3 Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament Endre Dányi Democracy in Central Europe is said to have begun in 1989. This statement is relatively easy to maintain if one defines democracy as the presence of a particular set of abstract institutions and procedures, such as independent legislatures and regularly held elections, but the picture becomes more complicated when one looks at the actual places where democracy happens. Consider the case of the Hungarian Parliament. By today’s standards, the first freely and fairly elected National Assembly was set up only in 1990, but the neo-Gothic building in the center of Budapest, on the east bank of the Danube, which serves as the home of the Hungarian legislature, was commissioned a little more than a hundred years before the collapse of communism. When opened in 1902, it was the largest (and arguably the most impressive) parliament building in the world (Figure 3.1). How could one account for its existence? One possible answer is given by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, which in 1987 decided to add Buda Castle and the banks of the Danube in Budapest to the World Heritage List. The site consists of several bridges and buildings, including the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Redoute, and the Hungarian Parliament. In its official recommendation, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) called the latter ‘an outstanding example of a great official building on a par with those of London, Munich, Vienna, and Athens, exemplifying the eclectic architecture of the nineteenth century, while at the same time symbolizing the political function of the second capital of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’ (ICOMOS 1987). By locating the Hungarian Parliament building in the AustroHungarian monarchy, the ICOMOS report suggests that its cultural heritage status is associated with the political regime of the second half 55 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 55 6/21/2013 5:52:42 PM 56 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe Figure 3.1 A cultural heritage site or an inhabited ruin? Photo by Endre Dányi, 7 October 2009 of the nineteenth century, which was markedly different both from the feudalist and enlightened absolutisms of the eighteenth century and the authoritarian dictatorships of the twentieth century. But what about today? What kind of a political regime is the Hungarian Parliament building supposed to hold together in the early twenty-first century, and how does that regime relate to the ones that occupied the same building between the dualist period and the collapse of communism? Implicitly present in this question is the realization that the past and the present cannot be neatly separated from each other – that to a large extent the past is the effect of what Geoffrey Bowker calls ‘the canonical archival forms of the present’ (2005: 32). On the one hand, this realization is not very new: the blurring of the boundary between the past and the present (and the political potential thereof) has fascinated many social theorists since at least the early twentieth century (Benjamin 1986; Halbwachs 1992; Warburg 2008). On the other hand, the discovery of archives, museums, libraries, and other such institutions as explicitly political places dates back only two or three decades. 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 56 6/21/2013 5:52:43 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 57 Perhaps the most often cited work in this regard is Pierre Nora and his colleagues’ multi-volume study on lieux de mémoire, the appearance of which coincided not only with the end of the Cold War and the alleged end of (a certain kind of) history but also with the radical transformation of the technical conditions of remembering (Nora 1989: 13–4). Bowker’s study of memory practices in the natural sciences (which often claim to have a perfect recollection) pushes Nora’s argument further by examining how archives, computers, electronic databases, and their material infrastructures contribute to the production of particular pasts, and how, in turn, these pasts are used to explain and/or justify the present (Bowker 2005: 34). Following Bowker’s approach, in this chapter I focus on three sets of memory practices associated with publicly accessible lieux de mémoire inside and around the Hungarian Parliament, namely the Cupola Hall, the Library of the National Assembly, and Kossuth Square. My aim is to examine the parliament building not as a cultural heritage, frozen in time, but as an ‘inhabited ruin,’ which continuously shapes, and is shaped by, various attempts to define a political community. 1 The museum of the Holy Crown In Hungary the year 2000 marked not only the beginning of the new millennium but also the thousandth anniversary of the foundation of the state by St Stephen, Hungary’s first Christian king. Just as in 1896, when Hungarians celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the conquest of the Carpathian Basin, the highlight of the millennium festivities was the transfer of the Holy Crown and other regalia to the parliament building. This time, however, they were there to stay. According to contemporary news reports, on 1 January 2000, the crown, the orb, the scepter, and the royal sword were carried from the National Museum to the square in front of the Parliament in an armored vehicle, accompanied by a police motorcade.1 It took about a quarter of an hour for the bulletproof car to reach the parliament building, where it was received by a joyous crowd and the Corporation of the Holy Crown – a special committee that consisted of the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the National Assembly, the President of the Constitutional Court, and the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. After saluting the National Flag and listening to the National Anthem, four members of the Republican Guard carried the special earthquake-proof glass cabinet containing the regalia up the main stairs and put it on display in the center of the Cupola Hall. 