‘We Never Had Colonies’: Global Histories of Race and Colonialism in Hungary, 1850–1939

Seminar Paper

Colonial Entanglements in Central and Eastern Europe Before 1939
Organized by Łukasz Zaremba and Agata Łuksza
University of Warsaw, 4–5 September

Global history has often ignored how race and coloniality articulated Eastern European economic, structural, and world-systemic positions. While Westcentric knowledge regimes focus exclusively on Western colonialism, the exceptionalist narrative of Eastern Europe ‘without colonies’ has relegated ‘innocent whites’ outside of global colonial history. This talk will refute these approaches by exposing the role played by race and coloniality in Hungary’s semiperipheral integration to the capitalist-colonial world economy between the mid-19th century and the 1940s – the era of Hungary’s opening up to global colonialism during ‘high imperialism’. The ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’ created semiperipheral dilemmas of choosing between agricultural liberal export-oriented development or import-substitution industrialization, which were prevalent in Hungary’s independence war against ‘Habsburg colonialism’ (1848–1849), and in playing empire and intra-imperial rivalry with Vienna within the dualist Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918). Finally, the fall of Empire after the Treaty of Trianon (1920) brought national trauma and bitter revanchism, which fueled racial-colonial attitudes and imaginaries, such as in the reception of German ‘Mitteleuropa’, Pan-Europeanism, or the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1936). This period also saw the burgeoning of racial theories, social-Darwinism, and eugenics, which informed local social ‘othering’, racial consumerism, and colonial culture. However, Hungarian political refugees, economic migrants, and settlers in the colonial frontiers abroad were also subsumed under global racial orders when settling on native lands. ‘Colonial escapism’ became a biopolitical fantasy of exporting unwanted populations or evacuating victims of racism to the colonies, such as in the case of Jewish colonialism. Semiperipheral positioning even produced ‘in-between’ racial identifications: anti-Western sentiment of the interwar saw the culmination of celebrating Hungarians’ ‘Asiatic roots’ (Turanism) as well as appropriative solidarity with Native Americans. My talk concludes that there is great intellectual and political urgency in unraveling these often-silenced histories and re-embedding them within a structural, world-systemic, and decolonial analysis of global colonialism, by showing the nuanced, entangled, and interconnected histories of Europeans who ‘never had colonies’.