U.S. and Non-U.S. Scholars

Fulbright New Century Scholars Program
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Balazs Szelenyi

ACLS Fellow
The Library of Congres,s Library of Congress Fellow in International Studies
Social Roots of Ethnic Conflict: A Comparative Study of the German Diaspora in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia
United States

Balázs Szelényi received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998. Currently he is an Andrew Mellon research scholar at the Library of Congress. His dissertation, German Burghers in Sixteenth-Nineteenth Century Hungary, is a monograph of the Zipsers, a German-speaking ethnic minority that lived in the Hungarian Uplands (today's Slovakia) who, during the nineteenth century, assimilated into Hungarian society. The Zipsers played an important role as merchants and artisans in the sixteenth century, and as educators during the Enlightenment. His first publication based on his dissertation will appear in the 2003 Austrian History Yearbook titled "Enlightenment from Below: German-Hungarian Patriots in the Eighteenth Century." Recently he has also completed an article manuscript called "Urban Development under Second Serfdom: Towns in Sixteenth-Seventeenth Century Hungary", as well as revisions to his dissertation, which he hopes to publish with the title, The Failed Bourgeoisie: German Burghers of Hungary's Royal Free Towns between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Research for his dissertation was conducted in the Eger Chapter Archive (Hungary), the Hungarian National Archive, the Hungarian Statistics Bureau, the City Archive of Vienna, and the Municipal and District Archives of Levoca and Košice in Slovakia.

Over the last three years, Balázs Szelényi has remained an active researcher, receiving post-doctoral fellowships from the Fulbright Scholars Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His current research focuses on the impact the partition of the Hungarian Kingdom after World War One had on the German minorities living in Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary. In 2000-2001, he conducted archival research in the Hungarian National Archive, the Hungarian Statistics Bureau, the Sibiu Branch of the Romanian National Archive, the Slovak National Archive, and the Poprad District Archive in Slovakia.

Selected Publications:

"Enlightenment from Below: German-Hungarian Patriots in the Eighteenth Century." Austrian History Yearbook, 2003. (Forthcoming.)
"Why Socialism Failed? Towards a Theory of System-Breakdown." Theory and Society, vol. 23, April 1994: 211-231. (With Iván Szelényi.)
"The Social Impact of Agrarian Reform. Social and Political Conflicts in Post-Communist Transformation of Hungarian Agriculture." The Anthropology of East Europe Review, vol. 10, No.1, 1991: 12-24. (With Iván Szelényi.)

My research compares the socio-economic development of three German minority groups (Zipsers, Schwabs, and Saxons) in three different countries (Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania) during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It intends to make two critical contributions to the understanding of ethnic conflict in East Central Europe.

First, by highlighting the differences between the Zipsers, Schwabs, and Saxons, the study intends to illustrate how the same "ethno-linguistic" group (in this case, Germans) can subscribe to such vastly different notions of "nationhood" (the Schwabs' ideal was the German "culture-nation," the Zipsers' the French "centralist state-nation", and the Saxons,' the Swiss "Confederation") depending on their socio-economic background (the Schwabs were peasants, the Zipsers were urban-dwellers, and the Saxons were a mix of peasants, burghers, and landlords).

Secondly, despite the fact that the Zipsers, Saxons, and Schwabs defined "nationhood" in such radically different ways, by the late 1930s each group had been Nazified and transformed into the pawns of the Third Reich. The Nazification of the Zipsers, Schwabs, and Saxons did not happen through one generic policy. Instead, in a dark and sinister version of Woodrow Wilson's ideal, policy makers collaborating with academics developed the appropriate strategy for each unique German-speaking ethnic group. My project, therefore, intends to appeal to a wide audience of scholars as well as policy makers interested in the questions of ethnic identity and ethnic conflict in one of the most volatile regions of the world during its most explosive period.

During 2003 I will conduct research at the Library of Congress, the United Memorial Holocaust Museum, the Hungarian National Archive, the Budapest City Archive, the Slovakian National Archive, and the Sibiu-Branch of the Romanian National Archive.