Hungarian fathers of single Europe

Hungarians with united Europe on their mind, mostly entertained dreams of federative changes in the Danube Valley and Central Europe, but some raised quite early on the idea of an Pan-European unity.

Politicians of the Reform Age generation, were the first to address the idea more closely: Miklós Wesselényi (1796-1850), recommended unity to counter Slavic expansion, turning the Habsburg Monarchy into a federal state; and the formation of a system of alliances; he thought a Central European alliance could easily block Russian expansions.

Similar ideas surfaced relatively late during the Hungarian War of Independence during 1848/49: the act on the free use of language adopted in late July 1849 still failed to grant autonomy. After losing the War of Independence, many ideas were published about a potential transformation and the unification of Central Europe.

The plans of Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894), to create confederation envisaged federal states and later a Danubian Confederation, based on the US constitution and contemporary jurisprudence. The writer Mihály Táncsics (1799-1884), dreamed about seven larger state formations. The goals promoted by philosopher of religion, János György, were equally ambitious as he would have merged the Habsburg Monarchy with the Balkan states and Greece. Advocates of Turanism also indulged in daydreams: narrowly speaking, Turanism covers Turkic peoples only.

Even today this idea is commonly shared by advocates of Pan-Turkism in present-day Turkey and in the Turkic speaking republics of the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia, where the term ‘Turan’ is interpreted to mean a common and cross-border homeland for Turkic people. A journal launched under the title „Turan” in 1913, envisaged Hungarians as the leaders of six hundred million Turanians.

Social scientist Oscar Jászi (1875-1957), and the supporters of civil radicalism, blamed small statehood and customs frontiers as barriers to development: this time, the unity of Central Europe is still conceived as a necessity.

By the second half of World War I, however, Jászi modified his ideas and identified a common international organisation and the cooperation of nations living here as the way out, from raging war: he dreamt of unifying Central Europe in the form of a Confederation.

The Treaty of Trianon had a major impact on approaches to a unified Europe: Economist Alajos Paikert (1866-1948), geographer Jenő Cholnoky (1870-1950) as well as the supporters of expansive imperialism, would have been welcomed a Turanian economic and political confederacy.

However, the majority rejected these ideas: moderate politicians saw regional cooperation as the way out. Prime Ministers István Bethlen (1874-1946), and Pál Teleki (1879-1941), as well as the writer Miklós Bánffy (1874-1950), saw the basis for Romanian, Polish and Hungarian alliance in  granting partial autonomy to Transylvania. Politician Elemér Hantos (1881-1942), also stressed the importance of regional cohesion in the Danube Valley; and justified this idea with the accessible natural resources and historical traditions. These plans and schemes had lost momentum by the second half of the 1930s, when German economic expansion also gained supremacy in this part of Europe.

The first Hungarian promoter of Pan-European unity was the writer József Pásztor (1873-1942), who would have divided Europe into federal states under the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, similarly to the United States of America. In 1925, István Tóth designed his unified Europe as a move towards the Modern Empire and Eternal Peace.

Established in 1926, the Pan-European Union also had an office in Hungary, which was joined by several acclaimed intellectuals. One of the members of the movement, Bertalan Hatvany (1900-1980), an Orientalist author believed that the Danube Valley itself would directly lead to a unified Europe as the traditions of people inhabiting the region forecast such a Union.