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 57 6/21/2013 5:52:44 PM 58 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe The idea of the crown’s transfer came up in 1999, when the government proposed a bill to commemorate the coronation of St Stephen as the symbolic act of the foundation of the state. Just before the end of the year, the bill was passed by the National Assembly and signed into Act I of 2000 by the President of the Republic. The preamble of the first law of the new millennium acknowledged St Stephen’s role in integrating the Hungarian people into Europe and recounted the development of his realm in the Carpathian Basin. It emphasized the importance of the Christian faith during times of occupation and dictatorship and without any further explanation declared the Holy Crown the relic that in the consciousness of the nation ‘lives as the embodiment of the continuity and independence of the Hungarian state.’ Finally it announced that: [o]n the occasion of the thousandth anniversary of the foundation of the state, Hungary elevates the Holy Crown to its appropriate place, and from the museum of the nation lays it under the protection of the representative of the nation, the National Assembly.2 The text of the law does not clarify how St Stephen and the Holy Crown relate to each other, but the preamble reiterates a well-known myth, popularized by Bishop Hartvic in the twelfth century, according to which the crown that is currently on display in the Cupola Hall of the Parliament is the same object used at St Stephen’s coronation in 1000. In Hartvic’s account, the crown was given by Pope Sylvester II as a formal acknowledgement of Hungary’s becoming a Christian country and as a guarantee of her independence from the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire (Bertényi 1978). In the period of growing tension between Rome and Constantinople, this account was clearly an important reference point and greatly strengthened the cult of St Stephen, whom Hartvic portrayed not only as the founder of the Hungarian state but also as a strong defender of the Christian faith. He ruled, ‘by the grace of God,’ for almost 40 years and was canonized by Pope Gregory VII on 20 August 1083 (Engel 2001; Klaniczay 2002). Despite the fact that most statues and paintings of St Stephen show him with the Holy Crown on his head, archaeologists nowadays think that the crown is somewhat younger than Bishop Hartvic had claimed. According to scientific examinations, it was made from two separate parts about a hundred years after St Stephen’s coronation (Lovag 1986). The corona graeca is the lower diadem, decorated with four golden chains on both sides and two rows of pearls in the bottom and the top. Around the golden rim, precious stones and enamel images alternate: the central 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 58 6/21/2013 5:52:44 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 59 piece shows Christ Pantokrator on his throne, surrounded by angels and saints, while the image in the back depicts Byzantine Emperor Michael VII. The diadem itself might have been a gift from the Emperor to Hungarian King Géza I or his wife, Synadene, prepared in the Byzantine court in the 1070s. The corona latina, the cupola-shaped part of the crown, consists of two intersecting bands, and its main purpose seems to be to hold the golden cross on the top. The enamel pictures on the two bands show Christ and eight of the twelve apostles, which suggests the piece is incomplete and was originally part of another object, possibly a Bible holder. The two parts were attached together in the twelfth century, but the present cross appears to be a later addition. Some experts believe it is a replacement of a reliquary that used to contain a piece of the True Cross and became crooked in the seventeenth century (see Figure 3.2). The first written document that refers to the crown as St Stephen’s Crown dates back to 1292, by which time it was considered to be more than a royal trinket. Ernst Kantorowicz observes that it was ‘at once the visible holy relic of St. Stephen, Hungary’s first Christian king, and Figure 3.2 Continuity since 1000 – the Holy Crown and the regalia in the Parliament’s Cupola Hall. Photo by Endre Dányi, 13 October 2009 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 59 6/21/2013 5:52:44 PM 60 AQ1 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe the invisible symbol and lord paramount of the Hungarian monarchy’ (1957: 339). As Kantorowicz’s classical work on political theology demonstrates, the conceptual separation of the king as a human being from kingship in general was common in medieval Europe – in fact, for centuries it was the main guarantee of the continuity of royal power from Sicily to Scotland. What made Hungary different in this regard was that sometime between the attachment of the corona graeca and the corona latina in the twelfth century and its attribution to St. Stephen in the thirteenth century, the physical object came to be seen as the sole sovereign of the country (Péter 2003). This unusual form of fetishism implied not only that anyone who wanted to be recognized as a legitimate King of Hungary had to be crowned with the same crown but also that he had to share his power with his noblemen, who (referring to the Golden Bull issued in 1222) retained the exclusive right to elect a king. This, at least, is what one of Hungary’s most influential legal scholars, Stephen Werbőczy, stated in his Tripartitum opus iuris consuetudinarii inclyti regni Hungariæ – the first systematic collection of customary law in Hungary, published in 1517. According to Werbőczy (2006), kingship and nobility in the realm of St Stephen existed as ‘reciprocal and reflexive and as always mutually dependent,’ which meant the ruler and his noblemen were all members of the Holy Crown (Rady 2000: 2). Had Hungary had a strong king in the period, this theorem, also known as the Holy Crown doctrine, would have remained little more than wishful thinking, but less than ten years after the publication of Werbőczy’s Tripartitum, the Hungarian army was defeated by the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Mohács, and the country was divided into three parts. The Ottomans occupied the central region; the eastern region became the Principality of Transylvania; and the north-western region, known as Royal Hungary, was annexed to the Habsburg Empire. During the 150 years of Ottoman occupation, the Holy Crown doctrine played a crucial role in maintaining the abstract unity of Hungary by treating the three regions as the Lands of the Holy Crown; while under Habsburg rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hungarian nobility saw it as the main assurance of the country’s sovereignty.3 The only Emperor who completely disregarded the Holy Crown doctrine was Joseph II, the ‘hatted king,’ who as a demonstration of his reform-mindedness refused to be crowned. In 1784, he ordered the royal jewels to be transferred to the Imperial Treasury in Vienna. They were returned to the Buda Castle only after Joseph’s death, where they remained until the outbreak of the 1848 revolution. 