The Holy Crown of Hungary, Visible and Invisible LA´ SZLO´ PE´ TER
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SEER, Vol. 81,No.3, July 2003 The Holy Crown of Hungary, Visible and Invisible LA´ SZLO´ PE´ TER The reader at this point will certainly ask: how it is possible that a national relic of such great significance has never been properly examined in order to attain satisfactory conclusions [about its origin]. The answer is as contradictory as unexpected: precisely because such importance was attached to the crown; because it has been treated as the greatest national treasure. Ka´lma´n Benda and Erik Fu¨gedi on the Holy Crown1 The history of political ideas reveals continuities and unexpected revivals. Too frequently it proves premature to pronounce a political idea dead. A well-known example which demonstrates that major political ideas hardly ever disappear without trace has been the re- emergence of the natural law theory which had spent years in the doldrums while utilitarianism dominated political philosophy in Britain and America.2 Ideas whose impact is more limited and confined to a single national society could, likewise, unexpectedly revive after their apparent demise. When over forty years ago the present writer, working towards his DPhil in Oxford, took up the doctrine of the Holy Crown of Hungary, he thought that the subject was of purely historical interest, or at least one without any direct relevance to Hungarian politics, present and future. The reason why this assumption looked obvious at the time was not even primarily because Hungary, as a part of the Soviet bloc, was ruled by Communists who rejected and sneered at any political La´szlo´ Pe´ter is Emeritus Professor of Hungarian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. I am grateful to Professor Ja´nos Bak (CEU, Budapest) for raising critical questions about the text, to Professor James Burns (UCL) for his point on Hegel’s influence, to Dr Lo´ra´nt Cziga´ny (London) for his comments on my use of terms, to Professor R. J. W. Evans (Oxford) for his incisive observations, to Virginia Hewitt (British Museum) for a piece of information, to Dr Martyn Rady (SSEES, UCL) for detailed criticism and archival references, to Judit Villa´m (Parliamentary Library, Budapest) for providing a copy of a colligatum she compiled, in 1999, of recent publications on the Holy Crown question. Finally, I should like to thank my wife, Margaret, for her suggestions for improving the grammar and style of the text. In the use of capital letters for ‘Holy Crown’, I follow established convention (the use of lower case would amount to the making of a political point). 1 Ka´lma´n Benda and Erik Fu¨gedi, Tausend Jahre Stephanskrone, Szeged, 1988, translation of A magyar korona rege´nye, Budapest, 1979 (hereafter, Stephanskrone), p. 20. 2 The revival followed the appearance of John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA, 1971. 422 the holy crown of hungary tradition of the old order which they replaced.3 The reason went deeper: it was generally taken for granted, even by opponents of the Communist regime, that political traditions, like the ideas of the Holy Crown, however important they had been in past centuries, were closely tied to the institution of the monarchy that had irretrievably perished by the end of the Second World War. By 1945 the whole traditional social order that used to maintain the institutions of the kingdom was gone. It is true that even after 1945 some e´migre´ groups of the displaced political e´lite, having escaped to the West from Nazi or Communist rule, cherished old political traditions including ideas about the Holy Crown.4 In the 1960s a Hungarian scholar, Charles d’Eszlary, published in France a three-volume history of the Hungarian political institutions from the Middle Ages,5 considered largely in terms of the Holy Crown doctrine (the doctrine was a late-nineteenth-century innovation, of which more later). He must have been a ‘last Mohican’. For the world at large, so far as it took cognizance of Hungarian constitutional matters, the doctrine was as dead as the dodo. Yet, the reports of the death of the Holy Crown tradition turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Come 1989, Eastern Europe’s annus mirabilis, Soviet power in the region collapsed and, together with that, Commu- nist rule. Hungary, like a few other former satellites, became a parliamentary democracy. There was no question of restoring either the monarchy or the old social order. And yet the Holy Crown, like that fabled Egyptian bird, the phoenix, miraculously came forth with new life. The revival, as in the past, touched on the visible St Stephen’s Crown as well as the invisible crown of ideas. Further, what makes the revival notable is that, as so frequently in the past, the ‘crown question’ stirred up an unusually large amount of political dust.6 Indeed, at one point the Academy of Sciences had to intervene to resolve the political conflict generated by the revival of the tradition. Leaving out anteced- ents, to which I shall in due course return, the millennial celebrations provided the occasion for the revival of a cult with remarkably strong roots. For, in Hungarian political rhetoric and historiography, the 3 I am informed that after 1945 the Law Faculty at the University in Budapest had on its noticeboard: ‘No dissertation will be considered on the law of rape and on the doctrine of the Holy Crown’. 