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Hungary (Hungarian: Magyarország; IPA: [mɒɟɒrorsaːg]; listen ), officially in English the Republic of Hungary (Magyar Köztársaság listen , literally Magyar (Hungarian) Republic), is a landlocked country in the Carpathian Basin of Central Europe, bordered by Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. Its capital is Budapest. Hungary is a member of OECD, NATO, EU and a Schengen state. The official language is Hungarian also known as Magyar, part of the Finno-Ugric family, thus one of the four official languages of the European Union that are not of Indo-European origin.
Following a Celtic (after c. 450 BC) and a Roman (9 BC - c. 4th century) period, the foundation of Hungary was laid in the late Ninth Century by the Magyar chieftain Árpád, whose great grandson István ascended to the throne with a crown sent from Rome in 1000. The Kingdom of Hungary existed with minor interruptions for more than 900 years, and at various points was regarded as one of the cultural centers of the Western world. It was succeeded by a Communist era (1947-1989) during which Hungary gained widespread international attention regarding the Revolution of 1956 and the seminal move of opening its border with Austria in 1989, thus accelerating the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The present form of government is Parliamentary Republic (1989-). Hungary\'s current goal is to become a developed country by IMF standards, having become already developed by most traditional measures, including GDP and HDIhttp://duihk.hu/fileadmin/user_upload/Dokumente/Wirtschaftsinfos/HU/Foerdermittel/2006-10-25_NFT2_en.pdf (world ranking 36th and rising). The country\'s first ever term of EU presidency is due in 2011The Budapest Times - Hungary‘s leading English Language source for daily news - Parties discuss preparations for Hungary\'s EU presidency in 2011.
Hungary is one of the 15 most popular tourist destinations in the worldIndex - Miért menjünk Magyarországra? Miért menjünk Szlovákiába?http://www.mth.gov.hu/download.php?ctag=download&docID=185, with a capital regarded as one of the most beautiful in the worldhttp://whc.unesco.org/archive/advisory_body_evaluation/400bis.pdfBudapest, including the Banks of the Danube, the Buda Castle Quarter and Andrássy Avenue - World Heritage Site - Pictures, info and travel reports. Despite its relatively small size, the country is home to numerous World Heritage Sites, UNESCO Biosphere reserves, the second largest thermal lake in the world (Lake Hévíz), the largest lake in Central Europe (Lake Balaton), and the largest natural grassland in Europe (Hortobágy).
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The arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin.
Galgóci tarsolylemez, a Medieval Hungarian pouch plate.
In the time of the Roman Empire, the region west of the Danube river was known as Pannonia. After the Western Roman Empire collapsed under the stress of the migration of Germanic tribes and Carpian pressure, the Migration Period continued bringing many invaders to Europe. Among the first to arrive were the Huns, who built up a powerful empire under Attila. It is believed that the origin of the name "Hungary" does not come from the Central Asian nomadic invaders called the Huns, but rather originated from a later, 7th century Bulgar alliance called On-Ogour, which in Old Turkish meant "(the) Ten Arrows"OSZK.Hungary, Encyclopædia Britannica..
After Hunnish rule faded, the Germanic Ostrogoths then the Lombards ruled in Pannonia, and the Gepids ruled in the eastern part of the Carpathian Basin for about 100 years, during which the Slavic tribes began migrating into the region. In the 560s, the Slavs were dominated by a Turkic/Mongol group from Central Asia, the Avars,The Avar Khaganate who maintained their supremacy of the land for more than two centuries. The Franks under Charlemagne from the west and the Bulgars from the southeast managed to overthrow the Avars in the early 9th century. However, the Franks soon retreated, and the Slavonic kingdom of Great Moravia and the Balaton Principality (Blatnograd) assumed control of much of Pannonia until the end of the century. The Magyars migrated to Hungary in the late 9th centuryRomania History - Moldavia.