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 60 6/21/2013 5:52:45 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 61 Regarding the Holy Crown as an object associated more with royal power than with the country’s independence, some radical participants of the 1848 revolution demanded that it be destroyed while others wanted to send it to the National Museum. However when Austria launched an attack on Hungary, Governor Lajos Kossuth thought it was better to hide the crown in an unmarked chest in the eastern part of the country. The revolution was subsequently suppressed in 1849, but the Holy Crown was recovered only in 1853 (Bertényi 1978). Emperor Francis Joseph had already been in power for five years then, but his official coronation could only take place in 1867, after the signing of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. It was Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy who placed the Holy Crown on Francis Joseph’s head, declaring him the Apostolic King of Hungary and the Lands of the Holy Crown, which at the time included Croatia, Dalmatia, Fiume, Slavonia, and Transylvania. The last addition was Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Austria-Hungary occupied after the Congress of Berlin in 1878. It was a diplomatic victory that also marked the fate of the monarchy: after decades of unrest in the Balkans, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Yugoslav nationalist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, which led to the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia and the outbreak of World War I. In 1916 Francis Joseph died and two years later Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy lost the Great War. Between 28 and 31 October 1918, five states announced their secession from the Empire, including Hungary. In a few days, a new government was set up and the First Republic was proclaimed in front of the Parliament (Romsics 1999). In the course of less than 12 months, however, Hungary witnessed a Bolshevik Revolution and a Christian-nationalist counterrevolution, led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, which brought an end to the republic. Horthy’s authoritarian regime was from the beginning defined in opposition to the Trianon peace treaty signed in Versailles in 1920, as a result of which Hungary lost two-thirds of its prewar territory and more than half of its multiethnic population. The Horthy regime considered the Trianon treaty as provisional and saw the Holy Crown doctrine as the justification for pursuing a revisionist politics. It claimed that the state lived on in the Holy Crown. When between 1938 and 1940 parts of Czechoslovakia and Romania were reattached to Hungary, it announced that those territories ‘returned to the body of the Holy Crown.’ The writer Ferenc Donászy articulated the dominant sentiment in 1941: [t]he mysterious body of the Holy Crown ... welds together the realm of St. Stephen, from the forests of the Carpathian slopes all the way 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 61 6/21/2013 5:52:45 PM 62 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe to the blue Adriatic Sea. The uniting force of the Holy Crown doctrine has proven to be stronger than the one and a half century-long rule of the Turkish crescent, stronger than the suffocating claws of the German imperial eagle, and stronger than the prison chains forged in Trianon. These are all disappearing in the distant past; the crown of St. Stephen continues to glow with its nine hundred-year-old glory. (Bertényi 1978: 148, my translation) Needless to say, the reattachment of parts of the lost territories to Hungary would not have been possible without the external support of Nazi Germany. In exchange, Hungary joined the tripartite pact of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and in 1941 actively participated in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. In the first years of World War II, Hitler regarded Horthy as a strategic ally, but when he learned that the Hungarian government began to negotiate armistice with the Western Allies, he ordered the invasion of the country. On 19 March 1944, German troops occupied Hungary. Edmund Veesenmeyer became responsible for the state administration, while together with the local authorities, Adolf Eichmann began the organization of the deportation of more than 440,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz (Ránki 1978). Although for a couple of months Horthy remained in office, in October 1944 Veesenmeyer appointed Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the national-socialist Arrow-Cross Party, to form a government. Szálasi took his oath on the Holy Crown in Buda Castle, but within a few weeks the Soviet Army got so close to Budapest that the government thought it better to hide the royal jewels in an unmarked chest in the western part of the country (Bertényi 1978). As the German forces were losing ground the regalia were taken to Austria, where they were eventually captured by the US Army. After the end of World War II, the Holy Crown was taken to the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, where it was held as a ‘property of special status’ for more than three decades. It was only in 1977 that President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would return it to Hungary, with the only stipulation that it had to be accessible to the public. The decision caused a furor in America – several senators opposed the move, claiming it would unnecessarily strengthen the legitimacy of a communist country. Nevertheless, on 5 January 1978, the regalia arrived at Budapest, and after