Coming from Hungary, ‘revisionism’ (well… the Hungarian equivalent per se) was one of the earliest words in my historical political vocabulary. Indeed, in a very Hungarian context revisionism refers with near exclusivity to the rejection of the Treaty of Trianon, and the corresponding downfall of the nation in its direct wake. Thus, the revisionism of Hungarian revisionists consists in advocating for the redrawing of the current borders, which were established in 1920, and for the revival of medieval and Habsburgist social structures. To this end, it is a worthwhile endeavour to enumerate some of the groups of interest belonging to this colourful bunch. From absolute monarchists and traditionalists (advocates of the supposedly legitimate Habsburg monarchy), the list goes on to neo-fascists and Hungarists (paramilitary groups, who are advocates of the post-Habsburg, crypto-fascist establishment), tribal anarchists (claiming monopoly over the Turanic heritage and pre-Christian traditions revolving around the right of conquest), as well as hardline communists, who idolise Béla Kun, and his Red Army, which took back Slovakia in the immediate wake of World War I. Perhaps the above-detailed circus is a fitting illustration of the multifarious and all-encompassing nature of revisionist notions in Hungary.
For the above reasons many Hungarians – which I admit, at various points in the past included yours truly – when they hear the word ‘revisionism’ immediately associate to the political fallacy, that is the strict revisionism of Trianon, as opposed to the teleological fallacy, which revisionism is in more general terms.
Why is that the case? If one attempts to embark on a journey to take a transnational survey of revisionism in Eastern Europe, he will find that much of the suffering in the short 20th century was rooted in a rejection of the current status quo, and the revision of current identities in favour of supposed former ones. Slovakian nationalism for example derived its legitimacy from a forged continuity with the Teutonic tribes, who populated the Northern Carpathians under late Rome. Albania engaged in the same operation, tracing back their origin to the Illyrians. Romania went so far as to adopt Rome into the very nation of their name, based on a much debated theory of continuity between them and the Dacians. The list goes on. If we believe all revisionists, then we would have to accept that indeed, nearly all countries in the region are rightful heirs of Rome, and Rome never really fell to begin with.
This would have been all well as long as these forged identities, which were organically developed to empower those on the peripheries of Europe were not exploited by modern politicians to gain political capital, or by radical movements to rationalise one people’s superiority over the other. And as we all know, both of these options turned out to be the case – often in overlap – leading to some of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind.
Mazzini – someone not exempt from charges of revisionism – argued that belonging to a nation was like a daily plebiscite. In his interpretation, the troops that Garibaldi commanded on his conquest of unification had to choose to be Italian, and with each individual choice they made, they had to pick the Italian option. In his – in hindsight – extraordinarily romantic terms, it was the Italian identity succeeding in this daily struggle that paved the way for its manifestation on the map of Europe, namely a unified Italy. Anderson expands on Mazzini’s point insofar as he coined the term ‘imagined community’. Nations exist on a practical level per se, but they are quite hard to grasp in themselves. Are they the land enclosed by their borders? Are they the people making up its population? Or are they perhaps more than the sum of all of these? Anderson and Webber claim that nations are imagined communities in the sense that they are created from the narratives people tell about them. Having established national identities as the practical projections of narratives, it seems paramount that one remains conscious that as any narrative, a national identity is prone to revisionism.
Metternich famously said that ‘Paris sneezes, Europe catches a cold’. To this day, the statement seems to stand, albeit originally intended as a warning to the Holy Alliance between the remaining absolute monarchies of 19th century Europe. Indeed, amidst the romanticist breeze that swept through Europe at the time many national identities were formed across the continent, blossoming into the modern nation states we know and love today. However, not all of these states included both elements of the French revolution and the long 19th century in their respective formations, leading to massive atrocities. I’d argue that these atrocities happened because of varying degrees of revisionism across Central and Eastern Europe, which was much more prone to its negative effects.
The two above mentioned developments happened hand in hand in the archetypal French revolution, namely 1) civil social changes, and 2) national awakening. Yugoslavia after its dissolution for example suffered the consequences of each of its many demographics’ respective revisionism. They internalised civil society, which was coerced from the people by decades of assimilationist policies and suppression of regional identities, resulting in the most severe loss of life in Europe since World War II. In Yugoslavia thereby, it can be said that the proneness to revisionism happened because civil society was relatively well-developed when measured against the rest of the Eastern Block (ie the dictatorship of Belgrade was imposed instead of that of Moscow), but it was not accompanied by a healthy national awakening, thereby leading to accumulating social frustrations.
Coming back to the example of my ancestral homeland, Hungary, quite an opposite parable can be drawn in retrospect, in terms of the reasons behind revisionist tendencies. A national awakening did in fact take place, and many would argue that it even went too far. However, it was not accompanied by the foundations of a civil society, and instead aristocratic, feudal nationalism outlived the grassroots popular movement we know from Italy and France. Thus, when the first wave of transnationally present nationalist breeze hit Hungary – as paradoxical as that may sound – the seeds for the next wave of revisionist identitarianism were already sown.