Europe in 998 , Hungary in lightblue
Medieval Hungary controlled more territory than medieval France, and the population of medieval Hungary was the third largest of any country in Europe. Árpád was the Magyar leader whom sources name as the single leader who led the conquering Hungarian tribes to the territory of the Carpathian Basin in the 9th centuryhttp://www.hungarian-history.hu/lib/hunspir/hsp05.htm. A later defeat at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 signaled an end to raids on foreign territories, and links between the tribes weakened. The ruling prince (fejedelem) Géza of the House of Árpád, who was the ruler of only some of the territory, but the nominal overlord of all seven Magyar tribes, intended to integrate Hungary into Christian (Western) Europe, rebuilding the state according to the Western political and social modelhttp://www.babylon.com/definition/Géza/English. He established a dynasty by naming his son Vajk (later called Stephen) as his successor. This was contrary to the then dominant tradition of the succession of the eldest surviving member of the ruling family. Hungary was established as a Christian kingdom under Stephen I of Hungary, who was crowned in December 1000 AD in the capital, Esztergom. He was the son of GézaHungaria Travel Information | Asia Travel Europe and thus a descendant of Árpád. By 1006, Stephen had solidified his power, eliminating all rivals who either wanted to follow the old pagan traditions or wanted an alliance with the orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire. Then he started sweeping reforms to convert Hungary into a feudal state, complete with forced ChristianisationHunmagyar.Org - The Controversy On The Origins And Early History Of The Hungarians. What emerged was a strong kingdomWelcome to Cambridge Szeged website :: www.cambridge-szeged-society.org.uk that withstood attacks from German kings and Emperors, and nomadic tribes following the Magyars from the East, integrating some of the latter into the population (along with Germans invited to Transylvania and present-day Slovakia, especially after 1242), and subjugating Croatia in 1102WHKMLA : History of Croatia, 802-1102.
In 1241-1242, this kingdom received a major blow in the form of the Mongol invasion of Europe: after the defeat of the Hungarian army in the Battle of MuhiThe Daco-Roman Legend, King Béla IV fled, and a large part (though not as great as suspected by historians earlier) of the population diedhttp://www.kulugyminiszterium.hu/NR/rdonlyres/C9FDF041-86A7-4B20-8B73-94C568E448E5/0/Culture_en.pdf (leading later to the invitation of settlers from neighbours in the West and South) in the ensuing destruction (Tatárjárás). Only strongly fortified cities and abbeys could withstand the assault. As a consequence, after the Mongols retreated, King Béla ordered the construction of stone castles, meant to be defence against a possible second Mongol invasion. These castles proved to be very important later in the long struggle with the Ottoman Empire in the following centuries (from the late 14th century onwards), but their cost indebted the King to the major feudal landlords again, so the royal power reclaimed by Béla IV after his father King András II weakened it (leading to the issue of the so called \'Arany Bulla\' or Golden Bull, in 1222), was lost again.
A miniature of the king Stephan from the Chronicon (Hungariae) Pictum
Árpád\'s descendants in the male line ruled the country until 1301. During the reigns of the Kings after the house of Árpád, the Kingdom of Hungary reached its greatest extent, yet royal power was weakened as the major landlords greatly increased their influence. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks confronted the country ever more often. The second Hungarian king in the \'Anjou\' Angevin line of Italian origin Louis I the Great (I. or Nagy Lajos, king 1342-1382) extended his rule over territories from the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea, and temporarily occupied the Kingdom of Naples (after his brother was murdered there by his wife, who was also his cousin). From 1370, the death of Casimir III the Great, he was also king of Poland. The alliance between Casimir and Charles I of Hungary, the father of Louis, was the start of a still lasting Polish-Hungarian friendship. Sigismund, a prince from the Luxembourg line succeeded to the throne by marrying Louis\'s daughter, Queen Mary. In 1433 he even became Holy Roman Emperor. His rule in Hungary, however, was marked by territorial losses in the South (especially surrounding the 1396 defeat of a late Western crusade against the Ottoman Turks at Nicopolis), the open dissent of feudal landlords, the Hussite rebellion in Bohemia and partly in the territory that is now Slovakia, and a major peasant rebellion in Transylvania. The last strong king was the renaissance king Matthias Corvinus. He was the son of the feudal landlord and warlord John Hunyadi, who led the Hungarian troops in the 1456 Siege of Nándorfehérvár. Building on his fathers\' vision, the aim of taking on the Ottoman Empire with a strong enough background, Matthias set out to build a great empire, expanding southward and northwest, while he also implemented internal reforms. His army called the \'Fekete Sereg\' (Black Army) accomplished a series of victories also capturing the city of Vienna in 1485. After Matthias\'s death, the weak king Ladislaus II of the Polish/Lithuanian Jagiellon line nominally ruled the areas Matthias conquered except Austria, but real power was in the hand of the nobles. In 1514, two years before Ladislaus\' death, there was a major peasant rebellion in the Pannonian lowlands and parts of Transylvania (called the Dózsa Insurrection [after its Transylvanian leader] or Hungarian Peasant\'s War), crushed barbarously by the nobles. As central rule degenerated, the stage was set for a defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. In 1521, Nándorfehérvár (modern Belgrade) fell to the Turks, and in 1526, the Hungarian army was destroyed in the Battle of Mohács. Within a few years after Mohács, the country came under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.