a brief stopover in the Parliament’s Cupola Hall they were put on display in the National Museum as objects devoid of any political significance. Many Hungarians, especially those who were born after World War II, might have thought the National Museum was the natural place for the 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 62 6/21/2013 5:52:46 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 63 royal jewels, but after the collapse of communism in 1989, some politicians and constitutional lawyers began to argue that the Holy Crown represented the independence and continuity of the Hungarian state and should under no circumstances remain in a museum. When in 1999 the government announced that as part of the millennium celebrations it would transfer the crown to the Parliament, the opposition and various groups of intellectuals were outraged. Some argued that the symbols of royal power had no place in the legislature of a republic, while others objected that the new location would not be appropriate for such a significant object (Radnóti 2002; Scheppele 2000). Be that as it may, Act I of 2000 turned the Cupola Hall of the Hungarian Parliament into a museum, open to visitors seven days a week. There are guided tours in eight languages – entry is free to all EU citizens. According to the Office of the National Assembly’s Department of Tourism, on average one million people come each year to see the home of the legislature and the symbol of the thousand-year-old state.4 2 The Parliamentary Collection Ironically, in its capacity as a museum, the Hungarian Parliament has very little to offer to those interested in the parliamentary history of Hungary. The closest thing it has to such an exhibition is the Library of the National Assembly, located south of the Cupola Hall on the Danube front of the building. The library itself was established soon after the signing of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, but the temporary House of Representatives, where it was initially housed, did not have a dedicated space for it, so for nearly three decades the collection of 20,000 books was scattered around on various bookshelves along its corridors (Jónás and Veredy 1995). The only reason why the librarians accepted the impossible arrangement was the promise of a proper location in the new parliament building. The Library Committee of the House of Representatives followed the design competition and the negotiation with the architect Imre Steindl with great interest and paid several visits to the construction site in the second half of the 1890s. The library’s collection, which in the meantime had more than doubled in size, was transferred to its current location in 1902. At the time of its opening, the Library of the National Assembly occupied one large reading hall on the ground floor and eight smaller rooms in the mezzanine. In the middle of the reading hall were several rows of well-lit desks, surrounded by wooden bookshelves on all sides. Despite the large size of the room, the library was meant to be a private 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 63 6/21/2013 5:52:46 PM 64 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe place: its main purpose in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the interwar period was to provide Members of Parliament and their close colleagues access to academic literature, reference books, statistics, and other forms of information required for the legislative work (Jónás et al 2003). The service went on uninterrupted until World War II, but as the air raids over Budapest intensified, the Library Committee moved parts of the collection to the Parliament’s basement, where they were stored behind bricked-up windows for three years. Had the committee not been so careful, the library’s 200,000 books would have certainly been destroyed in the siege of Budapest. Soon after Ferenc Szálasi took power in October 1944, the Soviet Army surrounded the Hungarian capital, and when the national-socialist government refused to surrender, it began one of the most devastating sieges of the war. Nearly 40,000 civilians lost their lives, the city’s infrastructure, including all bridges over the Danube, was destroyed and most public institutions were heavily damaged. The Parliament was no exception: in January 1945, a Soviet incendiary bomb set the roof alight, ‘with flames tinted an unearthly shade of blue and green by the melting lead covering’ (Ungváry 2003: 231). The liberation of Budapest ended in February 1945, around the same time President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Secretary Joseph Stalin met in the White Palace in Yalta to arrange the postwar order. In the so-called Crimean Conference it became clear that after the end of World War II Hungary, together with seven other countries in the region, would remain in the Soviet sphere of influence. This, however, did not automatically mean the loss of political autonomy. Following a democratic election in November, in which the communists received only 17 percent of the vote, a new National Assembly was set up. In its first act the government abolished the Holy Crown as a political institution and to the great satisfaction of hundreds of thousands of people in front of the Parliament declared the Second Republic of Hungary (Gati 1990). Before the new National Assembly could begin its work, the safety hazards of the parliament building had to be fixed. The debating chamber of the House of Representatives was relatively quickly restored, but the library collection could not return to its original location until the end of 1947.5 By that time the political situation in the country had completely changed. With the backing of the Soviet Union, the Hungarian Communist Party had gradually assumed power and, according to Stalin’s instructions, had begun ‘laying the foundations of socialism.’ In 1948 it absorbed the Social Democratic Party and renamed 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 64 6/21/2013 5:52:46 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 65 itself Hungarian Workers’ Party, and on 20 August 1949, St Stephen’s Day, it adopted Hungary’s first written constitution. In the new regime of the People’s Republic of Hungary, the Parliament became a weightless political institution. The unicameral National Assembly consisted almost entirely of MPs affiliated with the Hungarian Workers’ Party and held only two or three sessions a year, mainly to give formal approval to decrees issued by the Presidential Council (Mezey 2000). Soon after the adoption of the constitution, the Council as collective head of state moved into the parliament building and took over most of the offices and storage rooms – including those that used to belong to the Library of the National Assembly. While its collection already consisted of more than 300,000 books, the library had to confine its operations to five rooms (Jónás and Veredy 1995). That must have been difficult enough, but the most radical change came in 1952, when the Ministry of Culture took over the management and turned the library into a public institution. One part of it became an academic library specializing in jurisprudence, political science, and modern history, while the other part was divided into special collections. The first special collection was dedicated entirely to the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted only from March until August 1919 but served as an important source of legitimacy for the communist regime. It contained official documents, brochures, posters, and other materials that had been classified in the Horthy era (Villám and Redl, 2003). The second special collection, set up by the United Nations in 1960, five years after Hungary joined the organization, consisted mainly of annual reports, statistics, and other official publications. But the most impressive special collection of the library was established in 1962 ‘with the aim of gathering together the nearly three thousand volumes of parliamentary material from the storage rooms, and finding an appropriate environment for them in a modern, practical, chronological open-shelf system’ (Vértes quoted in Villám and Redl 2003: 334, my translation). According to the library’s official brochure, the ‘Parliamentary Collection,’ set up in a room above the reading hall, is currently the most complete collection of parliamentary documents in Hungary available to the general public (Jónás et al. 2003: 31). Among its oldest treasures are Stephen Werbőczy’s Tripartitum from 1517 and several handwritten reports of parliamentary sittings dating back to the 1580s. The most unique part of the collection comprises 67 volumes of rare manuscripts related to Hungary’s parliamentary life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and unofficial journals of the National Assembly in the 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 65 6/21/2013 5:52:46 PM 66 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe Figure 3.3 Continuity since the 1848 revolution – the Parliamentary Collection of the Library of the National Assembly. Photos by Endre Dányi, 28 October 2008 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 66 6/21/2013 5:52:46 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 67 Figure 3.4 Continuity since the 1848 revolution – the Parliamentary Collection of the Library of the National Assembly. Photos by Endre Dányi, 28 October 2008 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 67 6/21/2013 5:52:47 PM 68 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe first half of the nineteenth century. What makes them different from the rest of the collection is not only that they were written in Latin and in German but also that they were circulated as private letters in order to avoid the censors’ attention. This awkward practice changed only in 1848: one of the demands of the revolutionaries ‘in the name of the nation’ was the freedom of the press and the abolishment of censorship. Later that year the first democratically elected Parliament decided that its sittings should be held in Hungarian, and the transcripts of those sessions should be made as widely accessible to the public as possible. Although the revolution failed, the production and the format of the official journals of the legislature remained the same. Since 1848, the Parliamentary Collection contains the verbatim transcripts of all the plenary sessions held in the House of Lords and House of Representatives and then in the unicameral National Assembly. They are nicely bound and placed in chronological order on the shelves, waiting for the official records of the latest parliamentary term to be added to the stock (Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Their physical availability and linguistic accessibility makes the parliamentary events of the past 160 years much easier to remember than those of earlier periods. 3 The central square of politics Compared to the Cupola Hall and the Library of the National Assembly, the square in front of the Parliament received relatively little attention in Imre Steindl’s original design. From the beginning of the planning process, it was clear that the new home of the legislature would be built in Tömő Square, the former landfill site on the eastern bank of the Danube, but how exactly it would relate to other streets and buildings in the area was specified only after the competition (Csepely-Knorr 2007). In 1884 the Municipal Board of Works suggested that the Parliament move a bit further to the north, so that its main entrance could be seen as the extension of Alkotmány utca – a wide street perpendicular to the Danube. In the same year, Steindl reworked his design, as a result of which the proposed building became more accessible but also more isolated from the rest of the city. To counterbalance this effect, Steindl envisioned Tömő Square as a tripartite park with plants and fountains on both sides of the main entrance (Steindl, reprinted in Gábor and Verő 2000). The construction of the park was supposed to start in 1897 but in 1890 Gyula Andrássy died, and it was immediately clear he had to have a statue in the capital. After long deliberations, the relevant committee 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 68 6/21/2013 5:52:49 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 69 decided to place it at the southern entrance of the Parliament, turning that part of Tömő Square into an open forum (Nádori 2008). The statue, which showed the former Prime Minister on horseback, was unveiled in 1906 amid great pomp – even the Emperor showed up to give a