One of the longest standing debates in social science has been that which has divided students of ethnicity over the issue of modernization. On the one side are the tribalists, who emphasize that the ethnonational consciousness of a self-defined group is historically rooted and believe that processes of racial and cultural homogenization associated with the broader phenomenon of modernization promote the gradual break-down of ethnic boundaries within states and ultimately encourage the spread of global culture and the disappearance of ‘tribal’ languages (here one might include such examples as Catalan, Sorb, Romansch, and perhaps also Welsh, Macedonian and Estonian). In this view, ethnocentrism is negatively correlated with the degree of interaction, and multiethnic societies are supposed to be less ethnocentric than ethnically homogeneous societies. There are two chief variants of this approach represented by the functionalists (assimilationists) and the Marxists.

The German expulsion is a sad chapter of post-World War II Hungrian history. After 1945, hundreds of thousands of Hungary's German-speaking citizens (popularly known as Swabians) were expelled as traitors. They were accused of having joined the Nazi-oriented Volksbund, or of having “volunteered” in the Third Reich's SS forces. The legality, morality, and rationality of the Hungarian government's action will be disputed for many years to come. More useful, however, might be an exploration of this apparently arbitrary and cruel expulsion of German-speaking Hungarian citizens. This essay surveys the troubled relationship that bound the Swabians and Hungarians together in ceaseless controversy from 1918 until the end of World War II. Their misunderstandings were basic and defied solution through dialogue, mutual concessions, or compromise.

Prior to World War I, Hungary's German citizens considered themselves relatively secure in their adopted Magyar-dominated homeland. As Hungarian citizens, they owed allegiance to Franz Josef I in his dual capacity as king of Hungary and as emperor of the supra-national Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Despite some assimilationist efforts by the Magyars after the Ausgleich of 1868, the Swabians felt protected by the presence of a German king-emperor, and by the fact that the empire was largely Germandominated.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 exerted a deep influence on the international communist movement and greatly affected the political and economic outlook in Hungary. A less well-known legacy of the uprising is what may be called the refugee experience, a momentous chapter in the history of human migration and resettlement. An examination of this experience reveals that the appearance of the Hungarian refugees in Western Europe and the New World greatly changed the development of Hungarian ethnic communities already in existence there, and that the refugees’ presence in the West continues to have lasting influence on relations between Hungary and the West.

In the past, Hungary has been both a source of refugees and a refuge for them. Many times in her history has she offered refuge to persecuted minorities and fugitives driven out of their own countries by war or other calamities. She has also sent her own refugees to the four corners of the world, after such events as the Rákóczi Uprising of the early eighteenth century, the War of Independece of 1848-49, the revolutions of 1918-19, and the Second World War.

The multi-national composition of the interwar Polish state was one of its most serious domestic problems. The established supremacy of the Poles in all phases of national life provoked bitter resentment from most of the country's non-Polish inhabitants, who compromised over one-third of its total population. When the Polish government consistently obstructed the attempts of these ethno-religious minorities to preserve and develop their cultural identities, assure their economic well-being, and participate fully in political life, the affected groups responded with a resistance to state authority that intensified with the passing of the two decades of Polish independence. The relationship of the government to a substantial proportion of its citizens had so deteriorated that, on the eve of World War II, a virtual condition of “undeclared warfare” existed betwen the Polish state and the leading minorities. Consequently, Warsaw could not count on any meaningful support from the Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Germans residing within its borders when the Nazi attack fell on September 1, 1939, and the Soviet assault followed on September 17. Unfortunately for these three peoples, the war brought them monumental suffering and an even crueler fate than they had endured under the Polish Republic.

The creation of an Austrian province, titled “The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” (“with the Grand Duchy of Cracow” added later) was the result of the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. The addition of this territory to the already imposing number of Habsburg's realms was ostensibly based on the dubious claim of the Hungarian kings to sovereignty over the medieval Ruthenian (Ukrainian) realm of Galicia and Volhynia. Under the subsequent Polish rule, the southern part of this duchy was organized as the województwo ruskie (Ruthenian [Ukrainian] Province), which was one of the several provinces in the so-called Ziemie Ruskie (Ruthenian Lands) of the Commonwealth, or rather of the Korona (Kingdom of Poland), vis-à-vis the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Galicia as an Austrian creation included small parts of the adjacent Ruthenian provinces of Podilia (Podole), Volhynia and Belz, (i.e. Galicia proper), and in the west also the province of Cracow, with territorial enclaves, really medieval relics, such as the “Duchy of Oświȩcim [Auschwitz]” and “Duchy of Zator” (i.e. the non-historical “Western Galicia”). Under Austrian rule, Galicia became a common home for Ukrainians (officially called Ruthenians) in the eastern counties and Poles in the western counties. Many Poles lived in Galicia proper. The Polish or Latin-Polish culture deeply influenced the Ukrainian population. However, it stubbornly, though inarticulately, maintained a sense of ethnic community with the Ukrainians who lived under the Russian imperial rule. A prominent Polish historian (and for more than a decade President of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow), Stanislaw Smolka, ascertains the “common features” of the “ethno-historical indivudiuality” known in Polish history as Ruś (Ruthenia) which had been “dormant through the centuries but never moribund [obumarla].” This Ruthenia “at the present attempts to find for herself a new distinguishing name and wants it to be ‘Ukraine'.” He also determines “the historical continuity” in the past of the old Ruthenia of Yaroslav and Monomakh and the “Ruthenian Lands” of the Commonwealth.