In 2010, prominent Slovak historian Roman Holec published a provocative paper titled Trianon Rituals, or Considerations on Some Features of Hungarian Historiography, in which he criticised Hungarian historiography – particularly the approach to the Trianon Peace Treaty.Footnote 1 Two years later, a roundtable discussion featuring leading representatives from both historiographies demonstrated clearly that the paper had elicited highly emotional reactions.Footnote 2 In written responses – whether direct or indirect – Csaba Zahorán and László Vörös proposed shifting the focus to issues that transcend national perspectives, while Lázsló Szarka suggested a comparative analysis of Slovak and Hungarian historiographies.Footnote 3 This argument is not merely anecdotal; it may be representative of Central European historiography as a whole – and even beyond – in the context of debates on the nation-state–building nature of historical writing and methodological nationalism.Footnote 4
This paper addresses the issue by analysing the main explanatory frameworks, as well as the continuities and discontinuities in the approach of Central European historiographies to nationally sensitive topics – such as the dissolution of the Kingdom of Hungary and the creation of its successor states – over the longue durée.Footnote 5 From a broader perspective, the present study explores the complex interaction between politics and the socio-cultural milieu, on the one hand, and historiography, on the other. Historical narratives are often shaped by political ideologies and cultural contexts, which frequently determine which perspectives are amplified or marginalised. In turn, historiography plays a significant role in legitimising or challenging political power and societal norms.Footnote 6 This dynamic forms the general context in which other factors also influence historiography, including power relations within and beyond the discipline, as well as institutional, financial, material, personal and generational aspects, among others. Building on this analysis, the paper situates the critique of methodological nationalism within today’s socio-cultural and political landscape, emphasising its socially constructed nature.Footnote 7 At the same time, it advocates for moderate national narratives that take into consideration the latest historiographical trends.Footnote 8
The term ‘national story’ or ‘narrative’ signifies a social master-narrative, an explanatory frame that presents a nation and its interests as the drivers of historical events, which also demonstrates the nation’s unique attributes. The goal is to foster national unity, legitimate the current form of government and typically – explicitly or implicitly – anticipate the nation’s future.Footnote 9 In this study, analysed works and authors were selected based on the impact of their work and also considering how well they represent individual historiographical currents.
Historical Inevitability and the ‘Argument over Credits’ (1920–45)
The First World War and its aftermath laid the foundation of a new geopolitical order for Europe and particularly for Central Europe, which is why the interpretation of these events was – and frequently remains – strongly politically determined. In the inter-war period, European scholars and historians mostly served as legitimators of political aims, attempting to identify the parties responsible for the war. The nation was at the centre of their attention, and following the logic of event-based history, the war was interpreted as the result of decisions made by individuals.Footnote 10 The main features of these arguments were rooted in propaganda developed during the war and at the Paris Peace Conference.Footnote 11 As such, it is frequently difficult to distinguish the participants of individual events from those who interpreted them. In this respect, perhaps the most emblematic case is that of Tomáš G. Masaryk, whose book The World Revolution (Světová revoluce, 1925) became key in the interpretation of the creation of Czechoslovakia.Footnote 12 Post-war Yugoslav, Romanian and Czechoslovak historians presented the First World War as a prelude to the unification or expansion of their territories within the broader context of national emancipation. The chief antagonists, who were to blame for the war – Germany and Austria-Hungary – were also unambiguously identified, which was especially understandable in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
The inter-war period saw the publication of a large number of documents, memoirs, diaries, monographs and analyses, which remain factually relevant to this day. These works were limited mainly to stories and perspectives that were compatible with the official politics of memory. In this context, it is interesting to take into consideration the attitudes, turnabouts and choice of subjects of individual historiographies. The war also created a problematic legacy for a large number of former Austro-Hungarian soldiers who had fought against the creation of the successor states and had thus been on the ‘wrong side’ of the conflict.Footnote 13 Their stories were told mostly in literary fiction.
For inter-war Hungary, the Trianon Treaty was presented as the result of neighbouring countries’ insatiable imperialist ambitions and an act of unnatural outside interference carried out against the will of the nations, represented by such self-styled agents of the Entente like Tomáš G. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš.Footnote 14 Allegedly, Entente leaders were ignorant of the situation in Hungary and had therefore let themselves be manipulated.Footnote 15 Hungarian historians denied Hungary’s responsibility for the war, especially as concerns Prime Minister István Tisza (1903–5, 1913–7). They were also very critical of the leader of the Hungarian People’s Republic (1918–9), democrat Mihály Károlyi, who was portrayed as weak and the primary domestic culprit for Hungary’s dissolution.Footnote 16 Hungarian historiography was dominated by ‘Trianon trauma’ discourse and the conservative-nationalist narrative, which harmonised well with the contemporary governing regime. Hungarian revisionist propaganda between 1920 and 1945 underlined, among other arguments: the geographic and economic unity of the Kingdom of Hungary; the priority of Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin, which was but sparsely settled at the time of their arrival (the issue of which population settled the territory first constituted a central argument for every historiography); and Hungary’s history of tolerance of national minorities.Footnote 17 At the time, Gyula Szekfű had already highlighted the fate of the three million Hungarians in neighbouring countries, which he considered an even bigger tragedy than the actual dissolution of Hungary.Footnote 18 Revisionism, whether ethnic or integral, was an indelible part of the Hungarian Trianon discourse during the inter-war period.
