Tibor Joó’s Concept of the Nation and Hungarian Nationalism
In five of his works philosopher of history Tibor Joó dealt with the concept of nation and nationality in more detail. In his essay A magyar nemzeti szellem (The Hungarian National Spirit,1937), in his ‘study of national politics’ entitled Mátyás és birodalma (Matthias and His Empire, 1940), in the studies A magyar nemzeteszme (The Hungarian National Idea) and A magyar nacionalizmus (Hungarian Nationalism), 1941). It was this same topic that he discussed in his collection Vallomások a magyarságról – A nemzeti önismeret breviáriuma (Confessions on Hungarian Nationality – A Breviary of National Self-Knowledge, 1943), which was published in book form before his death and contains reflections on the concept of nation alongside studies of the great figures of Hungarian history.
As his monographer Gusztáv Tamás Filep puts it:
‘One of Joó’s starting points is that ideas remain unchanged throughout history, but concepts of ideas change. The task of a historian of ideas consists of the following steps: first, by collecting, understanding and sifting through historical sources, we have to determine how a national community views itself; then we have to clarify the normative concept of the nation; and finally we have to juxtapose the image of the community ideal and the concept to see how far the self-evaluation of the nation coincides with the norm.’[1]
Above all, Joó distinguished between the ‘Western’ and ‘Hungarian’ concepts of the nation. He saw this above all in the fact that the Hungarian concept of the nation, in his view, was formulated in a different cultural context, and because its origins and thus its historical development were different. The Hungarian concept of nation was born in the Steppe belt culture or civilization (László Koppány Csáji),[2] which once ruled the vast Eurasian steppe from Manchuria to Eastern Europe. Tibor Joó also found the true origin of the Hungarian people within this cultural circle, stressing that the foundation of the Christian state in the Carpathian Basin did not entail the birth of the actual Hungarian nation, but rather its entry into the Western Germanic–Christian cultural circle, determining its further destiny. As a matter of fact, recent historiographical debates surrounding King Stephen I’s ‘foundation’ of Hungary could profit from a longer term perspective, one for which Joó’s insights could prove useful.
Race, according to Joó, is ‘mere biology’, belonging to the realm of natural science, while the nation is ‘pure spirit.’[3] The main difference between people and nation, in his view, is that the nation is a self-reflexive, conscious reality, a subjective construct, while the people is a rather a disorganized, ‘pre-political’ biological substance. However, consistently with his premise of the centrality of intellectual history, neither can be considered a purely material form. Joó sees the people and the nation as successive stages in the elaboration of the Hegelian ‘objective spirit’, of an ‘awakening to consciousness’.
‘The nation recognizes that it occupies a place in the whole of the human being, and that this place assigns it a certain role. It assumes a vocation. The nation also lives within the circle of humanity, but it does not yet realise this, does not draw the consequences from it, does not rise to the consciousness of it. This is what happens with the birth of a nation. Or rather, it is with this awakening of consciousness that the nation is born. As it were, it rises above the narrow circle of its own community, it sees from above the great system of nations, the whole of humanity and itself in it.’[4]
Joó stresses that Hungary is the only nation in Europe which is not a nation of Germanic or Slavic or Celtic origin, apart from the originally Turkic Bulgarians, who have been significantly Slavicized and whose state-theoretical tradition is clearly of Eastern origin. The House of Árpád (the Turul gens according to 13th century chronicler Simon Kézai) traces itself back to Turul as a sacred totemic bird. It is probable that Turul was a divine symbol everywhere in the Steppe civilisation, just as it is possible that it was the totem of the Hun (xiongnu) dynasty of Mao-tun, and the claimed ancestor of the Turul dynasty or House of Árpád, High King Attila also represented. In this context, Joó rightly emphasized that the Hungarian nobility—not only the Szekler people—believed to be of Hun origin throughout the Middle Ages and part of the modern era. This sense of origin is not a retrospective contrivance, and the Hungarians who conquered the Carpathian Basin may indeed have had a layer of Hun origin. Although this has been consistently denied (especially during the Marxist period), it has now been proven by archaeogenetic evidence.[5] And here we can also point to the fact that the state idea of the conquering Hungarians is a specific nomadic imperial tradition, which significantly pre-dates the Romanized and Christianized Hungarian state idea.[6]
‘Prehistoric Hungarians do not appear as a single “race” but as a specific fabric of numerous ethnic collectives at the beginning of Hungarian history’
Joó also points out that there was no ethno–ethnic homogeneity in the Steppe civilization, even among the ruling elite tribes, i.e. the ‘nations’ in the narrow sense: as in the case of the Huns or the Avars, the prehistoric Hungarians do not appear as a single ‘race’ but as a specific fabric of numerous ethnic collectives at the beginning of Hungarian history.
