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Hungarian thinker and politician Istvan Bibó was the last minister left at his post when Soviet troops entered the Budapest parliament in 1956. Rather than flee to avoid arrest, herushed to finish his famous “For Freedom and Truth” proclamation. His 50-year-old views are growing increasingly pertinent.
István Bibó (1911-1979) remains among the more interesting Central European thinkers of the 20th century. He emerged from Calvinist and intellectual background and studied law at the University of Szeged. He spent a year in Geneva, where lectures by Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen and Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero had a fundamental effect on his mature thinking. While working for the Hungarian justice ministry during the Nazi occupation in March 1
944, Bibó used his official position to save many Jews from deportation.
Arrested by officials of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross, he was released after a brief detention but was living in hiding for the rest of the war.
In February of 1945, new Hungarian Interior Minister Ferenc Erdei coaxed him back into government. Starting in 1946, Bibó began teaches at his old university and was named a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. But his strident opposition to Communist Party repression led to his being stripped of all his official positions and forced to take a job in the university library. The writings he formulated while employed at the library have become the basis for modern Hungarian political thinking.
In 1956, Bibó joined the ant-Stalinist revolt and soon became part of the Imre Nagy government as state minister. When Soviet troops stormed the Hungarian capital in November, Bibó refused to flee parliament to seek refuge in a neutral embassy, as other did (“I admonish the Hungarian people to not consider the occupying army or their puppet government as legal authority,” he wrote in his famous “For Freedom and Truth” proclamation). By remaining behind, Bibó arrested and imprisoned until a1963 amnesty. Once released, he was not allowed to work freely and was again forced to become a librarian.
Understanding Bibó means understanding Guglielmo Ferrero’s concept of “legitimacy.” For Ferrero, legitimacy was tied to fear, not just at an individual level but a social one. Fear in turn gave rise to violence and oppression.
Societies gripped by fear and insecurity were far more likely to use lethal force, destroying legal institutions and generating further fear. While principles of legitimacy vary by historical periods, but what matters is their effectiveness, or how power becomes legitimate.
What’s perhaps most interesting Bibó is the way he applied criteria at the time unknown to Hungarian culture, including “distortion of the character,” “disorder,” “hysteria,” behavior patterns borrowed directly from the incipient lexicon of psychoanalysis. This went well beyond the “fear” factor emphasized by Ferrero. This psychoanalytic approach was so central to his thinking that literary critic Sándor Szilágyi has called him
“the therapist of Central Europe.”
Imperial domination
Bibó doesn’t chant on behalf of the Danubian world. He doesn’t recognize the role played by Hapsburgs in the long period during which Hungary lacked specific ethnic boundaries — which puts him in opposition with François Fejtö, among the great Hungarian historians.
In Bibó’s writings, the Dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary embodies is a negative in the most absolute terms.
“Empire” is not a word he attributes to the period. He instead he writes of a lack of center. He portrays Hungarians as “oikumene,” a “different” population that lacks the cohesive and unifying necessary to define or build a nation state.
For Bibó, the crux of Hungarian history is the defeat the independence movements of 1848-49, when “political instincts and the sense of danger among the ruling classes and intellectual forces was focused on a single point: the fear that ‘historic’ Hungary was about to disintegrate.”
As a result of this fear, landed and privileged classes hunkered down and agree to create “the political construction, that was both false and contradictory, of a compromise with Austria, which stranded the country and made community life sterile.” The “developmental disorders of society” and Central European nations “calling into question their very existence as nations” created “a particularly fertile breeding ground for false political formulations, as well as dead-end social and political constructs.”
Hungary thus became one of many Central and Eastern European nationstates born after 1918 that were characterized by an absence of stability and security, as well as a constant fear of dissolution. The people of these nations would be burned with something “sick” and irrational, something that was “emotionally unstable.” This ongoing state of insecurity, “a state of convulsive fear” made all “democratic development” shaky at best. These same factors, including the “gradual crumbling of healthy trends” from the inside, also led to “moral collapse of Hungarian society,” which was later reduced surrendered both to communism and anti-Semitism.
Small-state misery
According to Bibó, there could be no democracy in Central Europe until it rid itself of this “constant sense of fear and danger,” transforming into a rule “what the real democracies endure only in hours of danger: a diminishing of civil liberties, the hunt for ‘mercenaries,’ enemies,
and traitors to the state, the imposition of order at any cost, or the appearance order, and the creation of national unity at the expense of liberty.”
