The Ideology Of Preserving The Nation In Minority In Hungary
The ideology of national survival, and the ideology of „saving the Hungarianness” of the supported communities is a central pillar of organisational missions in these programs. The ideology prevailing in the Hungarian national imagery described above are all reproduced in everyday speeches and rituals. Needs and suffering framed in national terms are complemented with ideas on the responsibility of philanthropic actors from Hungary derived from the common national belonging of the helpers and the helped. The next excerpt, extracted from an interview with a volunteer teacher from Budapest reveals how oppression of Hungarian minorities by the majority Ukrainian state and society, and the need for the support of the co-ethnics from Hungary in resisting oppression prove in tandem the legitimacy and the significance of helping.
“Among these kids it is important this kind of support, so that they feel that they are not alone. That’s important, and it is getting even more important, because they have had this difficulty for two years now, that without a Ukrainian language baccalaureate, they can’t enter higher education, at all. Now, that makes their situation incredibly miserable. And now they talk about turning their high school into a Ukrainian language high school. It is a great danger. ” Worthiness is also often framed in national terms. The merits of heroic resistance to assimilation, implying a more real, more pure, more intense national belonging, that is national authenticity, compared to Hungarians living in Hungary, in a majority position, are vividly reproduced in the following sentences of one of the main organisers of the God-parent network: „This program cannot be abandoned to death. This is such a fantastic thing. And these Csángós, they deserve it. You know why? This is my opinion. That under fifty, or whatever, years of Ceausescu rule, continuously they had been attempted, had been forced to assimilate. There was no education in Hungarian, anything. And still. This Csángó language, it has been preserved! Guys, this is the most ancient Hungarian language, they have been able to preserve it, it has not disappeared, it has not died! So, this must be a sign, that this community, it is strong, and deserves not to die. ”
These programs, having the ’helping’ of minority Hungarian communities in the focus of their ideologies, also aim at forming national identities, shaping national culture and national belonging, both of the addressees of help (ethnic Hungarian minority communities in Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania), and of those individuals doing, contributing to or witnessing the helping activities (that is Hungarians in Hungary). According to the mission of these programs, such volunteering and philanthropy educate the helped as well as the helpers: improving their national consciousness contributes to their moral development. Language programs and trainings carried out in children camps, or in schools in Hungary or in minority Hungarian communities aim at the education of the helped; while personal encounters with these minority Hungarians, as well as travelling to these communities are assumed to immerse volunteers and philanthropists in experiencing national authenticity and thus make them more fully embrace the idea of belonging to the Hungarian nation, extended beyond state borders.
These programs are thus initiated with the assumptions that supported communities all share the goals of preserving Hungarian identity, language and culture. One of the programs consists of participants, whom both helpers and recipients share this discourse of the threatened Hungarian national culture. As narratives and symbols of preserving the nation are familiar to everyone in the program, in philanthropic encounters all parties affected are capable of acting according to this pre-existing imagery. In other programs, however many of the targeted groups are in late phases of assimilation, in particular in late phases of language change. These children occasionally or never use Hungarian in their everyday lives, and attend majoritarian (Ukrainian, Romanian language) state schools. Thus, they are not acquainted with Hungarian national discourses and related symbols and narratives, and they lack the knowledge of acting according to roles prescribed by these. Besides hardship of communication, poor command of Hungarian and the refusal of its use may question these children’s national belonging, as well as the legitimacy of the programs based on the preservation of Hungarian native language.
In the following extract of an interview with an active god-mother it can be clearly seen how preexisting expectations based on the Hungarian national discourses (on the heroic and conscious preservation of the Hungarian culture by ethnic Hungarians in minority) becomes problematic, and hinders the cooperation of donors and recipients. „And then she [the teacher in the program] said that that [Csángó] little girl does not deserve our support, because she’s not attending folk singing and dancing programs, nor the Hungarian language courses. And then, the girl said, I am Romanian, and she showed us how she can speak English. So I will have to deal with this, to ask for another child to support. ” Intense talk and interpretations of volunteers and donors in these programs may be perceived as reactions to such ’breaches’ of preexisting expectations about national identification and categorisation of their recipients. In what follows we shortly outline possible reactions and answers to such encounters that challenge the imagined national order of things, as strategies and mechanisms that enable the continuation of philanthropic practices besides these challenges.
