Multiculti

“The creed of multiculturalism – that ‘We are now living side by side, and how good this is for us’ – has failed,” Angela Merkel declared more than ten years ago. Well, they should have asked the Hungarians who ended up in the successor states after the Trianon border modification, we could have told them this would happen. Moreover, we can also tell what else will follow if migration continues like this, because we know exactly what it’s like when a community that has been living as a minority until then comes to power and reorganizes society, administration, etc. based on majority logic. This is practically what our past hundred years have been about. Based on our experiences, we could have told them that “side by side” means this: we live in parallel worlds.

Indeed, we, Hungarians pushed into minority, know a lot about multiculturalism. We know that multiculturalism is mostly monolingual, and this language is always the language of power.

In this part of Europe, we have long known what it’s like when ethnic ratios change. When masses of people with different languages and cultures arrive, for whom our built heritage means nothing, who casually relieve themselves at the foot of our churches during city days and festivals.

And if you wanted to complain about this, you would have to explain the grievance to an official for whom, for example, even the land registry and deed mean nothing. He considers it an attack if you would defend what is – now – a common value, because in his view it’s not common, but theirs. Not the state’s, not the city’s, not public property, but theirs. He speaks to the defeated as a victor.

As a victor, he also erases history completely. Just one example, ten years ago, a memorial plaque was placed on the Cluj-Napoca railway station with the names of the station masters, and it states: “1870-1945 UNKNOWN.” Seventy-five years disappeared into nothingness.

We also experienced how our children can be alienated from our homeland. You simply have to rename the settlements, street names, regions and change the administrative boundaries. We lived through the schizophrenic state when we appeared under foreign names in our official documents. And if our parents chose a first name that couldn’t be translated into Romanian, for example, then we could run into the problem that the official couldn’t read the double consonant; it can be quite frustrating when you have to spell out “sz” to the irritated clerk. And I could go on.

But I’d rather translate the future. For a long time, an image has been haunting me and resurfaces when I hear “multiculti”: at dawn in Csíksomlyó, the muezzin’s call to prayer sounds. And here the arguments run out. I simply don’t want this.

Notes:

Trianon border modification: The Treaty of Trianon (1920) after World War I, which resulted in Hungary losing about two-thirds of its territory and a significant portion of its population to neighboring countries. This event is central to understanding modern Hungarian national consciousness.

Successor states: Countries that gained territory from Hungary after WWI, including Romania, Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia), Serbia (then part of Yugoslavia), and Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union).

Cluj-Napoca: A city in Transylvania, Romania (Hungarian name: Kolozsvár). It has a significant Hungarian minority and historical importance for Hungarian culture.

Csíksomlyó: A village in Transylvania, Romania (Romanian: Șumuleu Ciuc), known for its Franciscan monastery and an important pilgrimage site for Hungarian Catholics.

Linguistic issues:

The text refers to difficulties with Hungarian names in Romanian administration, highlighting the challenges faced by ethnic Hungarians in Romania.

“sz” is a single letter in Hungarian, pronounced like “s” in English “see”. The author mentions the difficulty of explaining this to non-Hungarian speakers.

Angela Merkel quote: The text opens with a quote from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in 2010 declared that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had “utterly failed”.