Transnational...Transylvania

In late June, Romanian president Traian Basescu paid a strategic visit to the town of Tîrgu Mureş in Transylvania. This central Romanian region in the middle of the Carpathians has had an eventful history over the past century and a half. Transylvania was awarded to the Hungarian Kingdom under the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. A policy of forced Magyarisation ensued, leading to conflicts with the other regional ethnicities. After 1918, it was the Romanians’ turn to impose their hegemony on Transylvania, replete with attacks on the Hungarian residents, many of whom fled to Hungary. And that ethnic strife broke out again in 1990, right after the fall of the Ceausescu regime, in Tîrgu Mureş. Many Hungarians left town after peaceful demonstrators for greater regional autonomy were set upon by rural Romanians – incited, rumour has it, by vestiges of the dreaded Securitate [Ceausescu’s secret police] still on the payroll. Before the mass exodus, Hungarians made up the majority (52%) of the local population; now they are a minority in Tîrgu Mureş.

Tîrgu Mureş nevertheless still has the largest Hungarian-speaking population in Romania: 70,000 strong. So for his grand entrance the Romanian president picked this historically-charged powder-keg in which to assure the Hungarian minority, “I love you all. All of you who have Romanian ID cards and passports in your pockets,” and went on to praise the town as a “paragon of peaceful cohabitation”.

In the eyes of Romanian community leaders here, the choice of venue and the tenor of the speech were all part of the president’s cannily calculated campaign to land an early endorsement from the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania in the runup to this winter’s presidential elections. They are alarmed, moreover, at the rightward political swing in neighbouring Hungary: Fidesz, the nationalist party led by Viktor Orbán, is gaining ground and bids fair to win the next parliamentary elections. Not only that: Jobbik, the right-wing chauvinists, will presumably share lawgiving powers in Budapest. In their rhetoric, both parties are said to evoke the “Greater Hungary” of ages past. Orbán has also been campaigning in Transylvania. It is this influence Basescu now seeks to counteract with his “conditional declaration of love” for Romanian Hungarians – the condition sine qua non being that they pledge allegiance to the Romanian State.

The Hungarian minority accounts for 1.4 to 1.6 million of Romania’s total population of 22 million. Close to half the ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania – roughly 700,000 – belong to a Magyar subgroup called the Skékely or Szekler people. In the early 12th century, they were assigned the task of guarding the borders of the Hungarian Kingdom in the eastern Carpathian Mountains. Even then they had their own legal system. And now the Skékely are the ones clamouring for autonomy.

Sfântu Gheorghe is the Romanian name of a town of 62,000 inhabitants, three quarters of whom are Hungarians. The Hungarian-speaking majority view as a permanent provocation the very name of the town’s main street, “1 December 1918 Street”, the date Romania annexed Transylvania – and a national holiday in Romania –, and as a thorn in their flesh the prominently-situated statue of Romanian national hero Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul).

Town mayor Arpad Andras Antal (33), whose name betrays his Hungarian descent (and whose business card gives the town’s neutral moniker “Saint George”), makes no bones about his feelings on the matter. The resident Hungarian majority find it quite simply insufferable that the local and national police, for example, only hire Romanians, who do not speak a world of Hungarian. Before World War II, he points out, it was still perfectly normal for Transylvanians to speak three languages: Romanian, German and Hungarian.

Antal stresses that many Romanians accuse the Hungarian minority of secessionist aspirations. Romanian politicians were terrified at the breakup of Communist countries like Yugoslavia. But the Skékely were hoping for an autonomy modelled on the Southern Tyrol in Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy, or on Spanish Catalonia. Romania’s Hungarians, especially the Skékely, pinned great hopes on the European Union, which were subsequently dashed when the EU relegated the minority problem to an internal Romanian affair.

Antal perceives an ongoing process of “rampant Romanianisation” in the systematic implantation of Romanian residents and plans for new army barracks, all aimed at keeping down the Hungarian minority. The latter, adds the young mayor, have been recently radicalising. There has been a change of generation in the political leadership of the Hungarian minority, whose young elected representatives are no longer wary of asserting their radical demands.

HUNGARY/SLOVAKIA

Not a peep out of the EU

Ever since the election of a populist-nationalist coalition in Slovakia in 2006, tensions between Budapest and Bratislava have been on the rise, and have now reached boiling point over the issue of Slovakia's ethnic Hungarian minority. Writing in the Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet, Gabor Stier has harsh words to say about the passive response from the European Union.

As it so often does, the European Union has decided to say absolutely nothing — but stick its head in the sand and ignore the crisis brewing between Slovakia and Hungary. As far as the EU is concerned, we will have to make do with statement which says that no measures have been established to deal with this type of crisis. That's all. Next! And if he didn't hold his tongue, the Brussels apparatchik might well have added that the EU has had enough of these disputes in the northern Balkans — and a lot of people are regretting this damned enlargement, which is causing so much trouble. This is the same cynical attitude to tensions in our region, which prevailed in the more fortunate regions of Europe at the start of the last century, when bullheaded governments attempted to resolve complex conflicts with all the subtlety of a navy wielding a sledgehammer — and disastrous consequences. The current situation is abundantly clear, but what do European values have to say about bad blood on both sides of the Danube? The Nice Treaty curiously neglects to mention the question of minorities. The Lisbon Treaty does say that the European Union respects the rights of minorities, although it hasn't been ratified yet. But setting aside the question of treaties, the fact that the EU appears to be content to sit back and watch a serious turn of events in the dispute between two of its member states is quite simply astounding— especially when you consider that it is only too willing to act as a mediator in conflicts outside of the Union. It is a policy, which is not only irresponsible but also self-destructive. Inevitably, the silence in Brussels will weaken its moral authority, and worse still, it will sabotage years of work that were devoted to the construction of the EU.