Hungarian minority from Transylvania: the core of the Romanian-Hungarian conflict

Minorities in Eastern Europe. The Romanian case

As Alfred Stepan showed in his article "When Democracy and The Nation - State Are Competing Logics: Reflection on Estonia", the globe is such an overlapping and inter-mixing of different cultural nations that less than 20 of the almost 200 states in the world are homogeneous nation-states. This situation is particularly true for Eastern Europe, a space of diverse cultural and ethnic communities. As the analysis of Leszek Kosinski revealed, in 1930, from about 94 million people living in East Central Europe (in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania), 24 million - 26% - were members of minority groups #1;, making Raymond Pearson to name the states created by the Versailles treaty - "mini-empires" #2;. Romania's situation was common in Eastern Europe. Its minority groups grew after the First World War from 8 % to 29.1 % of the population, so that in 1930, from a population of 18,057,028 inhabitants, 71.9 % were Romanian, 7.9% were Hungarians, 4.1 % were Germans, 4 % were Jews, 3.3 % Ukrainians, 2.3 % Russians, #3; etc. The Second World War changed dramatically the minority map in Eastern Europe, due to war losses and physical extermination, deportations, and territorial or population transfers. The minority population of the seventh countries mentioned above was reduced to 7.1 million or 7.2% of the 99 million inhabitants in 1960 #4;. The changes took place especially in the northern areas of East Central Europe, particularly in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and affected especially German and Jewish minorities: from 5,878,000 and respectively 4,096,000 of the total minority population they became an insignificant minority part of the population. But these trends are not very relevant for our case, because:

1) after the Second World War, German and Jewish population of Romania did not disappear (as in other cases), although it decreased significantly:

Proportion of The Population of Jewish and German Origin in Romania #5;

(1930-1977): 1930; 1956; 1966; 1977;

Germans: 4.1%; / 2.2; / 2.0; / 1.7;

Jewish: 4.0%; / 0.8; / 0.2; / 0.1;

The German and Jewish minorities from Romania disappeared only gradually, especially in the 1970's and 1980's decades, due to emigration to Israel and Germany. The agreement between Romania and FRG after the visit of the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt led to the emigration of 11.000 Germans per year from Romania #6;. As for the Jewish emigration, it was part of the condition under which Romania received MFN status from USA (see Jackson-Vanik amendment) and affected the Romanian Jewish community to such a degree that in 1989 there were only 17.000 Romanian Jews left.

2) the Hungarian minority remained an important one in the region: in 1960 there were 1,604,000 in Romania, 504,000 in Yugoslavia, 517,000 in Czechoslovakia and about 200,000 in the USSR (Carpatho-Ukraine) #7;. In this period, the Hungarian minority in Romania remained relatively constant in percentage:

(1930-1977): 1930; 1956; 1966; 1977;

Hungarians: 7.9%; / 9.1; / 8.5; / 7.9;

Unlike in the other cases, emigration was not considered "a rational option" for the Hungarian minority, for different reasons, summarised by Ludanyi: In Hungary there are only 30.000 Romanians, so it is not possible a fair exchange. Hungary, together with Czechoslovakia has the greatest population density in East Central Europe (295 per square mile, compared with 251 in Romania's case), and could not absorb two millions new inhabitants. Hungary did not have the economic potential of Germany or Israel, nor the powerful economical and political attraction. But the main reason that the Hungarian government did not encourage emigration lies in the historical character of Hungarian community from Transylvania, which is living there for centuries. It is interesting to notice that, on the other hand, the Romanian government did not encouraged emigration. N. Ceausescu referred several times to this issue, stressing that Hungarians, Germans, Serbs and other nationalities from Romania were living together with Romanians for centuries. His reasons in stating this were diverse, from ideological considerations, on which I will refer extensively below, to fears of brain drain and losses of skilled labour force, which would increase the economic difficulties.