No abstract

Boosting national spirit through projection of otherness is not a new phenomenon, at least in authoritarian regimes. Yet the role of anti-Semitism in the Numerus Clausus debates in the Hungarian parliament in 1920 and 1928 is worth deeper analysis, as it bore a peculiar role in the Hungarian interwar counterrevolutionary nation-building. The Numerus Clausus law of 1920 set ethnic quotas to university enrolment; the explicit argument for this was countering the Jewish ‘over-representation’ in Hungarian society. However, in 1928 the law was amended, abolishing (in principle) the said quotas; this time the arguments favoured national consolidation, where segregation was to be moderated. In both cases, the national elites construed and made use of nation-centred political rhetoric, but used it for differing ends in different times. This article shall analyse the debates of the Hungarian Parliament concerning the Numerus Clausus laws, especially from the viewpoints of nation-building and rhetoric of exclusion.

During and after the First World War, discourses calling for constitutional reform pervaded Europe. The break-up of the continental empires, the emergence of the new nation-states, and the western calls for democratization collectively gave rise to transnational debates about parliamentarization and parliamentary government.However, in the diverse and contingent post-war political environment, at the same time these ideals were given profoundly nation-specific meanings. They were implemented in the process of nation-building in equally diverse national contexts. This article analyses the use and abuse of the parliamentary concepts and their vernacular redescriptions in Hungarian parliamentary debates in the years 1920, 1923 and 1927. In those instances, the concepts of parliamentarism were constantly redescribed in order to construct and maintain the legitimacy of the counter-revolutionary regime.