Magyarization - Historical Context

Historical Context

Joseph II (1780–90), a leader influenced by the Enlightenment sought to centralize control of the empire and to rule it as an enlightened despot. He decreed that German replace Latin as the empire's official language.

This centralization/homogenization struggle was not unique to Joseph II, it was a trend that one could observe all around Europe with the birth of the enlightened idea of Nation State.

Hungarians perceived Joseph's language reform as German cultural hegemony, and they reacted by insisting on the right to use their own tongue. As a result, Hungarian lesser nobles sparked a renaissance of the Hungarian language and culture. The lesser nobles questioned the loyalty of the magnates, of whom less than half were ethnic Magyars, and even those had become French- and German-speaking courtiers.

The magyarization policy actually took shape as early as the 1830s, when Hungarian started replacing Latin and German in education

In July 1849, Hungarian Revolutionary Parliament acknowledged and enacted foremost the ethnic and minority rights in the world, but it was too late: To counter the successes of the Hungarian revolutionary army, the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph asked for help from the "Gendarme of Europe", Czar Nicholas I, whose Russian armies invaded Hungary. The army of the Russian Empire and the Austrian forces proved too powerful for the Hungarian army, and General Artúr Görgey surrendered in August 1849.

The Magyar national reawakening therefore triggered national revivals among the Slovak, Romanian, Serbian, and Croatian minorities within Hungary and Transylvania, who felt threatened by both German and Magyar cultural hegemony. These national revivals later blossomed into the nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that contributed to the empire's ultimate collapse.

The eagerness of the Hungarian government in its Magyarization efforts was comparable to that of tsarist Russification from the late 19th century