Through the centuries the Kingdom of Hungary kept its old "constitution", which granted special "freedoms" or rights to the large nobility and ethnic or ethnic-like groups like the Saxons resident in Hungary or the Jassic people, and to free royal towns such as Buda, Kassa (Košice, now Slovakia), Pozsony (German Pressburg, Slovak Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia), Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania).
Dózsa\'s peasant war
Hungary around 1550
After some 150 years of wars with the Ottoman Empire in the south, the Turks conquered parts of Hungary, and continued their expansion until 1556. The Ottomans gained their first decisive victory over the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. The next decades were characterised by political chaos; the divided Hungarian nobility elected two kings simultaneously, \'Szapolyai János\' (1526-1540) and Ferdinand Habsburg (1527-1540), whose armed conflicts weakened the country further. With the conquest of Buda in 1541 by the Turks, Hungary fell into three parts. The north-western part (Present-day Slovakia, western Transdanubia, present-day Burgenland, western Croatia and parts of north-eastern present-day Hungary) remained under the rule of the Habsburgs, and although formally was independent, subsequently became a province of their empire under the informal name Royal Hungary. The Habsburg Emperors were crowned as Kings of Hungary. The eastern part of the kingdom (Partium and Transylvania), in turn, became an independent Principality, and a Turkish vassal state. The remaining central area (mostly present-day Hungary), including the capital of Buda, became a province of the Ottoman Empire. A large part of the area became devastated by permanent warfare. Most smaller settlements disappeared. Rural people could survive only in larger settlements owned directly and protected by the Sultan, in the so called Khaz towns. The Turks were indifferent to the type of Christian religion of their subjects and the Habsburg counter-reformation measures could not reach this area. As a result, the majority of the population of the area became Protestant (Calvinist). In 1686, Austria-led Christian forces reconquered Buda, and in the next few years, all of the country except areas near Temesvár. In the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz these changes were officially recognized, and in 1718 the entire Kingdom of Hungary was restored from the Ottomans.
Pozsony (Pressburg, today: Bratislava) became the new capital (1536-1784), coronation town (1563-1830) and seat of the Diet (1536-1848) of Hungary. Trnava in turn, became the religious center in 1541. Parallelly, between 1604 and 1711, there was a series of anti-Habsburg (i.e. anti-Austrian) and anti-Catholic (requiring equal rights and freedom for all Christian religions) uprisings, which – with the exception of the last one – took place in Royal Hungary, more exactly on the territory of present-day Slovakia. The uprisings were usually organized from Transylvania. The last one was an uprising led by \'II. Rákóczi Ferenc\', who was chosen by the people to be the future king. When Austrians crushed the rebellion in 1711, Rákóczi was in Poland. He later fled to France, finally Turkey, and lived to the end of his life (1735) in nearby Rodosto. Afterwards, to make further armed resistance impossible, the Austrians blew up some castles (most of the castles on the border between the now-reclaimed territories occupied earlier by the Ottomans and Royal Hungary), and allowed peasants to use the stones from most of the others as building material (the végvárs among them).
Much of the 18th century was characterized by a reconstruction of the country. The Habsburg rulers pursued a re-settlement of ravaged areas with new immigrants from present-day Austria and Germany, from the northern and eastern parts of the country (present-day Slovakia and Romania), and from Serbia. In the final decades of the century, influenced by the French revolution, and in response to attempts at Germanisation by Joseph II (ruled 1780-1790), there emerged a national revival movement in Hungary of the Magyars, but also of all the other non-Magyar nationalities living in the Kingdom of Hungary. During the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards, the Hungarian Diet had not convened for decades. In the 1820s, the Emperor was forced to convene the Diet, and thus a Reform Period began. Nevertheless, its progress was slow, because the nobles insisted on retaining their privileges (no taxation, exclusive voting rights, etc.). Therefore the achievements were mostly of national character (e.g. introduction of Hungarian as the official language of the country, instead of the former Latin). The other nationalities of the country protested against these measures. The first measurements of the population on the area of the Kingdom of Hungary (including Croatia) were performed in the late 18th century. Different estimates based on these measurements put the proportion of the Magyars in the Kingdom (with or without Croatia) at 29% to 42% towards the end of the 18th century. A first thorough research in 1836-40 put the percentage of Magyars at 36-37% (without Croatia 48%) and a census in 1850-51 at 45.4% in all the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary. The official percentages of the other nationalities according to the 1850-51 census (although it was criticised for bias towards the percentage of Hungarians and Germans already at that time) were:
The Habsburg Emperors and particularly the chancellor Metternich refused to implement reforms and this led to a national revolution.
