hungarian" the Csango are really depends on what Hungary wants out of Romania. The Csango know it: The Romanians are bad to them, but the Hungarians would be worse.

Of course, the Slavs were there before the Hungarians showed up. (Then again, the Romanians were there before the Slavs showed up, so there!)