This past October Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, listed these mortal dangers facing the Hungarian nation: “assimilation, the adoption of other languages and mixed marriages.” (Read here.)
Almost a century ago Hungarian nationalists thundered that Hungary was a lonely island in the “Slav Ocean” and warned that its unique language and culture would be swallowed by its neighbors. Now Budapest is promoting the very same dated nationalist (and racist) message. Orbán has stated that “ethnic homogeneity” is vital for economic success, arguing that marriages between Hungarians and Slovaks, Serbs, or Romanians are especially dangerous because they may reduce Hungarian influence in the Carpathian basin.
Zsolt Semjén Deputy Prime Minister has declared, “Hungary is a world nation.” Recently Péter Szilágyi, Undersecretary of State for Nation Policy at the Prime Minister’s Office, visited the US and declared that keeping “Hungarianness” must be the top priority in North America. Multiculturalism is dead; the future is in preserving the strong nation state, including Americans of Hungarian origin who are part of the Hungarian “nation-body.”
The reality is that multiculturalism is well and alive. In fact 29-year-old Nemanja Nikolic is a living example of that. Mr. Nikolic was born in Yugoslavia in 1987, in the town of Senta (Zenta in Hungarian) to an ethnic-Hungarian mother and ethnic-Serb father. Yugoslavia soon collapsed and the country ceased to exist. Mr. Nemanja grew up in the northern province of Vojvodina, part of the newly independent country of Serbia. He started to play soccer in a local club called FC Senta.
In 2006, while still a teenager, he joined the Hungarian club, Barcs, and later the Hungarian teams Kaposvár and Videoton. In 2015 Mr. Nikolic moved to Poland where Legia Warszawa hired him. Two years later Mr. Nikolic signed with Chicago. Today he is the star striker at the Chicago Fire soccer team.
Chicago Fire just announced that Mr. Nikolic received the Most Valuable Player and Golden Boot award this year. He was the only player to appear in all 34 season matches and scored 24 goals (!), breaking a club record. Mr. Nikolic speaks fluent Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian and also English. He has a Serbian passport and in 2011 he also received Hungarian citizenship. In Chicago he trains under the wings of Chicago Fire’ manager, a fellow ex-Yugoslavian, Veljko Paunović, who was born in Montenegro. .
Serb-Hungarian-American Nemanja’s good friend is US soccer gigastar Tim Howard. Tim’s mother is a Hungarian-American woman and his father is African-American. Howard is a US citizen who also obtained Hungarian citizenship.
Mr. Orbán’s attack on „mixed marriages” reminds me of Germany in the 1930s or apartheid South-Africa. It is shameful and quite frankly hard to believe that in 2017 an EU member can openly advocate a racist policy against “mixed marriages.”
Our congratulations to Nemanja Nikolic.
György Lázár