4 Even in Hungary not everybody changed their political beliefs after the War. I recall a meeting with an old fogey in Budapest in 1955 before his arrest, secret trial by the A´ VH and subsequent death in prison, who thought that the Russians would soon leave Hungary when a na´dor (palatine) was elected and the monarchy restored after a plebiscite. 5 Histoire des institutions publiques Hongroises, Paris, 1 (1959), 2 (1963), 3 (1965). 6 A perplexing case is Kim Lane Scheppele’s who writes that by moving the crown to parliament (see below) ‘it has become a symbol concentrating the dark passions of Hungarian conservatism, particularly those that move toward fascism’, ‘The Constitutional Basis of Hungarian Conservatism’, in East European Constitutional Review, 9 (Fall 2000), 4, pp. 51–57 (p. 51). la´ szlo´ pe´ ter 423 second millennium is intimately connected with the first. St Stephen, who turned Hungary into a Christian kingdom, was crowned at Christmas in ad 1000. In December 1999, after sharp debates between the ruling coalition of the moderate right parties, parliament passed a bill which commemorated the establishment of the State one thousand years ago and ordered the Crown of St Stephen, otherwise known as the Holy Crown, together with the other coronation regalia,tobe transferred from the National Museum to parliament for the millennial year.7 On 1 January 2000, it was reported, the crown was placed inside a glass cabinet and carried under heavy security in an armoured car followed by a motorcade. A guard of honour carried it up the stairs into parliament and then a gun salute was fired over the River Danube.8 The regalia were received by the Corporation (testu¨let) of the Holy Crown, created by the Law, consisting of the Republic’s highest office holders.9 The President of Parliament opened the celebration. Then the President of the Republic signed Law I of 2000 ‘To Commemorate the Establishment of the State by St Stephen and the Holy Crown’.10 The preamble of the Law referred to the Holy Crown as ‘the relic living in the memory of the nation and Hungarian constitutional tradition that embodies the continuity and independence of the Hungarian State’. Paragraph 2 of the Law ordered the transference of the Holy Crown to parliament. In his Address, the President said that the crown had for centuries signified the supreme power shared between the king and the nation as the crown’s members.11 This was followed by the Prime Minister’s speech with the following operative passage: 7 The government bill was passed on 21 December 1999 by a large majority after most of the references to the ‘doctrine’ of the Holy Crown were deleted from the ministerial draft. The bill (T/1816) ‘A Szent Istva´n-i a´llamalapı´ta´s emle´ke´nek mego¨ro¨kite´se´ro˝le´sa Szent Korona´ro´l’ was submitted by Ibolya Da´vid, Minister of Justice, in November 1999 and passed by the House’s Constitutional and Judicial Committee on 1 December (T/ 1816/32). The bill’s preamble was then substantially shortened by the House before it passed as Law I 2000, Magyar Ko¨zlo¨ny, 1 January 2000, pp. 1–2. The Centre-Right government gave way after the forceful intervention by the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences whose team of historians sanitized the text of the preamble: see La´szlo´ Sza´le and La´szlo´ N. Sa´ndor, ‘Tudoma´ny e´sko¨ze´let’, Magyar Tudoma´ny, 2000/6, pp. 736–41 (interview with President Ferenc Glatz). Also, the Opposition, before its revision, threatened to take the bill to the Constitutional Court. Still, the political Left, the Free Democrats and many Socialist deputies either voted against the revised bill or abstained and stayed away from the subsequent celebrations. 8 The Times, 3 January 2000. 9 Created by para. 5 of the Law. Its members are the President of the Republic, the Minister President, the President of Parliament, the President of the Constitutional Court and the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 10 Magyar Ko¨zlo¨ny, 1 January 2000, pp. 1–3. 11 This is the gist of the doctrine of the Holy Crown, deleted from the bill after debate but affirmed by the President of the Republic.