Czechoslovak and Romanian historiographies took very different points of departure, emphasising Hungary’s – and Austria’s – intolerance towards the national minorities living in their territories and the support of most, if not all, Slovaks and Romanians from Kingdom of Hungary for joining Czechoslovakia and Romania. Romanian representatives viewed Greater RomaniaFootnote 19 as an ideal state, stressing the natural connection of the new territories to the old kingdom and the success of their economic, political and cultural integration.Footnote 20 Similarly, the creation of Czechoslovakia was portrayed as not an ad-hoc solution but rather the continuation of a long-standing cooperation between Czechs and Slovaks with an emphasis on the unity of the new state.Footnote 21 Several Slovak – and even some Hungarian – historians have viewed the dissolution of Hungary as the culmination of an inevitable historical process.Footnote 22
In Romanian historiography, key themes include the role of Russia, whose failure in 1917 left the Romanian army to face the Central Powers on its own, the legitimacy of the country’s entry into the war and the justness of its territorial and political demands. As far as praiseworthy figures are concerned, historians highlighted Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu and King Ferdinand I. Also part of Romania’s triumphant First World War narrative was the war with the Hungarian Soviet Republic (HSR),Footnote 23 with historians claiming that Romania had only defended itself against a Hungarian incursion at a time when Hungarian nationalism masqueraded as bolshevism.Footnote 24
Yugoslavs, much like Czechs and Slovaks, could not harken back to a pre-war political unity. The kingdom’s foundational event took place after the end of the First World War (1 December 1918) and became the most prominent symbol of the realisation of a ‘historically inevitable’ Yugoslav national unity. With the start of King Alexander’s dictatorship in 1929, the official notion of three parts of the Yugoslav nation – the Serb, the Croat and the Slovene – gave way to integral Yugoslavism. Among other objectives, it was intended to defuse tensions between Serbs and Croats. This intention was reflected in the increased production of historical works aligned with this perspective, as well as in the establishment of the Yugoslav Historical Society.Footnote 25
In Austria, supporters as well as detractors of the monarchy presented Austria-Hungary as a state doomed to fail, but the country nevertheless engaged in a lively discussion concerning the ways the empire could have been saved. Opponents of the Habsburgs – especially pan-Germanists – viewed the monarchy as an obstacle to national unification.Footnote 26 An important shift in Austrian and German historians’ attitude towards Burgenland took place in the early 1930s as they began to apply ‘folk (völkisch) history’, which served the aims of German cultural and political expansion.Footnote 27 Understandably for Hungary, the significance of losing Burgenland was incomparable to the significance of losing territories in favour of Czechoslovakia and Romania.Footnote 28
Interpretations of the events in question were not monolithic and continued to evolve throughout the inter-war period. In Romania in the 1930s, 1 December, which had previously been seen more as a regional holiday, became a national holiday. Transylvanian Romanian elites highlighted the activities of the national movement and the mobilisation of the masses, while Bucharest elites emphasised the role of the army and the royal dynasty.Footnote 29
The dissolution of Hungary is one of the issues on which Czech and Slovak historiographies are almost completely at one. In the inter-war period, the breakup was interpreted mainly within the framework of official Czechoslovakism, even though Slovak historians also highlighted other related milestones. Slovak autonomist politicians in particular stressed the importance of the Pittsburgh AgreementFootnote 30 and the Martin Declaration,Footnote 31 which would later be embraced by a portion of Slovak historiography. The Czech lands witnessed controversy regarding the respective merits of the foreign and domestic movements, which reflected contemporary political disputes between Masaryk and Karel Kramář, head of the latter. The creation of Czechoslovakia was also debated as part of the polemics regarding the ‘meaning of Czech history’; Masaryk viewed it as a continuity of the ideals of humanism, while Josef Pekař along with other professional historians criticised Masaryk’s thesis from a positivist perspective and deemed it unscientific. Thanks to material support from the state embodied in the Memorial to the Resistance, Masaryk supporters dominated public discourse on the issues in question.Footnote 32
Yugoslav historiography brought a similar debate regarding who deserved more credit for the creation of the Kingdom of SHS and which of the three key actorsFootnote 33 had been more ‘Yugoslav’ during the war.Footnote 34 In the 1920s, the prevailing interpretation attributed decisive influence to the Serbian government.Footnote 35 Slovene historians analysed how the Yugoslavist notion had come to prominence among Slovene politicians.Footnote 36 Even though leading intellectuals rejected separatism and autonomism, Croat society was galvanising around events that symbolised a move towards the kingdom’s centralist government.Footnote 37 Croat historiography and memory focused on territorial disputes with Italy; disputes with Hungary had only local relevance.Footnote 38
From a global perspective, the controversy regarding who deserved more credit for the creation of Hungary’s successor states took place, with some overlap, on two levels: 1) domestic movements within the monarchy versus foreign movements; 2) new centres (Prague, Bucharest, Belgrade) versus peripheries (Slovakia, Transylvania, Croatia and Slovenia). In multinational states, this controversy translated into tensions between the constituent nations. Hungary looked abroad for people responsible for the dissolution of the country, yet on the home front, this process was reflected in political divisions.Footnote 39
Central Europe’s new borders survived for barely twenty years as Hungary’s revisionist ambitions benefited from the ascent of Nazi Germany.Footnote 40 During wartime, the story of Hungary’s dissolution and the creation of its successor states was not overwritten completely, but on the whole, attitudes towards Germany and its Austro-Hungarian ally were much more benevolent, which was a direct function of Nazi Germany’s alliance with Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. Slavko Pavičić authored a two-volume work on the Habsburg-led Croat militia (1914–18), but because of their country’s alliance with Italy, he did not include the Isonzo Front.Footnote 41 In his book, Slovak historian František Hrušovský avoided blaming Germany for the outbreak of the First World War. The creation of the Czechoslovak Republic, which was allegedly doomed to fail because it could not settle the Slovak question, was presented as a prelude to the founding of the Slovak Republic (1939–45),Footnote 42 an interpretation that would make a fierce return to Slovak historiography in the 1990s.