This concept of security could only be achieved be emphasizing an ethnically homogeneous culture. “This of course does not mean that a territory can’t also have minorities or that there are linguistic ‘islands,’” he wrote, “but it does means a stabilization of a system of boundaries that exists between the inner nations are not, as in Western Europe, based on historical borders, but on linguistic ones.”
For Bibó, the coexistence of various minorities in one state or under a federal state was no solution. He instead recommended the creation of ethnically and linguistically homogeneous states based on “principles of self-determination on ethnicity.” But Bibó’s works never clearly define concepts of “ethnicity” and “linguistic community” Their contours are opaque and eventually overlap. To achieve the goal of the homogeneous state, Bibó proposed the forced shifting of populations.
Bibó was faced with the dilemma of ethnic cleansing immediately after World War II, while at the interior ministry.
In the late spring of 1945 he learned that components of the ethnic German population, the Swabians, had been deported to make way for the Bukovina Székely. He decided to divide Swabians who
had called themselves German in the 1941 census into five categories: political leaders, active members of the Swabian community, supporters of Volksbund, politically passive inhabitants, and anti-fascist fighters. The first three were deemed liable to trial and deportation to labor camps.
Discussing the affair in 1978, Bibó claimed that while he was never particularly enthusiastic about the Swabian solution, he preferred to err on the side of a people’s right to collective responsibility. His previous positions on the matter were clear. In December 1945, he had drafted a memorandum openly critical of German expulsions from Hungary. He was equally disdainful of Czechoslovakia’s postwar Benes Decrees, intended to expel Germany toward the goal of achieving an ethnically homogeneous state. He suggested such discriminatory policies were not unlike those practiced by Hitler.
For Bibó, population transfers should take place “based on reciprocity and overseen by, and under the control of, the community of nations.” This, he said, might provide a way out of endless recriminations, which had repeatedly seen one state trying to mend past wrongs by creating new ones.
Anti-Semitism and political deformity
If Bibó repeatedly confronted 20th century Central European questions in an unconventional way, his reading of rampant regional anti-Semitism was equally unconventional. It’s now an established historical fact that the Jewish genocide can’t be blamed solely on the Nazi SS, its agents, and the German people as a whole. Its creation and development was also contingent on considerable regional acquiescence, much of it “bought” thanks to the “blood money” redistribution of property confiscated from Jews.
Bilbo again chooses to focus on the pathological character of societies of the time. “Broad strata of Hungarian society,” he writes, “simply became accustomed to the fact that people could build a fortune not only through work and commitment, but just by lift ing from what others had created with their own hands.
They just needed to denounce someone by discovering the origin of their grandparents, have them fired, have their business confiscated, possibly forcing them to jail, and then take over what they’d been forced to leave behind.”
These incidents provoked “an unforgettable shocks, not only to Jews involved but, more generally, to all Hungarians aware of what had happened.”
His analysis is particularly precious in examining the form anti-Semitism took in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe following World War II. Often, survivors returned home to hostility, their requests for property restitution met with responses raging from hatred to indifference.
“Following the first phase of trauma, survivors and post-liberation returnees suddenly faced a new, virulent and palpable anti-Semitism,” he wrote in 1948. His reflection, rare at the time, was based on the theme of national responsibility. Though Germany was largely responsible for the moral damage done, that by itself didn’t necessarily absolve the Hungarian people from their complicity.
In the same way and Jan Patocka and Václav Havel used life under communism to contrasted the polarities of “living in truth” against "living in a lie,” Bibó worked to demolish the alibis offered by indifferent citizenries.
Well ahead of Hannah Arendt, he argued against the impossibility of behaving irresponsible when faced with the prospect of evil.
“Mean spiritedness, mediocrity, and vileness don’t proceed from some free and spectacularly diabolical decision-making process,” he wrote, “but instead from the doing of something miserable without any awareness or free will. We do only that which our collective social, educational and personal traits tell us to do, based on the experiences that have twisted and deformed us, on ingrained prejudices, on empty platitudes, and on the silly formulas to which we adhere.”
Hungarian thinker and politician Istvan Bibó was the last minister left at his post when Soviet troops entered the Budapest parliament in 1956. Rather than flee to avoid arrest, herushed to finish his famous “For Freedom and Truth” proclamation. His 50-year-old views are growing increasingly pertinent.