Artist Mihály Zichy\'s rendition of Sándor Petőfi reciting the Nemzeti dal to a crowd on March 15, 1848
On March 15, 1848, mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda enabled Hungarian reformists to push through a list of 12 demands. Faced with revolution both at home and in Vienna, Austria first had to accept Hungarian demands. Later, under governor Lajos Kossuth and the first Prime minister, Lajos Batthyány, the House of Habsburg was dethroned and the form of government was changed to create the first Republic of Hungary. After the Austrian revolution was suppressed, and Franz Joseph replaced his epileptic uncle Ferdinand I as Emperor during the subsequent war, the Magyars (and failed revolutionaries from abroad) had to fight against the Austrian Army, but also against those Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, Romanians and Transylvanian Germans living on the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary, who had their own ethnic-national movements, and were unwilling to accept Hungarian dominance. At the same time, some members of these ethnic groups fought with the Hungarian army, like General János Damjanich, an ethnic Serb who became a Hungarian national hero through his command of the 3rd Hungarian Army Corps. Initially, the Hungarian forces (Honvédség) defeated Austrian armies. To counter the successes of the Hungarian revolutionary army, Franz Joseph asked for help from the "Gendarme of Europe," Czar Nicholas I, whose Russian armies invaded Hungary. The huge army of the Russian Empire and the remnants of the Austrian forces proved too powerful for the Hungarian army, and General Artúr Görgey surrendered in August 1849. Julius Freiherr von Haynau, the leader of the Austrian army, then became governor of Hungary for a few months and on October 6, ordered the execution of 13 leaders of the Hungarian army as well as Prime Minister Batthyány. Lajos Kossuth escaped into exile.
Map of the counties in the Kingdom of Hungary around 1880
Following the war of 1848-49, the whole country was in "passive resistance". Archduke Albrecht von Habsburg was appointed governor of the Kingdom of Hungary, and this time was remembered for Germanization pursued with the help of Czech officers.
Due to external and internal problems, reforms seemed inevitable to secure the integrity of the Habsburg Empire. Major military defeats, like the Battle of Königgrätz (1866), forced the Emperor to concede internal reforms. To appease Hungarian separatism, the Emperor made a deal with the Hungarian nobility led by Ferenc Deák, called the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, by which the dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary came into existence. The Empire was reorganised into two entities: the mostly western half of the realm, Cisleithania, and the Kingdom of Hungary, Transleithania. The two realms were governed separately with a common ruler and common external, military, and economic policies. The first premier of the Kingdom of Hungary after the Compromise was Count Gyula Andrássy. The Hungarian Constitution was restored, and Franz Joseph was crowned as King of Hungary. The autonomy of the Kingdom was partly achieved. There was also a Hungarian-Croatian Compromise of 1868, as Croatia, an already highly autonomous part of the Kingdom, broadened its constitutional freedom. Hungarian politicians gained strong influence on the Empire\'s political life and successfully prevented the change of the status quo in favour of other ethnic groups, notably the Czechs and the Southern Slavs. By the turn of the century, the diverse political development of the two realms raised increasing doubts about the political framework of the Monarchy. Attempts to transform the dual monarchy to a trial state or a confederacy remained futile. Besides the German-Magyar, Czech-Magyar conflicts about the future of the dual monarchy, ethnic problems escalated inside the Kingdom of Hungary. The intensifying Hungarian nationalism – intended to strengthen the integrity of the Kingdom – gradually alienated the non-Magyar population (see Magyarization). As a reaction, the already significant Romanian, Serbian and Slovak nationalism further escalated.
According to the census in 1910, 54.5% of the 18,247,000 people of Hungary (excluding Croatia, mostly autonomous since 1868) had Hungarian mother tongue. The percentages of the next 3 most numerous languages were as follows: Romanian 16.1%, Slovak 10.7%, German 10.4%. Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats combined added another 6.6%. The largest religious denomination was the Roman Catholic (49.3%, Hungarians, "Schwabian" Germans, Slovaks, Croats), followed by the Calvinist (14.3%, Hungarians in Eastern Hungary), Greek Orthodox (12.8%, Rumanians and Serbs), Greek Catholic (11.0%, Rumanians in Northern Transylvania and Ruthenians), Lutheran (7.1%, "Saxon" Germans in Transylvania and 1/3 of Slovaks), Jewish (5.0%, 77% of them declared Hungarian mother tongue, while 23% German, i.e. Yiddish) and Unitarian (0.4%, Hungarians) religions.
In 1910, only 6.37% of the population were eligible to vote in elections: the very wealthy or highly educated men. Vol. 3, p.825 in Magyarország Történelmi Kronológiája, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1982.
In contrast to political problems, the era witnessed an impressive economic development. The formerly backward Kingdom of Hungary become a relatively modern, industrialized country by the turn of the century, although agriculture remained the dominant part of the economy. Many of the state institutions and the administrative system of modern Hungary were established during this period.
