The Minority Self-Governments in Hungary

Despite the fact that contemporary Hungary is a relatively homogenous country in terms of its ethnic and linguistic composition, as the country has lost most of its national minorities with the Treaty of Trianon, several key aspects of its minority policy, including the system of minority self-governments (MSGs), the national variant of non-territorial autonomy adopted by the 1993 Act on the Rights of National and Ethnic Minorities (hereinafter the 1993 Minority Rights Act) have been regularly the subject of debates. These are especially centered around the consistency between the country’s kin-state policies targeting the overall much more numerous, often territorially concentrated, more conscious, and politically mobilized Hungarian minorities in the neighboring countries and the domestic minority policies that typically cover smaller, dispersed and highly assimilated communities. Closely related to this is the question of how to approach the existing diverse and multiple identifications as well as fluid community boundaries among the internal minorities, and further, the extent to which the adopted minority rights regime with its focus on cultural autonomy corresponds with the needs of the predominantly Hungarian-speaking, yet socially and economically marginalized Roma, the country’s by far largest ethnic community (Vizi 2009, 128).

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