HUNGARIAN STUDIES 10. No. 1. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1995]

Papers of the Seventeenth György Ránki Hungarian Chair Conference "Religions and Churches in Modern Hungary" - Indiana University, Bloomington, April 23-25. 1993 - László Péter: Church-State Relations and Civil Society in Hungary: A Historical Perspective

CHURCH-STATE RELATIONS AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN HUNGARY: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE LÁSZLÓ PÉTER School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, London, England The need for an historical perspective The past offers perspectives on what is permanent and what has changed. If political analysis confines itself to the present it will breed a myopic view of society and its prospects. In the history of modern Hungary the past and the present are brought together by the endeavour to create a west European type of civil society. Nineteenth-century Hungarian politicians and intellectuals strived to attain that social order and a century later their successors are still groping for it. The reform of church-state relations in the nineteenth century was just as important a part of the endeavour to create a civil society as it is now after the collapse of Communism. It would be wrong to assume that the Communist system of church-state relations was entirely the product of the post-war regime. The system had a good deal less to do with the Communist form of government and ideology and a good deal more affinity with the legal and political traditions of eastern Europe than is generally assumed. Before the Second World War most of the Churches in Hungary had enjoyed privileges, legal rights and internal autonomy on a far wider scale than that to which they were reduced after 1948. The ideological conflict between nineteenth-century liberalism and religion was trifling compared with that between Marxism-Le­ninism and religion. Living under the barrage of fierce anti-religious propa­ganda, the Churches were subject to the sternest restrictions even after the 1956 revolution when the regime had become more tolerant towards its ideological enemies. Differences in the treatment of the Churches before and after the Communist takeover, though fundamental, should not obscure the fact that important principles on which church-state relations rested after 1948 were similar to those on which they had rested in the past. The turning point came with the collapse of the Communist system. In 1989-1990 church-state relations were not restored to what they had been before 1949. The significance of Law IV of 1990 "On the Freedom of Hungarian Studies Wjl (1995) 0236-6568/95/$ 4.00 © 95 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

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