Kompország politikusai: Koppányok és Szent Istvánok. A kompország és a Koppány-politikai metafora elemzése
Politicians of Ferryland: St. Stephens and Koppanys. A Brief Analysis of Two Political Metaphors

Summary/Abstract: Over the past fifteen years, Hungarian Parliament has increasingly adopted the twin metaphors of Ferryland and Koppany. The former was coined in 1905, by Ady Endre, a paragon of patriotic pride. He meant Ferry to represent the nation’s means of mediation between its non-European roots and its Western heritage. It is a poignant symbol of the country’s predicament: being caught between two political systems, persuasions and civilisations. For Hungarian MPs, the analogy extends further still, to the recent geopolitical situation: it accurately expresses the zeitgeist of a nation squeezed behind an iron curtain on the frontiers of two clashing philosophies. Post-Yalta, post Soviet rule, the country has finally transcended its servile past. The ferry metaphor has also often been cited in the heated debates regarding Hungary’s accession to various international bodies (OECD, NATO, EU), as it lends itself well to the challenge of describing the current shift of political focus from the peripheries to an idealised central position. The second metaphor bears the name of Koppany, a pagan tribal chief, who lived around 1000. (He was related to St. Stephen, the nation’s first king, whom he nevertheless sought to defeat). St. Stephen, in stark contrast to Koppany, embraced the Christian values of the West. The Koppany - St. Stephen dichotomy set the underlying dynamic of Hungarian history for the ensuing thousand years. For today’s MPs, choosing NATO and the EU is no less than a re-enactment of St. Stephen’s decisive move. Accession to the EU thus becomes the new paradigm, indeed panacea, entailing modernisation by the wholesale and instant adoption of the Christian belief system, the basis of civilisation itself. Dissenters, accordingly, are relegated to the position of the pagan chief of old; in today’s setting, they necessarily represent the reprehensible forces of conservatism, communism and the Post-Yalta situation in general. For this, they are marked as the enemy within, to be annihilated, expunged and swept away. To sum up, the frequent use of these two metaphors in current parliamentary parlance is a sure indicator that Hungarian MPs regard the challenge of the country’s integration into the political and other institutions of Western Civilization as the final hurdle to everlasting peace, Christian values, constitutional democracy and the order of things “in the West”.

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