speech. The plinth was almost as important as the statue itself: one side of it commemorated Francis Joseph’s coronation on 8 June 1867, and the other the Congress of Berlin in 1878 as the two most significant episodes of Andrássy’s political career. In 1894 former Governor Lajos Kossuth, Gyula Andrássy’s main political rival, also died, and without any delay the municipal council of Budapest decided to commission a statue of him, too. A preliminary survey identified 12 suitable locations in the capital, but the council regarded the area near the northern entrance of the Parliament the most appropriate place for the ‘father of democracy’ (Nádori 2008). The design competition, however, took an unusually long time, and because of World War I and the turbulent years that followed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the statue was only unveiled in 1927. According to contemporary reviews, the white marble figure of Kossuth, surrounded by eight members of the 1848 government, looked rather lethargic, but that did not stop Miklós Horthy’s administration from renaming the Tömő Square as Kossuth Square, and in Act XXXI of 1927 declaring 15 March, the outbreak of the 1848 revolution, a National Day (Gerő 1995). In the interwar period, two more statues were set up in the square: one of them commemorated former Prime Minister István Tisza, assassinated in his home during the 1918 revolution, and the other Francis II Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania and leader of the anti-Habsburg war for independence in 1703–711. As historian András Gerő argues, with these additions the area in front of the Parliament was full; the symbolic places on both sides of the main entrance and near the two side entrances were occupied (Gerő 2009). The unity of the square did not last for long: in the siege of Budapest all the statues around the Parliament were badly damaged. In 1945 Andrássy’s and Tisza’s figures had to be permanently removed, while Kossuth’s had to be taken away for complete repair. Before the latter could be returned to its original position, however, Hungary was transformed into a communist country. The Hungarian Workers’ Party, which had assumed power with the support of the Soviet Union, was eager to demonstrate its place in Hungarian history. It wanted to portray itself as the true heir of the 1848 revolution – a political event that in the postwar context was no longer a national uprising against Habsburg 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 69 6/21/2013 5:52:49 PM 70 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe rule, but the first episode of a century-long class struggle. For this reason the government decided to celebrate the one hundred and fifieth anniversary of the birth of Lajos Kossuth by replacing his old statue with one that better fit the ideology of the People’s Republic. The new statue was unveiled in 1952 – around the same time the Library of the National Assembly became a public institution – by Minister of Culture József Révai. In his opening speech, Révai said that although Kossuth never was a socialist, he was a patriot, who fought for social progress, which confers on us, communists, the representatives of the working class, the right to consider ourselves the heirs of his progressive ideas. We, only we have the right to continue his work, no one else! Our government of the people’s republic is proud to call itself the successor of Lajos Kossuth’s revolutionary government. (Révai, quoted by Gerő 2009) The new statue showed Kossuth not as a calm statesman, surrounded by a few members of his government, but as a true leader of a nationwide revolution. With his right arm he pointed towards the parliament, mobilizing all segments of the people – workers, peasants, students, and soldiers – to fight the common enemy. In response, the armed people gathered around him, ready to sacrifice their lives if necessary. The revolutionary composition might have looked anachronistic in 1952, but it became quite appropriate four years later, when workers, peasants, and students gathered together in front of the Parliament, ready to fight the common enemy. Only this time, the common enemy was the communist government. On 23 October 1956, a group of students at the Budapest Technical University organized a demonstration to express their solidarity with a series of strikes in Poland and demanded comprehensive political reforms in Hungary. In a few hours, several groups of workers joined the march along the Buda wharf. They crossed Margaret Bridge and walked straight on to Kossuth Square, where about 200,000 people demanded free and democratic elections, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and the secession of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact (Litván et al. 1996; Lomax 1976). They wanted to hear Imre Nagy, a reform communist considered by many to be the most viable alternative to the hardliners of the Hungarian Workers’ Party. After some hesitation, in the evening Nagy appeared in one of the balconies on the right side of the main entrance of the parliament building and made an attempt to calm people down. ‘Comrades!’ – he began his speech, but he could not continue because 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 70 6/21/2013 5:52:49 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 71 of the booing that followed the inappropriate address. Nagy was visibly confused. As his biographer, János M. Rainer, put it, the people at Kossuth Square wanted change, wanted convincing and reassuring statements that this would happen. Nagy understood that much. But he was unable to perceive that the demonstrators had not been waiting for a party functionary who would promise changes in the name of the long discredited Central Committee, the government or the parliament. Rather they awaited the arrival of someone of the character of Lajos Kossuth who would take an oath to do everything imaginable to realize their demands. (Rainer 2009, 102) It took some time for Nagy to realize what role he was assigned in the revolution. Even when he was asked to set up a new government, he believed the State Protection Authority and Russian soldiers based in the capital could keep things under control. Just how wrong he was became clear on 25 October, when armed officials – most probably members of the secret police – opened fire on peaceful protesters in front of the Parliament, instantly killing almost a hundred people and injuring many more. The worst part of the massacre took place behind the statue of Rákóczi, where a fence around a construction site blocked the way to the side streets (Kő and Nagy 2001). Following the shooting, the Hungarian Workers’ Party dissolved itself, its leaders fled to Moscow, and a newly formed party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, took charge. In the last days of October, János Kádár, the newly appointed General Secretary, and Prime Minister Imre Nagy were both hopeful that with the hardliners gone Hungary would be allowed to follow its own path to a democratic socialism, but in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet leadership could not afford losing another European ally and decided to take action. On 1 November, Kádár was kidnapped from the Party Headquarters, secretly taken to Moscow, and under unclear circumstances persuaded to become the leader of a post-revolutionary government supported by the Soviet Union (Gough 2006). Within ten days the revolution was brutally crushed by Russian tanks, Nagy and several other politicians were arrested, and Kádár began the restoration of the socialist order in Hungary. During the first few years of the Kádár regime, thousands of people were imprisoned for their involvement in what was officially called a counterrevolution, and more than 400 were executed. After being in custody for more than a year, Imre Nagy and several members of his government were put on trial. They were hanged in the backyard of a 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 71 6/21/2013 5:52:49 PM 72 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe prison on 16 June 1958. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves – for three decades not even their closest family members knew where. In the meantime, enjoying the backing of Khrushchev, Kádár managed to consolidate his regime and by the 1970s turn Hungary into the ‘happiest barrack’ of the Eastern Bloc. The standard of living was on the rise and some political gestures (for example, the signing of the Helsinki Accords, which obliged all participating states to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms) gradually made him an accepted leader on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The return of the Holy Crown from the United States was widely interpreted as a sign that the betrayal of the 1956 revolution and the reprisals that followed its suppression were now forgotten. Forgetting outside the borders of Hungary might have been a natural process, but within the country, it had to be actively promoted. The legitimacy of the Kádár regime depended on a single statement: that 1956 was a counterrevolution, encouraged by the imperialists, and Imre Nagy was a traitor, who had to be punished for abandoning the international cause of communism (György 2005). The ‘truth’ of this statement was initially manufactured through various historical documents, reports, and memoirs, but after a while, it was mostly the silences of those who survived the reprisals, and absences of those who did not, that held up the façade of the People’s Republic. How well this collective forgetting worked can be illustrated by the fact that for decades no one dared to mention, let alone commemorate, any event associated with 1956 in public. The only exceptions were those small groups in the democratic opposition that from the early 1980s onwards made conscious efforts to thematize 23 October as the outbreak of an anti-Soviet revolution. Although these efforts, which consisted mostly of the illegal publishing of banned books and journals (samizdat) and the organization of underground seminars (flying universities), contributed to the emergence of a ‘secondary public’ (Hankiss 1986), they remained almost entirely invisible to the ‘primary public.’ For a radical re-evaluation of 1956 to occur many believed the initiative had to come ‘from above,’ that is, from the inner circles of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party. Until the end of the 1980s this seemed very unlikely. But as the country’s economic situation began to worsen and the ailing Kádár found it ever more difficult to keep the dissidents at bay, some reform communists thought it was time the party confronted its past in order to secure its future in a multiparty democracy. First, a special committee was set up by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences with the mandate of revising the ‘unfortunate events’ of 1956, and then, in early 1989, a prominent member of the 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 72 6/21/2013 5:52:49 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 73 Political Committee wreaked havoc when in a radio broadcast he called the ‘counter-revolution’ a popular uprising. Given the precarious legitimacy of the Kádár regime, this comment marked the beginning of the end: the re-evaluation process led to a series of protests and culminated in the reburial of Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs on 16 June 1989, on the thirty-first anniversary of their execution. According to cultural historian István Rév (2005), in a symbolic sense 16 June is the date of the regime change in Hungary. In a legal sense, however, it is most probably 23 October, the day when after several months of tedious negotiations about the peaceful transition of power between the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, the trade unions, and nine oppositional parties (Bozóki 2001), a new constitution was approved by the National Assembly. This was followed by the proclamation of the Third Republic from one of the balconies above the main entrance of the Parliament. It was the same balcony where Imre Nagy tried to address the revolutionary crowd on 23 October 1956. Whether Figure 3.5 Continuity since 1956 and 1989 – commemorative banner above the main entrance of the Hungarian Parliament, next to ‘Imre Nagy’s balcony’. Photo by Endre Dányi, 22 October 2009 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 73 6/21/2013 5:52:49 PM 74 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe this was intentional or a strange coincidence is difficult to tell, but the result is the same: as the commemorative banner celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Third Republic showed, in the recent history of Hungary, 1956 became the antecedent of 1989 (Figure 3.5). 