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Clad in western robes, changed into western mode
What does “the West” mean for Hungary and Romania?
Hungary and Romania are neighbouring countries. Within a space of three years both became members of the European Union, Hungary in 2004, Romania in 2007. For both countries membership of the EU means a return home to the western world. But what does this “West” mean for them?
In these two cultures very different resonances sound from this word – “occident” in Romanian and “nyugat” in Hungarian. Journalist Kathrin Lauer, who lives in both countries, explored both Romanian and Hungarian sensibilities. Romania: longing for the West Recently Alina Mungiu, Romania’s sharpest -political scientist, told about an experience in a city somewhere in Western Europe that she was visiting. She discovered a notice on a church door in which the residents of the urban district affected were invited to attend a meeting at which a building project that upset everybody was to be discussed: a multi-storey housing complex which would hide the view of a stream for all the other people in the surroundings. Just imagine, Mungiu writes in her article for the Bucharest culture weekly “Dilema” that this intrusive building cannot be erected if the local residents do not want to have it. She could not imagine so much solidarity for the common good in the Romanian capital Bucharest. But there, at this place somewhere in Western Europe, it was possible. “Civil society, democracy? These words may not be spoken out loud but their essence is present”, the 43-year-old says enthusiastically. And it is true: in Bucharest naked egoism prevails. Everyone builds what they want to, throws rubbish onto the streets and the roads blocked by permanent traffic jam are a veritable theatre of war. Alina Mungiu, president of the Bucharest think-tank “Societatea Academica Romana” (Romanian Academic Society), which is financed by western sponsors, has seen a lot of Europe through her numerous trips as visiting lecturer. Intellectuals such as she define the term “West” as the place where people are willing and able to get involved in working for a common goal. Romanians who are a generation older than Mungiu would probably label this as an outburst of left-wing thinking – they suffered too much under the negation of the individual imposed by the state during the communist era. They are suspicious about anything in western culture that seems left-wing in any way and that suggests the formation of groups: trade-unions, women’s movement, environmentalism, equal rights. In Romania one can still, by and large, tell the social origins, profession and level of education of a person from their clothing. In Western Europe on the other hand the consumer goods industry has meant that all people look boringly more or less the same – this is the reading of the right-wing conservative Romanian critics of capitalism, who see their social ideal in the interwar period when Romania still had a king, footmen with white gloves and peasant women who went bare-foot from house to house carrying baskets of vegetables that they offered for sale. For a long time the West was for Romanians the distant unreachable land of prosperity and freedom. This will probably remain the situation for a considerable time. At present more than two million Romanians work – legally or illegally – abroad in the West and send billions to their relatives at home. A number of Romanian -politicians see this not just as a fortunate economic chance – ten per cent of Romanian families live from money sent from abroad – but also as the chance for a political change of culture. The belief is that labour migrants will bring western – which is equated with enlightened – attitudes home with them. Therefore they will not be so ready to vote for populists of one kind or another at the elections. To this way of thinking the West therefore also stands for reason, pragmatism and enlightened thinking, in contrast to the oriental fatalism and contemplative dreaming that is particularly encouraged by Orthodox belief. For the Romanian Orthodox Church, to which more than 80 per cent of the population professes to belong – including increasing numbers of young people – the western world contains an enemy in the shape of Catholics and Protestants. For them Catholicism, through its international presence, represent a mafia-like world conspiracy and the Pope is a kind of “capo di tutti capi”. On the other hand Orthodox believers are disturbed by the Protestants dryly intellectual relationship to God and their culture shaped by a mercantile pragmatism. In historical terms the Romanians’ relationship to the West is shaped by the geo-political situation. Transylvania was and remains closer to the West (and feels itself to be so) because it once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Transylvanians look down on the more Russian influenced east Romanians and the Balkan southern Romanians. The principalities of Moldavia in the east and Wallachia in the south were alternately under Russian and Turkish influence. Modernism first arrived there only in the 19th century – initially through fashion. Wealthy young men in this region were sent to France to study where they exchanged their -oriental caftans for trousers. Dressed in western fashion they returned home and greeted people with “Bonjour”. It was as if they had forgotten how to wish someone good day in Romanian. They were therefore mockingly referred to as “Bonjourists” In Moldavia the western wind of fashion came from the east. During the Russian-Turkish wars elegant officers from Moscow and St Petersburg were often stationed there. To the delight of the ladies of fine Moldavian society these officers taught them how to waltz. Their husbands could only look on puzzled as in their long caftans they made a ridiculous spectacle of themselves if they tried to waltz. They