In First World War Austria-Hungary was fighting on the side of Germany, Bulgaria and Turkey . With great difficulty, the Central Powers, as they were called, conquered Serbia and Rumania but could not make significant progress against Italy. By 1918, the economic situation has deteriorated, uprisings in the army became commonplace, Entente troops landed in Greece and the country rapidly disintegrated in October 1918.
Difference between the borders of the Kingdom of Hungary before and after the Treaty of Trianon.
In 1918, as a result of defeat in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed. On October 31 1918, the success of the Aster Revolution in Budapest brought the liberal count Mihály Károlyi to power as Prime-Minister. The new government officially declared Hungary an independent republic on November 16, after the end of the war. On 22 November 1918 the Central Romanian Council of Romanians from Transylvania announced to the Hungarian government that it had assumed control of Transylvania. On 1 December 1918 the gathering of Alba Iulia (Gyulafehérvár) proclaimed union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania. By February 1919 the government had lost all popular support, having failed on the domestic and military fronts. On March 21, after the Entente military representative demanded more territorial concessions from Hungary, Károlyi resigned. The Communist Party of Hungary came to power, led by Béla Kun, and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Communists – "The Reds" – came to power largely thanks to being the only group with an organized fighting force, and they promised that Hungary would regain the lands it had lost (possibly with the help of the Soviet Red Army). The Communists also promised equality and social justice. Initially, Kun\'s regime achieved some impressive military successes: the Hungarian Red Army, under the lead of the genius strategist, Colonel Aurél Stromfeld, ousted Czechoslovak troops from disputed lands, proclaimed an ephemeral Slovak Soviet Republic, and planned to march against the Romanian army in Transylvania. In terms of domestic policy, the Communist government nationalized industrial and commercial enterprises, socialized housing, transport, banking, medicine, cultural institutions, and all landholdings of more than 400,000 square metres. Still, the popular support of the Communists proved to be short lived. In the aftermath of a coup attempt, the government took a series of reprisals (called the Red Terror) by half-regular and half-militarist detachments (like the "Lenin boys"). A total of 590 people were executed without trial, which alienated much of the population. Land reform took land from the nobles but did not effectively distribute it amongst peasants. The Soviet Red Army was never able to aid the new Hungarian republic. Although it did not lose any battles, the Hungarian Red Army gave up land under pressure from the Entente. In the face of domestic backlash and an advancing Romanian force, Béla Kun and most of his comrades fled to Austria, while Budapest was occupied on August 6. All these events, and in particular the final military defeat, led to a deep feeling of dislike among the general population against the Soviet Union (which had not kept its promise to offer military assistance) and the Jews (since many members of Kun\'s government were Jewish, making it easy to blame the Jews for the government\'s mistakes). The new fighting force in Hungary were the Conservative counter-revolutionaries – the "Whites". These, who had been organizing in Vienna and established a counter-government in Szeged, assumed power, led by István Bethlen, a Transylvanian aristocrat, and Miklós Horthy, the former commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. Starting in Western Hungary and spreading throughout the country, a White Terror began by other half-regular and half-militarist detachments (as the police power crashed, there were no serious national regular forces and authorities), and many Communists and other leftists were executed without trial. Radical Whites launched pogroms against the Jews, displayed as the cause of all the difficulties of Hungary. The leaving Romanian army pillaged the country: livestock, machinery and agricultural products were carried to Romania in hundreds of freight cars. Magyar Tudomány 2000. januárIgnác Romsics: Magyarország története a XX. században, 2004, p. 134 The estimated property damage of their activity was so much that the international peace conference in 1919 did not require Hungary to pay war redemption to Romania.[citation needed] On November 16, with the consent of Romanian forces, Horthy\'s army marched into Budapest. His government gradually restored security, stopped terror, and set up authorities, but thousands of sympathizers of the Károlyi and Kun regimes were imprisoned. Radical political movements were suppressed.
In January 1920, Hungarian men and women cast the first secret ballots in the country\'s political history. The voting was not totally democratic, because the entire left-wing either boycotted or was excluded from the voting. A large right-wing majority was elected to a unicameral assembly. In March, the parliament annulled the Compromise of 1867, and it restored the Hungarian monarchy but postponed electing a king until civil disorder had subsided. Instead, Miklos Horthy was elected Regent and was empowered, among other things, to appoint Hungary\'s Prime Minister, veto legislation, convene or dissolve the parliament, and command the armed forces.
