Thirty Years After the Fall: Is Socialism Dead?

Júlia Tar’s recent piece on the Hungarian government’s online media outlet, Hungary Today, points out that 2019 is the anniversary of not one, but three remarkable events of the 20th century: NATO’s 70th anniversary; Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic’s 20th anniversary since joining NATO, and the thirtieth anniversary of dismantlement of the Iron Curtain and of the Berlin Wall. According to Eugene Megyesy, the former Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister of Hungary and a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Friends of Hungary Foundation, publisher of Hungary Today, we might not have learned from these historical events. 1956 was a significant year for Hungary because of its revolt against the Soviet Union and dictatorial communism. The revolt was followed by the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Polish Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. Then,

Hungary opened the Iron Curtain toward Austria, allowing East Germans to flee the oppression of the Utopian socialist system, thereby rendering the Berlin Wall obsolete.

This was on 11 September 1989 (not June, as stated), when a courageous decision was taken at the urging of leading Socialist reformers in the government like Imre Pozsgay, and in spite of threats of invasion from Berlin. By November, the Berlin Wall had itself been destroyed. In summarising Megyesy’s ‘view’, Tar claims that…

… socialism was always built on the promises of a Utopian system, equality and the ability to solve all social problems (“heaven on earth”).

Eugene Megyesy warns that this is happening again in some countries:

Sadly, there are politicians and bureaucrats in Washington and Brussels, supported by ivory tower academics, media pundits and Hollywood luminaries, who believe socialism is viable.

Megyesy urges today’s generation to look back and think about whether socialism was ever successful. It may have been, but only for a limited period of time. He cites the unsustainability of the capitalism-backed socialistic systems in the Scandinavian countries as an example. In Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela, it is even worse and only serves to highlight the gap between the poor and the leaders living in luxury, Megyesy explains. Before socialism, Venezuela was one of the richest countries; now it’s one of the poorest. According to Megyesy, socialism means…

… control over all means of production and the redistribution of wealth by the government.

Definitions and Debates:

But not every ‘socialist’ today would agree with this definition, and especially the idea that public control means control by the central or federal government. Neither does this interpretation match those of the multifarious strands of socialism in western Europe which developed from the middle of the nineteenth century. To define socialism and understand its roots, a longer and broader view is necessary, not just one which draws conclusions based on events since the spread of Stalinism across eastern Europe, or which focuses on recent events in North Korea or Venezuela for evidence of the failings of the Utopian Socialist system. Many of the twentieth century’s ‘dystopias’ may have had their origins among the nineteenth century ‘isms’, as in previous centuries they were often the product of misguided Christian millenarianism, like ‘anti-Semitism’, but that does not mean that we should simply discard the thinking of the philosophers and political economists who developed their detailed critiques of capitalism any more than we should reject two millennia of Christian theology. After all, as Marx himself noted, philosophers only interpret the world: the point is to change it. 

In seeking to change its own world, each new generation must produce its own reinterpretation of the ideas handed down to it from past generations and come up with its own solutions to its own moral dilemmas and social problems. That is, in essence, what socialism means to me. We should neither rely on theories from posterity nor reject them out of hand as if all who came before us were thieves and robbers. We can only learn from the past by giving it a fair hearing, remembering as the novelist J P Hartley famously wrote, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. We are solely responsible for our own ‘country’ in equity

the ‘present’, and for not learning from our own mistakes in its past. In this context, and according to the eminent ‘man of letters’ of the twentieth century, Raymond Williams (1983), ‘Socialist’ emerged as a philosophical description in the early nineteenth century. In that century and beyond, it could be used in two ways, which have had profound effects on the use of the term by radically different political tendencies. Of course, social was the merely descriptive term for a society in its now predominant sense of the system of common life; a social reformer wished to reform this system. But ‘social’ was also …

… an emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with ‘individual’ and ‘individualist’ theories of society.

Naturally, there has always been a great deal of interaction and overlap between these two meanings, but their varying effect can be seen in the beginning in the formation of the term. In the first sense, it was viewed as an extension of ‘liberalism’ as it referred to radical political reform of the social order, in order to develop, extend and secure the main liberal values for all members of society; political freedom, the ending of privileges and formal inequalities, social justice (conceived as ‘equity’ between different individuals and groups). In the second sense, it was seen as the ‘enemy’ of competitive, individualist forms of society, specifically industrial capitalism with its system of wage-labour. Truly social forms depended on practical co-operation and mutuality, which in turn could not be achieved while there was still private (individual) ownership of the means of production. Real freedom could not be achieved, basic equalities could not be ended, social justice (conceived as a just social order rather than simply ‘equity’ between individuals) could not be established unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownership and control.

H. G. Wells, writing his well-known book in 1922, A Short History of the World, expressed the dichotomy in the following terms:

On the one hand are the individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present freedoms with what we possess, and on the other hand the socialists, who would pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary acts. In practice one will find every graduation between the extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any sort to support a government, and the communist, who would deny any possessions at all. The ordinary socialist of today is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a considerable amount of private property, but put such affairs as education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass production of staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly organised state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual convergence of reasonable men towards a scientifically studied and planned socialism.  

The resulting controversy among the many groups and tendencies all calling themselves ‘socialist’ has been, long, intricate and frequently bitter. Each main tendency has developed alternative, often derogatory terms for the others. But until circa 1850, the word was too new and too general to have any predominant use. The earliest known use in English is in Hazlitt’s On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen (1826), in which he recalls a conversation from 1809 in writing those profound and redoubted socialists, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. There is also a contemporary use in the 1827 Owenite Co-operative Magazine. Its first recorded political use in French dates from 1833. However, ‘socialisme’ was first used in 1831 in the more generic meaning, and Owen’s New Moral World also contains a similar use. Given the intense political climate in both France and England in the 1820s and 30s, these references provide a sense of the period in which the word came into ‘common coinage’. It could not have been known at that time which meaning of the word would come through as dominant. It was a period of very rapid developments in political discourse, and until well into the 1840s there were a number of alternative words for ‘socialist’, some of which were in more common usage: co-operative, mutualist, associationist, societarian, phalansterian, agrarian, radical. As late as 1848 Webster’s (AmE) Dictionary defined ‘socialism’ as ‘a new term for agrarianism’. By that time in Europe, especially in France and Germany, and to a lesser extent in Britain, both ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’ were common terms.

One alternative term, Communist, had begun to be used in France and England by the 1840s, but the sense of the word varied according to particular national contexts. In England in the 1840s, communist had strong religious associations, dating back to the Puritan sects of the seventeenth century. Thus its use was distinct from the secular word ‘socialist’ as used by Robert Owen, which was sometimes avoided for that reason. ‘Communism’ before Marx meant the primitive form practised in the early church when the followers of Jesus ‘held all things in common’. The ‘True Levellers’ or ‘Diggers’ of the English Commonwealth similarly wanted to abolish private property and social distinctions altogether. In the nineteenth century, their ideological ‘descendants’ believed this could only happen if a democratic state was to own all property. The French ‘anarchist’ philosopher Proudhon wrote that all property is theft. But the development of political ideas in France and Germany were different; so much so that Engels, in his Preface of 1888, looking back to the Communist Manifesto which he and Marx had written in 1848, observed:

We could not have called it a ‘Socialist’ manifesto. In 1847, Socialism was a middle-class movement. Socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite.

For a time, the stresses between employers and employees led to the worldwide dissemination of the very harsh and elementary form of communism which is associated with Karl Marx in particular. However, we need to view Marx’s political economy in its proper context as an integral shift in thinking about how to interpret the new industrial world which had grown up ‘like Topsy’ around the common man. It was only as the nineteenth century developed, according to H. G. Wells, that:

… men began to realise that property was not one simple thing but  a great complex of ownerships of different values and consequences … that there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest. 

Socialism and Communism in Europe, 1871-1918:

Across the continent, the relative militancy associated with the word communist was further strengthened by the very visual effect of the Paris Commune of 1871 (depicted below), though there was a significant argument as to whether the correct term to be derived from the event was Communist or Communard. For at least a ten-year period, the word Syndicalist became at least as important across Europe as a whole. It described the development of industrial trades unionism as a revolutionary force which would overthrow the capitalist system through the use of the General Strike and revolutionary violence in general. The word appeared in French in 1904 and in English in 1907; but it went through varying combinations with anarchism (in its stress on mutuality) and socialism, especially with Guild Socialism and Cooperative movements, emphasising the important interests of the consumer in economic models for the future.

The decisive distinction between ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party as the All-Russian Communist Party (the ‘majority’ or Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of ‘socialist’ from ‘communist’, often with supporting terms and adjectives such as ‘social democrat’ or ‘democratic socialist’ came into common currency, although it is significant that all ‘communist’ parties, especially in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its ‘satellite’ states, continued to describe themselves as ‘socialist’ and dedicated to ‘socialism’. This is one reason why, in central-eastern Europe, socialism is still viewed by many as synonymous with communism in contrast to the use of the word throughout the rest of Europe. That does not mean, however, that the history of socialist and social democratic parties in southern, western and northern Europe can simply be tarnished with the same brush of the ‘Stalinist’ past, as Medgyesy and other politicians have attempted to do in the run-up to this year’s European Parliament elections. Even Jean-Claude Junker, President of the European Commission and a member of the conservative European People’s Party has been characterised as a ‘socialist’ in the Hungarian press and media.

The First Hungarian Republic, the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ & the Horthy Era, 1918-44:

The Proclamation of Mihály Károlyi as President of the new Republic of Hungary.

Elsewhere on this site, I have written about the roots and development of liberal democracy in Hungary, and of how both of these have been fractured by various forms of authoritarianism and dictatorship, more recently of a populist variety. Yet even in Hungary, we can trace the origins of socialist movements back to 1907, when a series of strikes and disturbances among both the urban and rural workers. But the promise of electoral reform, for which a crowd of a hundred thousand demonstrated for a second time on ‘Red Thursday’, 10th October 1907, came to nothing when Andrássy’s modest bill expanding the suffrage was rejected by the Hungarian parliament. Seven years later, the Social Democrats, as elsewhere in Europe, supported the patriotic war effort, perhaps hoping for democratic concessions in return. Following the Revolution of November 1918, with the establishment of a republic ruled by a National Council, the Károlyi government embarked on the programme of social and political reforms it had announced. These were badly needed, given the explosive atmosphere in the country. There was no political force in Hungary at the time that would have been able to answer all of the conflicting interests and expectations of these turbulent times. Although the elections to the new national assembly were conducted on the basis of a franchise including half the population, second only those in Scandinavia at that time, the effects of progressive social legislation, including the introduction of unemployment benefit and the eight-hour working day, the abolition of child labour and the extension of insurance schemes, could not yet be felt. The political scene became polarised, involving the appearance of radical movements both on the Right and the Left.

The streets, for the time being, belonged to the political Left. Appeals of moderate Social Democratic ministers to order and patience evoked the contrary effect and served to alienate the disaffected masses from them. Their new heroes were the Communists, organised as a party on 24 November 1918 and led by Béla Kun. He was a former journalist and trades unionist, who had recently returned from captivity in Russia, where he had become convinced of the superiority of the system of Soviets to parliamentary democracy.  Communist propaganda also promised an end to all exploitation through the nationalisation of property, as well as international stability through the fraternity of Soviet republics which were prophesied to arise all over Europe. Within a few weeks, this attractive utopia, underpinned by well-designed social demagogy, had earned the Communists a membership of about forty thousand. Their supporters, several times that number, mobilised among the marginalised masses and the younger members of the intelligentsia, susceptible to revolutionary romanticism. By January 1919, a wave of strikes had swept across the country, in the course of which factories, transport and communication installations were occupied; in addition, land seizures and attempts to introduce collective agriculture marked the communist initiative, which also included the demand not only to eradicate all remnants of feudalism, but also the proclamation of a Hungarian Soviet Republic, and a foreign policy seeking the friendship of Soviet Russia instead of the Entente powers.

While the radicals on both the Right and the Left openly challenged the fundamental tenets of the Károlyi government, his Independence Party evaporated around him. Unhappy with the reform projects which Károlyi embraced and seemed too radical for them, most of the Independent ministers left the government, leaving the Social Democrats as the main government party. But they were struggling helplessly to tame their own radical left, who effectively constituted an internal opposition to the government, and gravitated towards the Communists. On 21 March 1919, the Social Democrats accepted the invitation to take sole responsibility for the government, but only to accelerate and conclude negotiations with the imprisoned Communist leaders about forming a united workers’ party. A new government, the Revolutionary General Council, presided over by a Social Democrat but in effect led by Béla Kun, was formed on the same day, with the declared aim of establishing a Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Certainly, the measures introduced by the Revolutionary government went beyond anything attempted in Soviet Russia at that time. The counterpart of these measures in the administrative and political reorganisation of the country was the replacement of old local, municipal and county bureaucracies with soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers. A ‘Committee of Public Safety’ was organised to put pressure on the civilian population where it was needed in order to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, its head, Tibor Szamuely travelling in his ‘death train’ to trouble spots in order to preside in summary courts, assisted by the notorious ‘Lenin Boys’, created to supplement the ‘Red Guard’, which took over the ordinary functions of the police and gendarmerie. Besides common murders of actual or alleged enemies by the ‘élite detachments, some 120 death sentences were meted out by the tribunals for political reasons.

The great momentum of the changes was partly intended to convince people that the realisation of the ‘socialist utopia’ was imminent. Social policy measures, the expected alleviation of housing shortages through public ownership of accommodation in a country flooded by refugees, the nationalisation of large firms, improved educational opportunities, the more effective supply of food and consumer goods through rationing and supervised distribution met with widespread approval, especially among the urban population. The intellectual élite, who had applauded the democratic reforms of the autumn of 1918, was initially also allured by the attractive goals of the Soviet Republic. They not only included known Marxists like György Lukács, the writer, who became People’s Commissar for Education, but also members of the Nyugati (Western) Circle, who held positions in the Directorate for Literature, and Bartók and Kodály, who became members of the one for music. Gradually, however, these figures became disaffected, as did the intelligentsia and middle classes in general and the leaders of the October 1918 democratic revolution, some of whom emigrated the following summer. By then, the historian Gyula Székfű, who was appointed professor at the University of Budapest, was already at work on his highly influential Three Generations (1920), in which he was hostile not only towards the communist revolution but also towards democracy and liberalism, which he blamed for paving the way for Kun’s régime.

The revolution and the village were unable to come to terms with each other. Despite the steady urbanisation of the previous half-century, Hungary still remained a largely agricultural country, especially after much of its towns were taken away by occupation even before the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. Besides being economically unsound the amidst the shortage of raw materials and fuel to supply machinery supposedly more efficient large-scale co-operatives than in smallholdings, the nationalisation scheme embittered not only the smallholders themselves, who actually lost land, but also the landless peasants, domestic servants and the agricultural labourers whose dreams of becoming independent farmers were thwarted by the same urban revolutionaries who had formerly encouraged land seizures. Decrees regarding the compulsory delivery of agricultural surplus and requisitioning further undermined whatever popularity the government still enjoyed in the countryside. It blamed the food shortages on the peasantry, which exacerbated the already existing rift between town and country, and served as a pretext for further central control of the economy. The anti-clerical measures taken by the government also annoyed the traditionally devout peasants, concerned about the security of ‘the family hearth’.

All of this made the communists more susceptible to counter-revolutionary propaganda, which did not fail to emphasise the foreign (that is, Jewish) character of the revolution (over half of the commissars were indeed of Jewish ethnicity). An ‘Anti-Bolshevik’ Committee was set up in Vienna in April by representatives of nearly all the old parties led by Count István Bethlen, and a counter-revolutionary government was set up at Arad on 5 May, later moving to Szeged. Paradoxically, the Soviet Republic was maintained in power for over four months, despite the increasingly dictatorial means it employed, mainly by the temporary successes it scored on the nationalities’ issue; it collapsed not in the face of internal counter-revolution but when its military position against the allies of the Entente in the region became untenable. The Entente powers, gathered at the Paris Peace Conference, sent General Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, to Budapest, mainly to obtain reliable first-hand information about the situation there in April 1919. Smuts concluded that Hungary truly had a government of Bolshevik character, which gave weight to the French Prime Minister Clemenceau’s proposal to suppress German revanchist designs as well as the spread of Soviet communism into Western Europe by a cordon sanitaire established out of the new states of Central Europe. Harold Nicolson, the young British diplomat who accompanied Smuts on the train leaving Paris on April Fools’ Day, wrote about these concerns about the Germans turning to Bolshevism in a letter to his wife Vita (pictured below, together in Paris):

They have always got the trump card, i.e. Bolshevism – and they will go the moment they feel it is hopeless for them to get good terms. 

Small wonder, therefore, that Béla Kun’s strike for communism triggered many anxious moments for the Supreme Council. The negotiations were conducted from the wagon-lit of Smuts’ train at the Eastern Station in Budapest, so as not to imply recognition of the régime, encircled by Red Guards with ‘fixed bayonets and scarlet brassards’. They centred on whether or not the Hungarian Bolsheviks would accept the Allies’ armistice terms, which would commit them to accept considerable territorial losses. As they hesitated, Harold decided to explore Budapest, a city he had grown up in before the war. He was alarmed and saddened by what he saw:

‘The whole place is wretched – sad – unkempt.’ He took tea at the Hungaria, Budapest’s leading hotel. Although it had been ‘communised’, it flew ‘a huge Union Jack and Tricoleur’, a gesture of good intent. Red Guards with bayonets patrolled the hall, but in the foyer what remained of Budapest society ‘huddled sadly together with anxious eyes and a complete, ghastly silence’, sipping their lemonade ‘while the band played’. ‘I shudder and feel cold,’ Harold remarked. ‘We leave as soon as possible. Silent eyes search out at us as we go.’

Kun desperately needed allied recognition of his government, but he inserted a clause into Smuts’ draft agreement that the Romanian forces should withdraw to a line east of the neutral zone established by the 1918 Armistice, in effect to evacuate Transylvania. Smuts would not countenance this, however, and the Bolsheviks were ‘silent and sullen’. Nicolson wrote that they looked like convicts standing before the Director of the Prison. Smuts concluded that ‘Béla Kun is just an incident and not worth taking seriously’. This proved to be only too true, as on 10 April, only a day after Harold’s account to Vita, a provisional government was set up in Budapest seeking to reinstate the old ruling Hungarian cliques. On 1 August, Kun fled the capital in the face of invading Romanian armies. He ended his days in Russia, dying in 1936, ironically as the victim of one of Stalin’s innumerable purges. The world revolution that was expected to sweep away the corrupt bourgeois politicians of the peace conference and their allies spluttered to a halt. The Bavarian Soviet Republic, proclaimed on 7 April, hardly survived into May and the communist putsch planned by Kun’s agents in Vienna on 15 June also failed. Meanwhile, General Deniken’s counter-revolutionary offensive in Russia thwarted hopes of help from across the Carpathians.

