In 1890 Friedrich Engels welcomed the newly instituted Social Democratic Party of Hungary (SDPH) in Népszava, the official party organ. He claimed that the SDPH was “international per se,” since it comprised workers of five different nationalities. Social democrats often called their annual plenary sessions “the true parliament of Hungary,” since before 1919 only 6% of Hungary’s population had the right to vote and about half of the citizens belonged to other ethnicities than Hungarian. In 1918, however, centrifugal tendencies prevailed over class consciousness: the German, Serb, Slovak, and Romanian members of the SDPH pronounced that their cause was better represented by their “bourgeois” co-nationals. By shedding a light on how step by step internationalism gave way to national separatism in the SDPH the aim of my paper is to scrutinise the interrelationship between ‘orthodox’ Marxism, Austro-Marxism, and Nationalism in the context of the Late Habsburg Hungary.
In my socio-historical analysis the Hungarian case is embedded in the fin-de-siècle left-wing political discourse that challenged (or even corrected) Marx' and Engels' thoughts on the nationality question in the Second International, Germany, Russia, and in the Austrian part of the Monarchy. This theoretical inquiry is complemented by a more bottom-up study. My case study from the multilingual Banat region shows not just the tensions between center and periphery but also various local (mis)translations of complex theoretical principles and the limits of their adaptability. To this end, I analyse a broad spectrum of sources: theoretical texts, party programs and statements, party protocols, central and regional newspapers of the Social Democratic Party, letters written by left-wing politicians and political thinkers, and cases of arrests.