LAW 1 OF 1920 AND THE HISTORICAL CONSTITUTIONi István Szabó 1. Prologue. At the end of the first world war, revolution swept across Hungary and, similarly to other two defeated states (Germany and Austria), plans were made to summon a new constitution- making national assembly which brought to an end an almost four-hundred-year long period in Hungarian history. The 1867 settlement was the final reformulation of the rights that the House of Habsburg enjoyed since it had ascended to the Hungarian throne in 1526. According to this settlement the clasp that held Hungary and the other parts of the empire together was the person of the ruler, whose resignation in 1918, irrespective of all the other developments, meant that this connection had ended. Hungary had once again become one of Europe’s independent states. The preparations for these new elections was, however, complicated by the support that the victorious powers provided for the territorial dismantlement of Hungary. The final list of electoral districts, which was completed only by 1 March, 1919, included all the territories that had belonged to the Hungarian state before 1918 – with the exception of Croatia, which had enjoyed autonomy since 1868. Thus, even though the elections were arranged to be held on 13 April, 1919, the victorious powers did not agree with these arrangements. At the same time, the government of Mihály Károlyi which had taken power in October, 1918 was not willing to continue shouldering the responsibility of resisting the growing territorial demands (of Hungary’s minorities) and on 21 March, 1919 it handed over power to the extreme Bolshevik forces. Thus, the development of Hungary immediately deviated from the other two defeated Central-European powers. Whereas in Germany and Austria a newly elected national assembly drafted a new constitution, in Hungary an international military intervention was launched against the Bolsheviks, with the result that by August 1919 the entire country was under military occupation. Following the collapse of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the short-lived ’trades unions’ government led by Gyula Peidl which held power for less than a week, István Friedrich formed a government having received the authorization of Charles IV’s former representative in Hungary, prince József. The victorious powers, however, regarded Friedrich with suspicion as a result of his loyalty to the House of Habsburg and compelled him, at the end of November, to hand over the premiership to Károly Huszár . This was one of the strangest changes of government in Hungarian history, as a sitting prime minister – under his own authority – handed over authority to a political rival. From that point onwards, the Huszár government oversaw all matters of governance until the election of Miklós Horthy as Regent in March, 1920. These developments had a profound impact on the political atmosphere in Hungary. After protracted debates with the victorious powers, the new parliamentary elections held in 1920, along with the elections which were held after additional territory was regained following the Treaty of Trianon (signed on 4 June, 1920), demonstrated that a decisive majority of the electorate rejected the ambitions of the revolutionaries who had first seized power in October, 1918. The newly elected national assembly, which assembled at the beginning of 1920, used the first law it enacted to formally invalidate all the legislation enacted not only by the Bolshevik Hungarian Soviet Republic (tanácsköztársaság), which had seized power in 1919, but also invalidated all the legislation which had been passed between November, 1918 and March, 1919 during the so-called People’s Republic (népköztársaság). With this law, the constitutional arrangements which had governed Hungary up until October, 1918 appeared to have been restored. In reality, this was only a partial restoration for reasons which will now be explored in the remainder of this chapter. There were, in fact, several areas in which the continuity with the pre-1918 constitutional order were not restored. The question of how the new political system that governed Hungary after 1919 was shaped by its continuities with the historical constitution is complicated. Indeed, each period in the development of the Hungarian constitution cannot be categorized by simplistic claims about whether it preserved unchanged or was defined by a complete break with the historical constitution. The idea of unchanging permanence is, in and of itself, a problematic idea, particularly as the historical constitution had constantly changed over time to the point that one can only conceive of an unchanging permanence within a given period. The type of government that emerged as a result of the legal system grounded in Law 1 of 1920 was, however, wedded not only to the general idea of the historical constitution but specifically to the structures of the state as it had existed between 1867 and 1918. The other two defeated powers in the region changed from monarchies into republics, and on 16 November, 1918 Hungary also proclaimed itself to be a People’s Republic, but the national assembly that was elected at the beginning of 1920 decided to restore the monarchy. The public mood essentially demanded this, and from this followed the close ties to the legal system that had developed (under the crown) before 1918. On closer inspection, however, this depiction becomes more complicated. Hungary did, indeed, remain a monarchy but many of the ties (between the pre-1918 and the post-1920 monarchic type of government) were broken. The dilemma of how to combine the need for both continuity and change was a central feature of the historical constitution and this dilemma was also evident in the deliberations of the national assembly that assembled at the beginning of 1920. Although there was broad agreement that legal continuity with the historic constitution should be restored there was no consensus over the extent to which the new political system should be connected to the legal system that had existed between 1867 and 1918. In the specialist literature that has concentrated on this dilemma a distinction has been drawn between the idea of formal (alaki) legal continuity and substantive (anyagi) legal continuity, and this chapter will now focus on the parliamentary debates that preceded the passing of Law 1 of 1920 in which the clash between these two rival concepts of legal continuity were evidence. Naturally, the question of whether Hungary should be a republic or a monarchy was also bound up with the question of how much of the historical constitution could be and should be preserved, and explains why the national assembly ultimately decided to restore the monarchy? This will be discussed in the second part of the chapter, while the third part will examine those areas of previous settled law which were disregarded after 1918 and the reasons for these ruptures. In summary, the most plausible way to measure the constitutional position of interwar Hungary is to compare it to the legal framework that governed the state between 1867 and 1918, but also to point out the differences beside the continuities. i The present paper is published under the aegis of the Hungarian Ministry of Justice, within the framework of the program entitled "The Elevation of the Standards of Legal Education". .