Volumen 11 (2017): Heft 2 (December 2017)

Since the 2010 elections, the current Hungarian government has proven to be a very active and restless “memory warrior” (Bernard and Kubik 2014). The ruling party, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, shows both a neat understanding of national history and the ability to transmit it by the adoption of different tools. This politics of memory is instrumental in granting the government political legitimacy. By ruling out oppositional actors and their historical narratives from the public sphere, Fidesz presents itself as the primary champion of Hungarian national sovereignty. Hungarians is, then, portrayed as a nation that has long suffered from the yoke of external oppression in which the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Soviets and eventually the Europeans figure as the enemies of the Hungarians. Specific collective memories, including the Treaty of Trianon (1920), Nazi occupation (1944–5) and socialist period (1948–90), are targeted so as to enact a sense of national belonging and pride, as well as resentment against foreigners. Moreover, in its rejection of the pluralism of memories and yearn for the homogenization of national history by marginalizing unfitting elements, this politics of memory is consistent with the System of National Cooperation (Batory 2016) that Fidesz’s administration has tried to establish in Hungary. This paper carries out an in-depth analysis of Fidesz’s multilayered politics of memory by investigating both its internal and external dimensions separately. In the final section, conclusions are drawn up to summarize its key tenets. Official speeches, legislative acts, and four interviews with key historians of Hungary have been used as sources.

While people of many nationalities live in Ukraine, Ukrainians and Russians constitute the majority of its population. Territorially, the Ukrainian language is spread unevenly, which results in pronounced bilingualism and language bipolarity. The influence of the Soviet policy of the Russian language dominance is still present in Ukraine. Ukrainian prevails in the sphere of public administration and education. Russian dominates in most mass media. Under such circumstances it is important to maintain conditions for the preservation of the language identity of other ethnic minorities, which would promote the development of linguistic diversity in Ukraine.

This paper deals with the ways of reconceptualization and negotiation of a new ethnicity and identity within the Pentecostal and Charismatic pastoral discourse among the Gypsies/Roma of Slovakia. The analysis is based on three denominations: the Word of Life movement in Plavecký Štvrtok, the Maranata Christian Mission in Spišská Nová Ves and the St. Paul’s Community within the Greek-Catholic Church in Čičava. The comparative analysis of pastoral and converts’ narratives has shown that the “New Roma” category is constructed as an ahistorical category of practice, which is intentionally largely ethnically emptied and creatively filled with specific content according to the life goals and paths of particular users either at the individual level or at the community level in line with the creed of good, moral, useful and decent life (of a Christian = Human = Rom). Research has revealed that in spite of the strong trans-social and trans-ethnic discourse, according to which believers should lose the reason for taking into account the inter-group stratifications, they still remain ethnically and socially sensitive. An important change in this context is, however, that the previous paradigm Gypsies versus “Whites” turns, after conversion, into the paradigm Roma alongside other nations. This fundamentally changes the basic classificatory schemes and positional way of defining themselves in relation to others. The New Rom is primarily the negation of the Old Rom, not of the White/Gadjo. The way in which Pentecostal and Charismatic pastors positively reconstruct, reconceptualize and negotiate the “New Roma” identity at the individual, group, collective and national levels goes largely beyond the traditional (modern) perception of ethnic identities and does not take into account historical origin, country, language, culture, etc. as constitutive elements. From this viewpoint, the Pentecostal and Charismatic pastors operating among Gypsies/Roma in contemporary Slovakia would be considered to be engineers, mentors and tutors of ethnoreligious innovation based on the concept of relocation and accommodation of Gypsies into the new and positively reconceptualized label Rom/a.

Standard Arabic is directly derived from the language of the Quran. The Arabic language of the holy book of Islam is seen as the prescriptive benchmark of correctness for the use and standardization of Arabic. As such, this standard language is removed from the vernaculars over a millennium years, which Arabic-speakers employ nowadays in everyday life. Furthermore, standard Arabic is used for written purposes but very rarely spoken, which implies that there are no native speakers of this language. As a result, no speech community of standard Arabic exists. Depending on the region or state, Arabs (understood here as Arabic speakers) belong to over 20 different vernacular speech communities centered around Arabic dialects. This feature is unique among the so-called “large languages” of the modern world. However, from a historical perspective, it can be likened to the functioning of Latin as the sole (written) language in Western Europe until the Reformation and in Central Europe until the mid-19th century. After the seventh to ninth century, there was no Latin-speaking community, while in day-to-day life, people who employed Latin for written use spoke vernaculars. Afterward these vernaculars replaced Latin in written use also, so that now each recognized European language corresponds to a speech community. In future, faced with the demands of globalization, the diglossic nature of Arabic may yet yield a ternary polyglossia (triglossia): with the vernacular for everyday life; standard Arabic for formal texts, politics, and religion; and a western language (English, French, or Spanish) for science, business technology, and the perusal of belles-lettres.