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Judit Gulyás and Monika Mária Váradi

Multicultural Eden or the land of ethnic conflicts?

One of the most important regional and social tendencies of post Socialist Hungary is suburbanisation, which is concentrated in the areas surrounding large cities and especially the capital, Budapest. The presentation, based upon a research carried out in a suburban village (Piliscsaba) in the neighbourhood of Budapest, intends to present in what ways suburbanisation transforms the ethnic, social, cultural and political structure of the local community and what sort of explicit and latent conflicts have emerged among various groups of the “traditional and continuous” dwellers and the new-comers of the village.
The social structure of the traditionally multi-ethnic (German, Slovak, Hungarian, Jewish and Roma) village has been continuously shaped by various types of migration (dominantly German and Slovak peasant population inhabiting the settlement from the 18th century on, one third of the Jewish villagers was forced to concentration camps in 1944, expatriation of Germans to West-Germany in 1945, exchange of Slovak population with Hungarians from Slovakia, reinforcement of Roma population in the 1960s, intellectuals moving in the village in 1990s). Suburbanisation, commenced in the middle of 1990s, has resulted in an extremely swift increase of population and the settlement of highly qualified and/or wealthy Hungarian families in a village that has been simultaneously characterised by the ever-reinforced cultural and interest-representing activity of the local German, Slovak and Roma national minorities.

Conflicts in the village community have frequently and permanently occurred on the one hand among “indigenous” dwellers and newcomers, and their shared feature is that these conflicts are most intensively represented in debates about issues of local surroundings, nature and community and indirectly of the interpretations on the future and visions of Piliscsaba. In the narratives of the indigenous dwellers specific, emotionally based knowledge related to the village can be observed, whereas newcomers’ narratives are basically not locally grounded, but are assigned to more general, national and global discourses (antiCapitalism, nature protection, pseudo history and mythology).

On the other hand, under the smooth surface, conflicts are also detectable within indigenous dwellers, among various ethnic groups. These conflicts are also represented in their strategies of minority policies, as the purpose of the cultural activity of the Slovaks and Germans is to moderate and slow down entire assimilation, whereas that of Roma minority is to promote their swift and thorough integration into village community. The most serious conflict among local ethnic minorities has emerged in the institutional sphere, since the German local minority council with the help of local Hungarians managed to establish an independent German primary school, which on the one hand reinforces German identity but on the other hand it also indirectly reinforces the social segregation of Roma children and eventually, Roma community. Meanwhile the majority of the population of Piliscsaba identifies him/herself as Hungarian in ethnic/national terms. In the open and latent conflicts among indigenous ethnic groups Hungarians are also divided. The majority of them supports German and Slovak endeavours, whereas a well-organised group of newcomer intellectuals promote Roma projects.

Judit Gulyás PhD-candidate, Hungarian and comparative folklore studies, Institute of Ethnology, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, field of research: (cultural) narratology, social symbolisation

Monika Mária Váradi, PhD (sociology), senior research fellow, Centre for Regional Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Budapest, field of research: national and ethnic minorities, border research, exclusion and inclusion

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