Forced Unity (1948–60)
Save for a few details, the Paris Peace Treaties of 1947 restored the borders of Hungary to the pre-war status quo. The Soviet Union acquired Transcarpathia, Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, and Bulgaria got to keep Southern Dobruja.Footnote 43 The Second World War had been the largest armed conflict in the history of humankind, and the Soviet Union’s victory was a key element of the country’s legitimation, which is why the questioning of borders – considered one of the main reasons why the war broke out – was unthinkable.
Despite some differences in chronology, approaches and topics between Eastern and Western European historiographies, they share several common features. Influenced by Marxism, decolonisation and the horrors of the Second World War, the war came to be viewed not merely as a military conflict, but as a total war that encompassed the whole of society. The focus then shifted to collective actors – soldiers, workers, civilians and women – as well as to social unrest, the socialist revolution and its origins. By prioritising a bottom-up perspective, historians emphasised that real power lies with society rather than with individuals.Footnote 44
The Soviet Union foisted its interpretation of history based on dialectical materialism upon Central Europe. Regional academies of sciences were transformed into a Soviet-style academy, with historical institutes tasked with providing ideological support for the regime. Specialised institutes were later established specifically for this purpose. In Yugoslavia, each federal republic had its own historical institute, and from the 1970s onward, the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo established their own as well, while in Slovakia, the Institute of History had existed since 1943. A younger generation of ideologically aligned historians embraced these opportunities, gaining control over the newly established institutions – particularly those focusing on research related to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Representatives of the preceding regimes faced purges and harsh political reprisals, which would also partially affect historians. Previously dominant inter-war narratives gave way to a synthesis of the national story and Marxism–Leninism.Footnote 45 Disputes between nations would be solved with proletarian internationalism and socialist patriotism.
The communist seizure of power substituted the emergence of nation-states as the end of history, although the creation of the nation-state did retain the status of an important, positive development that served as a precondition to later socialist revolutions. Protagonists of the new states’ founding, as well as bourgeois elites, were portrayed negatively and their role was taken by masses of the people, workers and communist leaders. According to the logic of Marxism–Leninism, foreign policy was shaped by internal socio-economic conditions. The First World War was presented as an imperialist conflict, the October Revolution was portrayed as a key event leading to the successor states’ creation and the states’ historiographies highlighted their citizens’ participation therein,Footnote 46 with symbolic events of national significance added to the October Revolution.Footnote 47 Communist ideologues openly argued that history as a scientific discipline was only useful if it provided ammunition for the ‘political practice of the present’, which resulted in frequent changes in interpretations of the past.Footnote 48
Hungarian historiography progressively changed its attitude towards the dissolution of Hungary, presenting the former state as a prison for not only Romanians, Serbs and Slovaks – who never identified with the nation – but also the Hungarian people, foregrounding class oppression. In line with Marxist–Leninist ideology, the Trianon Treaty was harshly criticised, not because of the attendant loss of ‘national’ territory, but because it represented a successful counter-revolutionary attempt by the imperialists, planting the seed of the next war.Footnote 49 Besides the October Revolution, the HSRFootnote 50 also played a key role, as would the Aster Revolution.Footnote 51 The expansion of Hungary’s territory between 1938 and 1941 was viewed as a pretext for a partial or complete reconstitution of feudal Hungary and as a way of drawing attention away from the poor domestic situation.Footnote 52
While historians in Romania and Yugoslavia tended to distance themselves from the monarchist traditions linked to the creation of Greater Romania and the Kingdom of SHS, in Czechoslovakia, the guiding thread of Marxist–Leninist historiography was the questioning of the role of the foreign movement leaders and the bourgeoisie in the national revolution – the so-called fight against bourgeois legends.Footnote 53 Czechoslovakia’s war with the HSR was understandably portrayed in a very negative light. Historiography highlighted the legacy of the Slovak Soviet Republic as a step towards the bolshevisation of Czechoslovakia and not its breakup.Footnote 54 According to the official narrative, the creation of Czechoslovakia had been a result of the October Revolution, which the bourgeoisie had managed to ‘steal’ during the inter-war period thanks to the betrayal of the right-wing Social Democrats. The Czechoslovak Legion’s fight against the bolsheviks in Russia was, of course, condemned.Footnote 55 Historians also frequently emphasised the bourgeoisie’s share of the blame for the ‘Munich Betrayal’ – the Munich Agreement of 1938. From a more general view, however, continuity with the dominant national narrative was stronger in post-1948 Czechoslovakia than in Hungary or Romania.
