Languages and mores - Part II

Update: added Potted History of Hungary, or 1000 yrs in 100 squares, 4 columns by 25 rows

This follows on the second last post, Languages and Mores, which mused on culture and communication. I extend that here based on my many travels and stint in Kuwait, as well as my Hungarian heritage - thanks to my co-counsellors for helping me recover my Hungarian identity - and follow-on next un this series here.

I hold a very unpopular notion to Hungarians, that Asia starts not at the Urals, the Ural River and the Bosporus, but between Vienna and Budapest. You have to have lived in the Middle East and travelled in Asia and Russia to notice that building tones, ambiant atmosphere, people's physiognomy and a history prone to invasions set Austria apart from Hungary. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire recognised that: the Austrian Emperor entrusted the Hungarian King - respectively the Kaiserlich and Königlich parts of  "K und K" - with managing what I call the Asian realm (it lasted 51 years until the end of WWI* against 158 years until 1699 the Ottoman rule, which ended the 240 year Hungarian Renaissance, added Potted History below).

Digression: another very unpopular notion to Hungarians, is that the Trianon Treaty* didn't strip Greater Hungary of its territories as yet another landgrab - who's complaining? Poland disappeared entirely at times! - but getting their just deserts from surrounding Slavic populations as sergeants to Austrians in the "K und K" regime. It's the unspoken thread in Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919: Six Months that changed the World", where the creation of Middle-Eastern and the reshaping of Balkan countries drew more attention. 

The term Balkanisation refers to the fact that there is no way to draw borders by ethnicity in Eastern Europe, they are so intermixed (see Youtube intro in one of Margaret MacMillan's talks, as well as Paul Lendvai's "The Hungarians: Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat"). Did you know that  King Matthias of Hungarian Renaissance fame had a hand in it?  After the Hungarian plains were decimated by various invasions from east-of-the-Urals, he invited peoples from neighbouring countries to come populate the land. So western Germanics brought doctors and engineers, northern Poles and Czechs brought miners , and southern Bulgarians and Croats brought shepherds and  farmers, just to name a few... and let's not forget the Roma Gipsies and their geese! As noted in the previous blog, all are observations and none are criticisms.

But when I went to Kuwait - the object of this blog after all - I found a similar mix of ethnicities, brought in for very different historic reason but functioning structurally the same: put simply, Kuwaitis sign the cheques, Europeans manage projects, white-collar Indians run projects and blue-collar Indians serve tea. Indeed Palestinians and Beduns - stateless Kuwaitis explained in this earlier post -  lent me a sympathetic ear... because they finally found someone with a notion of displacement! Now Hungary took part of the industrial and political revolutions like the rest of western Europe, and in its Renaissance period mixed with various royal houses like Angevins and Neapolitans. But I found there a whiff of greater importance of family and reputation, though its writing is the Latin alphabet and religion is by-and-large Christian (roughly a third each Catholic, Protestant and mix of Jewish, Orthodox, Unitarians etc. with historically no predominant faith). Having lived roughly a third of my life in Francophone and two thirds in Anglophone cultures, I found more similarities among French, Hungarian and Kuwait on one side, which I clash with often on matters of "a more elastic view of the truth" that harks back to the merit-based system I explained in the previous post... Basically why I left France never to return!

Potted history of Hungary

click to enlarge