János M. Rainer, ed. <i>Underground Streams: National-Conservatives after World War II in Communist Hungary and Eastern Europe</i>

The “Underground Streams” research project was carried out by researchers of the former 1956 Institute (Budapest) between 2012 and 2015, aiming to map the Hungarian right-wing tradition after World War II. In 2023, thus eight years after the closure of the project and the publication of four Hungarian-language collected studies, the main results of the research can be read in English thanks to Central European University Press. According to the key metaphor of the project, even if the political Right had been suppressed after 1945, and especially after the Communist takeover in Hungary, many elements of right-wing political thinking survived as underground streams, only to reemerge after 1989, affecting the political language and praxis of contemporary Hungary. Here I would like to deal exclusively with the historical part of the reviewed book, not paying attention to any contemporary concerns (which are sporadically mentioned and not elaborated in the text).Taking the nicely designed hardback volume in hand, the reader is immediately faced with the subtitle. It suggests that the scope of the analysis has been reduced from the broad category of the “right-wing” to “conservativism,” moreover to so-called “national-conservativism.” Basically, the conceptional framework of the work follows the approach of Miklós Szabó, who used the phrase “new conservativism” (újkonzervativizmus) for anti-liberal, agrarian, and antisemitic movements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Europe more broadly. Szabó linked his ideological construction with the interwar extreme Right, and this seems to be the reason why the book promises to discuss a part of the conservative heritage on the one hand, and to partly talk about the extreme Right on the other.Like its antecedents, Underground Streams is a volume of collected papers, edited by János M. Rainer, the former head of the 1956 Institute. In the introduction Rainer names “conservatism, nationalism, fascism, and populism” as the framework of the research. Unfortunately, the reader cannot know how and why this “basis of principles” (2) was chosen. It would have been especially important to explain the central role of populism in this context. The editor and his co-authors use the words “populist” or “populism” more than eighty times (in different senses) but without citing a single paper from the international literature on populism, which could fill libraries.Rainer presents his theories about Hungarian conservative political thinking in another chapter. First, he narrows this multifaceted topic down to Gyula Szekfű’s oeuvre, without using the current landmarks of “Szekfűology,” like the publications of Imre Monostori, Iván Zoltán Dénes, or Vilmos Erős. The importance of Szekfű comes perhaps from Rainer’s opinion that although the governing party of the Horthy era was a heterogeneous formation (which is a fact), “its intellectual fulcrum was conservatism in its Bethlenite liberal/conservative form” (139). This statement is difficult to understand, since Bethlen had left the governing party in 1935 for political reasons, and thereafter the party can hardly be labeled as a “Bethlenite liberal/conservative” formation, but much more as a radicalized right-wing party (committed to anti-Jewish legislation, for example). Similarly problematic is the editor’s schematic picture of Hungarian racialism, a worldview which had an anti-Nazi and anti-German platform between 1938 and 1945, while failing to discuss the Habsburg-loyal monarchist conservatives, the so-called legitimists. For example, Iván Miklós Szegő, in his extensive and interesting study of the financial expert and lifelong opportunist Béla Csikós-Nagy, neglects to mention the fact that Iván Lajos, the author of the famous “Gray Book” (against whom Csikós-Nagy co-authored a pro-Nazi philippic in 1939) was an ardent legitimist. The lack of a discussion of legitimists (and the aristocracy), who were attacked continuously by the extreme Right in the Horthy era, is not a coincidence, but corresponds with the editor’s inconsistency. Rainer’s chapter bears the title “Conservative Right-Wing Political Thinking in Hungary after 1945” (129); however, he writes about the Hungarian extreme Right as well, concluding that the whole “Hungarian right-wing,” according to him, “shared ideological and linguistic elements” (136) such as, inter alia, anti-liberalism, antisemitism, and anti-capitalism. None of these labels fits legitimists or conservatives like Tibor Pákh, whose portrait is drawn excellently by Zsuzsanna Kőrösi in the volume.Underground Streams is divided into three units and ten chapters, and Rainer’s mentioned study is the last chapter of the first unit. This first section aims to give an overview of the “right-wing tradition in Eastern Europe after 1945” (21), exploring hidden channels of the Romanian, Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian postwar Right. Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob present here the entangled paths of Left and Right in twentieth-century Romania. This chapter, and the cited works, illustrate the power of Romanian intellectual history, which is embedded in the international scholarly community. The authors point out how the fin-de-siècle intellectual generation remained influential in interwar Romania and how they later functioned as “founding fathers to the national turn in the humanities under communism” (38). This kind of intellectual heritage, the “fascist mimicry of national Stalinism” (47) generated the emergence of a “Stalino‒fascist baroque” (55) political language in the postcommunist era. In the next study, Attila Simon gives a well-written summary of the (lacking) Slovak right-wing tradition. Like most of the others, this chapter was also first published in Hungarian a decade ago, which—unfortunately—is probably the reason why the author did not use the more recent research of Anton Hruboň on the Slovak radical Right. At the end of his analysis, Simon concludes that the legacies of the “liberal/conservative” Milan Hodža and the “Christian/conservative” Andrej Hlinka (91) could have become key to Slovak tradition making, but for (various) political reasons this has not happened. Czech rightist tradition is similarly a difficult topic, since in the Czech region there was no conservative party in the interwar period, as we find out from András Schweitzer’s “round-trip” (95–129). Schweitzer, comparing the “conservative-nationalist” Hungarian tradition (which he too does not define) with the Czech case, points out an important aspect: namely, if something looks conservative in one country it can nevertheless easily seem to be liberal in another.The second and third units contain only chapters by Hungarian authors. Three of these discuss the enemy-making methods of state security during the Kádár era concerning right-wing persons and organizations. Krisztián Ungváry explains the possibilities of rightist social resistance, indicating that “the struggle against nationalism by domestic intelligence almost became a phobia” (177). Let it be mentioned that this was similar to how the authorities of the Horthy era treated the threat of communism; although it had no serious social background in interwar Hungary, nonetheless the memory of its aggressive harassment immediately became a political reference in 1945. In the next chapter, Gábor Tabajdi demonstrates the various methods of postwar repression via a case study on Christian Democrats. Harassment could mean physical violence, show trials, and manipulations by the state power; however, some of the persecuted considered “state security as an opportunity for a special channel of communication,” a “dialogue between Marxists and Christians” (204). When examining this conservative legacy, Tabajdi analyzes only the postwar programs of the Democratic People’s Party in his thorough study, but it would have been better to start the text with a comparison of Christian Democratic politics before and after 1945. The last chapter of this unit deals with the relations of the “petty” sympathizers with the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party and the Communist Party after World War II. The authors, András Lénárt and Rudolf Paksa, give an accurate picture of the pragmatic considerations of the Communist party-state, which could overwrite moral or legal concerns many times. Yet the reviewer still does not understand why this story is considered part of the Hungarian conservative legacy.The same problem arises in the case of Miklós Mester. The last three chapters of the book focus on personal life paths, and—besides Tibor Pákh and Béla Csikós-Nagy—here we can find an intellectual portrait of Mester written by Katalin Somlai. Born into a poor family in Transylvania, Mester became a government party MP in 1939 but switched already in the next year to the Party of Hungarian Renewal (Magyar Megújulás Pártja), the leading force of the Hungarian radical Right between 1941 and 1944. His decision was motivated mainly by social and economic radicalism, above all by his agrarian radicalism. Nonetheless, radical land reform was successfully opposed exactly by the conservative forces (chiefly by the Catholic Church) throughout the Horthy era.To sum up, Underground Streams contains many excellent studies, but the framing and conceptional background of the volume is misguided. It is much more disappointing than the few misspellings, mistranslations (e. g., “legitimate” (318) instead of legitimist—a characteristic mistake), or the missing archival sources in the bibliographies of some of the chapters.

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