Facing an ever more turbulent domestic situation marked by widespread peasant unrest and an uprising of the students of the military academy in Budapest, the Revolutionary government, after heated debates, decided to give in to the demands of the Peace Conference, withdrawing Hungarian forces from Slovakia behind the demarcation line at the end of June. Aurél Stromfeld, who as Chief of the General Staff led the Red Army into Slovakia which led to the short-lived Soviet Republic proclaimed there on 16 June, resigned in protest against the ‘capitulation’. Some of his generals now started to join the National Army, organised by the counter-revolutionary government in Szeged, under the command of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the last commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy. When the Romanians refused to retreat behind the neutral zone as envisaged, the Red Army launched a surprise offensive along the River Tisza. The initial advance was aborted, however, and ended in a disorderly flight of the Red Army. On 1 August, with the Romanian forces threatening to occupy the Hungarian capital, the commissars handed back power to the Social Democrats on the advice of trade union leaders that the creation of a government acceptable to the Entente powers was the only way to avoid complete foreign occupation. The next day, a government led by the trade unionist leader Gyula Peidl, who had refused to accept the creation of a united workers’ party, took office.

Although it promised to end the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ while at the same time defying a conservative restoration, the new government was still regarded as crypto-Bolshevik not only by conservatives but also by Liberals, peasant democrats and Christian Socialists. It also failed to gain support from the Entente. Assisted by the Romanian army, occupying Budapest, a coup forced the government to resign on 6 August. The government headed by István Friedrich, immediately set about annulling all the measures associated with the Soviet Republic, especially the nationalisation process. It also dismantled all the major social reforms of the democratic revolution, including those associated with individual civil liberties. Revolutionary tribunals were replaced by counter-revolutionary ones, packing prisons with workers, poor peasants and intellectuals, and by the beginning of 1920 it had passed roughly as many death sentences as had the lackeys of the ‘red terror’, the ‘Lenin Boys’. The intellectual élite of the country suffered a serious blow. Bartók and Kodály were prosecuted, Móricz was imprisoned and several dozen left the country, including Lukács, Mannheim and Korda. Horthy’s ‘National Army’, now transferred to Transdanubia, controlled and gave orders to local authorities and its most notorious detachments were instruments of naked terror. In three months, they may have killed as many as two thousand suspected former Soviet members, Red Army soldiers, and ordinary Jews who were in no way associated with the proletarian dictatorship. Besides executions and lynchings, about seventy thousand people were imprisoned or sent to internment camps during these few months.

Despite the protests of the Social Democrats and other left-wing forces, the occupying Romanian forces were replaced by Horthy’s National Army in Budapest. His speech before the notables of the capital stigmatised it as ‘the sinful city’ that had rejected its glorious past, Holy Crown and national colours for the sake of red rags. This suited an atmosphere in which most of the remaining adherents of the democratic revolution as well as the communist one were neutralised in one way or another. The returning conservatives promised to heal the country’s war-wounds by returning it to order, authority and the mythical ‘Christian-national system of values’. Sir George Clerk, the leader of the Peace Conference’s mission to Budapest in October 1919, abandoned his initial insistence that the Social Democrats and the Liberals should have an important role in a coalition government. As Horthy commanded the only troops capable of maintaining order and was ready to subordinate them to government control, it had to be acceptable to Horthy personally and the military in general. As a result, the cabinet formed by Károly Huszár on 24 November 1919 was one in which the Christian National Unity Party and other conservative-agrarian groups prevailed over those of the Independent Smallholder Party, the Social Democrats and the Liberals. Even though the great powers insisted that voting should take place by universal and secret ballot, the circumstances were unfavourable to fulfilling any illusion of a democratic outcome. Terrorist actions by detachments of the National Army and the recovering extreme right-wing organisations, designed to intimidate the candidates and voters for the Social Democrats, Smallholders and Liberals, led to the former boycotting the elections of January 1920 and withdrawing from the political arena until mid-1922.

On 1 March 1920, the army occupied the square in front of the Parliament building, and, accompanied by his officers, Horthy entered and, according to medieval precedent, was ‘elected’ Regent, with strong Presidential powers. This signalled the end of Hungary’s own short experiment with democratic socialism, following its even briefer experience of home-grown communism. Count Pál Teleki and Count István Bethlen, the dominant political figures of inter-war Hungary, both from Transylvanian aristocratic families, argued that the immediate post-war events had shown that the country was not yet ready to graft full democracy onto the parliamentary system. They advocated a limited ‘conservative democracy’, guided by the landed gentry and the aristocracy, as the proper response of the region to the challenges of the democratic age. They opposed all endeavours aimed at the radical extension of the liberal rights enshrined in the parliamentarism of the dualist. Liberal democracy seemed to them a mechanical application of the majority principle, undermining political responsibility and stability. They despised communism and were suspicious of social democracy because of its antipathy to private property. But they also opposed the right-wing radical and fascist trends epitomised by Gyula Gömbös and other ‘protectors of the race’ who thought that the parliamentary system had outlived its usefulness and ought to be replaced by an authoritarian rule which would facilitate a redistribution of economic functions in favour of the Hungarian Christian middle classes and away from the ‘foreign’ bourgeoisie (in other words, the Jews).

The fundamental character which the political system of the country retained until the German occupation of 1944 had emerged by 1922 as a result of Bethlenite consolidation. Hungary became a parliamentary state with strong elements of authoritarianism and a hegemonistic party structure, in which the institutions inherited from the liberal era were operated in an anti-democratic fashion. The government acknowledged a lawful political opposition, consisting on the left of Social Democrats, bourgeois liberals and, after 1930 a rejuvenated Independent Smallholder Party; and on the right of different groups of Christian Socialists as well as right radicals. One of the most important developments in the intellectual life of the Horthy era was the development of ‘populist’ writers, predominantly young and of peasant origin, who wrote ethnographically-based pieces revealing the economic and intellectual poverty of life in rural Hungary and drawing the attention of the ruling classes to the need for change. In ideological terms, some of them, most notably László Németh, advocated a ‘third way’ for Hungary between East and West, or between Soviet collectivism and capitalist individualism. Some, including Gyula Illyés and Ferenc Erdei, sympathised with socialism. Their top priority was the improvement in the lot of the poor peasantry through a genuine redistribution of land among them. But their willingness to engage with both the extreme Left and the extreme Right, as well as their emphasis on the ‘village’ as the root of ‘Hungarianness’, with its anti-Semitic overtones, led it into conflict with more cosmopolitan democrats and ‘urbanist’ intellectuals. This was symptomatic of a broader and longer-term division among Hungarian progressives which survived the attempts of even the Soviet communists to homogenise Hungarian society as well as the post-1989 transition to democracy and is resurgent in the propaganda of the current right-wing populist era.

The Second Hungarian Republic & The Eras of Rákosi & Kádár, 1945-1989:

The second Republic of 1945 was equally as brittle as that which followed the First World War, ending in a Soviet-style government which lasted more than forty years. By the time of the elections of November 1945, the communist vanguard, which had numbered only three thousand a year before, had managed to create a mass party of half a million members as a result of an unscrupulous recruiting campaign. Unlike the Social Democrats, they did not mention socialism as being even their strategic goal, and their rhetoric concentrated mainly on the pressing tasks of reconstruction combined with reform. Their avowed programme was essentially the same as the Independence Front; however, they did not refrain from occasionally playing nationalist tunes. Workers and smallholding peasants out of conviction, intellectuals out of idealism, civil servants out of fear and opportunism, all augmented the party ranks; the surviving Jews of Budapest joined out of gratitude to their liberators and their search for a new experience of community. Besides boasting an ever-growing influence on its own, the Communist Party was also able to manipulate the other parties of the Left. The Social Democratic Party, whose 350,000 strong membership possessed a powerful working-class consciousness, found it increasingly difficult to resist the call of the Communists for working-class unity. Together with the National Peasant Party, the Social Democrats chose to join the Communists in the Left-Wing Bloc on 5 March 1946, following the elections of the previous November which was won by the Smallholder Party, who collected fifty-seven per cent of the votes, with both the Social Democrats and the Communists polling seventeen per cent each, and the National Peasant Party a mere seven percent.

‘Forward to Peace & Socialism!’ The Young Pioneers’ Congress.

The elections themselves, by secret ballot and without a census, were the freest ever to be held in Hungary until 1990. Cardinal Mindszenty, the head of the Hungarian Catholic hierarchy, had condemned the ‘Marxist evil’ in a pastoral letter and called upon the faithful to support the Smallholders. Whatever the voters made of this intervention, the verdict of 4.8 million of them, over ninety per cent of the enfranchised, clearly showed their preference for the return of parliamentary democracy based on support for private property and the market economy over socialism with state management and central economic planning. But then the Smallholders gave in to Soviet pressure for the formation of a ‘grand coalition’ in which the communists were able to preserve the gains they had already secured and to secure a firm base from which they were gradually able to bully their way to power by 1949. After the tribulations of the Rákosi dictatorship, it was not surprising that, in 1956, what was initially a struggle between ‘reform’ communists and orthodox within the party, set off by and adjusting to changes in Moscow, and in the meantime itself triggering off a growing ferment among the intelligentsia, became a national anti-Soviet uprising. The events which began, from 20 October onwards, with meetings and demonstrations at the universities in Budapest and the provinces, culminating with a peaceful demonstration in support of Gomulka’s reforms in Poland on 23rd, became a ‘revolution’ when the crowd successfully laid siege to the radio station and fighting began the next day between Soviet tanks and young working-class ‘guerillas’ whom even the restored Prime Minister referred to as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ at this stage.

All the insurgents agreed about was their desire to return national sovereignty and to put an end to arbitrary rule. They did not call for a reversal of nationalisation or a return to the pre-1945 order.  As fighting continued, by 28 October, Nagy had dropped the label ‘counter-revolution’ and started to talk about a ‘national democratic movement’, acknowledging the revolutionary bodies created during the previous days. The Hungarian Workers’ (Communist) Party was reformed as the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) and the old coalition parties became active again, including the Social Democrats. After his initial uncertainty, the PM kept pace with developments on the streets, closing the gap between himself and the insurgents step by step. His changes culminated in the formation of a new multi-party cabinet on 2 November, including reform Communist, Social Democrat (Anna Kéthély, below), Smallholder and Peasant Party members.

However, this consolidation of power by a now avowedly ‘Revolutionary Government’ involved the collapse of the whole system of institutions of the party-state on which the cohesion of the Soviet bloc rested, and this was unacceptable for the Moscow leadership, Khrushchev included. It could not afford to lose a country of Hungary’s strategic location and mineral wealth from among its satellite states. But it was the radicalisation of the revolution in Budapest which made it impossible for a compromise deal to be struck. After announcing the formation of the MSZMP, also declaring himself to be in favour of neutrality and willing to fight in the streets, János Kádár left Parliament on 1 November for the Soviet Embassy. He quickly found himself in Moscow where he became the latest figure selected by the politburo to steer Hungary on a course acceptable to them. Having accepted this assignment, he entered Budapest with his cabinet in Soviet tanks on 7 November.

Although the pockets of armed resistance had been mopped up by 11 November, the most peculiar forms of the revolution, the workers’ councils, started to exert their true impact after 4 November, with an attempt to organise a nationwide network. Initially set up as strike committees, their basic idea was self-management in the factory, owned principally by the workers. On the initiative of the workers’ councils, a massive wave of strikes lasted into January 1957. The intellectuals, rallying mainly in the Writers’ Association, the students’ committees and the Journalists’ Association, founded the Revolutionary Council of the Hungarian Intelligentsia, chaired by composer Zoltán Kodály, which demanded the restoration of the country’s sovereignty and representative government. These movements marked out the Revolution as more than simply a defeated National Uprising. They were clearly socialist in their aims and membership. Kádár, on the other hand, did not have a clear policy to cope with this situation. The government programme which he drafted while still in Moscow, included promises of welfare measures, workers’ self-management and policies to aid the peasantry and small-scale enterprises. But these were clearly not the reasons for his ‘appointment’ by his Moscow patrons. To begin with, he was too busy organising special police forces for the purposes of retaliation and repression to spend time setting out policies. Although he negotiated with the leaders of the Budapest Workers’ Council on 22 November, on the previous day the special police squads prevented the creation of a National Workers’ Council and in early December, two hundred members of the movement were arrested on the same day that saw the abduction of Nagy and his associates.

The revolutionary committees which had been set up were dissolved, and the police shot dead nearly a hundred demonstrators in Sálgotorján, Miskolc and Eger. The ideological justification for these actions and the continuing repression and the impending campaign of retaliation was created at a party conference which identified the causes of the October Uprising as the mistakes of the Rákosi-Gerő faction on the one hand and, on the other, the undermining of the party by ‘Nagy circle’ leading to a capitalist-feudal counter-revolution of Horthyite fascism… supported by international imperialism. Given the trauma created by the revolution, its repression and the retaliation which followed in 1956-58, it is not surprising that Hungarian society was in the mood for Kádár’s Realsozialismus, based on his personalised creed that the ‘little man’ was interested simply in a decent living, instead of the great political issues of the day. He used the scope created by the ruins of the revolt on which he built his power to buy the complicity of Hungarians by unorthodox methods. In November 1962, Kádár somewhat pompously announced that the foundations of socialism in Hungary had been laid and that the construction of socialism was an all-national task, dependent on co-operation between Communists and non-party members, irrespective of personal convictions. There was to be no ‘class war’; this was what became known as the ‘Kádár doctrine’. These were the foundations of the ‘Hungarian model’, often referred to as ‘Gulyás communism’ in the 1970s, which was a far cry from utopian models. With characteristic persistence, Kádár managed to earn legitimacy, retaining it until it became apparent in the 1980s that Realsozialismus was not a functioning system, but merely ‘the longest path from capitalism to capitalism’.

Conclusion: The End of ‘Class-War’ Socialism?

Marx House (Memorial Library) in London.

Marx (before ‘Marxism’) based his theories on a belief that men’s minds are limited by their economic circumstances and that there is a necessary conflict of interests in our present civilization between the prosperous and employing classes of people and the employed masses. With the advance in education necessitated by the mechanical revolution, this great employed majority would become more and more class-conscious and more and more solid in antagonism to the ruling minority. In some way the class-conscious workers would seize power, he prophesied, and inaugurate a new social state. The antagonism, the insurrection, the possible revolution are understandable enough, but it did not follow that a new social state or anything but a socially destructive process would ensue. Marx sought to replace national antagonism by class antagonisms, but it is interesting to see how the two lines of thought, so diverse in spirit, so different in substance as this class-war socialism of the Marxists and the individualistic theory and socialist theory have continued to be part of a common search for more spacious social and political ideas and interpretations. In the long history of socialism in western Europe, as contrasted with the seventy years of Soviet-style Communism, the logic of reality has usually triumphed over the logic of theory.

Sources:

László Kontler (2001), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing.

H. G. Wells (1922, 1946), A Short History of the World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

  

Introduction: What is ‘liberal democracy’?

In his influential book, Keywords, first published in 1976 and reissued in 1988, Raymond Williams gives clear definitions of both the adjective ‘liberal’ and the noun ‘democracy’ in this much-used phrase. Leaving aside the medieval uses of the word ‘liberal’, which came into English via Latin and had a purely academic meaning,…

… the affirmation of ‘liberal’ came mainly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century from the strong sense of ‘Liberty’ from the mid-seventeenth century. It was used in the sense of ‘open-minded’, and thence of ‘unorthodox’ from the late eighteenth century: ‘liberal opinions’ (Gibbon, 1781).

The adjective is very clear in a modern political sense in an example Williams gives from 1801, concerning the extinction of every vestige of freedom, and of every liberal idea with which they are associated. This led to the formation of the noun as a political term, proudly and even defiantly announced in the title of an 1822 periodical, The Liberal. It was then that the term acquired it more negative connotation (for some) as referring to an unorthodox political opinion of ‘foreign’ origin. There was talk of the ‘Ultras’ and ‘Liberals’ of Paris in 1820, and some early usages were in a foreign form in English, e.g. Liberales (Southey, 1816); Libereux (Scott, 1826). The term was applied as a nickname to advanced Whigs and Radicals by their opponents; it was then consciously adopted and within a generation, it had become both powerful and orthodox. Liberality, which since the fourteenth century had carried the sense of ‘generosity’, and later of open-mindedness, was joined by political Liberalism from the early nineteenth century. Libertarian in the eighteenth century indicated a believer in free will as against determinism, but from the nineteenth century, it acquired social and political senses. By the mid-twentieth century, the term libertarian socialism was coined, which was not seen as a form of ‘liberalism’, but rather a form of ‘socialism’ opposed to centralised and bureaucratic controls. Libertarians on the ‘Right’ also share this antipathy to state control, as well as wishing to uphold individual liberties above the requirements of the central state.

In the established party-political sense, the term ‘Liberal’ is clear enough. But ‘liberal’ as a term of political discourse remains complex. It has been under regular and heavy attack from conservative positions, where the senses of a lack of restraint and lack of discipline have been brought to bear, and also the sense of a weak and sentimental generosity as being endemic to liberal views and values. The sense of a lack of intellectual rigour among ‘liberals’ has also been drawn on in academic disputations. Against this kind of attack, ‘liberal’ has often been a group term for ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ opinions, and is still clearly used in this sense, especially in the USA. But ‘liberal’ as a pejorative term has also been widely used by ‘authoritarian’ socialists and especially Marxists. This use shares the conservative sense of a lack of rigour and of shallow and over-generous beliefs and attitudes.

To this accusation, ‘liberals’ reply that they are concerned with individual liberties, and socialists are not. But socialists have countered with the rejoinder, which is supported by the burden of historical evidence, that ‘liberalism’ is a doctrine based on ‘individualist’ theories of the relationship between man and society and therefore in conflict not only with ‘socialist’ theories of that relationship but also with social democratic ones. However, as Williams points out, if ‘liberalism’ is the highest form of thought developed within ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist’ society, then ‘liberal’ can be taken to refer the mixture of liberating and limiting ideas, rather than being loosely used as a ‘swear-word’. In this sense, ‘liberalism’ is a doctrine guaranteeing certain necessary kinds of freedom, but also, and essentially, a doctrine of ‘possessive individualism’. C. B. Macpherson has used this concept to describe the way in which ‘Society’ becomes a dynamic entity of free and equal individuals relating to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society, therefore, consists of an exchange between proprietors.

‘Democracy’ is, of course, an ancient Greek word, Demokratia, a compound noun based on the root words demos, translated as ‘people’, and Kratos, meaning ‘rule’. It came into English in the sixteenth century, from its French form démocratie and the middle Latin word, democratia. It was defined by Elyot, with specific reference to the Greek instance, in 1531:

… another publique weal was among the people … This manner of governaunce was called in greke ‘Democratia’, in latine, ‘Popularis potentia’, in englisshe the rule of the commonaltie. 

Nevertheless, its meanings have always been complex, and everything depends on the senses which are given to ‘people’ and ‘rule’. Herodotus defined a democracy as an administration in which power was in the hands, not of the few, but of the many, and all that is opposed to despotic power has the name of democracy. Aristotle  wrote:

… a democracy is a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state.

Yet much depends here on what is meant by ‘invested with power’: whether it is ultimate sovereignty or, at the other extreme, practical and unshared rule. Plato made Socrates say that …

… democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power.

