SCAPEGOATS IN POST-WORLD WAR I HUNGARIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT
SCAPEGOATS IN POST-WORLD WAR I HUNGARIAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Summary/Abstract: Studying the history of twentieth-century Eastern and Central European political thought, one often comes across a basic stereotype that is common to both liberals and conservatives, communists and Fascists, nationalists and cosmopolitans, as well as to the ideologists of ruling and oppositional parties of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenians. When they are trying to explain the defeats, losses, failures, and sufferings of their respective nations in the course of the centuries, they often make an attempt at blaming influential personalities, smaller or larger social groups (layers, classes) or even non-personal factors (such as ideologies, traditions, or prejudices). Whether these explanations take the form of detailed analyses, or very superficial argumentation, or even merely occasional cursory remarks, the result is often the same: the identification of a scapegoat. This paper will make an attempt at examining the peculiarities of Eastern and Central European scapegoating on the basis of a case study of one of the greatest national tragedies in Hungarian history: the collapse of the Hungarian state in the aftermath of World War I, which entailed the loss of two thirds of the country's territory and about forty percent of the Hungarian ethnic population.

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