Migration and Refugees
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The Hungarian Historical Review New Series of Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae Volume 6 No. 3 2017 Migration and Refugees Ulf Brunnbauer and Gábor Demeter Special Editors of the Thematic Issue Contents ULF BRUNNBAUER Introduction to the Special Issue: Migration and East Central Europe – a Perennial but Unhappy Relationship 497 Articles SEVER CRISTIAN OANCEA Integration Through Confession? Lutheran Migration from Upper Hungary to Sibiu After 1671 – Isaak Zabanius 502 Stelu Şerban From Forced Migration to New Patterns of Social Life: Bulgarian Refugees in Teleorman County, Romania, in the Nineteenth Century 520 ANA-TEODORA KURKINA Mobile Elites: Bulgarian Emigrants in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century and the Accommodation of Difference in the Balkans 543 JAMES P. NIESSEN God Brought the Hungarians: Emigration and Refugee Relief in the Light of Cold War Religion 566 EMRE SARAL A Foreign Labor Force in Early Republican Turkey: The Case of Hungarian Migrant Workers 597 PETRA HAMERLI Croatian Political Refugees Living in Emigration in the Interwar Period: The Case of the Croatian Political Refugees in Hungary 624 KRISTINA E. POZNAN Return Migration to Austria-Hungary from the United States in Homeland Economic and Ethnic Politics and International Diplomacy 647 http://www.hunghist.org HHR_2017-3.indb 1 11/14/2017 3:48:35 PM Contents Featured Review Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918. Band XI. Die Habsburgermonarchie und der Erste Weltkrieg. 1. Teilband. Der Kampf um die Neuordnung Mitteleuropas. Teil 1. Vom Balkanenkonflikt zum Weltkrieg. Teil 2. Vom Vielvölkerstaat Österreich-Ungarn zum neuen Europa der Nationalstaaten. Edited by Helmut Rumpler. Reviewed by Rudolf Kučera 668 Book Reviews Medieval Buda in Context. Edited by Balázs Nagy, Martyn Rady, Katalin Szende, and András Vadas. Reviewed by Veronika Novák 675 Reneszánsz utazás: Anna királyné 1502-es fogadtatásának ünnepségei Észak-Itáliában és Magyarországon [Renaissance journey: The festivities held to welcome Queen Anne to Northern Italy and Hungary in 1502]. By Attila Györkös. Reviewed by Laura Fábián 680 The Visual World of the Hungarian Angevin Legendary. By Béla Zsolt Szakács. Reviewed by Iván Gerát 683 A zombori ördögűző: Egy 18. századi ferences mentalitása [The exorcist of Zombor: The mentality of an eighteenth-century Franciscan monk]. By Dániel Bárth. Reviewed by Márton Simonkay 686 A multietnikus nemzetállam: Kísérletek, kudarcok és kompromisszumok Csehszlovákia nemzetiségi politikájában 1918–1992 [The multiethnic nation state: Attempts, failures, and compromises in Czechoslovakia’s nationality policy from 1918 to 1992]. By László Szarka. Reviewed by Péter Bencsik 691 A Horthy-kultusz 1919–1944 [The Horthy cult 1919–1944]. By Dávid Turbucz. Reviewed by Róbert Kerepeszki 695 Szabadkőművesből református püspök: Ravasz László élete [From freemason to reformed church bishop: The life of László Ravasz]. By Pál Hatos. Reviewed by Ákos Bartha 699 tartalomjegyzek.indd 2 11/24/2017 10:49:57 AM Contents Lélektan és politika: Pszichotudományok a magyarországi államszocializmusban 1945–1970 [Psychology and politics: The psycho-sciences under state Socialism in Hungary]. By Melinda Kovai Reviewed by Gergely Kunt 704 Az első aranykor: A magyar foci 1945-ig [The first Golden Age: Hungarian football up to 1945]. By Péter Szegedi Reviewed by Dániel Bolgár 709 Jüdische Museen in Ostmitteleuropa. Kontinuitäten – Brüche – Neuanfänge: Prag, Budapest, Bratislava (1993–2012). By Katalin Deme. Reviewed by Peter Hallama 714 Lázadó falvak: Kollektivizálás elleni tüntetések a vidéki Magyarországon, 1951–1961. [Villages in uprising: Demonstrations against collectivization in the Hungarian countryside, 1951–61]. By Gyöngyi Farkas. Reviewed by Gábor Csikós 718 tartalomjegyzek.indd 3 11/24/2017 10:49:57 AM HHR_2017-3.indb 4 11/14/2017 3:48:35 PM Hungarian Historical Review 6, no. 3 (2017): 497–501 Introduction to the Special Issue: Migration and East Central Europe – a Perennial but Unhappy Relationship Ulf Brunnbauer IOS – Regensburg In March 1929, the ambassador of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes sent a query to the Kingdom’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His message concerned the repatriation of immigrants who were citizens of the country but were of Magyar or German ethnic background: Since these people had left our Kingdom dissatisfied with the new conditions, and because they represent an alien ethnic element which is of no use to our national state – on the contrary, according to the embassy’s opinion it should be in our interest that there are as few of these people as possible, especially in the border areas –, the embassy kindly requests instructions from the Ministry as to whether the