The creation of Greater Romania had been accompanied by political and military conflicts with its two bolshevist neighbours, which is why Mihail Roller – a prominent Party member and a leading figure in 1950s Romanian historiography – condemned not only the country’s participation in the First World War, but especially the conflicts of 1918/1919. He symbolically discussed the occupation of Bessarabia, which had also been in the sights of the bolsheviks, and the attack against the HSR in a single subchapter. Roller went even further when he questioned the annexation of Transylvania.Footnote 56 At this time, there was a strong emphasis on good Russian–Romanian relations.Footnote 57
Shortly after the war, Yugoslav historiography did not differ significantly from its Soviet counterpart. After the Tito–Stalin split of 1948, the image of ordinary Serbs who had spent centuries fighting for freedom and independence against foreign occupiers was extended to all South Slavs with the aim of consolidating newly acquired territories and pushing back against Soviet imperialism.Footnote 58 Another consequence of Yugoslavia’s falling out with the Soviet Union was a partial return to the legacy of inter-war historiography. In a speech delivered at the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1948, Tito commended Yugoslav unification, but opined that the Kingdom of SHS had been incapable of successfully tackling the South Slav question due to internal contradictions – which he also claimed was resolved by his own regime.Footnote 59
In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party officially rejected the Czechoslovakism of the inter-war period, but any discussion of the Slovak question was still labelled an exercise in ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and consequently suppressed. The ideological concept of the Czechoslovak working people basically had the same function – to justify the existence of the common state.Footnote 60 Hungarian historians, meanwhile, were silent on Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries. As a consequence of Hungary’s international isolation after the failed revolution of 1956, it became unthinkable that the country should broach sensitive questions with its neighbours.Footnote 61
Gradual Reemergence of National Narratives (1960–89)
The political and societal liberalisation that took place in the countries of the Soviet Bloc after the Twentieth Congress of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union proceeded at different paces. Among other things, there was a gradual recycling of the inter-war national story, which became incorporated into official discourse.Footnote 62 Changes manifested themselves most quickly in Romanian historiography, where the dogmatic Marxist–Leninist and heroic national-communist narratives coexisted briefly.Footnote 63 On the occasion of the fortieth – and especially the fiftieth – anniversaries of the founding of Greater Romania, historians emphasised the year 1918 instead of 1917. The annexation of Transylvania was presented as a historical inevitability – a revolutionary and progressive event that, to some extent, took over the dominant role of the October Revolution. However, historians kept away from the term ‘Greater Romania’ to avoid provoking the Soviet Union. The annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina was passed over in silence, and the war with the HSR continued to be criticised.Footnote 64
Towards the end of the 1960s, as Romania was emancipating itself from the Soviet Union in terms of foreign policy, the country’s journalists and historians began to highlight the Romanian character of Bessarabia (Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic) and, gradually, the progressive nature of their country’s annexation of the territory. This narrative was symbolically balanced by emphasising the positive relations between Romania and the Soviet Russia and the former’s refusal to intervene in the Russian Civil War. The war with the HSR was viewed negatively or glossed over,Footnote 65 and Romania’s entry into the First World War, which was purportedly motivated by national self-determination, began to be presented as legitimate.Footnote 66 For the Ceaușescu regime, 1918 became a symbol of national unity and the culmination of a long process of national determination and popular heroism. During this era, the significance of 1 December completely overshadowed the war, which was presented as a prelude to the annexation of Transylvania.Footnote 67 In 1974, the agenda of the Eleventh Congress of the Romanian Communist Party included a primer on the history of Romania, a kind of manual for history writing.Footnote 68 The narrative was based on four central tenets that had been present since the very institutionalisation of history as a scientific discipline in Romania:Footnote 69 1) the ancient roots of the Romanian nation; 2) the continuity of Romanian settlement on the current territory of the state from antiquity to the present; 3) the unity of the Romanian nation throughout its history; and 4) an incessant Romanian desire for independence.Footnote 70 Given Romania’s independence within the Eastern Bloc, the final point played an important role politically.
In Czechoslovakia, de-Stalinisation gradually began to take effect.Footnote 71 The tentative liberalisation of the regime throughout the 1960s and the abolition of censorship in the spring of 1968 enabled great volumes of scholarly and popular literature to be published. A hasty rehabilitation of Masaryk and Štefánik in expert and public discourse exposed the limited effectuality of the communist narrative.Footnote 72 Perhaps the most influential contemporary publication on the topic was Karel Pichlík’s factual analysis of the foreign movement in which he distanced himself from the Stalinist interpretation and rejected its idealised inter-war assessment.Footnote 73 By virtue of the Slovak story’s emancipation from the umbrella of Czechoslovak history, Slovak historiography once again began to view the creation of Czechoslovakia from the perspective of national goals and interests.Footnote 74 Slovak historical writing, which had merely copied and adapted the models of Czech historians in the 1950s, was confidently emancipating itself.Footnote 75 Ľubomír Lipták’s synthesis of the history of the twentieth century played an important role insofar as it also largely rehabilitated the foreign movement and ‘bourgeois’ actors.Footnote 76 Frequent highlighting of the importance of the Martin Declaration and the inequitable position of Slovaks in the inter-war republic were also part of the ongoing debates that led to the federalisation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The period of normalisation that followed the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact largely signified a return to the dogmatic thesis regarding the centrality of the October Revolution,Footnote 77 though it did not completely shut out reformist interpretations. Marián Hronský authored an especially compelling work that partly compared the activities of the 1918 national councils in the Czech lands and in Slovakia, whose centres ‘silenced’ the socialist revolution.Footnote 78 Furthermore, Czechoslovakia saw the publication of an interpretively balanced synthesis of the history of the Czech lands as well as works arguing that the creation of Czechoslovakia had been the outcome of a long-term striving for national emancipation by Czechs and Slovaks.Footnote 79 These tendencies manifested themselves even more strongly in novelistic and historicising texts. Towards the end of the 1980s, the national story gradually regained prominence at the expense of dogmatic Marxism–Leninism.Footnote 80