As he puts it in Hungarian Nationalism:
‘In the light of the nomadic society we must give new meaning to basic sociological concepts such as family, tribe, people, nation, state. They cannot be applied to nomadic society in their usual sense at all, and we must therefore transform their meaning, because, sticking to our concepts formed from narrow experience, we cannot say that these social formations did not exist among the nomads. But they did…In their case, therefore, these elementary communities are not even natural communities, even in their basic state, as they are generally considered to be. The nomadic way of life has its origins in pastoralism. They were pastoralists and were therefore at home in landscapes of such vast extent that is hardly imaginable. Their ever-growing livestock demanded new grazing land; they had to migrate; they were used to thinking in terms of large areas. But the multiplying livestock also demanded more and more shepherds. The owner’s family by natural descent could not keep and care for them. Strangers had to be taken in…Besides, the shepherd was too busy to provide for other needs. For this, too, strangers were needed: craftsmen and farmers who, staying in the winter shelter, prepared the shepherds’ grain and tools…But even at a more primitive stage, the flocks and their owners were brought closer together and more permanent relations could be established between them, even though they were not originally related by blood.’[7]
Thus, according to Joó, the myth of common ethnic origins did not exist even among the Hungarians around the time of the Hungarian ethnogenesis. In his opinion, common ethnicity it is a mere fiction even in the case of peoples of Western origin, since there are no ‘pure races’ anywhere, as the mixing of human races (and sub-races) began long before the first organized tribal communities were formed.
‘The nomad could not be behind the times and reclusive: he knew no limits and was used to constantly moving. Imagination, foresight, ambition, an unbridled desire for the fullness of life—of which there are so many possible manifestations—were all part of the nomad’s mental constitution. His habits, his way of life, his culture, his beliefs, his morals were untouched by anyone. In fact, he was eager to learn with his broad-minded, lively, receptive, impartial and enterprising spirit. This is so conspicuous, so common knowledge in the world of the Migration Period peoples, that even later, for example in the Nibelungenlied, it is known and emphasized that everyone at Attila’s court kept their national customs. But we must also bear in mind that the author of the epic was familiar with the Hungarian court of the time – in the 13th century – where he must have experienced the same thing. Indeed, in Attila’s empire, almost all the peoples of the then known world lived together, each in his own way, and this was the king’s great pride. He wanted an empire. This tolerance for the customs of the peoples, and even their cultivation and protection, extended to their language. As all these nomadic empires are multilingual, so Attila’s was also multilingual, a fact which characterized not only the empire itself, but also its ruling class, the nomadic warriors. Naturally, they spoke the language of their subjects. They didn’t make it a matter of pride, they were smarter than that…This superior patience in the matter of language is one of the essential characteristics of the nomadic character, including that of the Hungarians. It is a political wisdom. But it is so striking, so alien to the sons of communities of origin, of ethnic origin, that Rhetor Priscus, for example, calls the Scythians and Huns ‘mixed peoples’, for they spoke several languages. And indeed, the fact of their not being ethnically homogeneous, is part of their essence.’[8]
In the case of nomadic peoples like the Steppe Hungarians, the tribal confederation and later the empire was organized around the figure of a great ‘founding hero’, such as Mao-tun (Motun, Mete Han, Bagatur) for the Asian Huns, Kagan of Bayan for the Avars, and Álmos (or Árpád) for the Hungarian tribal confederation. Later in history, but sometimes already in his lifetime, the leader and his family begin to be characterized as divinely ordained, and eventually, the chiefs of the various tribes of different origins who accept the leader’s majesty become the nation in the narrower sense.