This particular use, indicating a form of popular class rule, is – of course – some distance from any orthodox modern ‘Western’ definition of democracy. But it does illustrate how the range of uses, near the roots of the term, makes any simple derivation impossible. ‘Democracy’ is now often traced back to medieval precedents and a given a Greek authority. But the fact is that, with only occasional exceptions, until the late nineteenth century, the term was a strongly negative term. It is only since then that a majority of political parties and groups have united in declaring their belief in it. In 1777, the American revolutionary Hamilton observed that representative democracy was not a perfect principle but a practical process …

… when the deliberative or judicial powers are vested wholly or partly in the collective body of the people, you must expect error, confusion and instability. But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated (is one in which) … the exercise of the legislative executive is vested in select persons … etc.

It is from this altered American use that a dominant modern sense developed. Jeremy Bentham formulated a general sense of democracy as rule by the majority of the people and then distinguished between ‘direct democracy’ and ‘representative democracy’, recommending the latter because it provided continuity and could be extended to large societies. In the mid-twentieth century, therefore, an assertion of direct democracy could be described as ‘anti-democratic’, since the first principle of ‘democracy’ is that of rule by elected representatives. Thus, the contemporary understanding of democracy involves the right to vote for representatives rather than the older, normal sense of popular power. ‘Democracy’ was still a radical or even revolutionary term in the mid-nineteenth century, and the specialised development of ‘representative democracy’ was at least in part a reaction to this.

It is from this point that the two modern meanings of ‘democracy’ can be seen to diverge. In the socialist tradition, it continued to mean ‘popular power’: a state in which the interests of the majority of the people were paramount and in which these interests were practically exercised and controlled by the majority. In the ‘liberal tradition’, democracy meant the open election of representatives and certain conditions of ‘democratic rights’ such as free speech, which guaranteed the openness of elections and political argument, discussion and debate. These two conceptions, in their extreme forms, are diametrically opposed to each other. If the predominant criterion is popular power in the popular interest, other criteria are often taken as secondary, as in the ‘People’s Democracies’, and their influence is often characterised as ‘bourgeois democracy’. But if the predominant criteria are elections and free speech, other criteria are rejected, e.g. an attempt to exercise popular power through a General Strike is viewed as being anti-democratic since democracy has already been achieved by other means. To claim ‘economic equality’ as the essence of democracy is seen as leading to ‘chaos’ or to totalitarian rule or government by trade unions.

In one characteristic use of ‘democratic’ as referring to open argument, freedom of speech and assembly are seen as ‘democratic rights’, sufficient in themselves, without reference to the institution or character of political power. This is a limiting sense derived from the ‘liberal tradition’, which in its full form has to include election and popular sovereignty, though not popular rule. To the positive opposed senses of the socialist and liberal traditions we have to add, from the late twentieth century onwards, various populist distortions of democracy, reducing the concepts of election, representation and mandate to deliberate formalities or merely manipulated forms; reducing the concept of popular power, or government in the popular interest, to nominal slogans covering the rule of a bureaucracy or oligarchy. These manipulated forms are not real democracy, Williams suggests, but they have added to the confused contemporary nature of the concept.

Putting the two words together, therefore, it would seem that a ‘liberal democracy’ as a term in modern use can be taken to refer to a nation-state which guarantees its individual citizens equal access to an open and pluralistic political discourse. To understand how this applies to Hungary today, we need first to understand how the concept has developed in the context of the modern history of Hungary.

The Hungarian Liberal Inheritance, 1828-1848:

Recently, in Hungarian political discourse, the adjective ‘Liberális’ has been used to describe ideas which are considered to be of alien, ‘Western’ origin, and therefore found objectionable by the ruling ‘Fidesz’/ Civic Alliance Party. Yet the Hungarian word for ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ is ‘szabadság’, which is also taken to mean ‘independence’, and the adjectival form is ‘szabadelvű’, which is used as a synonym for ‘liberális’. In the noun form it is used to describe the purpose of the Revolution which took place in 1848, which is commemorated by a National Holiday on 15 March. As István Bart (1999) has pointed out in his ‘Dictionary’ of ‘Keywords’ relating to Hungary and the Hungarians, this forradalom (revolution)…

… is such an unequivocally uplifting and ceremonious occasion in the history of Hungary, that every government, regardles of persuasion, has tried to turn it to its advantage by interpreting it to meet its own ends.  

The current government is certainly no exception to this rule, interpreting it as a popular nationalist uprising against the ‘slavery’ imposed on Hungary by the foreign Austrian empire. Hungarian historians like László Kontler have seen it as the fruition of a half-century in which the radical and liberal ideas of the French Revolution penetrated into Central European political thinking. He has  used the word ‘liberal’ to reference the swelling liberal sentiments in  early nineteenth century Hungary, commenting that:

The experience of the three decades between the Jacobin trials and the beginning of a new contest between progressive and retrograde opinion in Hungary developed what remained of it, in terms of culture and attitudes, into a vigorous national romanticism, and in terms of sociopolitical ideas, into a programme of improvement imbued by the principles of liberalism.

The execution of Ignác Martinovics and his comrades, a water-colour by an unknown artist. On 20 May 1785, five members of the Hungarian ‘Jacobin’ movement were beheaded on the Vérmező (Bloody Meadow) in Buda. Martinovics was a Franciscan monk and philosopher. The bodies of the chief defendants in the Jacobin trial were finally uncovered in 1914, with their heads placed at their feet.

Hungarian governments began to challenge the power of the feudal nobility, and though it was a formidable task to persuade the masses of petty nobility that they would in fact gain from losing the only thing that distinguished them from the peasantry: their privileges. Although their situation exposed them to the machinations of the government, it was at least possible to win part of them over to the rest of the ‘liberal programme’; equality before the law, civil liberties, representative and responsible government. Kontler goes on to argue that the new corporate constitution and the reform projects of the 1790s at the committee sessions of 1828-1830 created a space in which the ‘liberal nobility of the Age of Reform attempted a peaceful transition to modernity’.

Count István Széchenyi was the first of the dominant personalities of that ‘age’ to appear on the ‘stage’. He was an extensive reader of the modern classics of social and political thought from Rousseau through Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham and travels in Western Europe, Italy and the Balkans awoke him to the backwardness of his own country. Like his father, he was particularly impressed by the laws, institutions, manners and social system of England. Already by the 1820s, Széchenyi frustration with feudal Hungary had led him to become one of the founders of the Liberal Magnates Club at the Diet and a well-informed and disdainful critic of the policies of the Holy Alliance against the liberal movements and freedom fighters in Spain, Italy and Greece. He also abhorred violence and revolution, but his attempt to mediate between the court and the nation in the transition from absolute to representative government was rejected by Chancellor Metternich, who was still determined, in 1825, to work with the old reactionaries rather than the ‘new’ reformers.

A lithograph by V. Katzler, 1860. His chief project is omitted from the circle of pictures, the one to which he sacrificed most of his wealth – the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which stands on the Pest side of the Chain Bridge, close to the Parliament House.

Within liberalism, political concepts started to diverge, which led to a gradual separation between Széchenyi and his close friend and political associate, his companion on his travels in the 1820s, the Transylvanian Baron Miklós Wesselényi. Unlike Széchenyi, Wesselényi found not only that the redemption of the serfs’ feudal obligations should take place under state supervision, but also that social change ought to be accompanied by the dismantling of absolutism – on which he laid the blame for backwardness – and the creation of a monarchy with civil liberties. In 1839, the increasingly influential opposition, now led by Ferenc Deák, insisted on putting and keeping on the Diet’s agenda the issue of freedom of expression. Deák, with the assistance of a group of liberal magnates led by in the Upper House, including, besides Széchenyi, Count Lajos Batthány, Baron József Eötvös and others, managed to secure the refusal of the Diet to discuss taxation and recruitment before the issue of freedom of expression was settled. In addition, a half-century-long process towards the emancipation of the Jews started by permitting them the (almost) free choice of their residence, trade or profession and the ownership of real estate. Laws relating to commerce, industry and banking passed in 1840 created a legal framework which stimulated the development of Hungarian capitalism for several decades.

Ferenc Deák (1803-1876), in a painting by Bertalan Székely, 1869

In the 1840s, associations for charitable purposes, social service, self-help economic or cultural improvement proliferated and contributed to the disintegration of the barriers between the estates. The combined membership of the approximately six hundred associations in Hungary and Transylvania might have reached a hundred thousand by 1848. Some of the over two hundred ‘casinos’ and reading societies, with tens of thousands of members, became thoroughly politicised and were hotbeds of the political parties that arose in 1846 and 1847. An enthusiastic supporter of Wesselenyi, Lajos Kossúth, a young jurist and scion from a landless noble family been arrested in 1837 and spent his three years in prison reading classics of politics and economics and learning English. He emerged from captivity with strengthened determination and great charisma, launching a new liberal newspaper, Pesti Hírlap (Pest News) in January 1841. The government hoped that Kossúth’s radical enthusiasm would split the ‘liberal movement’ and that, through censorship, he could be kept under control. However, these traditional methods were fully unequipped to cope with the difficulties posed by Kossúth’s entirely new type of political journalism.

The experimental railroad at Köbánya: 1829 engraving. The first ‘real’ railroad track between Pest and Vác was completed in 1846. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Hungary was trying to catch up with other European countries intellectually and technologically. But by the end of the century, it had carved out for itself a leading in its machine industry which also served its rapidly developing electrification. The First World War brought these developments to an abrupt end.

During the first few months of the existence of Pesti Hírlap, the editorials exposed the most soaring cases of social injustice, such as the backward and humiliating practice of flogging peasants at the behest of overbearing landlords. Kossúth’s antidote was a true ‘union of interest’ through social and political emancipation, a more equitable distribution of burdens and economic modernisation, and cited examples from the experience of capitalism and political liberalism in Western Europe and America. Instead of the aristocracy, he considered the ‘nobility of middling rank’ as the vehicle of the reform process, which he found, or rather hoped, to be sufficiently imbued with an enlightened and ‘liberal spirit’ to push through his programme. Kossúth’s propaganda also resulted in the rise of local Buy Hungarian! movements and he was elected director of the National Protectionist Association established by distinguished liberal aristocrats in 1844. All this contributed to nationalist and separatist sentiments, and Pesti Hírlap encouraged the process of Magyarisation, although Kossúth also warned against the violent propagation of the Hungarian language.

The aristocratic new conservatives (or ‘cautious progressives’ as they dubbed themselves) urged a united front of the propertied classes against the propertiless, led by Kossúth, whom they saw as intoxicated by ‘poorly digested liberal and radical maxims’, and hoped to drive a wedge between him and figures like Széchenyi (pictured right), Batthány and Deák. Széchenyi, in particular, did not need stimuli to turn against Kossúth, whom he attacked in a lengthy pamphlet, The People of the Orient, as early as 1841. The conflict between the two dominant personalities of Hungary’s transition to modernity is one of the factors which raises the process to a dramatic pitch, and naturally one of the most fruitful and often exploited topics of Hungarian historical discourse. Among other criticisms, Széchenyi berated Kossúth for what he saw as the latter’s excessive nationalism, adding that the nationalisms of the ethnic minorities were merely self-defence mechanisms in the face of Magyar dominance. These were opinions which could hardly have endeared Széchenyi to the bulk of contemporary liberals, whom he tried to win over to a ‘moderate liberal centre’, but in vain.

Széchenyi was the first to call attention to the problem of the multiple nationalisms in the Carpathian Basin, which ultimately proved to be the insoluble dilemma of Hungarian liberalism. It was a liberalism based on the concept of the extension of noble rights to non-nobles which would result in the replacement of the corporate natio Hungarica with a modern Hungarian state of emancipated citizens. Language and ethnicity were not enough, in the view of the Hungarian liberals, to constitute a nation without a historic past and a historical state. Except for the Croats, they refused to acknowledge the claim of the ethnic minorities to nationhood. Kontler has written that…

… the organising principle behind the concept of the ‘unitary Hungarian political nation’ of Hungarian liberals was that the extension of individual rights would render collective rights superfluous even in the eyes of the ethnic minorities who … would voluntarily assimilate into the Hungarian nation.

In the mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian mind, therefore, ‘liberalism’ and ‘nationalism’ went hand in glove. They were not seen as separate ideologies. The Hungarian national movement proved highly successful, especially in urban contexts, not only among the Jewish intellectuals and German burghers of Budapest but also among many Slovaks, Serbs, Greeks, Armenians and others. From the earliest times that charges of forced Magyarisation were levelled against the Hungarian political élite, there were also plenty of examples of voluntary integration as well. But as far as the views of the leading members of the movements for ‘national awakening’ among the ethnic minorities were concerned, the concept of a ‘unitary political nation’ was anathema. They stressed the role of language and ethnicity in nationhood. Hungary’s population in 1842 was nearly thirteen million, of whom under five million, less than forty per cent were ethnic Magyar. Romanians numbered 2.2 million (17%), Slovaks 1.7 million (13%), Germans 1.3 million (10%), Serbs 1.2 million (9%) , Croats 900,000 (7%), Ruthenes 450,000 (3.5%) and Jews 250,000 (2%). Only a part of each of these nationalities lived in contiguous regions or areas, the rest being inseparably intertwined with others in patchwork-like patterns, making ‘national territory’ impossible to demarcate with any precision. Against this complex background, the statement made by the Romanian historian Kogalniceanu in newly independent Moldavia in 1843 might look somewhat ominous:

I regard as my fatherland all that territory where Romanian is spoken.

The obsession with the Pan-Slav threat made the Hungarian liberals somewhat negligent of Romanian national aspirations, even though the cultivation and modernisation of the mother tongue continued under strong French and Italian influence into the second half of the nineteenth century. By the mid-1840s, the Hungarian liberal national movement seems to have emerged in full force, to some extent in competition with others in the historic Kingdom of Hungary. Opposition liberals were returned in large numbers to the Diet of 1843-1844.

However, Metternich was able to take advantage of the differences within the liberal opposition. Frustrated with the meagre results of the diet, which however included the passing of the official status of the Hungarian language, at the end of 1843 József Eötvös offered his support for the government in return for its commitment to reform. Eötvös was probably the most politically erudite and intellectually sophisticated of the Hungarian reformers of the nineteenth century. From an aristocratic family, he had travelled widely in the West in his youth and having been bankrupted in 1840, he became a professional politician and a freelance writer, and the leader of the ‘centralist’ group of liberal reformers. With the historian László Szalay and others, he idolised English Whiggery and Alexis de Tocqueville, and advocated ‘constitutional centralisation’. In addition to these ‘defections’, a national Conservative Party was founded in November 1846 which appropriated a number of the reform proposals from the liberals.

At first, therefore, it seemed as if the Habsburg court would be able to defy the ‘liberal challenge’. The rise of parties was a prelude to elections into what turned out to be the last feudal diet in Hungary opened in Pozsony (Bratislava, pictured above in a contemporary painting) in November 1847. By February 1848, a stalemate had developed at the Diet, which was only resolved under the impact of the wave of European revolutions. The revolutions of 1848 were the outcome of a combination of factors, from the general tensions arising from the conservative international system created in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna (pictured below), through the economic and financial crisis prior to 1848, to the encouragement they mutually drew from each other in a chain-reaction of upheavals across the continent.

At the same time, these mutual effects were largely superficial and symbolic, and despite the roughly common ideology the outbreak, the goals, events and the outcome of the revolutions reflected local circumstances. Nevertheless, the Hungarian revolution fitted smoothly into the chain-reaction, preceded as it was by those in Palermo, Paris, central Italy, Piedmont and Vienna, and followed by those in Berlin, Merlin, Venice, Prague and Bucharest. The real catalyst was the events of 22-25 February in Paris and the news of the overthrow of the rule of the ‘bourgeois king’ Louis-Philippe by a combination of nouveaux riches who wanted political influence, radicals who wanted to extend suffrage, and socialists who wanted social equality. These goals were clearly at variance with those of contemporary Central European liberals, but the news of the revolution which reached Pozsony on 1 March caused great excitement.

The Liberal Revolution & War of Independence, 1848-49:

 Revolutionary leaders of the ‘Ides of March’, including Sándor Petöfi & Kossúth (front)

It is not my intention here to provide a detailed narrative of the events of the ‘Ides of March’ and the 1848 Revolution here, but my purpose is rather to highlight the role of the liberal movements in it. The Battyány government which moved to Pest on 14 April, was a coalition. The ‘court’ minister was Prince Pál Eszterházy, an experienced conservative diplomat. Lázár Mészáros, a hussar general appointed as minister for war, was politically unaffiliated, as was Széchenyi, who overcame his scepticism about Kossúth and his radical faction to become Minister of Communication and Public Works. The moderate liberals were represented by Deák, Minister of Justice, and Gábor Klauzál (Agriculture and Industry), the radicals by Kossúth (Finance) and Bertalan Szemere (Interior). The ‘centralist’ Liberals were represented by Eötvös (Education & Ecclesiastical Affairs). This was a government ‘of all the talents’ in William Pitt’s famous phrase, and one which remained in office longer than any other of the revolutionary administrations created in Europe in 1848. It was Hungary’s first modern government.

However, the Hungarian liberal constitution was silent on the subject of the collective rights of national minorities and established Magyar as the only language of legislation and administration in the country, thus denying any corporate rights, which were considered to be vestiges of the feudal past. Following the June elections, the Hungarian Parliament convened on 5 July. Nearly a quarter of its members had been deputies in the previous diet, and the electors seemed to acknowledge the political expertise and former services of the ‘liberal nobility’. Besides a handful of conservatives and about forty of the radicals, the overwhelming majority supported the government.

The execution of Lajos Batthány: a lithograph by Louis Noeli. Batthány, the ‘president’ of the Hungarian republican government was a great but enlightened landowner who supported measured opposition and progress through compromise. His execution was a juridical absurdity, the product of intimidation and vengeance.

The revolution was followed by a ‘War of Liberation’ or ‘War of Independence’ against the Austrian emperor in a year-long struggle which ended in October 1849 when the Hungarian Army was finally defeated by the Imperial Army, bolstered by Russian troops. Hungary’s fight for independence won the goodwill of the world, including the United States President. Hungarian emigrants and refugees were received with open arms by the Western liberal democracies, many of whom were themselves involved in a broad struggle with autocracy in the revolutions which swept across Europe in 1848.

The ‘bourgeois’ Revolutionary leader Lajos Kossúth was welcomed in New York, Washington and in Britain. The contemporary English poet, Matthew Arnold, penned his praises to the ‘liberal’ Hungarian leaders of 1848-49:

Hungarians! Save the World!

Renew the stories

Of men who against hope repelled the chain

And make the world’s dead spirit leap again! 

Even twenty-five years after the defeat of the Revolution, the English poet Charles Swinburne described Kossúth as the Star of the unsetting sunset, though some contemporary conservative Hungarian politicians saw him as an irresponsible radical, particularly when he opposed their Compromise with the Habsburg autocracy as “treason” in 1867. He and his fellow radicals may not always have described themselves as ‘liberals’, but this is certainly what they were in the context of European history and historiography of the period.

The Kossúth Memorial Statue in New York (1928). In the USA, the aura Kossúth obtained through his personal tour following defeat in the War of Independence was revived through the emigration that carried waves of human beings to the New World by the turn of the century. Though this emigration was chiefly rooted in economic factors, it was invigorated by patriotic nostalgia, the “1848 state of mind” and the Kossúth ‘cult’.