In Yugoslavia, military history was the principal preserve of the Military History Institute in Belgrade (established in 1949), which initially focused on the Second World War and the communist resistance led by Tito, but the triumphs of the Serbian army in the First World War were also highlighted. Croatian historians meanwhile wrote especially about deserters, mutinies, the unification of 1918 and anti-Habsburg politicians.Footnote 81 The class perspective and the workers’ movement played an important role,Footnote 82 but promising new perspectives were also coming to the fore, even though they needed to harmonise with the official narrative.Footnote 83
In relation to the 1974 drafting of a new constitution that would deliver federalisation, the country saw a surge of nationalism and historiography that increasingly began to reflect national-republican positions, with a few exceptions. Novelistic production echoed the Serbian national story, which some Serbian historians also began to adopt. They highlighted the fact that the federalised republic left no room for reflecting upon the role of Serbia in the creation of the Kingdom of SHS, which was also viewed as the first step towards the introduction of communism.Footnote 84 In time, Yugoslav historiography would benefit from the liberalisation of official oversight, methodological diversityFootnote 85 and the opening of the Yugoslav archives. Many 1970s and 1980s works on the creation of the Kingdom of SHS remain unsurpassed to this day.Footnote 86 Several Serbian historians have offered more balanced accounts of the activities of Pašić and King Alexander, especially in contrast to the preceding, ‘iconoclastic’ era.Footnote 87 They also analysed the First World War from the perspective of social and economic historyFootnote 88 and highlighted other aspects of Yugoslav unification, such as its bottom-up dynamics.Footnote 89 These authors’ interpretations of the kingdom’s creation frequently contrasted with the views of Serbian nationalist intellectuals. However, any attempt to revise the established image of inter-war Yugoslavia as a ‘prison of nations’ was met with dismissal by Croatian, Macedonian, Bosnian and Slovenian historians, which could be seen as a continuation of similar disputes from the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote 90 While Slovenian historians increasingly wrote about the First World War, their Croatian colleagues more or less avoided the subject.Footnote 91 After Tito’s death in 1980, history became a tool in the political struggles between the individual parts of the federation, which led to an increase in ‘propaganda’ publications.Footnote 92
In 1960s and 1970s Hungary, class aspects and Marxist–Leninist vocabulary still played an important role.Footnote 93 Gradually, however, a new generation of historians appeared on the scene, supporting their findings with Western archival and literary sources and sometimes also new historiographical approaches; they partly abandoned the Marxist–Leninist narrative and, in some cases, revised the inter-war Trianon story, laying the foundations of the present-day Hungarian historiographical mainstream. Several Hungarian historians treated the breakup of the monarchy – and by extension, of Hungary – as an immanent process that was only accelerated by 1918 and the policies of the victorious powers.Footnote 94 A few even declared that the monarchy’s downfall had been facilitated by Hungary’s policy towards national minorities,Footnote 95 but most highlighted the interests of the Entente powers in Central Europe. Here, France and its unfair attitude towards Hungary played an especially prominent role.Footnote 96 The fact that three million Hungarians, around half of whom lived in the borderlands, were left in neighbouring countries – in contradiction to the official Wilsonian policy of national self-determination – was generally considered a grave injustice.Footnote 97 The dissolution of Hungary, which had been the fundamental issue, gave way to a split of the nation, interpreted both within a more or less Marxist–Leninist frameworkFootnote 98 and outside of it.Footnote 99 The 1980s saw open polemics with Romanian historians over interpretations of national history.Footnote 100
Due to historical circumstances, Austrian historiography was less bound by ideology than its Soviet Bloc counterparts. Post-war Austrian historians strongly supported the development of an independent, non-German Austrian identity. Their more nuanced views on history mostly remained the preserve of academic professionals.Footnote 101 Furthermore, so-called Habsburg Studies came under the strong influence of British and American experts, who gradually shifted the focus to social and cultural history,Footnote 102 with a special emphasis placed on its capitals.Footnote 103 The former, dominant thesis regarding the inevitability of Austria-Hungary’s downfall was strongly challenged, and historians generally wrote in favour of the state’s maintenance, which had ideological roots in the ongoing Cold War and Soviet domination over Central Europe.Footnote 104
Despite persisting ideological restrictions, it would have been impossible to view the individual national historiographies of the 1970s and 1980s as a homogenous whole. Historians in Romania were perhaps under the greatest influence of politics and often had to openly legitimise the political ambitions of the government. The 1948–89 historiographies analysed here could be divided into three schools of thought. First, the dogmatic Marxist–Leninist school of thought (whether in its radical, Stalinist or, later, moderate iteration), whose interpretations were largely based on the political needs of the moment, dominated in the 1950s and then waned. Second, the factographic/positivist school of thought, which was strongly influenced by nationalism (whether it employed Marxist–Leninist vocabulary or not) and which most frequently and emphatically reproduced the national story, dominated in the 1980s; it was focused mainly on political history and articulated new perspectives based on yet untapped sources. Third, the social school of thought, which stressed the role of the masses and was interpretively limited by Marxism–Leninism (with the notable exception of Yugoslav and partially Hungarian historiography), nevertheless generated new issues and perspectives.
In the Grip of National Narratives? (1989–2024)
In Central Europe, the year 1989 does not represent as crucial a paradigm shift in the historiography as the years 1918–20 and 1945–50. The transition was relatively frictionless, in terms of both interpretations and interpreters. There were mounting calls for an undistorted interpretation of history, including a rejection of the Marxist–Leninist narrative and vocabulary, but the foundations of the national stories had already been laid.Footnote 105 A general surge of nationalism in the region once more revived painful questions about historical injustice and fears of shifting borders, with national minorities portrayed as fifth columns. Historiography witnessed great thematic expansion and began to focus on recent historical issues such as the Holocaust, the crimes of the communist regimes, the Second World War, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Likely frightened by methodological innovations and the language barrier, as well as disgusted by Marxist–Leninist theory, which claimed to explain ‘everything’, the majority of scholars in the post-1989 period have hidden behind positivist, event-based works, professing an essentialist concept of truth.
In most Central European countries, the respective Institutes of History of the Academy of Sciences lost their former central role due to their support of the regime’s ideological needs. On one hand, the discipline became more decentralised with the creation of new universities and research centres; on the other hand, ‘rationalisation’ and financial issues caused a significant generational gap that lasted over a decade, even longer in some cases. The leitmotif of all the studied historiographies became ‘Westernisation and Europeanisation’.
