Socialist patriotism and nation-building in Hungary, 1956-1989

After the anti-Stalinist 1956 revolution, socialist patriotism in Hungary was adopted as a basic political concept in the propaganda of state socialism, which was suitable for identifying the enemy and clarifying the blurred boundaries between friend and foe. While socialist patriotism was initially used to condemn the enemy – bourgeois nationalism – new meanings emerged after the easing of the politics of retaliation in the first years of the 1960s. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the era of the reign of Janos Kádár as first secretary of the Hungarian communist party. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter-concept to set against “bourgeois nationalism” which was characterized as a xenophobic sense of nation serving the interests of the capitalist classes. This formula of socialist patriotism provided a means to contest the ideas both of Hungarian independence and neutrality as espoused by the revolutionaries of 1956 and the traditional (Western) conception of the nation. Meanwhile, with an ideological tour de force, the ideologists of the Kádár regime were eager to combine socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism under the leadership of the Soviet Union. From the late 60s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy, that is, supra-nationalism. This latter was the affinity of socialist citizens for the American (or Western) way of life, individualistic consumption and political ideals. In this ideological struggle, national identity, embodied in historical traditions, emerged as an increasingly positive element in the construction of socialism.