Hungary: A Short History

This was supposed to be a book review. But the fact that the author of the book, the British historian Norman Stone (March 8, 1941 – June 19, 2019) passed away shortly after its appearance does in some way connect this last work with the life of the scholar. What is also extraordinary about this book is the fact that it is the very last book of a historian who had never written a book on Hungary before, although he did study Hungarian, and visited archives there already in 1962, surely one of the very first Western scholars to work in the country only a few years after the 1956 revolution and just months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. This tells us something about the author. Norman Stone was an unusual, and surely more adventurous historian compared to his colleagues. In Czechoslovakia—or to be more precise, in Bratislava—he was even arrested and imprisoned for a couple of months for trying to smuggle a Hungarian dissident out of the bloc. After writing his dissertation about the Eastern Front of World War I—a topic almost completely neglected by British, French, or German research at that time, mostly because of lack of command of Eastern European languages—Stone unfortunately (from the perspective of Hungarian Studies!) turned to other topics and other parts of the world. His career continued in three phases, first in Cambridge (1967–84), then in Oxford (1984–97), and finally, again quite unusually, at Bilkent University in Ankara (1997–2017). Stone spent the last years of his life in Budapest, somehow bridging the distance between England and Turkey. His historiography, as demonstrated in his Europe Transformed, 1878–1919 (1983) and The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War (2010),1 tended to be extremely well-written, funny, thought-provoking, and broad in scope, though not without an eye for telling details; and it always found a large audience, which also had to do with Stone’s journalistic talent. He was called a “maverick”; he had many personal problems and his conservatism was loathed by many academics in Oxford and in other places, which explains why he fled to Turkey, where he was allowed to smoke and did not have to bow to absurd political correctness. His defenses of Margaret Thatcher and Turkey (he did not qualify the massacres of Armenians as “genocide”), and, in this book, his praise for Viktor Orbán, will not please many liberals and leftists. But those who would avoid him for these reasons would miss one of the best-written books on Hungarian history in the English language, that is partly very funny and full of insightful anecdotes and stories. And Stone is very honest when he mentions his own flaws and the limits of his knowledge. The best things about Hungary: A Short History, however, are the broad, European perspective and the distance with which he looks at the history of the small country in the center of the continent. Specialists of Hungarian history will not find many new ideas, but the book is not written for them, although it is mostly accurate and reliable—if we overlook Stone’s tendency to leave out the more problematic aspects of the Fidesz regime of the last decade. But apart from that, Stone does not fail to criticize the stupidity of Hungarian nationalism and the often short-sightedness of her elites in often tragic historical situations, which they made worse by their own stubbornness.The story begins with the consequences of Mohács, when “Hungary fell to foreigners” in 1526 (2), explaining, in the next chapters, why it took more than three hundred years for the country to recover from the setback and enjoy a European modernization, looking to Britain for a liberal model. This long period is covered in the first four chapters, and was marked by the struggle against the Habsburgs for self-determination, which ended in national independence in 1918, but also in absolute disaster. Under Regent Miklós Horthy, whose lack of intelligence Stone emphasizes, the country became more and more dependent on Germany, driven by the desire to revise the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which ended in an even greater catastrophe with the Holocaust (1944/45) and the complete breakdown in 1945 of “Hitler’s Last Ally” (149). Chapter 6 describes the brutal Communist takeover, and chapter 7 the horrors and ludicrous paradoxes created by Stalinism. Stone’s assessment of János Kádár (ch. 8) is balanced, and it shows how this historian has a great idea of the tragedies of human lives, recounting the miserable youth of János Csermanek (Kádár’s name when he was born in the then-(Austro-)Hungarian port city of Fiume, now Rijeka, Croatia). The final chapter is a very condensed, and somewhat open-ended, history of Hungary since 1980, which ends with a paragraph that speaks about “a moment of hope”—obviously in comparison to Hungarian history since the sixteenth century!—and the sentence “A shadowy version of the old Habsburg unity is coming about, and Hungarians learn” (245). Stone seems to indicate that since the end of state socialism in 1989 the European Union made mistakes and “mismanaged” the transition, but that the disappearance of borders dividing Hungary from other former parts of St. Stephen’s realm will bring some advantages in the long run. This is a great book, and it is fun to reading even if one does not share the author’s political leanings. When reading it, we should mourn a great historian, who we might wish had turned to writing Hungarian history earlier on.

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