After the fall of communism, Hungary witnessed a renewal of interest in the dissolution of its kingdom. That said, present-day Hungarian historiography does not present a united front on the issue. There is the mainstream, on one hand, represented by such authors as Mária Ormos, Ignác Romsics, László Szarka,Footnote 106 Miklós ZeidlerFootnote 107 and the Lendület Trianon 100 research group centred around Balázs Ablonczy,Footnote 108 which examine the dissolution of Hungary from the perspective of the country’s internal and national complexity. Regarding topics and approaches, the Hungarian mainstream is thriving. Many historians subscribing to this school of thought attribute partial responsibility for the dissolution of the empire to Hungarian political elites but persist in their criticism of the abandonment of Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries.Footnote 109 The activities of the Peace Conference – and the Entente policy in general – are presented in a similar light. On the other hand, there is the nationalist school of thought led by Ernő Raffay and Mária Schmidt, which exhibits a strong continuity with inter-war narratives – with the exception of irredentism, though it occasionally crops up. These authors blame the dissolution of Hungary on the Entente powers, the successor states, Károlyi and the Freemasons.Footnote 110 Since Viktor Orbán’s return to power in 2010, the nationalist narrative has grown stronger, with several government-funded research institutes founded to support such thinking. In terms of the politics of memory, we can see a continuity with the Horthy era,Footnote 111 even if Orbán was very careful in commemorating the Trianon centenary, recognising the importance of his neighbouring countries’ support for his anti-EU politics.Footnote 112 Compared to the other historiographies, the greatest interpretive change is palpable in Hungarian historiography, which has shifted from inter-war revisionism to the history of the Hungarian minorities living in neighbouring countries.Footnote 113
When it comes to the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Slovak historians have mostly focused on the issue of Czech–Slovak relations at the time of the country’s dissolution in 1993. The nature of their polemics is best illustrated by the dispute over whether to commemorate 28 October, the official day of Czechoslovakia’s founding, or 30 October, the anniversary of the Martin Declaration. One group of historians who were opposed to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 viewed the country’s founding as the most important day in Slovak history, while another group, who supported the dissolution, did not deny the significance of the common state but criticised Czechoslovakism and emphasised the Slovaks’ inequitable standing in the republic.Footnote 114 The ideological dispute regarding the national question, initially between the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Matica slovenská, and later with the Ústav pamäti národa (Nation’s Memory Institute), was exacerbated by institutional competition. Over the past thirty years, the historiographical discussion has moved in a more analytical direction,Footnote 115 but the question of Slovaks’ relation to their Czechoslovak past remains important.
With respect to Trianon, the key post-1989 Slovak author is undoubtedly Marián Hronský, who considers the creation of Czechoslovakia the result of an inevitable process and views the dissolution of Hungary as a consequence of not only the national emancipation movement or the country’s defeat in the war but also its lack of economic and political progress.Footnote 116 A significant interpretive shift in the national story did not occur until 2020, when Roman Holec drew attention to the plurality of the relevant actors’ interests and the miscues of Czechoslovak policy towards Hungary.Footnote 117 In a comprehensive view, for most Slovak historians, ‘Trianon is just a formal and belated confirmation of what they believe to have been definitively settled on 28 or 30 October 1918’. While Slovak scholars acknowledge that the borders were not entirely equitable from an ethnic perspective, they emphasize that their delineation also reflected military, economic, strategic, infrastructural, and other pragmatic considerations.Footnote 118
For Czech historiography, the dissolution of Hungary is understandably a marginal issue, focusing more on the founding of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the whole monarchy. Immediately after the fall of communism, many historians returned to the traditional but well-argued national story strongly approving the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918,Footnote 119 while others openly questioned the narrative and offered provocative alternatives.Footnote 120 Nevertheless, the polemic with critics of the founding of Czechoslovakia and the entire First Czechoslovak Republic remains current.Footnote 121 There have also been voices that claim that the monarchy in the nineteenth century was a stabilising force that enabled the development of the Czech nation,Footnote 122 a perspective far from widely accepted in the Czech Republic. The romanticised portrayal of the ‘multiethnic and tolerant’ empire contrasted with the destructive force of nationalism nevertheless remains a subject of criticism in Czech as well as other historiographies.Footnote 123 Nazi and Soviet domination of Central Europe also raises the question of the consequences of the monarchy’s breakup for security and stability in the region.Footnote 124
The leading proponent of the Romanian national story is Ioan-Aurel Pop – elected as president of the Romanian Academy in 2018 and re-elected in 2022 – who insists on the ‘patriotic function’ of national history. His book The History of Transylvania ends symbolically with the region’s annexation by Romania in 1918.Footnote 125 According to one far-ranging synthesis of Romanian history, Romania entered the war to ‘liberate’ territories inhabited by ethnic Romanians, and the founding of Greater Romania was an expression of popular will; however, a study of the war with the HSR and the Romanian occupation of Budapest is non-existent.Footnote 126 A different synthesis partly recycles the inter-war narrative regarding the war with the HSR.Footnote 127 The national narrative continues to evolve. Sorin Alexandrescu explains the 1918 union as the result of the activities of elites and not the masses.Footnote 128 Lucian Leuștean has proposed much more balanced works on the matter.Footnote 129 Lucian Boia, a prominent representative of Romanian critical historiography, views 1918 as the starting point of Romanian unification rather than a culmination of the nation’s history; 1918 signifies the start of the Romanianisation of populations from newly gained territories.Footnote 130 In Romania and Slovakia, the 1918–20 events are a source of tension and interpretive disputes mostly with Hungarian historiography that are exacerbated by the existence of Hungarian minorities in their countries.
