CALL FOR ARTICLES: The History of Property Regimes in Hungary
For 50th Anniversary Issue of Hungarian Studies Review
Submission Deadline: February 15, 2023
Modern Hungarian history can be told as one of changing property regimes. The long nineteenth century saw the sanctioning of capitalist private property against the feudal and corporate ones, while the twentieth century witnessed the forced introduction of socialist property after World War II and its dismantling after 1989. Each new property regime was linked to specific ideologies and legitimations of particular political structures that sanctioned certain property rights; the law not only defined what property meant and determined people’s connection to it, but it also shaped one's ties to other individuals as well as the state. In short, each property regime was tied to a particular vision of citizenship, to rules of inclusion/exclusion, and fostered certain subjectivities.
The late eighteenth century Theresan and Josephist reforms created the legal basis of exclusive private property, contributing to the material improvement of the lot of serfs and peasant smallholders against landlords. The nineteenth century liberal legislation sought to transform land into a commodity and regarded society as independent producers and sellers, which disadvantaged the poor and uneducated. The successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire nationalized the property declared as formerly belonging to the state, often de facto belonging to the churches and corporations. The authoritarian Horthy Regime invented stigmatized social categories like Jews, Sinti and Roma, the mentally disabled, and homosexuals, to first exclude them from citizenship rights, and then to expropriate their property. Finally, they were even exterminated in the context of the Holocaust. The socialist party-state of the “peasants and workers” continued the violent practice of social exclusion and expropriation, this time prosecuting and stigmatizing “Kulaks” or aristocrats and bourgeois capitalists. The collapse of socialism and its property regime brought the re-privatization and restitution of property, particularly after the EU accession. Each property regime change was accompanied by conflicts and sometimes protracted violence; it transformed social bonds and solidarities, defined the “us” against the “them” anew and shaped the self-understanding of individuals, often in terms that were antagonistic to dominant ideologies embraced by the state and its elites.
We are seeking contributions about the nature and transformation of property in its broad socio-economic and political contexts in Hungary from the 18th until the 21st centuries in the fields of history, sociology, geography, art and literary history and political science. We are interested in studies exploring its historical forms and changes in the capitalist, right-wing authoritarian, socialist, and neoliberal political regimes. We welcome articles exploring representations of property, the “bundle of rights” attached to them, the connections of people to their property, to one another, to the state, and the world via ownership. We welcome analyses of subjectivities created by different property regimes, but also social bonds and antagonisms. Last, but not least, we are interested in articles addressing the emergence of new types of properties and the conflicts created by them, enabled by techno-scientific development and the transnational circulation of goods.
Hungarian Studies Review is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated to publishing humanities and social scientific scholarship on contemporary and historical issues related to Hungary and the surrounding region, and to the Hungarian diaspora.
Articles should be between 5000 and 7000 words and submitted through the Hungarian Studies Review’s online portal (http://www.editorialmanager.com/hsrj) by February 15, 2023.
Please send any questions to the journal’s managing editor, Dr. Leslie Waters: lwaters@utep.edu
Manging Editor, Leslie Waters