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Mark Pittaway, In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism and Anti-Semitism, 1890–1944, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1061–1063, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem185
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FOR most of the twentieth century, Hungarian civil society has been fractured by sharp political conflict over the very meaning of the nation. The traumatic outcome of the First World War characterised by revolution, counter-revolution and losses of territory opened an era of intense political polarisation along left-right lines. This polarisation underpinned the country's entanglement in the Second World War, the Holocaust of the country's Jewish population, the emergence, consolidation and finally the fall of its post-war socialist dictatorship. Beneath these patterns political polarisation lay considerable cultural conflict over the nature of Hungarian national identity, and issues of belonging; after 1919 Hungary was not merely shaken by the contraction of the borders of the state, but was rent by a struggle over the boundaries of the nation. Paul A. Hanebrink's ground-breaking study of the role of religion in Hungarian nation-building projects traces one aspect of this cultural struggle over the legitimate boundaries of the nation, and its concrete political consequences.
