Gábor Egry is István Deák Visiting Professor in the Department of History. He is a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and director-general of the Institute of Political History, Budapest. His research interests include nationalism, everyday ethnicity, politics of identity, politics of memory, and economic history in modern East Central Europe. He is the author of five volumes in Hungarian and several articles, published in European Review of History, Slavic Review, Hungarian Historical Review, Südost-Forschungen.

Harriman: Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became a political historian?

Egry: I grew up in Miskolc. My parents were both economists. My mother was involved in politics even before Communism fell in 1989, so let’s call her a party apparatchik, even though she was a part of the reformist group. My parents were very liberal in letting me choose what I wanted to do professionally, but at the time, Eastern European countries were transitioning to market economies, and the obvious thing was to study economics. I was interested in history—the first adult book I read as a child was a historical novel about the Hungarian war of liberation against the Habsburgs in the early 18th century and I decided that I wanted to be a historian by the age of 13 or 14. The compromise I reached with my parents was that I decided to study economic history. My dissertation, which I defended in 2006, was about the financial system of the Transylvanian Saxons.

Writing this thesis and working on this minority group from the 19th century, I became more and more interested in issues of nationalism. I was fascinated by this new wave of work on the late Habsburg Empire. I ended up focusing on the history of nationalism as a political ideology, and the politics of identity. This was relevant at the time because in post-Communist regime Hungary and in Hungary of the early 2000s, the issue of Hungarian minorities was very important in politics. And I found that a historical understanding of the issue was missing from the discourse.

I was most inspired by thinking about the experiences of the common people, so to say. That’s what brought me to look at Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia and Romania during the interwar era, and how their ethnicity and politics of identity affected their everyday lives.

Harriman: What role did national identity and nationalism play in Hungary’s post-Communist transition? 

Egry: The issue of national identity became much more politicized than it was before the change of regime. The Communist regime tried to play down Hungarian national identity and bolster what they called “socialist patriotism.”

But there were between two and three million Hungarians living in neighboring countries and they faced serious discrimination, particularly in Romania, where there was an assimilationist state policy. Because the socialist regime did not publicly politicize this issue, the opposition leveraged the regime’s silence and made the fate of these Hungarian minorities a central focus.

There were competing ideas about how Hungary should relate to these Hungarian minorities; how Hungary should think about the Hungarian nation; how Hungary should institutionalize the Hungarian nation, whether there could be differences, legitimate differences in the legal status and treatment of Hungarians within Hungary and Hungarians outside of Hungary; and what the Hungarian state’s own idea of its past national history should look like.

Today, and this is mostly the making of the Fidesz government, the perception of Hungarian nationhood is more conservative and it’s very hard to find contradicting public voices to the dominant idea expressed by the state.

And most of the new opposition parties also subscribe to a more classical, conservative Hungarian nationalism.

Harriman: How has this political climate impacted your work as an academic and your ability to express yourself?

Egry: I’m lucky in the sense that I work for a private research institute. The government has harassed us in several ways, but it hasn’t been able to shut down the Institute so far. Even though we have been deprived of any kind of direct state support subsidies, the government doesn’t have the kind of power over us that some of my colleagues in state-run institutions have to deal with.

I haven’t been publicly harassed in my capacity as a historian. The flip side of it is that I’m not as engaged as some of my colleagues are in the most famous aspects of Hungarian history, and since I’m not so well-known by the Hungarian public, my often-critical comments about official politics do not necessarily reach a broader audience.

Harriman: What courses will you be teaching at the Harriman Institute this fall?

Egry: One course is about food culture and politics in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a kind of social and political history of food. Something I hope to convey with the course is that Eastern Central Europe’s food history in political and social terms, is just as interesting as that of Western Europe, even though most of the literature on this topic is about Western Europe.

Harriman: Can you give a brief example of what you mean?

Egry: In the Central and Eastern European context, we can get a really good glimpse of changes of consumption culture and how the cultural aspects of food are linked with national identity, because of the many political transitions that this region has experienced. For instance, food in present-day Hungary could be part of the Communist legacy, and the anti-Communist struggle could be seen as the revival of a lost national food culture because of all the historical tragedies that fell on Hungary.

And this is similar in many other Eastern and Central European countries. So, in a sense, it’s much more complex than Western food culture because of the complexities of history.

Harriman: Fascinating.

Egry: The second course I’ll be teaching is a modern economic history of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe through the lens of the Austro-Hungarian high capital and the economic space it created from the last bit of the 19th century and what actually survived the collapse of Austria Hungary and persisted up to the Second World War. I hope to show that this kind of regional economic history is also possible to tell from a more bottom-up perspective than that of classic economic histories, which build their narratives and arguments mostly on macro-level statistics or national statistics, as well as phenomena like international trade mobility, international finance, and so on.

I’m would like to highlight how these businesses operate and how these operations go beyond the boundaries of the business link up with the broader economics. Through this lens, I hope to teach the class more about the relationship between political and economic imperialism.

Gabor Egry will teach the courses “Food in Modern East Central Europe: A Cultural and Political History,” and “An Economic History of East Central and Southeastern Europe through the Austro-Hungarian Lens.”