Neo-Absolutism & The Compromise, 1849-1869:

Political opinion in Hungary during the years of neo-absolutism which followed the War of Independence was highly stratified, with a number of competing visions about the future of the country. There was certainly a minority willing to co-operate in the creation and operation of the institutions of the new régime. The ‘old conservative’ aristocrats, the dominant figures in the government in the mid-1840s certainly did not sympathise with the vision of the new imperial leaders in Vienna, while the ‘centralist’ Liberals, while deeply pessimistic about the fight for the full liberal programme of the Age of Reform, were also abhorred by the Habsburg repression. Whereas Kemény, in his pamphlet After the Revolution (1850) and as editor of the still influential political weekly Pesti Hírlap, urged Hungarians to return to the programme of Széchenyi, Eötvös made efforts to point out to Vienna that the ‘European necessity’ of a large state in the middle of the continent could only be fulfilled by the Habsburg monarchy if the existing historic rights were adjusted to the unity of the monarchy (through federation), and other ethnic and linguistic rights were also satisfied within that framework through the granting of autonomies.

As an archetypal ‘Central European liberal’, Eötvös used his experience of competing nationalisms to enrich the views of contemporary Western liberals like Lord Acton on the inevitable tension between the ideals of liberty and equality. The ‘dominant ideas’ of the nineteenth century, Eötvös suggested, caused so much suffering because they were misinterpretations of the true notions of liberty, equality and nationality. They were all mistaken for the idea of sovereignty, which bred conflict, whereas rightly conceived they were merely devices to protect the integrity and ensure the self-fulfilment of the individual. Instead of popular sovereignty, based on the wrong ‘dominant ideas’, it was civil liberties, primarily the right of association, that would effectively safeguard the individual and the group (including ethnic groups) against the modern nation-state.

The Hungarian delegation that negotiated the Compromise with the Austrian Emperor in January and February 1867 was headed by Count Gyula Andrássy, who enjoyed the full confidence of Ferenc Deák and Hungarian liberals as well as the royal couple, even though his name was on the list of émigrés hanged in effigy in the aftermath of 1849. Having returned to Hungary in 1857, he was an experienced politician, with an instinctive skill for brilliant improvision. Andrássy was appointed Prime Minister in February 1867. Liberal commoners, as well as aristocratic magnates, were represented in his ministry, Hungary’s third. Contemporaneously, the Austrian Emperor and court well understood that the Compromise was arguably the only way to preserve its great power status. In Hungary too, it was seen by many as the only way to secure the country’s survival. After all, three out of every ten of the imperial democratic corps and four out of ten of the Dual Monarchy’s foreign ministers were subjects of the Hungarian crown. It is therefore not surprising that Hungarian nationalists were dazzled by the prospect of governing the half of the empire whose economic and demographic dynamism might soon shift the balance of power in their favour and might even compel the Habsburg dynasty to remove its main residence and seat of power from Vienna to Budapest.

The Rise of Hungarian Liberalism, 1870-1890:

The historical tarot card game: a painting by Arthur Ferraris. Under the portrait of Ferenc Deák are Kálmán Tisza (1830-1902) and the players participating in the ‘general’s’ game, including Károly Eötvös (1842-1916), the lawyer and author who successfully defended the Jews of Tiszaeszlár who were charged with the “ritual murder of children”, Mór Jókai  (1825-1904), the well-known author of prose fiction and MP. Kálmán Tisza was prime minister from 1875 to 1890, an unprecedented period in office. During this period, major political issues were settled not in parliament but at casino tables, and the political and intellectual élites were not yet separate entities.

An element of Hungary’s past cherished among liberals was the supposed parallel between the constitutional development of Hungary and that of Britain. These parallels go back at least to the time of Magna Carta, which preceded the Golden Bull of Andrew II by a mere seven years. I have written more about these links and parallels in an earlier series of articles on this site. They were popularised from the end of the eighteenth century in Hungary. At the level of domestic policy, one convincing argument in favour of the Compromise was that for the two leading nations of the Habsburg Monarchy it did represent a shift from absolutist government to liberal representative democracy, albeit with all its flaws, and for the bulk of Hungarian liberals some of these shortcomings made it more attractive than potential alternatives. Some of these limitations derived from the nature and basis of liberalism in Hungary. At its inception, it had been a ‘liberalism of noblemen’, largely directed to offset or moderate the effects of capitalist development in a predominantly rural society, priorities reflected in the way in which the dismantling of feudalism had taken place during and after the Age of Reform and the Revolution of 1848. Relations of dependence and hierarchy and traditional respect for authority were preserved in social attitudes. As Kontler has pointed out:

Liberal equality remained a fiction even within the political élite. The Compromise, which was, after all, a conservative step, checked whatever emancipationist momentum Hungarian liberalism still had. It became increasingly confined to the espousal of free enterprise, the introduction of modern infrastructure and, with considerable delay, to the secularisation of the public sphere and the regulation of state-church relations. Political power remained in the hands of the traditional élite, with which newcomers were assimilated, with roughly eighty per cent of MPs permanently drawn from the landowning classes. 

The franchise only extended to about six per cent of the population throughout the period, was acceptable at the beginning but anachronistic by 1884, the year by which Britain had achieved Universal Manhood Suffrage. Most districts remained under the patrimony of local potentates and political groups, elections were rigged and there was large-scale patronage at all levels of administration. Kontler’s view is that, if Hungary’s constitutional liberty resembled that of Britain during the time of Kalmán Tisza’s premiership from 1875 to 1890, it mainly represented the Britain of Robert Walpole’s ‘whig oligarchy’ of a century and a half earlier. Yet since the Hungarian Parliament was a largely independent institution under the crown, Hungary’s constitution was freer than that of any state east of the Rhine. In addition, there was a conspicuous case of the amalgam of liberal and conservative principles and motives was the regulation of county and municipal self-government (1870). The county and municipal assemblies were acknowledged as the legitimate bodies of political discussion outside the parliament. They were entitled to address national political issues at their sessions, to make their resolutions on these issues public, to petition the government on these issues or to remonstrate against measures they deemed illegal or unsatisfactory.

The Royal Family at Gödöllö – a lithograph, 1871. Queen Elizabeth was glad to stay in Buda after the Compromise and coronation of in 1867, and especially at Gödöllö, rebuilt as a royal summer residence.

The most unequivocally liberal in spirit and letter was the 1868 law on elementary schooling, worked out by Eötvös. The appalling literacy statistics (in 1869, 59 per cent of the male and 79 per cent of the female population over the age of six were illiterate) made new legislation urgent. Elementary education for children between the ages of six and twelve was made compulsory and was to be obtained in the mother tongue. Schools were established in every locality with over thirty school-age children and there was also provision for ‘higher elementary’ education, until the age of fifteen. Over the following two decades, more than three thousand new schools were added to the nearly fourteen thousand already existing. The proportion of school attendance increased from 50% to 81%, and illiteracy dropped to 34% among men and 53% among women.

The Tisza era saw significant ‘anti-liberal’ trends emerge in parliament, though they didn’t constitute a menace to either the Tisza government or the ascendancy of the Liberal Party. One of these was political anti-Semitism, which emerged as a nascent political party which had the potential to overtake the Independence Party by targeting its voters, those who had lost out in capitalist development, a process which seemed to benefit the Jewish middle classes. Largely through immigration from Galicia and Moravia, from a modest 83,000, or one per cent of the population at the beginning of the century, the Jewish population of Hungary rose to five million or five per cent by the eve of the First World War. Immigrant Jews established family wealth by trading in corn, wood and wool. ; their sons turned it to interest in credit institutions or industrial assets, and the grandsons of the most successful bought into the titular aristocracy. They were a tiny minority among a mass of small businessmen and professionals, and they represented no competition to the livelihood of the genteel classes, which considered the civil service as the only respectable form of employment. Nevertheless, the foreignness and capitalist success of the Jews made them viable scapegoats in the eyes of an ailing gentry, in spite of the fact that they assimilated and supported the idea of the Hungarian nation-state with great enthusiasm.

“PANEMI!”  (BREAD!) – a painting by Imre Révész (1859-1945), 1899. Following the liberation of the serfs in 1848, agrarian society in Hungary became profoundly segmented, and the land was very disproportionately distributed. Hundreds of thousands of village people emigrated, and agrarian-socialist movements were established. Despite technological innovation in agriculture elsewhere, in Hungary harvesting by hand remained the sole method until the mid-twentieth century.

At the height of the anti-Semitic agitation, in 1883, an Anti-Semitic Party was established, the stake being nothing less than bringing down Tisza, who was motivated by his liberal convictions and ties with the Jewish community to take a firm stand against the movement and the new party. The Independence Party resisted the temptation to join forces with the anti-Semites, who figured badly in the 1884 elections, and having been discredited by the outcome of a blood libel case, disappeared from the political scene by the end of the decade. The fall of Tisza was finally precipitated by his inability to work out a compromise on the reform of the defence forces. He had held the office of PM for fifteen years; in the following fifteen years, Hungary had seven PMs, struggling ever more helplessly to cope with the same problems. Even after his fall, Tisza remained as a dominant figure in the Liberal Party, convinced that the maintenance of ‘dualism’ was the only chance for the survival of historic Hungary with its many national and ethnic minorities. Regarded as stubborn, Tisza was a politician of stature and integrity unknown in Hungary since the eras of reform and revolution. Among the traditional élite, he might have been alone in recognising the full relevance of industrialisation and capitalism. His traditionalism, the paternalistic and aristocratic brand of liberalism he inherited from his father led him to turn to ‘disciplining’ the Hungarian people and awakening them to an awareness of where their true interests lay, in the consolidation of dualism.

The Decline & Death of Liberal Hungary, 1890-1914:

The limited liberal thrust of Tisza’s policies continued in the 1890s under the administrations of his former associates, Gyula Szapáry and Sándor Wekerle.

It was under the Wekerle and Szapáry governments that the reform of church-state relations was carried out. In Hungary, only a minority of the Catholic clergy was imbued with the spirit of the Christian Socialist movement associated with Pope Leo XIII. However, even the reformist Pope opposed the contemplated separation of Church and state in an encyclical specifically devoted to Hungary. The Church was also backed by a profoundly religious ruler in Franz Josef (seen at prayer on the right), who considered the Church one of the strongest pillars of the monarchy. It successfully resisted innovations that had been introduced in most of the western European countries a few decades earlier: civil marriages, state registrations of births and deaths, freedom of conscience and affiliation and the acceptance of Judaism as a ‘received’ faith.  Against a background of intensive public interest and heated debates in parliament, these reforms were finally introduced in 1894 and 1895 and became outstanding pieces of liberal legislation in Hungary. Following this high-water mark, however, when in 1903, the Habsburg ruler turned to István Tisza to secure the continuation of the dualist system, a faction of the Liberal Party led by Andrássy the younger left the government party and joined forces with the coalition of the parliamentary opposition determined to ‘improve’ that system. The ensuing violence in parliament led to its dissolution and in the January 1905 election, the coalition headed by Ferenc Kossúth, son of Lajos and leader of the Independence Party, gained a substantial majority.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Social Democratic Party also gained in influence, thanks to the talented orator Dezső Bokányi and intellectuals like Ervin Szabó, an original Marxist theorist of international stature. The latter kept close links with the most articulate of all those challenging the régime including the radical democrats, who ‘raised their standard’ in the social science journal Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), launched in 1900, and in the Society for Social Science, founded in the following year. The group, whose ranks included a number of young assimilated Jews, argued on the basis of social Darwinism and Marxist sociology in favour of universal suffrage, the elimination of ‘feudal’ remnants and the promotion of the co-operative movement among the peasantry, democratic local self-government, the extension of the nationalities law, educational reform and improved insurance schemes. They had a broad network of sympathisers from dissident Independentists through to the Galilei Circle of university students and Freemasons to respected literary figures like the prophetic poet Endre Ady. They did not emerge as a distinct political party until 1914, but their programme had already been conceived by 1907 and published by their leader Oszkár Jászi in his article Towards a New Hungary, foreshadowing the ideas in his scholarly thesis of 1912 on the nationality question: that there was a way to reconcile national independence and democratic progress, ‘the Hungarian idea and free thinking’, in the historic state transformed through reform into a ‘brotherhood of nations’.

However, the dated and old-fashioned liberalism of the previous generations defied the democratic challenge, and the progressive coalition collapsed. Some of the leaders and most of the supporters of the Independence Party, frustrated by the failure of the government to achieve the ‘national goals’, had already been alienated by 1909. The party split under the leadership of Ferenc Kossúth. In January 1910, Wekerle was forced to step down, to be replaced by the old Liberal Khuen-Héderváry. István Tisza re-emerged on the political scene at the head of a party consisting mainly of haute bourgeois and land-owning supporters of the former Liberal Party. His new National Party of Work won a convincing victory in what turned out to be the last elections in the Hungary of the dualist period in June 1910. Obstruction in parliament began again, and Tisza concluded that the strengthening of dualism and of historic Hungary as he envisaged it was no longer compatible with observing the ‘niceties of parliamentarism’.

The Parliament House, on the Danube bank on the Pest side of the river, built between 1885 and 1904

His view prevailed in the party of one-time Liberals in the spring of 1912 when Kluen-Héderváry was replaced by László Lukács as PM and Tisza had himself been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. A mass demonstration in the capital against his hardly concealed plans degenerated into street fighting and police and protesters in which six people were wounded on ‘Bloody Thursday’, 23 May.  On 4 June, the new Speaker refused to let the opposition speak, and had its protesting members removed by the police. Similar methods were used in the debate on the rather lightweight electoral reform bill, voted through in April 1913. Tisza had no doubt that there would be a major war between the Habsburg monarchy and its adversaries in the region, and laws were passed which curtailed the freedom of association, assembly and the press, prohibited republican propaganda and made it possible for the government to wield emergency powers. There were few in Hungary who recognised the dilemmas, the traps the country faced on the eve of the First World War in all their depth. As Kontler has written:

On one side of the ideological divide, Endre Ady was the greatest of them all, as he singled out with characteristic acuteness his counterpart on the other: István Tisza. In the troublesome summer of 1914, the ‘deranged man of Geszi’, as Ady called the Prime Minister after the seat of the Tisza estate, hesitated for two weeks, but in the end he gave his sanction to decisions that made inevitable the war which ultimately demolished historic Hungary in a way unwanted by any of its Hungarian critics.  

By the outbreak of the war, Tisza had effectively halted the forward march of Liberal democracy in Hungary. It didn’t resume on a continuous basis until the last decade of the twentieth century.

Sources (in addition to those fully referenced in the text):

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Jewish-Christian relations in the time of the first churches:

The penultimate chapter in the ancient history of Jerusalem has to do with the relations between Jews and Christians in the mid-first century. Despite the fact that many, if not most, of the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth, were, like him, Jews, and although the early church borrowed much from Judaism, Christians were also reacting against it. This resulted in a love-hate relationship. On the one hand, Christians claimed to be the true Israel; on the other, they made light of many of the distinctive features of the ‘chosen people’ – the law, circumcision, the temple and the Sabbath. Moreover, they took to meeting together in their own houses and adopting other attitudes which were considered anti-social by their Jewish neighbours throughout the Roman Empire. Since Jesus had been executed by a Roman governor under Roman law, local governors had little alternative but to take action when they received complaints. As the century progressed, relations seem to have got worse. One reason was undoubtedly the great pressure under which Judaism suffered as a result of the Jewish war, the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. Christians were looked on as hybrid Jews and were therefore unpopular. Before AD 70, as far as we can tell from ‘listening to the silences’, the Jews showed remarkable restraint. Paul, as an active missionary, found many of them stirring up trouble for him wherever he went, but they were not alone in this, and we need to be wary of Luke’s stereotypes of them, which were written in Acts from an obvious Greek Gentile bias. Paul escaped with his life, and only three martyrdoms were recorded for this period; those of Stephen, James, son of Zebedee, and James, the brother of Jesus.

The first Christian communities which grew up between AD 29 and 65, were in Jerusalem, Samaria, Caesarea and other Palestinian cities and also, largely as a result of Paul’s missionary activities, in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome. At this time the leaders of these communities were mainly Jews and their understanding of the teachings of Jesus was partly coloured by their Jewish inheritance. These communities possessed no Gospels so that their knowledge came from oral traditions; from memories of what Jesus had said and done, passed on by word of mouth in public addresses, instruction classes for new converts and in private discourses and conversations. Some of the deeds and words of Jesus were probably written down quite early, including the parables, the aphorisms and the proclamations of the kingdom of God, almost as they were spoken for the first time. However, for the most part, Christians at this time relied for their knowledge upon the shared memories of those who had known Jesus at first hand.

The message of Jesus as it is presented in the four gospels was written for the newly established churches of the Roman empire, churches stretching from Antioch in Syria to Rome. This was the world of the Gospels as written in the form in which we possess them. They are church books, written in the second half of the first century AD to meet the needs of the early followers of Jesus gathered together out of a pagan environment in their Christian communities. These early churches were not, for the most part, Palestinian, and after AD 70 when the country had been laid waste and Jerusalem destroyed, Christians in Galilee and Judaea must have been few and disorganised. The growing churches were in the great cities of the Graeco-Roman world, Antioch in Syria, Ephesus in Asia Minor (now in south-west Turkey), Corinth, Philippi and Thessalonica in Greece and in Rome itself. The members of these churches were Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Egyptians and Asiatics, though a significant number of Jews also converted to the new religion. These centres of Christianity and these church members were far away in distance from the world Jesus knew and very different from him in culture and upbringing.

Above: The Western or Wailing Wall, the only remnant of the Second Temple rebuilt by King Herod. It once stood on the adjacent Temple Mount and remains the most significant devotional site for Jews, who believe that they are in physical connection with the divine when they pray at it and kiss it.

Nazarene heretics:

By the end of the first century, however, there were growing signs of a clear break between church and synagogue. It may well have been the case that many Jews blamed the Christians for the destruction of Jerusalem, since Vespasian’s reconquest of first Galilee and then Judaea could have been seen as acts of vengeance for the burning of Rome, which Nero had alleged was the work of the Christians. Before AD 70, the Romans drew little distinction between the two alien, Judaistic faiths. To them, they were all the same, troublesome provincial people. It was after this period that the Birkat ham-minim, the ‘Heretic Benediction’ was added to the Eighteen Benedictions: 

May the Nazarenes (Christians) and the minim (heretics) perish as in a moment and be blotted out from the book of life. 

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the gospels, especially that according to Matthew, contain many biased statements against the Jews in general, and that these statements were used to justify anti-Semitism among Christians in the Middle Ages and Early Modern times. All three Synoptic Gospels appear to have been written after Nero’s persecution (AD 64), and all three emphasise the message of a powerful Christ, breaking with Judaism. They were also clearly written after the fall of Jerusalem, to which they all refer (Mark 13. 1-2; Matthew 22. 7; Luke 21. 20). It is necessary, therefore, to disentangle the original message spoken by Jesus in Palestine from the meaning drawn out of it by Christian teachers and the four evangelists. The Christian communities in AD 29-65 had a real zeal for evangelism. They looked outward to a world which desperately needed the message of Jesus, so they were missionary churches. In these years, there was a particular reason why evangelism could not wait. The great decisive moment – the return of Jesus to earth in great power and glory – was, so they believed, imminent. While they waited for the Day of Judgement and Reward the Christians evangelised fervently among mostly pagan peoples. An evangelist needs a message, and therefore the task of separating the original message of Jesus from the later additions and interpretations is difficult and often uncertain.

