Going Against the Flow: Sinn Féin’s Unusual Hungarian ‘Roots’

Abstract

Can states as well as non-state political ‘actors’ learn from the history of cognate entities elsewhere in time and space, and if so how and when does this policy knowledge get ‘transferred’ across international borders? This article deals with this question, addressing a short-lived Hungarian ‘tutorial’ that, during the early twentieth century, certain policy elites in Ireland imagined might have great applicability to the political transformation of the Emerald Isle, in effect ushering in an era of political autonomy from the United Kingdom, and doing so via a ‘third way’ that skirted both the Scylla of parliamentary formulations aimed at securing ‘home rule’ for Ireland and the Charybdis of revolutionary violence. In the political agenda of Sinn Féin during its first decade of existence, Hungary loomed as a desirable political model for Ireland, with the party’s leading intellectual, Arthur Griffith, insisting that the means by which Hungary had achieved autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire in 1867 could also serve as the means for securing Ireland’s own autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. This article explores what policy initiatives Arthur Griffith thought he saw in the Hungarian experience that were worthy of being ‘transferred’ to the Irish situation.

Keywords:

• Ireland
• Hungary
• Sinn Féin
• home rule
• Ausgleich of 1867
• policy transfer
• Arthur Griffith

Notes

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2. See M. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923 (Cambridge, 1999), 26. Also B. Maye, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 1997).

3. A. Griffith, The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland. 3^rd ed. (Dublin, 1918; orig. pub. 1904).

4. D. McCartney, ‘The Political Use of History in the Work of Arthur Griffith’, Journal of Contemporay History, viii (1973), 3–19, quote at p. 9.

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7. Cited by L. Baritz, ‘The Idea of the West’, American Historical Review, lxvi (1961), 618–40, quote at 637–8.

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29. S.R. Leslie, ‘The New Ireland and the New World’, Ireland-American Review, v [n.d. but likely 1941], 71–90, quote at p. 81.

30. Griffith, Resurrection of Hungary, xiv (preface to the 1^st ed).

31. M. Szabó, ‘A Magyar nemesi és polgári liberalizmus’ [Hungarian Noble and Civic Liberalism] in I. Z. Dénes (ed), Liberalizmus és nemzettudat: Dialógus Szabó Miklós gondolataival [Dialogue with Miklós Szabó’s Thoughts] (Budapest, 2008), 31–102, citing from pp. 37–40.

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33. Szabó, ‘A Magyar nemesi’, 41.

34. G. Egedy, Konzervatizmus az ezredfordulón [Conservatism at the Turn of the Millenium] (Budapest, 2001), 17, 173.

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36. Korkut, Liberalization Challenges in Hungary, ch. 4.

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38. Szabó, ‘A Magyar nemesi’, 37–53.

39. B.K. Király, Ferenc Deák (Boston, 1975), 149.

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41. See especially R.D. Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London, 1977). Also see J. Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London, 1987).

42. J.E. Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate Over the United Kingdom Constitution, 1870–1921 (Montreal and Kingston, 1989), 41.

43. Király, Ferenc Deák, 69.

44. Ibid., 56; Barany, Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 385.

45. Király, Ferenc Deák, 182.

46. Quoted in ibid., 164.

47. Cartledge, Will to Survive, 231–2.

48. P. Colum, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 1959), 76–7.

49. Hoensch, History of Modern Hungary, 28.

50. E. Niederhauser, ‘The National Question in Hungary’ in M. Teich and R. Porter (eds), The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1993), 248–69, citing from 258.

51. C. Younger, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 1981), 9.

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53. F. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), 1–22.

54. Quoted in P. Maume, ‘The Ancient Constitution: Arthur Griffith and His Intellectual Legacy to Sinn Féin’, Irish Political Studies, x (1995), 123–37, quote at 128.

55. Barany, Széchenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 138–9.

56. S.B. Vardy, Baron Joseph Eötvös (1813–1871): A Literary Biography (Boulder, 1987), 70.

57. Király, Ferenc Deák, 120–1.

58. Colum, Arthur Griffith, 32.

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61. Younger, Arthur Griffith, 27–8.

62. J. Stephens, Arthur Griffith: Journalist and Statesman (Dublin, 1922), 7.

63. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, 164–6.