Hungary\'s signing of the Treaty of Trianon on June 4, 1920, ratified the country\'s dismemberment. The territorial provisions of the treaty, which ensured continued discord between Hungary and its neighbors, required Hungary to surrender more than two-thirds of its pre-war lands. Nearly one-third of the 10 million ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside the diminished homeland. The country\'s ethnic composition was left almost homogeneous, Hungarians constituting about 90% of the population, Germans made up about 6%, and Slovaks, Croats, Romanians, Jews and Gypsies accounted for the remainder.[citation needed] New international borders separated Hungary\'s industrial base from its sources of raw materials and its former markets for agricultural and industrial products. Hungary lost 84% of its timber resources, 43% of its arable land, and 83% of its iron ore.[citation needed] Because most of the country\'s pre-war industry was concentrated near Budapest, Hungary retained about 51% of its industrial population, 56% of its industry, 82% of its heavy industry, and 70% of its banks.[citation needed] Horthy appointed Count Pál Teleki as Prime Minister in July 1920. His right-wing government issued a numerus clausus law, limiting admission of "political insecure elements" (these were often Jews) to universities and, in order to quiet rural discontent, took initial steps toward fulfilling a promise of major land reform by dividing about 3,850 km² from the largest estates into smallholdings. Teleki\'s government resigned, however, after the former emperor, Charles IV, unsuccessfully attempted to retake Hungary\'s throne in March 1921. King Charles\'s return produced split parties between conservatives who favored a Habsburg restoration and nationalist right-wing radicals who supported election of a Hungarian king. Count István Bethlen, a non-affiliated right-wing member of the parliament, took advantage of this rift forming a new Party of Unity under his leadership. Horthy then appointed Bethlen prime minister. Charles IV died soon after he failed a second time to reclaim the throne in October 1921. (For more detail on Charles\'s attempts to retake the throne, see Charles IV of Hungary\'s conflict with Miklós Horthy.)
As prime minister, Bethlen dominated Hungarian politics between 1921 and 1931. He fashioned a political machine by amending the electoral law, providing jobs in the expanding bureaucracy to his supporters, and manipulating elections in rural areas. Bethlen restored order to the country by giving the radical counterrevolutionaries payoffs and government jobs in exchange for ceasing their campaign of terror against Jews and leftists. In 1921, he made a deal with the Social Democrats and trade unions (called Bethlen-Peyer Pact), agreeing, among other things, to legalize their activities and free political prisoners in return for their pledge to refrain from spreading anti-Hungarian propaganda, calling political strikes, and organizing the peasantry. Bethlen brought Hungary into the League of Nations in 1922 and out of international isolation by signing a treaty of friendship with Italy in 1927. The revision of the Treaty of Trianon rose to the top of Hungary\'s political agenda and the strategy employed by Bethlen consisted by strengthening the economy and building relations with stronger nations. Revision of the treaty had such a broad backing in Hungary that Bethlen used it, at least in part, to deflect criticism of his economic, social, and political policies. The Great Depression induced a drop in the standard of living and the political mood of the country shifted further toward the right. In 1932 Horthy appointed a new prime-minister, Gyula Gömbös, that changed the course of Hungarian policy towards closer cooperation with Germany and started an effort to magyarize the few remaining ethnic minorities in Hungary. Gömbös signed a trade agreement with Germany that drew Hungary\'s economy out of depression but made Hungary dependent on the German economy for both raw materials and markets. Adolf Hitler used promises of returning lost territories, and threats of military intervention and economic pressure to compel Hungarians into supporting Nazi policies, including those related to Jews. In 1935, Hungary\'s leading fascist party, Ferenc Szálasi\'s Arrow Cross, was founded. Gömbös\' successor, Kálmán Darányi attempted to appease both the Nazis and Hungarian antisemites by passing the First Jewish Law, which set quotas limiting Jews to 20% of positions in several professions. The law satisfied neither the Nazis nor Hungary\'s own radicals, and when Darányi resigned in May of 1938, Béla Imrédy was appointed Prime Minister. Imrédy’s attempts to improve Hungary’s diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom initially made him very unpopular with Germany and Italy. Undoubtedly aware of Germany\'s Anschluss with Austria in March, he realized that he could not afford to alienate Germany and Italy on a long term basis; in the autumn of 1938 his foreign policy became very much pro-German and pro-Italian. Hungary: The Unwilling Satellite John F. Montgomery, Hungary: The Unwilling Satellite. Devin-Adair Company, New York, 1947. Reprint: Simon Publications, 2002. Intent on amassing a base of power in Hungarian right wing politics, Imrédy began to suppress political rivals, so the increasingly influential Arrow Cross Party was harassed, and eventually banned by Imrédy’s administration. As Imrédy drifted further to the right, he proposed that the government be reorganized along totalitarian lines and drafted a harsher Second Jewish Law. The new government of Pál Teleki approved the Second Jewish Law, which greatly restricted Jewish employment and defined Jews by race instead of religion. This definition altered the status of those who had formerly converted from Judaism to Christianity.
