CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2026
| Author | Inglis, Cody James |
|---|---|
| Title | Between Freedom and Constraint: Republicanism and the Left in Hungary and Yugoslavia, 1918-1948 |
| Summary | This dissertation interprets the emergence, articulation, and eventual subsumption of republican political thought on the Left in Hungary and Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1948. It first examines the “crystallization” of this ideational formation during the First World War, when ideas of general human emancipation were linked to visions of radical state democratization and macro-regional federation on the Left. By the end of the 1910s, leftist republican intellectuals in both the Hungarian and South Slavic linguistic contexts answered the intertwined questions of state form and nation with the idea of a democratic federal republic which rejected a capitalist economic framework in favor of socialist, syndicalist, or solidarist ideas of economic organization and production. In the wake of the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, Hungary was declared a People’s Republic (népkö ;ztársas&# xe1;g), then transforming into a Republic of Councils (tanácsk&# xf6;ztársa ság). At first, the new Hungarian republican state was led by a heterogenous cohort of the republican Left—civic radicals, social democrats, national independentists, urban liberals, and feminists. Yet, after pressure from the Entente to withdraw further from the country’s historic borders, the central state apparatus was taken over by a coalition of left-wing social democrats and communists in mid-March 1919. A combination of violent excesses, internal policy missteps, and a deeply hostile international situation ultimately paved the way for a right-wing counterrevolution, a White Terror, and the “restoration” of the Hungarian kingdom in 1920. By contrast, the rapid union of South Slav territories with Serbia in late 1918 cut off the path to federal republican statehood for Yugoslavia early on, a fact set in stone with the passage of the monarchist and centralist Vidovdan Constitution in June 1921. Within this period too, small, ephemeral states in local contexts cropped up, many of which claimed the republican label. Aside from the interesting discursive use of the concept ‘republic’, these microstates did not exist long enough to exercise any lasting alternative to nation-statehood. In both the Hungarian and South Slavic contexts, republican political thought survived, though now—or perhaps once again—as a sharply oppositional language of politics, emphasizing democratization and popular sovereignty, federalism and self-determination in settings which evermore lurched toward oligarchy, authoritarianism, and centralism. During this period of consolidation, so called, republican political thought in Hungary and Yugoslavia found limited expression in official political fora. Instead, republican political ideas circulated in the metapolitical sphere of culture. The retreat to culture in the 1920s and ‘30s was a key metapolitical act. Both contexts witnessed the republican Left cultivate its own political temporality, one that linked the construction of a progressive past with the critique of a stagnant present, ending in the theoretical expression of emancipation in a radically democratic future. Yet through this intellectual process, a fundamental conceptual shift occurred: the concept ‘republic’ was increasingly replaced by that of ‘democracy’ in leftist republican political language. From the mid-1930s, however, the republican Left in the Hungarian and Yugoslav contexts increasingly returned to public political life, often under the banner of antifascist popular fronts. In contrast to the French and Spanish cases, these popular fronts rather took the form of decentralized but vibrant “periodical communities” of antifascist and antiauthoritarian intellectuals. These efforts only barely survived the increasingly authoritarian turns in both countries, swept up from 1941 in the Nazi German drive to continental domination through war and genocide. Despite the particularities across contexts, republicanism in both cases advanced common ideas: freedom as individual and collective autonomy, emancipation from domination, full democratic control over the state and economy, as well as the cultivation of a culture of active civic participation to resist arbitrary rule, that is, a full conception of self-determination. These key themes allowed republican political thought to serve as a bridge during the period of passive and active resistance to fascism in both countries, thus facilitating antifascist alliances between communists and conservatives, liberals and socialists, and civic radicals and peasantists alike. In Hungary, the endurance of a semi-open public sphere until March 1944 permitted the partial circulation of a surprising plurality of leftist republican ideas. In Yugoslavia, the partisan movement rapidly subsumed republican ideas within the communist parole, but this did not mean its exhaustion. Although Hungary and Yugoslavia diverged in their exits from the war, republics were proclaimed in the winter of 1945–46. Postwar Hungary experienced a brief democratic “interlude” through 1948, while in Yugoslavia the process of postwar Stalinization alternatively co-opted and marginalized leftist republican currents. This did not mean the complete disappearance of leftist republican thought, however. As the conclusion makes clear, there were surprising continuities through the rest of the twentieth century. |
| Supervisor | Trencsényi, Balázs |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2026/inglis_cody-james.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2025, Central European University