4 Democracy in ruins A closer look at the Hungarian parliament building and related memory practices clearly shows that the present and the future of a given political community – in this case the Hungarian people – is largely envisioned as the extension of the past it creates for itself. This past, however, seems to consist of several, sometimes conflicting, claims of continuity. The first claim takes material form in the Holy Crown, located in the Cupola Hall of the Parliament. There it is treated as the symbol less of a state form than a thousand-year-old state and defines the political community in broad ethno-cultural terms: anyone who feels Hungarian is Hungarian, including those living outside the current borders of Hungary. Given the fact that there are about three million ethnic Hungarians living in places that today belong to Slovakia, the Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria, this understanding is often seen as highly problematic by those who prefer to define the political community as a group of individuals within a nation-state. This, in fact, is the second claim of continuity. As the Parliamentary Collection of the Library of the National Assembly illustrates, it treats the 1848 revolution and the formation of the first democratically elected government as an absolute threshold in the history of Hungary. The emphasis is on the term ‘democratically elected,’ which denotes a radical shift in the logic of sovereignty. According to this logic, power stems not from God or the Holy Crown but from the people – a term that in this context refers to the collective of those who have the right to vote. But what if voters want to use their power to exclude certain groups from the political community, either to ‘purify the nation,’ or to ‘realize the dictatorship of the proletariat?’ In the middle of the nineteenth century this question was largely hypothetical, but as the reign of fascist and communist regimes in the twentieth century made it painfully clear, a rights-based definition of a political community can hardly guarantee the stability of a liberal democracy. The third claim of continuity, therefore, has less to do with the state or the nation than with a society, held together by a moral commitment to fight all forms of tyranny. In the Hungarian consciousness this commitment is exemplified by the 1956 revolution, which might 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 74 6/21/2013 5:52:50 PM Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament 75 have been betrayed and crushed by force but from the early 1980s onwards served as one of the most important sources of inspiration for the illegal democratic opposition, and then for the National Assembly set up in 1990. The first post-communist legislature tried its best to reconcile the tension between the ethno-cultural, legal-political, and moral definitions of the political community by naming 20 August the day of the founder of the state, St Stephen; 15 March, the first day of the 1848 revolution and the birthday of modern parliamentarism; and 23 October the first day of the 1956 revolution and the proclamation of the Third Republic. Still, the tension between these three definitions has not only remained present but seems to have gained a new impetus (Wydra 2006). In 2010, for instance, the newly elected government, which at the time of writing still enjoys a two-thirds majority in the Hungarian Parliament, decided to draft and adopt a new constitution for the country, which since 1 January 2012, is called Hungary, and not the Republic of Hungary. Although the new constitution still acknowledges 15 March and 23 October as national holidays, it identifies 20 August as the Official National Day and the Holy Crown as the prime symbol of the continuity of the state and the unity of the nation. Recent developments, such as the hurried drafting of the new constitution and the passing of a number of controversial laws and regulations, have led several political theorists, constitutional scholars, and politicians from across the political spectrum to declare that democracy in Hungary now lies in ruins. The notion of ruins, however, rarely indicates clear turning points in time. Just as democracy in Hungary did not begin in 1989, it has not ended in 2012. Democracy is, indeed, in ruins, but what this notion implies is not loss but a necessary lack of coherence. And while in the case of a written constitution any lack of coherence is perceived as a weakness, in the case of a building associated with democratic politics it is quite possibly its greatest strength. Acknowledgments This chapter is based on historical and ethnographic research that took place in Budapest between 2008 and 2010. I am grateful to The Leverhulme Trust for its financial support (award reference F/00185/U), András Gerő, Barna Mezey, and András Mink for their historical advise, and the employees of the Office of the Hungarian National Assembly – especially József Lukács, István Soltész, and Judit Villám – for their assistance during my research. I wish to thank John Law, Julien McHardy, 9781137305855_06_cha03.indd 75 6/21/2013 5:52:50 PM 76 The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe Christoph Michels, Derek Sayer, Lucy Suchman, András Szigeti, Laura Watts, Yoke-Sum Wong, and Jennifer Tomomitsu for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this text, and Manolita Wiehl for her help with the images. Notes 1. The description of the transfer is based on an article published on 1 January 2000, on the Hungarian news website origo.hu: http://www.origo.hu/ itthon/20000101atkerult.html (accessed 2 May 2011). For a report on the BBC website, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/587191.stm (accessed on 2 May 2011). 2. Preamble of Act I of 2000, my translation. The original text is available online at http://www.complex.hu/external.php?url=3 (accessed 1 May 2011). 3. Interview with Barna Mezey, Professor of Constitutional History at the Eötvös Loránd University, 20 October 2009. 4. 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