consequently changed their mode of dress rather quickly. In more recent times, for Romanians the Western world has been split into two – through the disagreement between the USA and a number of EU states as regards the politics of combating international terrorism. Romanian governments since 2000 have been clearly pro-American – completely in harmony with the general mood of the population. The intellectual Andrei Ples¸u, founder of the journal “Dilema”, finds the fact that Romania is sometimes reproached with this stance most confusing. To be forced to decide between Europe and America is just as absurd as the stupid question that some grown-ups ask children: “Whom do you love more, your mummy or your daddy?”, writes Ples¸u. One thing becomes clear here: Romania’s relation to the occident is a parent-child relationship. Romania’s State President Traian Ba˘sescu takes loyalty to America so far that he repeatedly publicly and senselessly criticises Russian president Vladimir Putin. Accordingly Romania pays one of the highest prices in Europe for imported Russian gas. Hungary: we are part of the West! Romanians compare themselves constantly with West Europeans and react partly with an inferiority complex, partly with a scorn that results from frustration. Their Hungarian neighbours do not need to make comparisons of this kind because they regard themselves as belonging to the West. Thus they have no need to define the West. They occupy themselves far more with preserving their national characteristics that, above all due to their language, have given them an insular existence in need of protection. The question is not “West or East” but “We or the rest of the world”. The Hungarians live and consume like people from the West but allow far fewer English words to penetrate their language than other peoples in the globalised world. Almost everything is unsparingly translated. Exceptions are made only in cases of great need – for example the word “software”, which in Hungarian is called “szoftver”. The issue for Austria’s eastern neighbour is to defend cultural terrain, after, as a result of the First World War, Hungary was deprived of its status as a regional power due to the huge territorial losses it suffered, a wound that still causes pain today. Croatia, a part of modern-day Slovakia, Transylvania, the Carpatho-Ukraine: this was the kingdom that the founder of the state King Stephen created more than a thousand years ago. The Hungarians dominated these areas even while belonging to the Habsburg Empire because even then they enjoyed a special status. Despite all its self-confidence the intellectual class in Hungary has always felt a need to cultivate contact with the West. The most important newspaper of the 19th century in Hungary was called “Nyugat” (West). A circle developed here around the upper middle-class writer Hugo Veigelsberg (1896–1949), who wrote under the pseudonym Ignotus and offered a platform for the most important Hungarian writers of the time including Mihály Babits, Endre Ady, Dezső Kosztolányi, Gyula Krúdy und Móricz Zsigmond. With these authors (whose complete works are, undeservedly, still not available in German), “Nyugat” attempted to introduce western tendencies such as naturalism and symbolism, in the process creating a modernist trend of its own. Ignotus opened the first number of “Nyugat” in 1908 with comparisons about the supposed relationship between the Finns and the Hungarians. The occasion was the visit to Budapest of a Finnish theatre group that Ignotus found particularly mediocre. He came to the conclusion that “our current Austrian nature that has sprung from the Hungarian” was a “very different kind of cultural world” to the Finnish one. Characteristic of Hungary’s view of the world is the great interest shown in international politics – very different to the situation in neighbouring Romania. While the Budapest newspapers are filled with reports from throughout the world and the relevant commentaries, in Bucharest the interest seems to be confined almost entirely to internal problems. There is even little to be learnt in the Romanian media about neighbouring countries. In contrast the Hungarians have a keen interest in their region – due to a historically motivated nostalgia as well as solid economic calculations. It is not irrelevant to them who buys up the Serbian, Croatian and Romanian oil refineries, telephone companies and salt mines. The Hungarians want to become players and here they see western investors as the competition. For example the government in Budapest reacted with extreme annoyance recently when, without warning, the Austrian OMV almost doubled its stake in the Hungarian mineral oil company MOL by increasing the number of shares it owns to 18.6 per cent. Prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány spoke of a “hostile takeover” and the MOL chief executive announced in a provocative tone that they were more interested in collaboration with Russian mineral oil multi-nationals than with the OMV. For some time now the Russians are no longer just in the east, as has been clear at the latest since Roman Abramovitch bought the English football club Chelsea, and the services of former German prime minister Gerald Schröder were hired by Gazprom. In this sense the question about the nature and location of the western world is becoming increasingly complicated.
Kathrin Lauer was born in Bucharest in 1964 and emigrated in 1980 to the Federal Republic of Germany. She studied Romance languages and literature, and modern history in Bonn and Paris. Since 1994 she has worked as a freelance journalist for the Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa), the “Sźddeutsche Zeitung” and the “Standard” among others. The central themes of her work are Romania and Hungary. Kathrin Lauer moves between Budapest and Bucharest, with a domicile in both cities.
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