minority marginalisation
Social and demographic processes cannot be disconnected from the political and institutional framework that determines the daily life of the minority community. In the modern nation-state, which cannot be culturally neutral simply because of the use of an official language, the relationship between minority and majority is fundamentally characterised by an asymmetry of power. Over the last two centuries the history of Central Europe has been marked by the disintegration of empires and the struggle of national communities for independent statehood. From the nineteenth century onwards the relations between Hungary and its neighbours were characterised by tensions arising from the clash of parallel nation-building, which determined the situation of the Hungarian minority communities and the ethnopolitics of the countries concerned after 1920. Everywhere the latter aimed to create a unified nation state. The asymmetry of power was not only present in the political system but also in the processes of social re-stratification.
In 1920 the population, urbanisation, literacy and occupational indicators of the Hungarians in Romania were better than those of the majority Romanian nation and the national average. Hungarians also held dominant positions in terms of institutionalisation and ownership in Transylvania. Hungarians in Czechoslovakia were in a similar position to that of the Slovaks, while Hungarians in the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia had worse socio-economic positions than the Serbs and Germans there.
The ethnopolitics of the three countries were distinguished not only by these positions, but also by the fact that while the two Balkan countries were unified by a centralised, single-centre administrative tradition, Czechoslovakia retained the Austro-Hungarian model of local administration, but took care to avoid the development of parallel ethnic centres of power in local governments.
Social re-stratification has been taking place through population, migration and assimilation processes, and census practices. The impact of all this is reflected in the transformation of the ethnic face of the cities (with emigration and, subsequently, mainly with socialist industrialisation), the limitations of the mother tongue education system (the educational overload, inequality of opportunity in the acquisition of the state language, the lack of vocational training and higher education in the mother tongue), and the restrictions on the official use of the mother tongue.
Tools for economic marginalisation: land reforms, agrarian resettlement, collectivisation, nationalisation of the “subsoil”; nationalisation of industrial, commercial and banking corporations; transport policy affecting border links and minority areas; failure to develop minority regions or artificial resettlement of industrial enterprises with majority-nation labour force; increased taxation of minorities (economic sectors, regions); anti-minority credit policy; nationality numerus clausus in public and private companies and in certain occupational sectors (diplomacy, army, interior affairs); anti-minority foreign trade, tax and customs policy; discriminatory property restitution, privatisation and public procurement policy.
Areas of minority institutional deficiencies include citizenship policy; the operation of a mother tongue education system; denominational equality and institutional language use within the church; the provision of a linguistic landscape; restrictions on self-government administration; the return of cultural contributions paid by minorities to their own institutions; and the public media system for minorities.