Ugor-Török Háború as Invented Intellectual Tradition in Hungarian Nationalism

Abstract

The author analyses the Türkic myth in Hungarian national identity. Hungarian Turkism emerged in the 19th century and developed as part of ethnic and political nationalisms in the 20th century. Propaganda of the ideas of Turkism became the reason for “Ugric-Turkic war” — several waves of intellectual discussions and debates of Hungarian nationalists about the primacy of Ugrism or Turkism as the basis for Hungarian national and ethnic identities. Hungarian Turkism became a part of the intellectual history of Hungary and the invented intellectual and cultural tradition. Representatives of early Hungarian Turkism were romantic nationalists who idealised ancient Turks as possible ancestors of Hungarians. The ideologists of Hungarian Turkism in the early 20th century and the era of the First World War were pragmatic nationalist politicians who hoped to benefit from cooperation with the Ottoman Empire. The ideas of Turkism competed with the Magyar myths in Hungarian ethnic nationalism. Turkish nationalists and ideologists of Pan-Turkism supported the theorists of Hungarian Turkism. The founding fathers of the Turkic myth developed radical ethnic versions of identity and simultaneously stimulated the emergence of a national tradition of Oriental Turkic studies. Turanism as the ideology of Hungarian nationalism failed to realise its potential in competition with the ethnic and political trends of Magyarism. The ideas of Turanism could not effectively resist the modernization and consolidation potential of Hungarian political nationalism. The ideas of Hungarian statehood supplanted the values of Turanism. The political collapse of the Ottoman Empire as the greatest Turkic state also contributed to the fall of the popularity of Turanism. Turanism transformed in the studies of the history of Hungary during the period of Turkish rule, and the history of cultural, linguistic and ethnic contacts in contemporary Hungarian historiography. Non-academic historiography continues to develop the political mythology of Turanism.