return of these people is opportune.1 Five months later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has the honor of informing the Royal Embassy that requests for repatriation to the Kingdom by our citizens of Magyar and German nationality should be dismissed under whichever pretext. The return of these a-national elements to our country must be obstructed to the furthest extent possible. Obviously, the government of the Kingdom wanted to impede the return of citizens who were not considered part of the South Slavic nation, while “Yugoslav” emigrants were encouraged to return. The same reasoning based on a notion of ethnic selection also applied to applications for permission to leave the country. In 1924, the Ministry for Social Policy, which was responsible for emigration affairs, informed its departments that the emigration of so-called 1 This and the following quotes are from Ulf Brunnbauer, Globalizing Southeastern Europe. Emigrants, America and the State since the 19th Century, (Landham, Md.: Lexington, 2016), 236–38. See also: Ulf Brunnbauer: “Emigration Policies and Nation-building in Interwar Yugoslavia,” European History Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2012): 602–27; Aleksandar R. Miletić, Journey under surveillance: The overseas emigration policy of the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in global context, 1918–1928 (Berlin–London: Lit, 2012). http://www.hunghist.org 497 Bevezeto.indd 497 11/24/2017 10:08:47 AM Hungarian Historical Review 6, no. 3 (2017): 497–501 “a-national” families should be encouraged, while “national” families should be denied permission to emigrate. In 1925, the same ministry sent a circular to the Department for State Security with the following declaration: Regarding the emigration of national minorities the Ministry shares the view that their emigration must be favored. The relevant authorities have agreed and maintain their interest in this issue; from that it follows that this is the official line for implementing emigration policies. In 1926, the director of the Kingdom’s Emigration Commissariat in Zagreb, Fedor Aranicki, joyfully reported to the Minister for Social Policy that almost half of the emigrants who had left the country over the course of the few years that had passed had been “a-national” elements, and he recommended setting higher goals for the future: “One of the tasks of our emigration policy is to exert influence over the emigration of the a-national minorities in the future as well, in order to return the affected regions to their original national character.” Fast forward some ninety years and the region appears still to be obsessed with the connection between migration and ethnicity. Control of migration continues to be seen as a tool of nation-building, and officially spread fears of immigrants underpin the legitimacy of increasingly authoritarian governments. Today, though, attention is paid primarily to immigration. The Visegrád governments in particular excel in promoting xenophobic stances in their concerted efforts to prevent the immigration of people seen as innately alien and unassimilable. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán uses his hardline policies against refugees from the Middle East to portray himself as the defender of Europe against imagined Islamization. Polish strongman Jaroslav Kaczynski claims that refugees and immigrants would spread unknown diseases, and in doing so he ironically employs stereotypes similar to those prevalent (and used) in Germany in the first years of the twentieth century, when the public began to grow increasingly concerned about the millions of Eastern Europeans (among them many Poles) traveling through Germany on their way to North America. Similar to interwar Yugoslavia, East Central and Southeast European governments pursue a highly selective policy of entry: while they present non-European immigrants as mortal dangers, they invite co-ethnic citizens of neighboring countries to immigrate and generously extend citizenship to them. Hundreds of thousands of citizens of Moldova and Macedonia have enjoyed the privilege of receiving, respectively, Romanian and Bulgarian passports, only 498 HHR_2017-3.indb 498 11/14/2017 3:48:35 PM Introduction to the Special Issue: Migration and East Central Europe – a Perennial but Unhappy Relationship to use them to settle in one of the prosperous countries in Europe. Two things seem obvious: conceptualizations of international migration are highly ethnicized or even racialized. People’s alleged cultural or biological properties determine whether they are welcome or not, not for instance economic of humanitarian considerations. Second, public and political attitudes towards migration are closely tied to deep-seated anxieties, including fears of loss, alienation, domination, and marginalization, and these fears can