In 1941, Hungary participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia, gaining some territory but effectively joining the Axis powers in the process (showing his non-agreement, prime minister Pál Teleki committed suicide). On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union using the code name Operation Barbarossa. Hungary joined the German effort and declared war on the Soviet Union on 26 June, and entered World War II on the side of the Axis. In late 1941, the Hungarian troops on the Eastern Front experienced success at the Battle of Uman. By 1943, after the Hungarian Second Army suffered extremely heavy losses at the river Don, the Hungarian government sought to negotiate a surrender with the Allies. On 19 March 1944, as a result of this duplicity, German troops quietly occupied Hungary in what was known as Operation Margarethe. But, by now it was clear that the Hungarians were Germany\'s "unwilling satellite". On 15 October 1944, Horthy made a token effort to disengage Hungary from the war. This time the Germans launched Operation Panzerfaust and Horthy was replaced by a puppet government under the pro-German Prime Minister Ferenc Szálasi. Szálasi and his pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party remained loyal to the Germans until the end of the war. In late 1944, Hungarian troops on the Eastern Front again experienced success at the Battle of Debrecen. But this was followed immediately by the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Battle of Budapest. During the German occupation in May-June 1944, the Arrow Cross Party and Hungarian police deported nearly 440,000 Jews, mostly to Auschwitz.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Holocaust Encyclopedia Over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, as well as tens of thousands of Romani people. Hundreds of Hungarian people were also executed by the Arrow Cross Party for sheltering Jews. The war left Hungary devastated destroying over 60% of the economy and causing huge loss of life. On 13 February 1945, the Hungarian capital city surrendered unconditionally. On 8 May 1945, World War II in Europe officially ended.
Following the fall of Nazi Germany, Soviet troops occupied all of the country and through their influence Hungary gradually became a communist satellite state of the Soviet Union. After 1948, Communist leader Mátyás Rákosi established Stalinist rule in the country complete with forced collectivization and planned economy. The rule of the Rákosi government was nearly unbearable for Hungary\'s war-torn citizens. This led to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Hungary\'s temporary withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. The Soviets retaliated massively with military force, sending in over 150,000 troops and 2,500 tanksFindley, Carter V., and John Rothney. Twentieth Century World. sixth ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 278.. Nearly a quarter of a million people left the country during the brief time that the borders were open in 1956. From the 1960s through the late 1980s, Hungary was often satirically referred to as "the happiest barrack" within the Eastern bloc. This was under the autocratic rule of its controversial communist leader, János Kádár. The last Soviet soldier left the country in 1991 thus ending Soviet military presence in Hungary. With the Soviet Union gone the transition to a market economy began.
In June 1987 Károly Grósz took over as premier. In January 1988 all restrictions were lifted on foreign travel. In March demonstrations for democracy and civil rights brought 15,000 onto the streets. In May, after Kádár’s forced retirement, Grósz was named party secretary general. Under Grósz, Hungary began moving towards full democracy, change accelerated under the impetus of other party reformers such as Imre Pozsgay and Rezső Nyers. Also in June 1988, 30,000 demonstrated against Romania’s plans to demolish Transsylvanian villages.
In February, 1989 the Communist Party’s Central Committee, responding to ’public dissatisfaction’, announced it would permit a multi-party system in Hungary and hold free elections. In March for the first time in decades, the government declared the anniversary of the 1848 Revolution a national holiday. Opposition demonstrations filled the streets of Budapest with more than 75,000 marchers. Grósz met Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, who condoned Hungary’s moves toward a multi-party system and promised that the USSR will not interfere in Hungary’s internal affairs. In May, Hungary began taking down its barbed wire fence along the Austrian border – the first tear in the Iron Curtain. June brought the reburial of Prime Minister Nagy, executed after the 1956 Revolution, that drew a crowd of 250,000 at the Heroes’ Square. The last speaker, 26-year-old Viktor Orbán publicly called for Soviet troops to leave Hungary. In July U.S. President George Bush visited Hungary. In September Foreign Minister Gyula Horn announced that East German refugees in Hungary would not be repatriated but would instead be allowed to go to the West. The resulting exodus shook East Germany and hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At a party congress in October 1989 the Communists agreed to give up their monopoly on power, paving the way for free elections in March 1990. The party’s name was changed from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party to simply the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and a new programme advocating social democracy and a free-market economy was adopted. This was not enough to shake off the stigma of four decades of autocratic rule, however, and the 1990 election was won by the centrist Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), which advocated a gradual transition towards capitalism. The social-democratic Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), which had called for much faster change, came second and the Socialist Party trailed far behind. As Gorbachev looked on, Hungary changed political systems with scarcely a murmur and the last Soviet troops left Hungary in June 1991.
