„The True Love of the People and Motherland”. The Concept of Socialist Patriotism in the Kádár Regime Cover Image

„A nép és a szülőföld igaz szeretete” – A szocialista hazafi ság fogalma a Kádár-rendszerben
„The True Love of the People and Motherland”. The Concept of Socialist Patriotism in the Kádár Regime

Author(s): Milán Pap
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences
Published by: MTA Politikai Tudományi Intézete
Keywords: Socialist patriotism; the idea of nation; socialism; Kádár regime; ideology; history of concepts

Summary/Abstract: In the last decade, several historical works on modern Eastern European history attempted to revaluate the relationship between Communism and Nationalism. In the post-Stalinist era, the political-ideological experiments of the integration of the idea of nation into official Marxism-Leninism resulted in a great variety of Socialist Patriotisms in Eastern Europe. In Hungary, this process commenced right after the fall of the revolution of 1956. This essay makes an attempt to follow and analyse the concept of Socialist Patriotism in the last three decades of the Kádár regime. Harnessing the methodological achievements of conceptual his tory, different layers of the meaning of Socialist Patriotism can be revealed in a diachronic analysis. In this text, I will refer to three main groups of this semantic fi eld: Socialist Patriotism as a borderline concept of distinguishing between political enemies and friends; as a reference of the identity of a Socialist political community; and ultimately, as a historical stage in the line of Communist civilisational progression.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 68-83
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: Hungarian