As for the Hungarians, throughout the first half of their documentable history, we can indeed speak of proto-Hungarian tribes being part of a vast nomadic empire of several different kinds, built on similar principles. Joó does not name them, but we should add that the various Hun empires[9], the Avar Empire, the Göktürk Empire and one of its successor states, the Khazar Empire, whose close relationship with the Hungarians is already clearly documented in historical sources, may have been such. After the Hungarian tribes broke away from the Khazar Empire, which ruled the Eastern European steppe, in the 9th century AD they eventually founded their own empire—after the various tribes of ‘Scythian’ origin,[10] tribal alliances, the European Huns and then the Avars in the Carpathian-Mediterranean region.
The most important distinguishing feature of the Hungarian national ethos and Hungarian nationalism, according to Joó, is that the Hungarian nation’s leitmotif of Steppe origin survived the foundation of the Christian state, and even survived the Middle Ages, synthesizing it with Christianity. In Western Europe, however, a very different kind of nation-building took place. Charlemagne’s brief attempt at empire-building, i.e. his efforts to renew the Roman Empire on a Christian–Germanic basis, essentially quickly failed, and, despite similar efforts by the Holy Roman emperors, it was precisely in opposition to the empire-building activities of the ruling dynasties that the process of Germanic ‘nation-building’ began in the modern age. (This can also be transposed to other Western European nations.) Consequently, the Hungarian and Western European conceptions of nationhood are not only incommensurable, but also essentially opposite.
[1] Tamás Gusztáv Filep, Joó Tibor, 137.
[2] On the concept of ‘Steppe civilization’, see, László Koppány Csáji, A sztyeppei civilizáció és magyarság. Adalékok az eurázsiai sztyeppei civilizáció kutatásához, a magyar őstörténet-kutatás változásához, illetve a sztyeppei vagy sztyeppei eredetű népek etnogenezis-kutatásához.
[3] Tibor Joó, ‘Faj és nemzet’, Protestáns Szemle, 1939. 194–200.
[4] Tibor Joó. A magyar nacionalizmus, Athenaeum, 1942, 264.
[5] See especially The genetic origin of Huns, Avars, and conquering Hungarians’, Current Biology, Vol. 31, No. 13, 11 July 2022, pp. 2858–2870. https://www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222007321, accessed 3 Oct. 2024.
[6] When the Hungarians joined Christian Europe, they also carried on the tradition of the great nomadic empires of Asia—just as there was no question of Christian kings disowning their ancestors. While for the Western world, and in particular the world west of the Rhine, Attila was always a monstrous ‘scourge of God’ (as is evident in the Carolingian and medieval French chronicles) whose primary characteristic was unscrupulous destruction—despite the rhetorical remarks of Priscus to the contrary. In Bonfini’s chronicle even Mátyás Hunyadi (King Matthias of Hungary) proudly declares himself a descendant of Attila, bringing a particular colour to the medieval conception of royal authority. King St Stephen, in his famous Admonitions to Prince Imre (Emeric), probably also refers to this tradition when he writes: ‘The greatest royal jewel, as far as I know, is to follow in the footsteps of royal ancestors, to imitate one’s parents. For he who despises what his paternal ancestors have prescribed, he heeds not the divine laws.’
[7] Joó, Magyar nacionalizmus, 66.
[8] Joó, Magyar nacionalizmus, 72.
[9] The Huns established several empires between the 2nd century BC and the 7th century AD on the Eastern European steppe. Attila the Hun’s Western Hun Empire, best known to Westerners because of its geographical proximity, was only one of these empires. See Hyun Jin Kim, The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 137–143.
[10] Sarmatian and Sarmatian-like tribes (such as the Agathurs) were present in the Carpathian Basin long before the Huns—the Sarmatians and the Scythians, best known to the Greeks, represent essentially the same archaeological culture, although they belonged to different—and opposing—tribal confederations. On the history of the Sarmatians in the Carpathian Basin, see Eszter Istvánovits, Valéria Kulcsár, Egy elfelejtett nép, a szarmaták (A Forgotten People, the Sarmatians). According to the research of Endre Neparáczki and others, the early Hungarian tribes had a significant Sarmatian ethnic component (see research cited above).
All translations of quotes from Hungarian in this article are by the author.
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