In coalition with two smaller parties, the MDF provided Hungary with sound government during its hard transition to a full market economy. Antall died in December 1993 and was replaced by Interior Minister Péter Boross.
The economic changes of the past few years have resulted in declining living standards for most people in Hungary. In 1991 most state subsidies were removed, leading to a severe recession exacerbated by the fiscal austerity necessary to reduce inflation and stimulate investment. This made life difficult for many Hungarians, and in the May 1994 elections the Hungarian Socialist Party led by former Communists won an absolute majority in parliament. This in no way implied a return to the past, and party leader Gyula Horn was quick to point out that it was his party that had initiated the whole reform process in the first place (as foreign minister in 1989 Horn played a key role in opening Hungary\'s border with Austria). All three main political parties advocate economic liberalisation and closer ties with the West. In March 1996, Horn was re-elected as Socialist Party leader and confirmed that he would push ahead with the party’s economic stabilisation programme.
In 1997 in a national referendum 85% voted in favour of Hungary joining the NATO. A year later the European Union began negotiations with Hungary on full membership. In 1999 Hungary joined NATO. Hungary voted in favour of joining the EU, and joined in 2004.
"Magyar" is the term Hungarians refer to themselves or to their language in their own language. The English equivalent for the word would be "Hungarian". However the word "Magyar" is frequently used in English context. In most of the cases, it is used, when refering to Hungarian nationality, ethnicity, and even more general, when describing the medieval nomadic Hungarian/Magyar tribes.http://www.photius.com/countries/hungary/national_security/hungary_national_security_the_medieval_period.html Some sourceshttp://countrystudies.us/hungary/49.htm claim "Magyar" to be the proper form instead of Hungarian, although "Hungarian" is the form that set foot in the English language during the centuries.
Many theories exist on the origins and meanings of the word "Magyar"".http://www.geographic.hu/index.php/fotopalyazat/fotopalyazat/nyomtathato.php?act=napi&id=4208 Although the etymology of the word Hungary/Hungarian is accompanied by less debate. In Old slavic texts Hungarians were referred to as Ugors or Ogurs (Ugri), in Byzantine and early Latin texts uniguri, Ungri words were used, presumably from the Turkic word On ogur, meaning ten arrows, i.e. ten tribes (the traditional Hungarian tribes (Megyer, Jenő, Keszi, Nyék, Kér, Tarján, while Kürt and Gyarmat merged into one tribe making it seven total) joined by 3 Kabar tribes whose names are not known for sure, the usual suspects are Ság, Ladány, Berény, Tárkány). Later, from the Unugor form evolved the words Ungarus, Ungar, Venger. In the middle ages the Latin Ungarus, Ungaria words changed to Hungarus, Hungaria, that also referred to the Hungarians being related to the Huns, a common belief until the 19th century.Translated from the Hungarian Wikipedia article on the topic. http://hu.wikipedia.orgMagyarok#A_.E2.80.9Emagyar.E2.80.9D_n.C3.A9v This finally was the base for many languages\' word for Hungarian/Hungary.
The President of the Republic, elected by the Parliament every five years, has a largely ceremonial role, choosing the dates of elections.
The Prime Minister is elected by Parliament and can only be removed by a constructive vote of no confidence. The prime minister selects Cabinet ministers and has the exclusive right to dismiss them. Each Cabinet nominee appears before one or more parliamentary committees in open hearings and must be formally approved by the President.
A unicameral, 386-member National Assembly (the Országgyűlés) is the highest organ of state authority and initiates and approves legislation sponsored by the Prime Minister. National Parliamentary elections are held every four years; the next are due to be held in 2010.
An 11-member Constitutional Court has power to challenge legislation on grounds of unconstitutionality.
Administratively, Hungary is divided into 19 counties. In addition, the capital city (főváros), Budapest, is independent of any county government. The counties and the capital are the 20 NUTS third-level units of Hungary.
The counties are further subdivided into 173 subregions (kistérségek), and Budapest is comprised of its own subregion. Since 1996, the counties and City of Budapest have been grouped into 7 regions for statistical and development purposes. These seven regions constitute NUTS\' second-level units of Hungary.
There are also 23 towns with county rights (singular megyei jogú város), sometimes known as "urban counties" in English (although there is no such term in Hungarian). The local authorities of these towns have extended powers, but these towns belong to the territory of the respective county instead of being independent territorial units.
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