Above: Portraits of Jesus from Roman-era frescoes to modern forensic reconstruction.

Source: National Geographic, December 2017.

Apocalyptic Poetry:

Remembering that Jesus was a poet with an inward vision and a gift for handling words, using vivid images from everyday life, not abstract arguments helps us to get to the heart of his teaching. It is often a clue to those passages of the Gospels where someone has added an explanation of his words. Poets do not explain their poems. They offer us their vision and leave us to discover the meaning. Jesus is a visionary whose eyes are fixed upon a dramatic future in which the old order of the world will disappear and a new order will take its place:

And then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. (Mark 13. 26f.)

Poets are not usually interested in creating logical systems of thought in which every single part fits the whole. They speak or write about that which at a particular moment captures their imagination and stirs their soul. If we think, for example, of the poet and illustrator William Blake, writing about John Milton, the author of the great epic poems, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, we do not need to demythologise and strip away his powerful, apocalyptic imagery in order to understand his fundamental message in his Jerusalem:

And did the countenance divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among those dark satanic mills?

 

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

 

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green a pleasant land.

The four verses which make up the now well-known hymn, set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1917, first appeared in the preface to one of Blake’s last poem’s, ‘Milton’, which was written in 1804. Underneath them he wrote, would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, quoting Numbers 11.29. In the rest of the poem, the seventeenth-century poet is depicted as returning from eternity and entering into Blake to preach the message of Christ crucified and the doctrines of self-sacrifice and forgiveness. Some of the complex imagery in the poem is borrowed from the Bible, such as the ‘chariots of fire’ which are taken from 2 Kings 2. 11, but much is of Blake’s own invention. In suggesting, in the first verse, that Jesus may have set foot in England, Blake is resurrecting the old legend, and myth, which tells of Jesus’ wanderings as a young man with Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant and member of the Sanhedrin whom Jesus accompanied on a visit to Cornwall. The tale was, at one time, popular with the British Israel movement, which claimed that the British were one of the lost tribes of Israel.

There are two very different interpretations of the main message in ‘And did those feet’. One school of thought regards it as a plea for intuition and imagination in the face of scientific rationalism. From this interpretation, we get the idea that the ‘dark, satanic mills’ represent the cold logical approach of philosophers such as Locke and Bacon that Blake deplored, while Jerusalem represents the ideal life of freedom. The other, more common way of interpreting the poem is as a call for the rule of those social values of social justice and freedom which will build a new Jerusalem in Britain. This message, like that of Jesus himself, has no tidy outward shape but has an inner unity centred upon the proclamation of the kingdom of God. We recognise that inner unity, or message, through the allusions and imagery, without interpreting them as literal events either in the past or the future.

 

 

Much of Jesus’ teaching was directed to the immediate needs and problems of the men and women to whom he talked in small groups in the marketplace, or in large crowds gathered to listen to him. Yet, in all the Gospels there is teaching which seems, on the face of it, to refer to dramatic and even cataclysmic events in the future. Some of these are predictions; forecasts about the future. We have already noted some of these, in particular, his well-known lament over Jerusalem, the Holy City.  (Luke 19. 41-44). This is a terse and vivid prediction of the siege and destruction of the city which began in September AD 70. Since this event took place some forty years after the time of Jesus, it is often argued that such a description of the great catastrophe must have arisen within the early church. However, the prediction does not describe in detail the actual siege of Jerusalem as the Jewish historian Josephus recorded it after the event. The words of Jesus describe a typical siege; a city encircled, siege engines battering at the wall, and so on. Indeed, it took no special insight or vision to predict that if the revolutionary elements continued to resist the government of Judea by violent acts, the Romans would reinforce their troops around Jerusalem.

Did Jesus predict the rejection of Israel as the chosen instrument of God’s purpose? It is clear that this view was held in at least some quarters of the early church. The part played by the Jewish authorities in his arrest, trial and execution; the hostility displayed by some Jews towards the new Christian communities, both played their part in shaping the belief that the ‘Old Israel’ had been rejected and the ‘New Israel’ – the Christian church – had taken its place.This belief has certainly left its mark upon the form in which some of the sayings and parables of Jesus have come down to us. In Matthew 23 there is a sustained and bitter condemnation of the Pharisees and scribes. This was certainly put together in its present form by an editor, prefacing the parable of the vineyard as told by Mark (12. 1. 1-11.), and copied by Matthew and Luke. Matthew’s ‘preface’ contains seven accusations against the lawyers and Pharisees, each beginning, ‘Woe to you’ in a recognisable literary form. This is followed by the lament over Jerusalem, the centre of unfaithfulness, killing the prophets and stoning the those who are sent to you (Matthew 23. 13-37.). The evidence of the Gospels as a whole makes clear that Jesus did attack the religious authorities, declaring that they embodied the kind of religion which would soon be rejected.  Whether he predicted the rejection of Israel and Judah as God’s chosen people depends largely on the interpretation of two parables, that of the Vineyard, which I have already referred to, and that of the Marriage Feast, which tells a similar story (Matt. 22. 1-14.). The invited guests make various trivial excuses and refuse to attend the banquet, and their places are taken by people, both bad and good, collected at random by the king’s servants; the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you (Matt.  21. 31). It seems clear that it is not the nation as a whole which is rejected but the religious leaders, the scribes and the Pharisees.

Another controversial question is whether Jesus predicted that he would come again in glory; that there would be a final Day of Judgement and an end of the world. This was a belief strongly held by Christians during the early years of the first century (1 Thess. 5. 1-11; II Thess. 1. 5-12). The belief waned as the years went by, but in medieval times it gained great popularity. The belief finds expression in Mark 13 and is expanded in Matt. 24-25 and in Luke 21. 5-36. Here the predicted events are dramatic and terrifying  – wars, earthquakes, famine and persecution, the rise of bogus messiahs and false prophets precede the appearance of Christ as judge of the world. There is a different picture in Luke, who uses a third source. Men and women are going about their daily routine when, suddenly, like a flash of lightning, the Day of the Son of Man is upon them. This teaching from the Gospels and Epistles is known as eschatology and uses language which is largely alien to our ‘western’, scientific way of thinking. Many Christians ignore this element in the New Testament, and some biblical scholars deny that Jesus ever thought in these terms, or that he expected his own second coming. Eschatological thinking arises when there is a contradiction between the harsh realities of life and man’s faith in God’s power and justice. In this kind of situation, The words of Paul (depicted below) in Romans VIII were meant to comfort and console…

… the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us (Rom 8. 18).

Eschatological teaching therefore brings hope to men, and when present sufferings are severe then the hope of a glorious future is often expressed in imaginative pictures. Sometimes the language is both poetic and pastoral, as in Isaiah’s prophecies about the coming of the Messiah (11.7). Sometimes it is dramatic, ‘technicoloured’ language to match the drama of the moment, like in the Book of Daniel:

Behold, with the clouds of heaven,

there came one like a son of man,

and he came to the Ancient of Days

 and was presented before him.

And to him was given dominion 

and glory and kingdom

that all Peoples, nations and languages

should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,

which shall not pass away, 

and his kingdom one

that shall not be destroyed 

(Dan. 7. 13 f.)

It was natural that the first Christians, often isolated from the rest of their fellow citizens because of their faith, usually under suspicion, taunted for worshipping a crucified Saviour, and at times persecuted, should rest their hopes on Christ’s return to power and glory. They believed that this hope was founded upon the teaching of Jesus, and they made collections of sayings which supported their faith and included them in their church books – the Gospels.

In the final months and weeks of his life, Jesus knew that his enemies would turn the full force of their power against him, but he also he was alarmed and sorrowful at the political situation of his nation. He knew that armed rebellion could only end in national disaster. Yet his faith in the purposes of God and in the realities of God’s kingship did not waver. Whether or not he believed in his own ‘second coming’, he knew that he had been chosen by God to fulfil a particular role in history. The sayings and parables which he used when he thought about the future were his way of expressing his confident faith in God’s undefeated purpose. He expressed his hope for the future in vivid and dramatic language, that of a poet dreaming dreams and seeing visions.

 

The Book of Revelation, to many the most enigmatic in the New Testament, was written in a similarly poetic and visionary form by a certain ‘John the Divine’ (depicted above) in exile on Patmos, possibly during the Domitian persecution. It is full of a bitter hatred of Rome, but although the author was in exile, he had not suffered a particularly harsh penalty, and his banishment did not even include the loss of property or other rights, as one might expect had Patmos been a penal colony. His one reference to past martyrdom, the mention of Antipas, gives no details of how he met his end. Recent persecution seems to have been more limited and local: John’s fears are for the future. Domitian was despotic, like Caligula before him, but his main anti-Christian actions, against prominent citizens, were taken on the grounds that ‘they had slipped into Jewish customs’. The main threat to Christianity in the New Testament period came from the hostility or malice of the people among whom they lived, whether Greeks, Romans or Jews. Tertullian commented that…

… if the Tiber rises too high or the Nile too low, the cry is: “The Christians to the lion”. 

(to be continued…)

 

Over the past year, as the tide of inter-continental migration has battered onto Europe’s eastern shores and frontiers, not least at Hungary’s new steel curtain, government and opposition spokesmen in Britain have made much of Britain’s proud record of coming to the aid of refugees, largely as means of defending the country over its failure to rescue those in the Eastern Mediterranean who would rather risk their lives crossing from Turkey than go without hope for themselves and their families in the overcrowded, makeshift camps on the borders of Iraq and Syria. Today, 15 March, marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the civil war in Syria, so that the refugee problem in the region has now lasted almost as long as that experienced in Eastern Europe in the Second World War.

Of course, Europe’s refugee problems of the inter-war period did not begin in 1939. Already in 1936 there were large numbers of refugees from fascism leaving both Spain and Germany. The capacity of the British people to welcome children, in particular, from the Basque country and Nazi Germany, in the wake of the bombing of Guernica and Kiristallnacht in 1938, has become legendary, the efforts of the Quakers and individuals like Nicholas Winton in the transport and settlement of the young ones especially so. This was at a time when Britain was experiencing its own internal migration crisis, with millions of miners and shipyard workers moving south and east from valleys and estuaries where traditional industries had suddenly come to a halt. Only from 1938, with rearmament, did the human exodus, bringing half a million workers and their families from south Wales alone since 1920, begin to slow. Government support for the distressed areas, which it renamed ‘Special Areas’ in 1936, had been grudging, and it was only at that time that they began to support the migration of whole families and communities which had been underway for more than a decade, organised by the migrants themselves.

Then when we look at what the British governments themselves did to help the Jewish populations to reach safety in Palestine, a very different story emerges, and one which present-day ministers would do well to remember. I’ve been reading Anna Porter’s book, Kasztner’s Train, which gives a quite comprehensive survey of the organised attempts at exodus by those trying to escape from the holocaust which began engulfing them as soon as the Nazis invaded Poland. Their determination to reach their ancient homeland had been articulated by the Budapest-born founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, six-score years ago, when he wrote in The Jewish State in 1896:

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency… We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral state remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence… We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfillment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.  

Above: Hungary and Central-Eastern Europe in the Second World War

Rezső Kasztner was born a decade later (1906), in Kolozsvár, then in Hungary, now Cluj in Romania, as it was after its annexation after the Paris Peace Treaties of 1918-21 until its re-awarding to Hungary by Hitler in 1938. The idea that the Jews one day return to Palestine attracted Kasztner to Zionism as a young teenager, even before he had read Herzel’s writing. When he did, he could accept Herzel’s foretelling of the disasters of National Socialism under Hitler because he had also read Mein Kampf, in its first German edition. Like David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive in Palestine, Kasztner realised that if Hitler came to power, the Jewish people would bear the brunt of the war which would follow.

Above: The Division of The Middle East by the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Palestine had been the one sure destination for Jews fleeing from Europe, but, as German enthusiasm for Jewish emigration grew in the early years of the Reich, so did Arab resistance to Jewish immigration. The sporadic riots that began in 1936 soon culminated in a full-scale Arab rebellion against British rule over Jewish immigration. About six hundred Jews and some British soldiers were killed, with thousands more wounded. The British government’s priority was to protect the Suez Canal, the jugular vein of the Empire, as it was described by contemporaries, was determined to appease the Islamic in its north African colonies, and so commissioned a  White Paper on a new policy for Palestine to replace that determined by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement. Its effect was to limit Jewish immigration to twelve thousand people per year. Peace with the Arabs was to be of greater strategic importance as world war threatened than peace with the small number of Jewish settlers in Palestine and the powerless, if still wealthy, Jewish population of Europe. The British authorities soon amended the numbers to a maximum of a hundred thousand immigrants over five years, to include ‘refugees’ who arrived without proper entry certificates, but after 1941 the Palestinian Arabs would have the right to veto any further Jewish immigration.

Compared with the numbers under threat from the tidal waves of anti-Semitism sweeping across Europe, in Hungary from the enacting of a stronger version of its first Anti-Jewish Law in 1938, the numbers to be admitted to Palestine by the British were pitifully small. In the pages of Új Kelét (New East), Kasztner’s Hungarian-Jewish newspaper in Kolozsvár, he thundered out the headline Perfidious Albion. In exchange for political expediency, Britain had shut the gate to the only land still open to the Jews. Winston Churchill, still in the ‘wilderness’, accused the British government of setting aside solid engagements for the sake of a quiet life. He charged it with giving in to threats from an Arab population that had been increasing at a rate faster than Jewish immigration:

We are now asked to submit to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and fascist propaganda.

Refugees from Poland, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany itself poured over the borders of both Hungary and Transylvania, with only the clothes they were wearing. There were no rules to control the fleeing Jews, though some of the border guards made it difficult even for ethnic Hungarian Jews, insisting that they should recite to prove that they were ‘genuine’ Christian refugees, and not ‘just Jews’. Despite specific prohibitions from the Budapest government on the provision of aid to the refugees, Kasztner set up an information centre in Kolozsvár. He elicited help from local charitable organisations, providing temporary accommodation, food and clothing, but his main concern was to provide the Jewish refugees with safe destinations. He sent telegrams to the Jewish Agency in Tel Aviv, asking for help and funds to buy passages on ships and to pay bribes to local officials. The Agency’s staff were restricted by the British administration as to how far they could assist, especially in respect of how many visas they could issue according to the imposed limits. These were never enough, so they secretly began encouraging illegal immigration. The Agency had already set up an office in Geneva to monitor the situation in Europe, and it soon began to help with both legal and illegal migrants. Following the British White Paper, all Yishuv leaders had been supporting illegal immigration to Palestine, or aliya bet, as it was known.

To help Jews escape from the increasingly dangerous situation in Europe, the Jewish Agency paid the going rate for the passage of forty-five ships between 1937 and 1939. In 1939 alone, thirty ships, legal and illegal, sailed through the Black Sea ports through the Bosphorus and on to Palestine. Kastner obtained exit visas from the Romanian government, despite the efforts of the British to persuade Romanian  officials not to allow the departure of the overcrowded boats. He was certain that the British would have to allow the refugees to land once they arrived at the harbour in Haifa. Of course, both officials and shipowners were willing to take part in this lucrative trade in ‘people smuggling’, selling passages from the Romanian port of Constanta to Istanbul and then on to Palestine. Refugees set out down the Danube, from ports on the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.

Once the immigration quota for 1941 was filled, the British began their blockade of Palestine, fearing an all-out Arab revolt in the Middle East and North Africa. Several ships carrying illegal immigrants were apprehended by the Royal Navy. Conditions on these ships were so squalid that some people who had escaped from Nazi persecution at home now opted for suicide by water. The refugees who managed to reach Palestine were herded into detention camps. Those with valid passports were sent back to their countries of origin, where many were later murdered by the Nazis, or deported to concentration camps. A few thousand had been sent to Mauritius in late October 1940, and several thousand had ended up in Shanghai, where no-one had even thought of setting immigration limits, and where full-scale war did not break out until after Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

On one ship, the Atlantic, a group of Jewish saboteurs, members of the Haganah (the Jewish ‘underground’ whose members undertook illegal operations, including immigration), decided to disable the vessel so that the British could not force it to leave Palestinian waters. Inadvertently, they  caused an explosion which killed 260 people on board, many of them women and children. To make sure that would-be immigrants were aware of the dangers facing them on a sea crossing, the BBC reported the casualties, the deaths, and the redirecting of ships. Not wishing to incite the sympathy of the British people for the plight of the refugees, however, the officials made sure that the details were only included in broadcasts to the Balkans and eastern Europe.

Kasztner arrived in Budapest in the Spring of 1941. He continued to focus on his political contacts, working to gain sympathy for renewed emigration to Palestine even though Britain kept the borders and ports closed. Jewish emigration was not expressly forbidden by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler until late October 1941. The Palestine Office was on Erzsébet Boulevard, near the National Theatre. When Kasztner first went there, he met a group of young Zionist pioneers, or halutzim, from Slovakia, who wanted everyone to hear about the brutal deportations they had witnessed. Only a few young people tried to escape: they had heard stories from the Polish refugees, and they suspected a fate that their parents refused to believe. They hid in closets, cellars, and lofts, or in bushes along the riverbanks. They found the Hungarian border during the night.

In the Palestine Office, desperate people waited to hear if they were on the lists of those who had been chosen for the few Palestine entry tickets that were still available. Kasztner wondered if there would be more certificates, now that most of the offices in other countries had closed, or, as was the case in Warsaw, been closed by the Germans. Surely the British would open the borders to Palestine now that Europe was in flames? 

Not until the case of the ss Struma, however, did British policy toward Jewish refugees receive worldwide attention. An old, marginally refurnished, British-built yacht, the Struma had set out from Constanta in Romania in December 1941 with 769 Jewish refugees on board. The Greek shipowner had sold tickets for the voyage at exorbitant prices, aware that few ships would risk the voyage and that, for most of the passengers, the Struma offered their last, best chance to survive. The vessel arrived at Istanbul with a broken engine, the passengers crowded together with barely enough room to sit and no fresh water, food, sanitation, or medicine for the ailing children or those suffering from dysentery.

The ship remained in Istanbul for two months, during which time no-one was allowed to disembark or board, though the Jewish Agency succeeded in distributing food and water. The British government had put pressure on the Turks to block the ship’s entry and to prevent it leaving for Palestine. There was some discussion about lifting the women and children off the ship, followed by an exchange of cables involving the Foreign Office, the Turks, the Jewish Agency and the governments of the USA, Romania and the Reich. Eventually, the ship was towed out of the harbour. An explosion ripped open the hull, and the ship sank. There was a solitary survivor. Whether the explosion was the result of a bomb on board or a Soviet torpedo, all those familiar with the story at the time blamed Britain’s intransigence. On the walls of the Jewish areas of Palestine, posters appeared bearing the photograph of Sir Harold MacMichael and the words:

Known as High Commissioner for Palestine, WANTED FOR THE MURDER of 800 refugees.

Great Britain had declared war on Hungary on 7 December 1941, the same day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Tied to Japan by the Tri-Power Act, Hitler had declared war on the United States on 11 December. The next day, the American ambassador departed from Budapest, as the US no longer regarded Hungary as an independent nation, though it did not formally declare war until June 1942. The fate of Hungary’s Jews, and those of the rest of Europe, was then effectively in the hands of the Third Reich, as was the fate of Hungary itself. Nevertheless, by February 1942, an anti-Fascist front in the guise of the the Hungarian Historical Memorial Committee had come into being. It first step was a mass rally on 15 March, the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848-9 Revolutionary War, at the Petöfi monument in Budapest, demanding independence and a democratic Hungary.