During the war-torn 1990s, Yugoslavia saw several re-editions of books on the First World War whose parts were tendentiously used to demonstrate the historical right of this or that nation to a particular territory, as well as its historical uniqueness compared to the others. Serbian historians highlighted the continuity of Germany’s and the Vatican’s support for Croatia in 1941–5, which was itself seen as a replay of an older tradition of Austria-Hungary’s imperialist policy towards Serbia, with support from Germany. Since 2000, Serbian historiography has focused on three sets of questions: medical issues in the country during the war; the fate of refugees after 1915; and the political and military ties between Serbs and their allies, which had been at the centre of Yugoslav and Serbian historiography since the end of the war.Footnote 131 The First World War is interpreted through the lens of Serbian national history, and the founding of the Kingdom of SHS as well as the idea of Yugoslavism is typically avoided. Considerable uproar was caused by the publication of ‘revisionist’ books by Sean McMeekin, Margaret MacMillan and Christopher Clark, which reopened the question of Serbia’s responsibility for the First World War, especially in light of its relations with Russia. These tendencies have been met with dismissal by a significant part of Serbian historiography, which responded emotionally and with strong anti-Westernism. A minority of Serbian historians criticised their colleagues’ ‘collective paranoia’ and pointless emotional mobilisation, which also reached the highest echelons of politics.Footnote 132
In Croatia, following the breakup of Yugoslavia, historians began to study issues they had not dealt with previously, such as Croat soldiers in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian army and navy, important Croat leaders in the Austro-Hungarian army and pro-Habsburg Croat politicians. They also began to question the schematic, black-and-white portrayal of the ‘good’ Entente and the ‘evil’ Central Powers. During the Yugoslav Wars, several Croatian historians refused to admit any positives of the creation of the Kingdom of SHS.Footnote 133 Former politician and historian Franjo Tuđman offered a classic teleological and nationalist story about oppressed Croats who did not want to submit to Greater Serbian domination.Footnote 134 This view is also strongly represented in history books, though it is not a monopolistic position.Footnote 135 Today, Croatian historians have reached a sort of consensus according to which, in the chaotic circumstances of the end of the First World War, there was probably no better option than joining the Serbs.Footnote 136
Slovenian historians frequently view the founding of Yugoslavia as a step towards their later independence.Footnote 137 The attitude towards their Yugoslav past is best illustrated by the fact that Slovenian historiography almost exclusively deals with ‘Slovenian national’ territory, isolated from the Yugoslav historical context despite having been part of it for much of the twentieth century.Footnote 138 While the inter-war period saw a struggle over who was more ‘Yugoslav’, after the Yugoslav Wars, the historical legacy of Yugoslavia and Yugoslavism became an unwanted child.Footnote 139
Overall, the period between 1918 and 1920 and the way individual states exited the First World War largely determined how their historiographies viewed the conflict, regardless of whether they were on the side of the victors or the vanquished. Furthermore, the inter-war period laid the foundations of perspectives that were revived after the fall of communism, albeit in a less current and slightly modified form.Footnote 140 Since 1989, at least two schools of thought can be found in every historiography analysed in this paper. One adopts a broadly nationalistic point of departure, promotes the national narrative with the idea of the nation-state and is based on wide-ranging heuristic research and strong factography. The other is more open to methodological innovations, external stimuli and international cooperation. Although this latter line of reasoning also embraces the starting point of the national story, it presents that story in a more moderate form, has made important methodological progress since 1989 and often offers a plurality of national narratives. The dominant topic remains the breakup of Austria-Hungary, and its interpretation involves the familiar thesis, revolving around its inevitability caused by problems with national minorities.Footnote 141
The Socio-Cultural Turn as the New Consensus?
In the final decades of the twentieth century, historiography – military and otherwise – witnessed a smooth socio-cultural turn. Historians began to investigate the so-called culture of war, placing a strong emphasis on remembrance and historical memory, everyday life and microhistory.Footnote 142 War and related issues are currently studied through the prism of cultural anthropology and social history, with a focus on the close links between war and culture and the variety of cultural categories of warfare.Footnote 143 These trends have also been visible in Central European historiographies, which now pay increasing attention to such subjects as the family in war,Footnote 144 war refugees,Footnote 145 the concept of loyalty (not limited to national-ethnic motivations),Footnote 146 society’s relationship to war,Footnote 147 historical memory,Footnote 148 local history,Footnote 149 war veterans and POWsFootnote 150 and minorities,Footnote 151 among others. Before 2014, similar publications were rather rare, and because they lived in the shadow of traditional approaches to political, military and diplomatic history, such perspectives felt refreshing.
The most visible qualitative and quantitative development was brought on by the centenary of the First World War, which has shaped a research dynamic that persists to this day. The latest historiographical production has branched out in three directions. First, it focuses on forgotten or marginalised actors, such as Austro-Hungarian army veteransFootnote 152 and women,Footnote 153 the experiences of POWsFootnote 154 and everyday life on the frontline or hinterland.Footnote 155 Second, it analyses historical memory, representations of the war and its aftermath,Footnote 156 its historiographyFootnote 157 and the role of scholars – especially geographers – in the process of border demarcation between 1918 and 1921.Footnote 158 The massive loss of life caused by the war has translated into the construction of memorials to the fallen.Footnote 159 The influence of the First World War on art and architecture is also under examination,Footnote 160 as is its depiction in cinematography.Footnote 161 Third, with the increase in historians’ interest in other fronts apart from the Western one, there has also been a growing focus on the issues of exiting wars,Footnote 162 paramilitarism as a key phenomenon of the continuation of war and the post-war social and political situation.Footnote 163
The continuous questioning of national narratives should also be mentioned, although there has been a large degree of continuity with the pre-2014 era.Footnote 164 Gábor Egry’s project, ERC NEPOSTRANS, is particularly worth discussing in this regard. Egry offers a new narrative regarding the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, developed from a bottom-up perspective through the prism of everyday nationalism, economic history, phantom borders and integrated urban history, highlighting the continuity between the pre-war and post-war worlds.Footnote 165 In this sense, we have also seen an emphasis on the role of contingency,Footnote 166 even though the historian’s perspective on the monarchy’s breakup is determined by the sources they use in research.Footnote 167 The flourishing historiographical production during the First World War centenary was also motivated by popular demand.Footnote 168 The socio-cultural approach, which focuses on the experience of individual actors, often supersedes the logic of the national narrative. The personal experiences of soldiers or POWs will likely be similar, irrespective of whether they were nationalist Hungarians or Romanians, Czechs who were simultaneously Austrian patriots or nationally indifferent Slovaks. Even though not all of the above-mentioned works entirely abandoned the national narrative, there is nonetheless a strong trend in that direction, while others are firmly grounded in a socio-cultural perspective.
