This article belongs to the special cluster, “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka.

With reference to the Hungarian minority’s overarching concern over its declining population in Slovakia, this article reveals how different elements of the past are activated, remembered, and renegotiated to ensure the minority’s cultural survival. Using elite interviews, party documents, and a detailed analysis of two local newspaper archives in Hungarian, I unpack how memory and politics interact in the post-EU accession period. First, I uncover how political and civil society actors use acts of commemoration as a conduit to circulate certain narratives of the Hungarian minority identity. Through remembering historic Hungarian leaders and events, elites affirm and construct the minority identity, thus enabling its cultural reproduction. The Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian Monarchy period is referred to most frequently with the celebration of national heroes. Events spanning the twentieth century are generally mourned as painful and detrimental for the Hungarian minority. While the acts of commemoration are “soft” measures to ensure cultural survival, Hungarian political actors also desire “hard” guarantees through institutional measures, best encapsulated by their desire for autonomy arrangements. However, the Slovak nation’s own past of claiming autonomy and their eventual secession from Czechoslovakia in 1939 conditions the cultural rules around language and the appropriate vocabulary that Hungarian elites can use. Consequently, Hungarian minority elites appropriate the past strategically in two ways. They readjust their tactics through using different vocabulary to claim autonomy and second, they pursue policy reforms across areas such as education and regional development, thus making the de facto possibility of autonomy more palatable to their Slovak counterparts.

本文属于由FélixKrawatzek和George Soroka进行客座编辑的专题组“这里，这里：东欧的历史政治”。

关于匈牙利少数民族对其在斯洛伐克的人口减少的总体关注，本文揭示了如何激活，记忆和重新谈判过去的不同因素，以确保少数民族的文化生存。通过使用精英访谈，政党文件以及对匈牙利两个地方报纸档案库的详细分析，我剖析了欧盟加入后时期记忆与政治之间的相互作用。首先，我发现政治和民间社会行为者如何利用纪念行为作为传播匈牙利少数民族身份的某些叙事的渠道。通过记住历史悠久的匈牙利领导人和事件，精英们确认并建构了少数民族的身份，从而促进了其文化的再生产。哈布斯堡王朝和奥匈君主制时期是庆祝民族英雄最常被提及的时期。人们普遍哀悼整个20世纪的事件，这对匈牙利少数民族来说是痛苦而有害的。纪念活动是确保文化生存的“软”措施，而匈牙利政治参与者也希望通过体制措施获得“硬”保证，最好是通过对自治安排的渴望来体现。但是，斯洛伐克民族自称拥有自治权的过去及其最终于1939年脱离捷克斯洛伐克的局面，决定了匈牙利精英可以使用的围绕语言和适当词汇的文化规则。因此，匈牙利少数民族精英从两个方面战略性地适应了过去。