In January 1942, Hungarian military units had executed more than three thousand civilians in the recently occupied parts of Yugoslavia, the Délvidék, or southern lands, as Hungarians referred to those territories which had been awarded to Yugoslavia by the Treaty of Trianon. Those ‘executed’ included 140 children, who, according to one of the commanding officers, “could grow up to be enemies”. A third of the victims, it was estimated, were ethnic Hungarian Jews, who it was claimed had joined the Serbian partisans. A military tribunal was held to decide who was to blame for this atrocity, but not before the guilty commanders were able to find refuge in Germany. The flood of refugees into Hungary now included Jews from the Délvidék, who arrived with terrible tales of mass executions: people had been thrown into the icy waters of the Danube , those in charge continuing the killings even after receiving orders to stop.

However, even amidst harsh discriminatory laws, which made mixed-marriages illegal and denounced ‘inter-racial’ sexual relations as a crime of defamation of race, the lives of most Jews in Hungary were not in immediate danger until 1944. As a result of this, about a hundred thousand Jews sought and found refuge in Hungary from Slovakia, Romania and Croatia, where they had been exposed to pogroms and deportation to death camps from early 1942 onwards. They joined the Polish Jews who had taken refuge in the capital at the beginning of the war.

In hindsight, it is surprising that the extermination camps were not anticipated in Budapest and elsewhere. As early as July 1941, Göring had issued a directive for the implementation of the Final Solution. The Wannsee Conference had also taken place in January 1942, at which ‘Hangman Heydrich’ had boasted openly that that Solution involved eleven million Jews, all of whom would be selected for hard labour, most of whom would die through natural dimunition, the rest of them being killed. The President of the Jewish Council in Budapest, Samuel Stern, an anti-Zionist, remained confident that these terrible stories were isolated incidents. Scientifically regulated extermination facilities were impossible to imagine. He told Kasztner:

In the months to come, we may be left without money and comforts, but we shall survive.

Why, after all, would the Germans sacrifice men, transportation and scarce resources to murder unarmed civilians with no means of defending themselves? Nevertheless, The Times in London reported from Paris that four thousand Jewish children had been deported to a Nazi concentration camp. In the House of Commons, Churchill gave a scathing address, broadcast by the BBC, and heard throughout Budapest:

The most senseless of their offences… is the mass deportation of Jews from France, with the pitiful horrors attendant on the calculated and final scattering of families. This tragedy illustrates… the utter degradation of the Nazi nature and theme.

At the end of 1942, there was still hope that refugees could slip through the German dragnet in exchange for bribes and, if the Hungarians allowed free passage for boats down the Danube, they could find a passage to Palestine from one of the Black Sea ports. The Jewish Agency in Palestine issued a statement condemning Britain’s breach of faith with the Jewish people:

It is in the darkest hour of Jewish history that the British government proposes to deprive Jews of their last hope and close the road back to their Homeland.

The British government refused to budge. In fact, as some Zionist leaders continued to support illegal immigration, it tightened the conditions for emigration to Palestine, declaring that from that point onwards, all illegal immigrants would be carefully deducted from the overall ‘legal’ quota totals. At the same time, the UK demanded that neutral nations, such as Portugal and Turkey, deny Jews transit to Palestine, and that their ships should stop delivering them to any port close to Palestine. The Foreign Office began to seek other settlement opportunities for the refugees in Australasia, Africa and South America, but without success. Ottó Komoly told Kasztner that there was…

…strong evidence to suggest that the British would rather see us all perish than grant one more visa for that benighted land. It’s a protectorate only because they want to protect it from us.

Despite mounting evidence of the persecution of Jews under the Third Reich, the British government adhered to its established limits on Jewish immigration throughout 1943. Neutral nations, such as Switzerland and Portugal did not want more Jews crossing their borders. Both the US and Britain tried to persuade Portugal to accept a sizable Jewish settlement in Angola, and they agreed to bribe the Dominican Republic with three thousand dollars per head, but neither of these measures could help alleviate the magnitude of the problem.

It was only in January 1944 that the United States created the War Refugee Board, charged with taking all measures within its power to rescue victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war. Even then, visas were often denied on the basis that the applicants had relatives in enemy countries, though most of them were, if still alive, on their way to the gas chambers by this time. Two affidavits of support and sponsorship were also required from “reputable American citizens”, attached to each application. It would have been difficult to invent a more restrictive set of rules. A joke was making the rounds in Budapest at the time:

A Jew goes into the US Consulate to ask for a visa. He is told to come back in 2003. “In the morning,” he asks, “or in the afternoon?”

Above: Apostág Synagogue, Bács-Kiskun County.

 

In any case, the setting up by the US of its War Refugee Board was too little, too late. On 19 March 1944, the Reich occupied Hungary, and Adolf Eichmann was put in charge of its primary objective – the annihilation of the Jews of Hungary and its surrounding territories. Within three months, the entire Jewish population from the rural areas, some 440,000 souls, had been deported, mainly to Auschwitz.

The fate of the Budapest Jews, another 250,000, swelled by the refugees from other countries of central-eastern Europe, hung in the balance. Samuel Stern accepted, reluctantly, that the Zionists and Kasztner were right and he was wrong. Their only guarantee of survival was to buy their way out of the city and onto trains which would begin their journey to Palestine, whatever the British may say or do. Of course, we shall never know what would have happened had the Allies acted sooner to set up a proper system to enable the refugees to find asylum and eventually resettlement, most – though perhaps not all – of them in Palestine or the USA. However, whatever the generosity shown by ordinary people towards refugees, it is clear that governments have a responsibility to act on behalf of the victims of war and persecution. Now we have supra-national governments and international organisations, can we apply these lessons?

Sources:

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train. London: Constable.

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing.

 

1916: The Battle of Verdun

After a bombardment using a million shells, a hundred thousand German troops attacked the French city of Verdun. Rather than a full-frontal attack, small groups of stormtroopers went forward into action with flame-throwers and grenades. The Germans gained the upper hand and took the large fort of Douaumont on 25 February  without a shot being fired. German church bells were rung and a holiday granted in celebration.

The bloody battle continued through the spring and summer and into the autumn; Douaumont was recaptured almost eight months to the day after it was taken. German general Erich von Falkenhayn had claimed the siege of the city would ‘bleed the French white’, but the casualties were high on both sides; the French lost 540,000 lives, and the Germans 430,000. After the Battle of Verdun, the Germans did not undertake another large-scale offensive on the Western Front until the spring of 1918.

Two-thirds of the whole French Army took part in the battle. General Nivelle’s memorable Order of the Day issued on 23 June was:

Vous ne les laisserez pas passer, mes comrades.

(You shall not let them pass, my comrades.)

It is estimated that a hundred thousand corpses lie under the battlefield to this day.

Introduction of Conscription in Britain

Meanwhile, the Military Service Act brought military conscription into force in March, for the first time in British history. All single men aged between 18 and 41 were eligible for call-up (married men were included from May and in 1918 the upper age limit was increased to 51). Exemptions were granted to those who were unfit, ill, in essential jobs (such as munitions workers, miners and farmers), ministers of religion and those who had a concientious objection to combatant service.

1941: A Transylvanian Jew in Budapest

By the beginning of 1940, most young Jewish men in Hungary were already in labour battalions, and the young men of Kolozsvár, now part of Hungary again (see map below), were swiftly called up to join them. The Jewish journalist Rezső Kasztner was one of these young men, serving for a few months in a battalion of mostly Jewish intellectuals, building military fortifications in northern Transylvania. He managed to negotiate a special dispensation for medical reasons and returned to Kolozsvár, where he continued to to work on behalf of the Hungarian refugees from Romania. He found that bribery was still effective among the officials, and managed to win exemption cards for sickly Jews and the sons of widows. He had connections on the black market, knew where to trade currencies, and what the going rates were for bribes in dollars and Swiss francs. Local government officials would still see him without an appointment and continued to treat him with the deference due to a member of a prominent Jewish-Hungarian family.

However, in January 1941, members of the Romanian Iron Guard had launched a rebellion to overthrow Antonescu’s Romanian government. Its ranks were swelled by nationalist fervour and the hope for easy loot, so the guards hunted for Jews in villages and small towns. Thousands were herded into box-cars and left on railway sidings for days, while in Bucharest, human bodies were hung on meat hooks and displayed in the windows of butcher shops. After March 1941, German troops were stationed in Romania, preparing for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Although the new Hungarian laws affecting the Transylvanian Jews were troubling, the Jews of Kolozsvár were relieved to be outside the reach of the Romanian mob rule.

In preparation for friendly overtures towards the British (see my writings elsewhere on this site on Magyar-British relations during this period, based on the testimony of Domokos Szent-Iványi and others),  Prime Minister Pál Teleki signed a treaty of peace and eternal friendship with Yugoslavia in February. Many Hungarians saw this as a hopeful sign amid the bellicose sabre-rattling of the Hungarian military, which was fixated on the reacquisition of Croatia in order to fulfill the dream of restoring the former Greater Hungary. Count Teleki was of Transylvanian aristocratic stock, a professor of geography at the University of Budapest, and the joke about him in Kolozsvár was that he was that the cartographer was too busy redrawing the political map of Hungary to remember to look at the physical map showing all the rivers flowing into the Carpathian basin either from German or Russian lands. There was little hope of Hungary remaining neutral and even less hope that Great Britain, standing alone in the west, would concern itself with central-eastern European affairs. In fact, Teleki himself was a mild-mannered but vocal anti-Semite, though he claimed to be relatively friendly towards the ‘assimilated’, patriotic Jews of the big cities.

Nevertheless, it was under his premiership that the anti-Jewish laws were strengthened and in early 1941 the Hungarian government closed all Jewish newspapers, including Új Kelet (‘New East’), the paper Kasztner was writing for in Kolozsvár. Having lost his voice among the people in Transylvania, he was worried that he would also lose his status and influence. He needed a job, and certainly did not want to accept the patronage of his affluent father-in-law. It was agreed that once he was established in the capital, his wife, ‘Bógyo’, would join him. So it was that in the early spring of 1941 Rezső Kasztner arrived in Budapest, from where he was to secure the release and survival of tens of thousands of fellow wealthy Jews in his dealings with Adolf Eichmann three years later.

1946: Revival of the Hungarian Independence Movement

In February 1946, Zoltán Tildy became the President of the Republic, while Ferenc Nagy became Prime Minister of a government in which the Smallholders retained half the portfolios. Besides the Minister of the Interior, Rajk, the Communists supplied the Deputy Premier, Rákosi, and the transport and welfare ministers. They exploited these positions with tactical skill and ruthlessness against the Smallholder majority, which hesitated to take a tough line against the Soviet-supported left-wing grouping. The group consolidated their advocacy of class warfare and the need to proceed with social revolution through the creation of a Left Wing Bloc on 5 March.

This was the same day on which Winston Churchill made his famous speech referring to the iron curtain separating the Soviet occupied regions from the rest of Europe. Although it was a full year before the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of the USA’s entry into the Cold War, it was clearly imminent in 1946 and induced Stalin to accelerate the Sovietisation of the occupied territories. This was the background against which the Communists in Hungary prepared to eliminate their rivals through ‘salami slicing’ tactics, as Rákosi called them. It began as soon as the Nagy government took office.

In response, during February and March, three men attempted to revive the MFM, the Hungarian Independence Movement, which had been dormant since the Nazi Occupation of Hungary two years earlier. One or two days after 19 March 1944, according to Domokos Szent-Iványi,  the directors of the MTK (The Hungarian Fraternal Community), the secret society within the Regency and Government of Hungary, allied to the MFM, with an overlapping membership, decided to suspend its operations due to the presence of the Gestapo and the advance of the Red Army. At that time, the MTK had been mainly a social society rather than a political organisation. In 1946, however, a trio led by György Donáth wanted the MTK to become more politically active. Donáth began to promote the idea of an Underground Army, advocated by Major Szent-Miklósy, who had been impressed by the success of the Polish Underground Army. The third man, Károly Kiss, had spent his life organising the administration of the MTK, since it had come into being in the early 1920s. He was an engineer, and had become an influential leader of the MTK by 1939. All three men were arrested and put on show trials before ‘the People’s Tribunal’ later in 1946 and in 1947.

The men were motivated by the belief that the Soviets would soon be forced by the western powers to evacuate central-Eastern Europe, including Hungary, but that before leaving, they would take steps to establish Communist rule by force of arms. This was what lay behind the idea of an ‘Underground Army’ which would keep order and democracy in the country. Papers outlining these plans and ambitions were later ‘discovered’ by the ÁVO (secret police) and formed the basis for the show trials.

1991: Return to Cold War & Operation Desert Storm

Boris Yeltsin, the elected President of the Russian Republic, 1991.

The Gulf War: US marines at Khabji, Saudi Arabia, reinforcing the front line with Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. They suffered casualties here.

Following the escalation of conflict between Moscow and the Baltic States in January, Boris Yeltsin, the parliamentary leader of the Russian State, signed a mutual security pact with his Baltic counterparts. A summit meeting between Gorbachev and Bush, planned for February, was abandoned as East-West relations again deteriorated. Conscious of Soviet ties to Iraq and hard-line Kremlin opposition to US gunboat diplomacy, Gorbachev realised that even though the Soviet Union had initially voted at the UN to support the use of force against Iraq, he would need time to work on the government in Baghdad. On 18 February, he met with Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, in Moscow in a last-ditch attempt at mediation. However, the timetable for the ground war against the Iraqi regime was already set. Operation Desert Storm began on 24 February. On 27 February, President Bush announced that Kuwait had been ‘liberated’.

Anti-Gorbachev demonstration. The President of the USSR faces opposition from both sides, from reformers and hard-liners. The latter were planning to oust him from the Kremlin.

In Moscow, Gorbachev fought on, winning a referendum in support of his proposed new Union Treaty; the Soviet Union was to be preserved as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the freedoms of all nationalities would be guaranteed. Several republics boycotted the vote, Yeltsin supporting them. In March, a coal miners’ strike began in the Donbass, Ukraine, and there were mass demonstrations in Moscow supporting Yeltsin against Gorbachev. These came to a head on 28 March when a planned protest proceeded in spite of a ban and the presence of fifty thousand police and soldiers on the streets of the capital. The marches went off peacefully, but the ban and the massing of armed forces caused great offence, with Gorbachev suffering a further loss of respect among reformers.

Sources:

Domokos Szent-Iványi (2013) (Kodolányi & Szeklér (eds.)), The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-46. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train. London: Constable & Robinson.

Jeremy Isaacs (1998), Cold War. London: Bantham Press.

Norman Ferguson (2014), The First World War. Chichester: Somersdale.

Lászlo Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Introducing the Issues:

On 28th December (2015), The Daily Telegraph reported that the student leading a campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from an Oxford college has turned his fire on the university itself, accusing it of spreading “injustice” around the world by educating future leaders with a “skewed” and “Eurocentric” mindset.

Ntokozo Qwabe and the Cecil Rhodes statue on Oriel College in Oxford

(Photo: Rex).

 

South African Ntokozo Qwabe, himself a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, claimed that students at Oxford endure “systemic racism, patriarchy and other oppressions” on a daily basis. The 24-year-old also said that the university’s admissions and staff recruitment systems “perpetrate exclusion” and suggested that even Oxford’s architecture is laid out in a “racist and violent” way. And he accused the British media of treating him and his supporters like “terrorists” for challenging the establishment.

His comments came in a lengthy posting on Facebook in response to reaction to his remarks likening the French Tricolor to the Nazi swastika or the hammer and sickle under Stalin as a “symbol of violence, terror and genocide for many”. He said he had suffered a media “onslaught” as a result. Mr Qwabe shot to prominence earlier this month after Oriel College agreed to remove a plaque under a statue of the colonial era mining magnate and politician and consider talking down the statue itself. It followed protests by Mr Qwabe’s “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign group, which takes its inspiration from a movement in South Africa which has succeeded in having statues of Rhodes removed.

 

The campaigners say the statue at Oriel College glorifies a figure seen as one of the architects of South African apartheid and is therefore “offensive and violent” to students. But others have argued that taking the statue down would amount to purging the past to conform to contemporary political demands.

This rather strange, if not bizarre, set of circumstances, reminds many in Eastern Europe of the controversies of the late nineties and ‘noughties’ when the statues and commemorobilia of the Soviet Era were systematically removed, including war memorials. Many of the statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders were removed to a theme park near Budapest in the case of Hungary. More controversially, perhaps, street names were changes, often against the wishes of residents, in order to expunge any memory of the collaboration of Hungarians in the forty-year occupation.

More recently, there have been further controversies about what, who and how to commemorate the previous dark period in Hungarian history which led to the Nazi occupation of 1944-45 and the Holocaust and Hungarian Fascist regime. The erection of a statue of the Regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944, Miklós Horthy, caused a furore, since many associated his regime as anti-Semitic, passing anti-Jewish Laws from the early twenties to the 1940s, facilitating the deportation of Hungary’s Jews from rural towns and villages, and then collaborating with the Nazis in the occupation of his own country, only belatedly heeding advice to leave the Axis and seek an armistice with the Allies. Was he, perhaps like János Kadar after him, a saviour or a traitor?

The Hungarian government also became unpopular with the current Jewish community in Budapest by commissioning a national memorial to ‘all the victims of the German occupation’, symbolised by a rampant eagle, rather than recognising the events of 1944-45 as a Hungarian Holocaust, Hungarian in origin, willingly participated in by Hungarian politicians, armed services and police. In some provincial towns, local figures who collaborated in these events, whether actively or passively, have had their previous contributions recognised in the commissioning and raising of statues, most recently in Szekesfehérvár, not without provoking both local and national outrage.

The who, what, why and how of acts of commemoration will, of necessity, change from generation to generation. As the events of the two World Wars become more remote from current generations, the annual Acts of Remembrance in the UK are bound to focus on more recent wars and their victims, whether fallen or surviving. Commemoration is about the needs of current communities for remembrance, not about an agreed, detailed version of the past. It is about the gathering together of diverse individual experiences into a collective memory. Just as two people’s memories of the same family members and events can be diverse, so collective memory is also heterogeneous.

However, to be true nations, we must be true to our common heritages, and that means that we must have regard to the historical bedrock from which we sculpt, both actually and metaphorically, the memorials we leave for future generations. We carve them in stone because they are supposed to represent lasting truth, not some contemporary fad. The same applies to their removal as to their erection. In deciding what and who to commemorate, politicians need to consult other craftsmen before they commission architects and artists. These metaphorical craftsmen, the historians, will no doubt have their own principles and perspectives, but they are also charged with testing all the available sources of evidence, before producing a synthesis about the legacy of past people(s) and events.

This coming year will be marked by a number of commemorations, including controversial ones such as the Battle of the Somme and the 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin. As a second-year undergraduate I can remember reading about this latter event in some detail. Soon after submitting my essay, I met an Irish republican, and tried to apologise to him for the legacy of bitterness which originated from these events. Somewhat older and better studied than me at the time, he pointed out that I could not take responsibility for what the British Empire had done three or even two generations before. All either of us could do was to deal with the legacy as we both perceived it in our own lifetimes.

