Dreaming of a "Greater Hungary"

All the media here devoted a lot of attention to the interview Churka gave to the Zagreb weekly "Globus". The greatest attention was attracted by the sentence: "I don't say that we would not have territorial requests in regard to Baranja and Vojvodina, because these requests would be legitimate. But we are not able to realize them". Right after the information came from Zagreb, a real fever caught the Budapest media. The most widely-read Hungarian paper "Nepsabadshag" managed, a few minutes before midnight, to get Churkin's statement claiming that the Zagreb newspaper got some of his sentences mixed up and that "Globus's" treatment was more than incorrect, but he will "decide whether to take this to court, after reading the integral text". At the same time, the writer-politician said on television: "It is pointless to speak about Hungary's revisionist intentions when the necessary military force for this does not exist, which, again, does not mean that I want such force for the purpose of creating a new Greater Hungary".

This is not the first time that the question of territorial requests regarding Vojvodina and Baranja appeared on the post-communist Hungarian sky. Let us recall: after the victory at the first free elections, the head of the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the new prime minister, Jozef Antal, said that he felt like the president of all the 15 million Hungarians". After sharp reactions from the neighboring countries in which there live Hungarians, Antal said that this is primarily a spiritual, and not "some kind of legitimist idea". Afterwards, in the midst of Yugoslavia's disintegration, Antal claimed that the international agreement (signed after World War I) envisages the annexation of Vojvodina to Yugoslavia (that is, to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), and not to Serbia. Therefore, if there is no more Yugoslavia, and if "only Serbia" is left, everything is subject to reexamination. Later on, with the appearance of the internationally unrecognized Federal Republic of Yugoslavia the matter was temporarily placed "ad acta". However, the topic is, not even by far, exhausted.

At a recent panel discussion about possible scenarios of a catastrophe in Central and Eastern Europe, well known political scientist Laslo Lendel set out the thesis that, in the campaign for the 1994 elections, the current prime minister would raise the question of returning Vojvodina to Hungary. According to his opinion, the first possible scenario is for Russia to get back all the territories that used to belong to the former Soviet Union by the year 2000. According to the second scenario, all the countries in the region would fight against each other. The third version is, according to Lendel, a Greater Hungary. Nevertheless, the political scientist did warn that any change of borders, even if carried out in a peaceful way (for instance, by a referendum) unavoidably leads to a catastrophe. It is in this context that he set out the belief that Antal would raise the question of Vojvodina. Lendel considers that any annexation of long lost territories would be too big a bite for Hungary. Thoughts of this kind still belong to the realm of speculation, but what is tangible is the official stand of Hungarian bodies of authority, primarily the parliament. Laslo Kovac, president of the parliament's Foreign affairs committee (a socialist who replaced the former foreign minister) recently warned: "Yugoslavia is an example of the fact that the non-respect of the rights of national-ethnic minorities endangers the security of the entire region. However, it is impossible to agree to have the minority question be the only criterion in Hungary's relations with any of its neighbors. If someone reduces cooperation only to this, he consciously or unconsciously strengthens nationalist tendencies in neighboring countries and does not help in the least the Hungarians living there".