Murray N. Rothbard, “But What About the Hungarians?” (1993)

This short March 1993 political essay is a polemical intervention in the post-Soviet “nationalities question.” Rothbard’s central claim is that the same principle of ethnic justice invoked for Slovenes, Croats, Chechens, Abkhazians, and others should also be applied to Hungarians left outside Hungary after World War I. He frames Hungary as the overlooked case in a Europe suddenly willing to reconsider borders, arguing that “territorial integrity” has become a selective doctrine protecting some settlements while denying justice to others.

But in all this reaching for a place in the sun, one oppressed and despised ethnic group remains immobile, and no one seems to care: I speak of the marvelous and ancient people, the Hungarians.

The essay’s structure is compact: Rothbard first situates Hungary among post-communist national movements; then turns backward to Versailles and Trianon; then surveys disputed territories—southern Slovakia, Vojvodina, Transylvania, and Carpatho-Ruthenia; and finally criticizes Hungarian and Western elites for stigmatizing Hungarian irredentism. His conceptual move is to treat borders not as settled legal facts but as moral claims subject to ethnic scrutiny.

Just as Germany was shattered and torn apart by the monstrous Treaty of Versailles in 1919, so Hungary, also burdened with phony “war guilt” for World War I by the victorious and vengeful Entente powers (Britain and France), was carved up by the equally monstrous and corollary Treaty of Trianon the following year.

Trianon is the essay’s historical hinge. Rothbard presents Wilsonian self-determination as hypocritically applied: some national groups were liberated, while others were placed under foreign rule. Hungary, in this telling, became a paradigmatic casualty of victorious Allied mapmaking.

Poor Hungary was shorn of fully one-third of its ethnic and linguistic brethren.

The territorial survey sharpens the argument from grievance into prescription. Rothbard names Hungarians in southern Slovakia and northern Vojvodina, then dwells most on Transylvania, where he treats the ethnic question as complicated but not therefore irrelevant. His most striking passage invokes Bela Kiraly’s view that the wartime division of Transylvania may have approximated ethnic justice better than later settlements.

The distinguished historian Bela Kiraly, a top general in Hungary who escaped to the West after the heroic and failed Revolution of 1956, told me, when I asked him about ethnic boundaries in Transylvania: “I hate to say this, but Hitler’s imposed boundary was probably about the best solution.”

Rothbard’s argument here is deliberately provocative: he separates the moral status of a regime from the possible accuracy of a boundary decision. That move lets him insist that anti-Nazi sentiment, pro-Western alignment, or postwar diplomatic legitimacy should not decide ethnic claims. Carpatho-Ruthenia receives more qualified treatment, since he says Hungarian claims there are weaker, showing that the essay’s irredentism is not presented as unlimited but as ethnographically bounded.

His political conclusion is explicit and maximalist. The essay calls not merely for minority rights or cultural autonomy, but for border revision in favor of Hungary.

Hungary’s territory should definitely be expanded to include: southern Slovakia, the northern Vojvodina in Serbia, and something like two-thirds of Transylvania. Hungarians arise!

The final section turns from history to contemporary political alignment. Rothbard describes Hungarian nationalist activists, including Istvan Czurka and the 1956 Anti-Fascist and Anti-Bolshevik Association, as forces of national recovery, while casting the “pro-Western” establishment and U.S. opinion as guardians of the postwar and post-Cold War status quo. The essay’s relevance lies in this fusion of anti-centralism, ethnic self-government, and hostility to U.S.-approved international order.

It’s clear that Hungarians will never achieve their true place in the sun so long as their rulers are more interested in currying favor with the United States government than they are in justice for themselves.

Rothbard’s core conceptual pattern is therefore consistent: self-determination must override inherited state borders; Trianon is morally parallel to Versailles; Western liberal opinion selectively blesses some nationalisms and demonizes others; and Hungarian irredentism becomes, for him, a test case of whether ethnic justice is a principle or merely a geopolitical convenience.