My experience of that legacy had begun with a visit to Nelson’s other column, in Dublin in the mid-sixties, shortly before it was blown up by the Official IRA. A warning was given in that case, so only the monument suffered. More recently, it had culminated in the blowing-up of two pubs in the centre of Birmingham in November 1974. This was by the Provisional IRA, and no warning was given.  Twenty-one people were killed, and many more suffered life-changing injuries. Most of them were teenagers; many, like me, aged seventeen. In fact, I could easily have been one of them, had I left the Bull-Ring Centre burger-bar minutes later than I did. Those responsible have never been held to account; instead six Irishmen were falsely imprisoned for more than fifteen years, compounding the confusion felt by the general victims, the people of Birmingham, including its well-integrated Irish community. The point is that, in wanting to apologise, I was doing what many with emotional connections to current or past events do, confusing history with legacy.  I desperately wanted to help set things straight. Much later, as part of a Birmingham-Belfast Education for Mutual Understanding Project, I had the opportunity to do so. Reconciliation became possible, but it was not history which absolved us. Nor did it condemn us; that is not its role.

Similarly, some time ago, one of my students asked to do her special study on the Amritsar Massacre. One of her reasons for this was that she first wanted to come to terms with the family legacy that General Dyer, the officer commanding the British troops that day in 1919, was a relative. She was able to write a fascinating prologue on this before providing a well-researched, dispassionate account and interpretation of the events surrounding that day. Her present-day family are Quakers pacifists.

Chronicling Cecil Rhodes and his Empire:

So, what is the legacy of Cecil Rhodes and why has it provoked such controversy both in South Africa and the UK? To understand this, we first need to examine the chronicle of events surrounding his life, and then put this in the context of South Africa’s later history in the twentieth century, asking the questions, in what sense can he be described as a ‘racist’ and to what extent can he be seen as one of the key architects of the ‘apartheid’ state?:

• Born in 1854, the son of a clergyman from Bishop’s Stortford, Rhodes had emigrated to South Africa at the age of seventeen before going to Oxford. He was at once a business genius and imperial visionary. It was not enough for Rhodes to make a fortune from the vast De Beers diamond mines at Kimberley. He aspired to be more than a money-maker. He dreamt of becoming an empire builder.

• Cecil Rhodes became the wealthy chairman of the Kimberley diamond-mines, following the annexation of Griqualand West by the British Government in 1871 at the request of the Griqua chief. The extension of the Cape Colony across the Orange River checked the westward expansion of the Boer Orange Free State.

• Though his public image was that of a lone colossus bestriding Africa, as in the cartoon above, Rhodes could not have won his near-monopoly over South African diamond production without the assistance of his friends in the City of London; in particular, the Rothschild bank, at that time the biggest concentration of financial capital in the world.

• When Rhodes had arrived at the Kimberley diamond fields there had been more than a hundred small companies working the four major ‘pipes’, flooding the market with diamonds and driving one another out of business. In 1882 a Rothschild agent visited Kimberley and recommended large-scale amalgamation; within four years the number of companies was down to three. A year later, the bank financed the merger of Rhodes’s De Beers Company with the Compagnie Francaise, followed by the final crucial fusion with the bigger Kimberley Central Company.

• Now there was just one company: De Beers. Rhodes did not own the company, since Rothschild was the largest shareholder, and by 1899 the Rothschilds’ stake was twice that of Rhodes. When Rhodes needed financial backing for a new scheme in October 1888, he turned to Rothschild, who by then had become the first Jew to enter the House of Lords.

• The proposition that Rhodes wanted Rothschild to consider was the concession he had just secured from the Matabele chief, Lobengula, to develop ‘simply endless’ gold fields that Rhodes believed existed beyond the Limpopo River. The terms of his letter made it clear that his intentions towards the chief were anything but friendly. The Matabele king, he wrote, was

  the only block to Central Africa, as once we have his territory, the rest is easy, as the rest is simply a village system with a separate headman, all independent of each other… the key is Matabele Land, with its gold, the reports as to which are not based solely on hearsay… Fancy, this Gold Field which was purchasable, at about £150,000 two years ago, is now selling for over ten million.

• Bechuanaland (modern-day Botswana) was in a key position in South Africa, as it lay on the direct route to the rich Zambesi valley, which Rhodes wanted to control. He had used his influence with the home Government to secure a protectorate over the territory in 1884, fearing that the Germans in south-west Africa would intervene and block British expansion northward. He now dreamed of a united Africa under British rule, extending northwards from the Cape, with a Cape-to-Cairo railway across British territories.

• When Rhodes joined forces with the existing Bechuanaland Company to create a new Central Search Association for Matabeleland, the banker Rothschild was a major shareholder, and increased his involvement when this became the United Concessions Company in 1890. He was also among the founders of the British South Africa Company, acting as the Company’s unpaid financial adviser.

• 

   Rhodes established the British South Africa Company in 1889, and was granted the right by charter to develop the resources of the country now bearing his name – Rhodesia.

• Rhodes became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1890. Like many of his contemporaries, he was inspired by a sense of Great Britain’s mission to extend a civilising influence throughout its Empire, known as ‘the White Man’s Burden’, as most clearly expressed in Kipling’s poem. He saw his own part in this as extending British influence in South Africa, aiming to create a South African Federation  out of the British and Afrikaaner colonies.

• The first step towards this was to consolidate his control over Matabeleland. When Lobengula realised he had been hoodwinked into signing over much more than mere mineral rights, he resolved to take Rhodes on. Determined to dispose of the chief once and for all, Rhodes responded by ending an invasion force – the Chartered Companies’ Volunteers – numbering seven hundred. By African standards, the Matabele had a powerful and well-organised army, numbering in the region of three thousand. But Rhodes’s men brought with them devastating Maxim guns which could fire five hundred rounds a minute, fifty times faster than the fastest rifle available.

• Maxim testing his gun…

Above: Hiram Maxim with his gun, c. 1880.

• The Maxim gun had been invented by an American, Hiram Maxim, who had an underground workshop in Hatton Garden, London. As soon as he had his prototype ready for the British market, he invited several members of the Royal Family and the British aristocracy to give the weapon a trial. Among those who accepted were the Duke of Cambridge, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Devonshire and the Duke of Kent. The first of these, who was then Commander-in-Chief, felt ‘confident they will, ere long, be used generally in all armies’. When the Maxim Gun Company was established in 1884, Lord Rothschild was on its board. In 1888 his bank financed the £1.9 million merger of the Company with the Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company.

• The Battle of Shangani River in 1893 was among the earliest uses of the Maxim in battle. One eyewitness recorded what happened:

  The Matabele never got nearer than 100 yards led by the Nubuzu regiment, the king’s body-guard who came on yelling like fiends and rushing on to certain death, for the Maxims far exceeded all expectations and mowed them down literally like grass. I never saw anything like these Maxim guns, nor dreamed that such things could be: for the belts and cartridges were run through them as fast as a man could load and fire. Every man in the laager owes his life under Providence to the Maxim gun. The natives told the king that they did not fear us for our rifles, but they could not kill the beast that went pooh! pooh! by which they meant the Maxim.

• To the Matabele it seemed that ‘the white man came… with… guns that spat bullets as the heavens sometimes spit hail, and who were the naked Matabele to stand up against these guns?’ Around 1,500 Matabele warriors were wiped out. Just four of the seven hundred invaders died. The Times reported that the Matabele

put our victory down to witchcraft, allowing that the Maxim was a pure work of an evil spirit. They have named it”S’cockacocka”, owing to the peculiar noise it makes when in action.

• The conquered territory was renamed Rhodesia, since he had masterminded the operation. However, it could not have succeeded without the financial might of Rothschilds. One member of the family noted with satisfaction the connection between ‘a sharp action having taken place with the Matabeles’ and ‘a little spurt in the shares’ of Rhodes’s British South Africa Company.

• The official Matabeleland souvenir, published on the fortieth anniversary of the one-sided conflict, long after Rhodes’s death, opened with his ‘tribute’ to the men who had conquered the Matabele ‘savages’. The ‘highlight’ is the following hymn, originally written as a Liberal satire on the expedition, which Rhodes’s men adopted as their anthem:

Onward Chartered Soldiers, on to heathen lands,

Prayer books in your pockets, rifles in your hands.

Take the glorious tidings where trade can be done,

Spread the peaceful gospel – with a Maxim gun..

• Rhodes’s ambitions brought him into conflict with the Boers whose leader, Paul Kruger, resented his policy of expansion which meant the encircling of Boer territory. The Boers were farmers, but the discovery of gold in the Witswatersrand in 1886 and the rapid development of the mines by British settlers led to the outnumbering of the Boer population by the Uitlanders in the Transvaal. Kruger adopted a hostile policy towards them, denying them all political rights and taxing them heavily. Moreover, monopolies granted to Europeans and heavy railway rates hampered the expansion of the mining industry.

• The Jameson Raid (1896) was a plot engineered by Dr Jameson, administrator of Rhodesia, and supported by Rhodes, to use the Uitlanders to overthrow the Boer Government of the Transvaal. Its failure led to Rhodes’ resignation and discredited the British Government in the eyes of the world, uniting both Boer states against Britain.

• The Wars in…

• The Uitlanders of the Transvaal continued to agitate for improved conditions and petitioned the British government to intervene on their behalf. Negotiations failed to reach a compromise, due to the obstinacy of Kruger on the one hand and the uncompromising imperialism of Joseph Chamberlain, on the other. The Boers declared war in 1899. The Boer War came to an end in 1902, after Roberts and Kitchener finally wore down the resistance of the Boers, partly through the use of concentration camps for the women and children of the irregular fighters. The Boer republics were annexed, but the Boers were to continue to rule themselves and their farmers were compensated for war damage.

• During the Second Boer War Rhodes went to Kimberley at the onset of the siege, in a calculated move to raise the political stakes on the government to dedicate resources to the defence of the city. The military felt he was more of a liability than an asset and found him intolerable. Rhodes insisted that the military should adopt his plans and ideas instead of following their orders. Despite the differences, Rhodes’ company was instrumental in the defence of the city, providing water, refrigeration facilities, constructing fortifications, manufacturing an armoured train, shells and a one-off gun named Long Cecil.

• Rhodes used his position and influence to lobby the British government to relieve the siege of Kimberley, claiming in the press that the situation in the city was desperate. The military wanted to assemble a large force to take the Boer cities of Bloemfontein and Pretoria, but they were compelled to change their plans and send three separate smaller forces to relieve the sieges of Kimberley, Mafeking and Ladysmith.

Funeral of Rhodes in Adderley St, Cape Town on 3 April 1902

 

• Although Rhodes remained a leading figure in the politics of southern Africa, especially during the Second Boer War, he had been dogged by ill-health throughout his relatively short life. From age 40 his heart condition returned with increasing severity until his death from heart failure in 1902, aged 48, at his seaside cottage in Muizenberg.

• The Union of South Africa came about in 1909, and included the two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. A constitution was drafted and accepted by the British Parliament which agreed, among other matters, a common policy towards the native African populations.

As PM of Cape Colony

 

The Jameson Raid

Churchill’s Adventures in South Africa

Of course, many others were attracted by a sense of imperial adventure to South Africa. Among them was the young Winston Churchill, who had already spent time in India with the Queen’s Own Hussars, before arriving on a ‘new’ continent as a journalist-adventurer.

Above: Churchill as chief Boer War correspondent on The Morning Post, 

South Africa, 1899

Extracts from Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain: 1776-2000; The Fate of Empire. London: BBC Worldwide.

In South Africa fame and fortune went together. Randolph (Churchill) had invested in Rand mining shares, which had appreciated by at least fifty times their original face value – a small fortune that, unhappily for Jennie and Winston, was largely consumed by the late Lord’s equally substantial debts. But Churchill also shared the indignation of the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and the empire builder Cecil Rhodes that the might of the British Empire was being held to ransom by the obstinacy of a bunch of Dutch farmers who dictated what political rights British settlers might and might not enjoy in the Transvaal. Mostly, however, the Boer War was another opportunity for the kind of military-literary adventure that Winston had made his trademark… he resigned his commission in the Hussars and was made chief war correspondent for ‘The Morning Post’. He sailed with the commander-in-chief of the expedition, Sir Redvers Buller; managed to be taken prisoner while defending an armoured train against Boer attack; escaped from a military gaol at Pretoria…, hid in a coal wagon and then walked hundreds of miles to freedom; and finally returned to active duty with the South African Light Horse in time to be at the relief of Ladysmith. The escapades were almost too fabulous to be true, and they turned Churchill from a purveyor of ripping yarns on the frontier into a genuine, nationally known war hero. Writing about his Boer War and lecturing with lantern slides in Britain, Canada and America… put £10,000 into his bank account.  

Must Rhodes Fall in Oxford?

A prominent statue of Rhodes on the main campus of the University of Cape Town was vandalized with human excrement in March 2015, giving rise to a student-led campaign called “#RhodesMustFall” which drew attention to what the activists considered the lack of systemic racial transformation in South African institutions after apartheid. The university’s management took the statue down for relocation on 9 April 2015.

A statue of Rhodes adorns the frontage of Oriel College, Oxford. In 2015, a group of students demanded the removal of his statue, stating that it “symbolise[d] racism and colonialism”. Certainly, the statue dominates the High Street. Rhodes was an Oriel alumnus and left the College £100,000 in his will, though he stipulated that his trustees should enquire closely into how it was spent since ‘the college authorities live secluded from the world and so are like children in commercial matters’. Appropriately, like the young Winston Churchill, he looks like a man who has just come in from a walk on the dusty veldt. The inscription is a ‘chronogram’: concealed within the message is the date of the building’s erection in Roman numerals. It is 1911, but takes some unravelling.

There is also a plaque to Rhodes in King Edward Street (pictured above) marking where Rhodes lived as a student in 1881, and commemorating his ‘great services rendered… to his country’. Many imperial animals, including lions and elephants, also occupy important positions on Oxford’s buildings. The loftiest of these are, of course, the birds, including an eagle and a pelican, the latter being the target for a bottle thrown by an angry scholar, John Keble. Perhaps the most unusual and impressive of these statues is the Zimbabwe bird on the roof of Rhodes House (below).

This is a copy of one of eight soapstone effigies of birds found during the excavation of the ancient Shona city of Zimbabwe in the 1880s, the only representations of animals found in any archaeological site in sub-Saharan Africa. Rhodes is known to have bought one in 1889. Of course, by logical extension, both the plaque and the bird would be additional candidates for the iconoclasm suggested for Rhodes’s statue, the former for its celebration of the man as a national hero, and the latter, in addition to its association with the house named in his honour, due to Zimbabwe’s more recent fall from grace within the Commonwealth.

Quotations from Rhodes:

 Cecil Rhodes (Sketch by Mortimer Menpes)

• “To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annexe the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”

• “Pure philanthropy is very well in its way but philanthropy plus five percent is a good deal better.”

• “I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race… If there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of Africa British Red as possible…” (as an undergraduate in Oxford)

• “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

• “Equal Rights for all Civilized Men South of the Zambesi.”

• “I could never accept the position that we should disqualify a human being on account of his colour.”

• “To be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life.”

• “Take Constitution Jesuits if obtainable and insert English Empire for Roman Catholic Religion” (outlining the original conception of the Rhodes Scholarships to Lord Rothschild, 1888).

Secondary Sources and Interpretations:

A Simple School Text Narrative of The British Empire in Africa:

The map shows the extent of the European empires at the end of the nineteenth century. European influence… extended considerably… between 1870 and 1900 when a scramble for overseas possessions in Africa, Asia and elsewhere took place.

The largest of the European empires in 1900 was the British Empire. This occupied about one quarter of the world’s land surface and included between one quarter and one fifth of the world’s population.

It included two types of colony. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, together with the South African states of Cape Colony and Natal, were self-governing colonies which meant that they controlled their own internal affairs. They were also colonies of settlement, for throughout the nineteenth century European settlers, most of them British, were attracted to these sparsely populated lands.

… Britain came to feel that it was her duty to lead the native peoples along the path of progress. As Joseph Chamberlain, who was Colonial Secretary between 1895 and 1903, put it: ‘We feel now that our rule over these territories can only be justified if we can show that it adds to the happiness and prosperity of the people…’ . Rudyard Kipling stressed the same idea, that possessing an empire involved obligations to the peoples ruled:

Take up the White Man’s burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need….

In the first place, however, the Empire existed for the benefit of trade, as it had done in the eighteenth century… In 1885 Britain’s exports to the Empire were valued at £26 million; in 1905 this figure was £113 million. Referring to Britain’s new African territories, Lord Salisbury, who was Prime Minister for the greater part of the period 1885-1902, said: ‘It is our business in all these new countries to make smooth the paths for British commerce, British enterprise, the application of British capital, at a time when … other outlets for the commercial energies of our race are being gradually closed…’.

The acquisition of vast new territories… was accompanied at home by mounting public interest in and enthusiasm for the Empire. These feelings reached their climax in 1897 during the celebrations held to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (pictured below).  

 Above: Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, London 1899

Extracts from Bernard Porter (1984), The Lion’s Share: A short history of British Imperialism. Harlow: Longman

The encirclement of the Transvaal was completed at the end of the decade, when the diamond millionaire Cecil Rhodes (who always had British colonial interests more at heart than the British Colonial Office) formed a commercial company to occupy Matabeleland and Mashonaland to the north. The idea was that the company should take over the administration of the country in return for its profits. There was opposition to this scheme from humanitarians, worried by the implications of a situation whereby native Africans were governed by their exploiters. But for a parsimonious government it was a tempting bargain. The profits to be got from the country were as yet merely notional, whereas the expense of governing them was predictable. So the company got its royal charter in October 1889. In this way Rhodesia was born, and for the British government another potential counterbalance to Afrikanerdom secured at almost no expense.