Conclusion
The socio-cultural turn should be also put in the larger socio-cultural and political context. More concretely, we should bear in mind the unequal relationship between ‘peripheral’ Central European historiographies and the ‘central’ Western European and American historiographies from which the former frequently draw inspiration.Footnote 169 Power relations within the individual Central European historiographies also play a role. The socio-cultural turn has typically been championed by members of the younger and nowadays middle-aged generation of historians who have studied or won scholarships at Western European or North American universities. The fact that they are presenting ‘Western’ perspectives on history provides a sense of legitimacy compared to their older colleagues, who typically subscribe to more traditional – political, diplomatic and military – approaches to history writing. Today in the region, Western study and research experience considerably aids historians in advancing their careers. In this context, it would be unwise to ignore financial motivations, such as better salaries at Western universities and research centres, prestigious European grants, and opportunities for professional advancement, which have always had and will always have a significant influence on historiographical production.
It is also impossible not to see parallels between the communist attempts to foist a class logic onto interpretations of the events analysed in this paper and the current efforts by the European Union to present the First World War as a de-heroicised European civil war, though there are significant differences between the applications of these two visions. In any case, there have been times when the national narratives were dominant or prevalent and maintained considerable potential to generate disputes with historians representing the ‘other side’, such as the inter-war period, the 1980s and the 1990s. These trends continue into the present, albeit in a more moderate form. Likewise, there have been times when national narratives were partly suppressed, such as during the Second World War, Stalinism and in recent decades, when we have seen a push in the socio-cultural direction, largely attributable to the fact that Central European nation-states now co-exist with the European Union. In an era of large transnational blocs, national perspectives recede into the background and interpretive differences are minimised in accordance with current alliances. In the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, historians were loyal to the idea of progress represented by the nation-state. Today, they prefer exploring lost cultures, forgotten traditions and alien viewpoints.Footnote 170 As globalisation has advanced, a clear shift can be observed – from the ‘Europeanisation’ of Central European historiographies in the 1990s to a more transnational approach today.
Another reason for the increased popularity of socio-cultural history could be the fact that past historiography was overly politicised. This is why new perspectives resonate more easily. It is also important to bear in mind the importance of family history. Many people were in possession of documents related to the war, which have since been donated to archives and museums or digitised as part of the Europeana 1914–1918 project.Footnote 171
A historian is not an absolute ‘prisoner’ of his time, as evidenced by the diversity of views on the 1918–20 events. Furthermore, even though states and governments obviously preferred certain themes and interpretive lines, there were also lines that did not correspond to the mainstream narrative as well as competing memory claims, which, it needs to be said, had to negotiate with the powers that be in order to break through. Officious narratives were more successful in novelistic production, which was less politically exposed. In other words, the historian is a key actor who uses their great critical potential to create historical knowledge within complicated networks of power.Footnote 172
Besides important theoretical reflections, we should also mention the practical aspects. From a long-term perspective, the Hungarian, (Czecho-)Slovak, Yugoslav and Romanian national stories have far more points of contact today than in the inter-war period. In other words, proponents of national stories – or at least, the moderate ones among them – are able to communicate and frequently take into consideration the outcomes of other historiographies. A good example is the Slovak edition of Ignác Romsics’s book on the Trianon Peace Treaty,Footnote 173 which was very well received by the Slovak scholarly public,Footnote 174 with all three of its editions, amounting to a total of 3,000 copies, selling out, an impressive achievement in terms of the Slovak historical literature market.Footnote 175 Similarly, the Hungarian translation of Holec’s book on the Trianon Peace Treaty was well received in Hungary.Footnote 176 Besides these examples, there is a host of bilateral or multilateral projects whose aim is to facilitate discussion on sensitive matters of common history.Footnote 177 The communists’ failure to impose a strong class perspective onto national narratives is proof of their deep roots in society and historiography. Furthermore, a complete abandonment of national perspective would likely create room for a far more radical interpretation. Of course, abandoning the national narratives can be one of the ways, and a very interesting one, of writing about traumatic events of the past, but it is not the only one. It goes without saying that moderate national narratives should take recent developments in the discipline into consideration.
Translated from Slovak by Jakub Tlolka; proofread by Robert Zanetti.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nino Delić, Adam Hudek, Radu Mârza, Jakub Štofaník, Veronika Szeghy-Gayer, Csaba Zahorán and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This article was supported by VEGA project 2/0052/22, ‘Political, Social and Economic Aspects of Repatriations in Central Europe in the 1940s.’ This article is the partial result of the Project No. APVV-22-0205 ‘Problems of the History of Historiography and Thinking about History in Slovakia’.
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