Szuverénként, mégis szövetségben? Adalékok a közép-európai regionális koncepciók 19–20. századi történetéhez
Authors: Köő Artúr 
Published: January 2025

Following the Napoleonic Wars, when the political and military
alliance known as the Holy Alliance was concluded in Paris on 26 September
1815 under the leadership of the Russian Tsar Alexander I, the Austrian Emperor
and Hungarian King Franz I and the Prussian King Frederick III, the countries
that controlled the destiny of Europe believed that the 18th -century conditions
could be preserved in the long term, as regards the organisation of the state,
social organisation, border issues, etc. The ideological systems that emerged at
the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries (nationalism, liberalism, conservatism,
socialism) transformed social thought and the way humanity saw the world to
such an extent that the previous feudal European conditions were impossible to
maintain and preserve. This also meant, however, that ethnicity and nationality,
which had previously been considered less important, since one’s social status
was determined by one’s (non-)possession of a noble title and one’s religious affiliation, became an important factor, not only in the exploration of the community’s historical past and the search for the nation’s historical greats, but also in the
demand of peoples for the unification of their brothers and sisters speaking the
same language in a single country. This ambition created serious difficulties and
conflicts in European regions with ethnically mixed populations. Among the political elites in Central Europe, the majority were those who
believed that unified nation states could be created despite the ethnically mixed
nature of the region. They expected various measures and changes to ensure
successful implementation. In the Kingdom of Hungary, the great reformers,
such as Lajos Kossuth, hoped that the liberation of the serfs would solve the
country’s ethnic problems (such as the ethnic Vlachs, i.e. Romanians, the Serbs,
Slovaks, Rusyns and so on). In their view, the ethnic communities that formed
a truncated society, i.e. devoid of a noble class, and subsequently fully reduced
to serfdom, would become loyal to the Hungarian state in gratitude for having
been made free peasants, and would not want territorial autonomy, would not
seek to secede and might even embark on a path of voluntary assimilation.
Others did not even consider the idea of forced assimilation to be diabolical,
referring to the French Revolution (1789 and the events of the following years),
which not only gave birth to the modern French nation, but the revolutionary
events allowed for the annihilation of the nationalities in France, their forced
assimilation into the majority nation, which effectively transformed the Kingdom of France into a nation-state.
Few had the privilege of exploring the idea of a confederal state, or of designing regional cooperation concepts, based on the multi-ethnic nature of
Central Europe. But who were the people who came up with these ideas and
what were their proposals? Our study aims to illustrate of these plans and ideas
from the 19th and 20th centuries, without being exhaustive.