… one constant factor in British policy… was that British interests in South Africa be secured as cheaply as possible. As much as in mid-century, national interest had to be balanced against national economy; and ways could generally be found of reconciling the two. This was one of the purposes of the federation policy, and of the constant efforts of British governments to persuade the  colonists themselves to assume responsibility for new territories annexed. It was also a reason why Rhodes’ offer was so eagerly accepted in 1889. One result of this, however, was a kind of paradox: that in order to maintain cheaply a general British supremacy over southern Africa, Britain was tending to lose her particular authority there – her authority over the white colonists’ conduct of their domestic affairs, including, of course, their ‘native policies’.  As yet the concept of British imperial trusteeship for native races was not quite dead, and the humanitarian lobby in Britain won some minor victories, where it did not cost much in money or local goodwill. Where larger interests were at stake, however – agreement with the Boers at the London Convention, containment of the Boers by Rhodes in 1889 – trusteeship could make little headway. Slowly Whitehall’s powers were devolved upon the men on the spot, to secure their co-operation and spread the burden. Consequently, as the area of the British empire in southern Africa expanded, so its real effective control there diminished.  (pp 99-101)

 

Because of the many thousands of Britons and British organisations which had established themselves in far-off places, long before governments feared to tread there, it was seldom difficult for governments, if they wanted to, to find people to delegate to… in southern Africa the government of the Cape. Elsewhere a favourite instrument of vicarious colonial administration in the 1880s was the chartered company, like Rhodes’s in South Africa. The disadvantages of the giving commercial companies licence to rule colonial territories were that they discouraged free competition; and that their exploitative functions might not always be compatible with their subjects’ welfare – although current economic orthodoxy tended to assume that profits arising from exploitation did filter down. The great advantage of the chartered company was that it disburdened the British taxpayer of the cost of colonial administration. The Liberal and avowedly anti-imperialist Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir William Harcourt was reported in 1892 to have said that ‘even jingoism is tolerable when it is done “on the cheap”.’…  (104-5)   

For men like Chamberlain, Rosebery, Curzon, Milner, Rhodes, their imperialism was a serious matter: in a very literal sense a matter of life and death. It was a question of fitting Britain for survival, preparing her, as Lord Rosebery put it, ‘for the keen race of nations’. Consequently, it would involve quite drastic changes in Britain as well as abroad: all agreed, or said they did, that a true imperialism began at home. ‘An Empire such as hours’, wrote Rosebery to The Times in 1900, ‘requires as its first condition an Imperial Race – a race vigorous and industrious and intrepid. Health of mind and body exalt a nation in the competition of the universe. The survival of the fittest is an absolute truth in the condition of the modern world.(129-130)

Of course some people would not be fully satisfied until the whole world was British. Only when there were no foreigners would Britain be entirely secure from foreigners. This was the ultimate in imperialist paranoia. Cecil Rhodes as a young man envisaged Britain taking over and settling

the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seabord of China and Japan;

The whole process to be completed by ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’; and this, he concluded, would ‘render wars impossible’. This was clearly over-ambitious; but it was a common desire of imperialists to want to make existing colonies secure by surrounding them with more… there were many who saw Egypt’s frontier stretching as far as Uganda, and South Africa’s boundary way beyond the Zambesi. There were supposed to be other reasons why it was so imperative, in the interests of national survival, to take more colonies. The most common one was the economic one: an old familiar argument for imperialism, but given a new urgency… by the prevailing climate of fear. Cecil Rhodes… put it sensationally, as if the survival of the capitalist system depended on it:

In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

… Ideas like these were widespread amongst self-styled ‘imperialists’ in the 1890s… Fundamentally they believed in their own abilities: were confident that they had it in them to run a great empire – that they were, if they organised themselves properly, fit to rule a quarter of mankind. ‘We happen to be’, said Cecil Rhodes, ‘the best people in the world, with the highest ideals of decency and justice and liberty and peace, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better for humanity’. Many others doubtless shared his patriotic self-esteem, but it was not common to voice it so crudely, and it was in any event not necessary to the imperialist’s  case to believe that his ‘race’ was overall and absolutely superior to others. What late Victorian imperialists did like to claim was that they were better at the practical and pragmatic science of managing the affairs of other people. In this they fancied themselves greatly. ‘I believe,’ said Joseph Chamberlain in 1895, ‘that the British race is the greatest of governing races that the world has ever seen’ (131-5).

The association of capitalism with imperialism … was commonplace: but nowhere in the late nineteenth century British Empire… was the association quite so close or so blatant as in South Africa in the 1890s. In South Africa the tissue of industrial capitalism, grafted late, had taken hold firmly in the 1880s and spread phenomenally thereafter; by the mid-nineties, for those who believed capitalism should be kept in its place and that place was outside politics, it was clearly out of control. The cause of this was the domination of the South African industrial scene by Cecil Rhodes, a man whose conception of financial and political power would not admit of any necessary demarcation between them: who believed that what was good for his Consolidated Gold Fields was good for South Africa, and would bury political power to achieve that good. Rhodes was the reason why South African capitalism in the 1890s became a force on the side of British imperialism… Of the handful of big European capitalism scrapping for riches amongst the gold reefs of the independent Transvaal… only a tiny minority believed that their interests would be furthered by an extension of British rule there; most of them… were happy digging for gold under the auspices of the relatively ordered, if not very friendly, government of the Afrikaners… Rhodes was exceptional partly because his financial interests were spread over more of southern Africa than theirs, and partly because he had very special imperial visions of his own; his capitalism was imperialistic… The consequence was that, in the imperial history of Southern Africa in the 1890s, the forces of industrial and financial capitalism played a more prominent role than they would have done otherwise.

Rhodes’s influence in South African affairs was partly the outcome of his wealth and the use he made of it, partly the result of the favour shown to him by British government ministers for reasons of their own. The two things were connected, of course: Rhodes used his wealth to cultivate ministers’ favour, and ministers favoured him partly because of the power he wielded through his wealth… Rhodes’s power had been built up in the Kimberley diamond fields, which he came to monopolise in 1888, and the gold reefs of the Witwatersrand, which he could never control absolutely, but which he shared with two or three other great magnates in the 1890s. With the wealth from these two gigantic concerns, and with winning ways with all kinds of men which none of his rivals could begin to compete with, he established for himself a predominant position in South African politics. In 1890 he became Prime Minister of Cape Colony at the head of a party which had preached and practised co-operation between the white races, and which practised, though it did not preach so loudly, co-operation too between politics and capital: of his dual role as company director and premier, ‘I concluded’, he wrote, ‘that one position could be worked with the other, and each to the benefit of all’. …in England he had the admiration of the Queen, the backing of Lord Rothschild… and the support of at least two influential journalists… This kind of influence was of great assistance to him when… in 1889 (he) secured from the Liberal government a charter to carve a whole country in his own commercial image… In the early 1890s his company took possession of its inheritance, swindled and shot the Matabele and Mashonaoples who lived there into a sullen subservience, and dug for the promised gold: but failed to find it. It was when the prospect of big dividends… receded in ‘Zambesia’ that he turned his full attention, and the powers – legal and illegal – that his wealth gave him, towards making the Transvaal British.

Rhodes always insisted that he valued riches not for their own sake but for the power they gave him to help extend and consolidate the British empire: which grand ambition, he held, justified any use he might make of those riches – ‘you must judge of my conduct by the objects that I had in view’. …It followed for Rhodes that, for southern Africa to be secured for the British Empire, the Transvaal must become part of it; and he believed he had the means to help this on. …When the Rand’s gold had first been discovered the Cape had reaped some profit from it by transporting it to the sea. By 1894, however, the Transvaal could export and import goods without touching British territory at all, by means of a new, independent railway just completed to Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa. …There were rumours too Paul Kruger, the Transvaal president, was planning a republican takeover of the whole of South Africa… And from 1894 there were more solid reports of German involvement in the Transvaal, with the Transvaal’s encouragement, which gave the situation a more sinister outlook still. Ministers in London were worried, but not worried enough yet… to take overtly aggressive action against the Transvaal… Rhodes, however, had more urgency, fewer scruples, and the power to make an African war almost on his own.  

Rhodes’s decision to use his considerable powers to incite revolution in the Transvaal, to abet it when it came, and to use it to force the Republicans into some kind of compliant union with the British colonies, arose from his conviction that a rebellion was going to break out in the Transvaal anyway, and that it had better be turned into a British imperial direction by him than into another direction, less favourable to the British, by others. For years there had been unrest amongst the largely foreign mining community on the land, the ‘Uitlanders’, who were daily subjected to innumerable aggravations and disabilities by a dominant people they regarded as rude and inferior, and who regarded them, with rather more justice, as a threat to their whole national way of life… During 1894-95 there was talk of armed rebellion on the Rand: wild talk, as it turned out, from the ordinary Uitlanders, but more serious from some of the big capitalists, who took measures – like gun-running – actively to promote it. Rhodes’s involvement in this plotting would ensure that the revolution, if it came and succeeded, would be to the advantage of the empire.

It also led the British government to be dragged into the affair: not necessarily because it approved of Rhodes’s cloak-and-dagger ways of solving its South African problem, but it was because it was coming to accept his diagnosis of that problem, and because his power and prestige in South Africa made him the readiest means to hand, if not the best, towards a solution… Rhodes was the agent she was given to work through, and Rhodes had ideas of his own… Before the autumn of 1895 he had secured the co-operation he needed from the British government to put his plot into effect: troops, a friendly High Commissioner, and a strip of land on the western border of the Transvaal he could start an invasion from. Joseph Chamberlain at the Colonial Office… played along with Rhodes… His connivance in Rhodes’s schemes rested on the assumption.. made on the best authority, that an Uitlander rebellion would take place… In that event intervention by Britain, or by a British colonial in Britain’s name, could be presented as a response to a situation generated independently of her, made in order legitimately to safeguard her nationals in the Transvaal. What ruined things for the government was that the Uitlanders never rebelled, yet the intervention took place regardless. On 29 December 1895 Dr Leander Starr Jameson rode into the Transvaal at the head of a band of 500 mounted troops and carrying a Union Jack, to aid a rebellion which never happened. He was easily stopped. The results of this fiasco were disastrous for everyone except the Boers… Chamberlain tried to cover the traces of imperial involvement, but could not… To all intents and purposes Britain was implicated in a squalid conspiracy against a foreign state… The result of the Jameson Raid was the complete opposite of what had been intended. Instead of weakening Kruger it strengthened him; instead of persuading him to compromise it made him more intransigent…

The lesson of the Jameson Raid for the British government was that it could no longer pursue its policies in South Africa on the coat-tails of capitalists.Rhodes and the government had done a great deal for each other in the past, and Chamberlain was convinced that Rhodes could do something for him still in the future – but in the north, where his buccaneering methods were likely to be more successful against black Africans than against white Afrikaners, and less likely to arouse strong feelings at home or diplomatic repercussions abroad. …Before he had raided the Transvaal Dr Jameson had been Rhodes’s viceroy in Zambesia; in this capacity he had managed to provoke the Matabele, and even their neighbours the Mashona… to seething unrest… they both rebelled, reasserted their old sovereignties, and put ‘Rhodesia’ – and the value of Chartered Company shares – in very real danger. Rhodes had to restore the authority of the Company or his whole world would have collapsed: and this he did during the course of 1896 in one of the bloodiest and most ferocious of southern Africa’s ‘punitive’ wars, capped – when it was clear the Africans were not going to be tamed by force alone – by a remarkable exercise by Rhodes in peaceful persuasion. In the north, therefore, Rhodes was left to repair his own breaches; but in the south he was, for the time being, a spent force, too discredited to be of use… The British government had perforce to disown him, and to secure its South African salvation by its own efforts – as it should have done all along.

Britain was stalemated. She could neither persuade the Transvaal to join the empire nor force her into it… The stalemate was broken slowly, in 1897-99… Chamberlain nursed public opinion in Britain on to his side in a series of speeches calculated to make it hostile to Kruger.And in south Africa he got what he needed most: a handle to turn his policy by, to fill the gap left by Rhodes’s departure. The ‘South African League was formed in 1896 to rally imperialist opinion in the two British colonies and the Transvaal… its policies were Rhodes’s, and in April 1899 Rhodes himself returned from the political wilderness to become its president. This time, however, it was not Rhodes who would take the initiatives. That duty lay firmly with… Chamberlain and his new High Commissioner, Alfred Milner…

Milner was move positively for war. A self-declared ‘British Race Patriot’, he could not conceive of the Afrikaners of the Cape being loyal to the empire while there remained an independent nation of their ‘race’ to the north to divert their loyalties…(168-176)

Cases came to light around the turn of the century of the most shocking abuses of trust by exploitative concerns. One was Cecil Rhodes’s conduct in Zambesia in the 1890s. But the worst was the Congo Free State, entrusted to King Leopold of the Belgians by the Berlin Conference in 1884, where the most horrific tales of systematic massacre and mutilation in the search for profits were revealed to the European public in the 1900s, and provoked widespread agitation which eventually led to Leopold’s surrender of his Congolese kingdom to the Belgian parliament in 1909. Rhodes and Leopold together made Liberals highly distrustful of capitalists in the tropics, and especially of capitalist monopolies with title over vast expanses of territory, which were the cause of the worst abuses. (223)

1919 was a year for dreams to come true; another one which did was Cecil Rhodes’s ‘Cape to Cairo’ scheme, when Britain took Tanganyika from Germany and so completed that chain too… further down the Union of South Africa took over the administration of South-West Africa. (248-9) 

Extracts from Niall Ferguson (2003), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Penguin Books.

So close was Rhodes’s relationship with the Rothschilds that he even entrusted the execution of his will to Lord Rothschild, specifying that his estate should be used to fund an imperialist equivalent of the Jesuit order – the original intention of the Rhodes Scholarships. This would be ‘a society of the elect for the good of the Empire’… Rothschild in turn assured ; ‘Our first and foremost wish in connection with South African matters is that you should remain at the head of affairs in that Colony and that you should be able to carry out that great Imperial policy which has been the dream of your life.’

The creation of his own personal country and his own imperialist holy order were indeed merely components of a much bigger Rhodesian ‘Imperial policy’. On a huge table-sized map of Africa (which can still be seen in Kimberley today) Rhodes drew a pencil line stretching from Cape Town to Cairo. This was to be the ultimate imperial railway. From the Cape it would run northwards like some huge metal spine through Bechuanaland… Rhodesia… Nyasaland… then on past the Great Lakes to Khartoum and finally up the Nile to its final destination in Egypt.

By this means, Rhodes envisaged bringing the whole African continent under British domination… There were literally no limits to Rhodes’s ambitions.

At one level, wars like the one waged against the Matabele were private battles planned in private clubs like the Kimberley Club, that stuffy bastion of capitalist conviviality of which Rhodes himself was among the founders. Matabeleland had become part of the Empire at no cost to the British taxpayer since the entire campaign had been fought by mercenaries employed by Rhodes and paid for by the shareholders in the British South African and De Beers companies. If it turned out that Matabeleland had no gold, then they would be the losers. In effect, the process of colonization had been privatised, a return to the early days of empire when monopoly trading companies had pioneered British rule from Canada to Calcutta. Rhodes was indeed consciously learning from history. British rule in India had begun with the East India Company; now British rule in Africa would be founded on his business interests. In one letter to Rothschild he even referred to De Beers as ‘another East India Company’. (227-8)

By the beginning of the new century, the carve-up was complete. The British had all but realized Rhodes’s vision of unbroken possession from the Cape to Cairo:their African empire stretched northwards from the Cape Colony through Natal, Bechuanaland (Botswana), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi); and southwards from Egypt, through the Sudan, Uganda and East Africa (Kenya). German East Africa was the only missing link in Rhodes’s intended chain… the lion’s share belonged to Britain. (239-40)

To Rhodes, Chamberlain and Milner, the Boer’s independence remained intolerable. As usual, British calculations were both strategic and economic… the Cape remained a military base of ‘immense importance for England’ (Chamberlain) for the simple reason that the (Suez) Canal might be vulnerable to closure in a major European war. It remained, in the Colonial Secretary’s view, ‘the cornerstone of the whole British colonial system’. At the same time, it was hardly without significance that the Boer republics had turned out to be sitting on the biggest gold seams in the world. By 1900 the Rand was producing a quarter of the world’s gold supply and had absorbed more than £114 million of mainly British capital. Having been an impoverished backwater, the Transvaal suddenly seemed set to become the economic centre of gravity in southern Africa. But the Boers saw no reason why they should share power with the tens of thousands of British immigrants, the ‘Uitlanders’, who had swarmed into their country to pan for gold. Nor did they approve of the (somewhat) more liberal way the British treated the black population of Cape Colony. In the eyes of their president Paul Kruger, the Boers’ strictly Calvinist way of life was simply incompatible with British rule… Ever since 1895, when Rhodes’s crony Dr Leander Starr Jameson had led his abortive ‘raid’ into the Transvaal, it had been obvious that a showdown was imminent.

(273-4)

Not only was imperialism immoral, argued the critics. According to the Radicals, it was also a rip-off: paid for by British taxpayers, fought for by British soldiers, but benefiting only a tiny elite of fat-cat millionaires, the likes of Rhodes and Rothschild. That was the thrust of J. A. Hobson’s profoundly influential ‘Imperialism: A Study’, published in 1902. ‘Every great political act’ argued Hobson,

‘must receive the sanction and the practical aid of this little group of financial kings… They have the largest definite stake in the business of Imperialism, and the amplest means of forcing their will upon the policy of nations… Finance is the governor of the imperial engine, directing the energy and determining the work.’ 

H. N. Brailsford took Hobson’s argument further in his ‘The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of the Armed Peace’, (written in 1910, but not published until 1914). ‘In the heroic age,’ Brailsford wrote,

‘Helen’s was the face that launched a thousand ships. In our golden age the face wears more often the shrewd features of a some Hebrew financier. To defend the interests of Lord Rothschild and his fellow bondholders, Egypt was first occupied and then practically annexed by Great Britain… The extremest case of all is, perhaps, our own South African War.’ 

Was it not obvious that the war had been fought to ensure that the gold mines of the Transvaal remained securely in the hands of their capitalist owners? Was not Rhodes merely, in the words of the Radical MP Henry Labouchere, an ‘Empire jerry-builder who had always been a mere vulgar promoter masquerading as a patriot, and the figurehead of a gang of astute Hebrew financiers with whom he divides the profits?’

Like those modern conspiracy theories which explain every war in terms of the control of oil reserves, the Radical critique of imperialism was an over-simplification (Hobson and Brailsford little knew what a liability Rhodes had been during the siege of Kimberley.) And like those other modern theories that attribute sinister power to certain financial institutions, some anti-imperialism conveyed more than a hint of anti-Semitism. (283-4)

Conclusion: The ‘Crux’ of the Issue

In this last comment by Niall Ferguson we reach the crux of the issue. Certainly, Rhodes was a colonialist and imperialist, as were most leading figures of his day, not just within the British Empire, but within all the European empires. In Africa, as noted here, the French were equally aggressive in their pursuit of land and resources, and the Belgians and subsequently the Italians also used what, even within the terms of this ‘scramble’ were excessive means against the native African populations. That is not to justify the actions that Rhodes was involved in, but just to place them in a broader context. It also needs to be noticed that his while his strategy for developing Rhodesia was a classical colonialist one, through the control of trading companies, his involvement in the Transvaal and later in the relief of Kimberley was concerned with achieving British supremacy over a white race, the Boers and that, if anything, his attitudes towards the original natives were far more liberal than those of the Afrikaners, certainly than those of Kruger. There is also evidence that, as a business man, he retained a practical antipathy for everyday racial discrimination. On this question, he should not be judged by today’s standards, but as living at a time when theories of racial hierarchy and paternalism were dominant throughout Britain and Europe.  These theories are certainly evident in the architecture of Oxford, Bristol, Liverpool, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and other cities which grew rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. If every surviving reminder of slavers, colonialists and imperialists were to be torn down, the cityscapes of Britain would look radically different, and greatly impoverished.  More importantly, much of modern human history has been about the replacement of one great ‘construct’ with another, whether in economics, politics, or art and architecture. As Niall Ferguson has pointed out, the liberal imperialism of the late Victorian period was criticised by Radicals who revealed themselves as overtly anti-Semitic. The new empires of fascists and communists which characterised the 1930s and 1940s were far more universally destructive than the old ones, yet we do not seek to remove every trace of them. Finally, far from being an ‘architect of apartheid’, there is a fundamental ‘disconnect’ between the imperialism of Rhodes and his contemporaries in Africa and the post-1948 racist regimes in Southern Africa. They drew their inspiration from a heretical view of sectarian Calvinism which was very far removed from the Victorian paternalism of ‘the white man’s burden’ to which Rhodes subscribed.