Julien wrote:
Well I don't know what you know about Hungary, but you visibly haven't understood the obvious reason why I was saying that Hungary is not strictly speaking European. Hungarians descent from the Huns, a central Asian tribe culturally and linguistically related to the Mongols. The Huns invaded Europe in the 5th century AD and sped up the end of the Western Roman Empire. In fact, there were two groups of Huns. One settle in the plain that later became Hungary, while the other settle in present-day Finland and Estonia.
This is not true. As a Pole I studied in Hungary for 4 years, and my "majors" in university were history and ethnography/cultural anthropology. This is right up my alley. Hungarians have nothing to do with the Huns, although Westerners who first experienced the marauding Magyars in the late 9th and 10th centuries thought they looked like Huns and they came from the formerly Hunnic lands - but remember that the Huns existed in the 5th century, and had long since ceased to exist. I recall once reading about Christianized Hunnic settlements in the Italian Alps a century or so after Attila's defeat but they didn't last long. The Carpathian Basin where the Huns had operated had long since been cleaned of Huns by the 9th century as it had since been overrun by Goths, Gepids, Avars and Slavs by the time the Hungarians showed up. Chronicles at the time the Hungarians seized the Carpathian Basin from Svatopluk's Moravia Magna mention a mixed population of Avars and Slavs. There was a 14th century Hungarian chronicle that fabricated the link between the Hungarians and Huns because the author wanted to create a heroic origins myth (in Hungarian, the myth of the brothers Hunor and Magyar and the golden stag) but this has been proven a fabrication. As Laci mentioned, the name "Hungary" likely comes from the Western confusion of the Huns with the Magyars - although there are other theories relative to a Turkic tribal alliance the Magyars neighbored with in southern Russia called Onogur ("Land of the Ten Tents") that may have played a role. The problem with the Hungarian-name-derived-from-Huns theory is that the northeastern Slavic tribes, who had few connections to Western Europe in the 10th century, also called the Hungarians a variation of Hungarian (Vengierskij) while having an entirely different name for the Huns. (Hungarians have always called themselves Magyars, possibly derived from the Hungarian word "to speak" [mondanni].) The Huns, the Hsiong-gnu of Chinese history, were Turkic/Altaic speakers, while the Hungarians' language derives from the Finno-Ugric language family. The Ural-Altaic and Finno-Ugric language families may have been united at some point more than 3000 years ago, but that relationship would mean modern Japanese, Korean and Hungarian are all distantly related. It also means that modern Bulgarian, a Slavic language but one derived from a fusion of a Turkic language (Old Bulgar) with Slavic, is only partially European while modern Serb and Croat both old Iranian hybrids that were Slavicized are closer to the Indo side of Indo-European. Even Polish had rumors of ancient Sarmatian (i.e., Iranian) origins and dont forget that the Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages only recently separated from one another, relatively-speaking.
Nowadays, even after 15 centuries of separation, Finnish (Suomi) and Hungarian (Magyar) languages are still thouroughly un-European and keep strong similarities together. These language are part of the Ural-Altaic family, not Indo-European.
This also isn't true. As a native speaker of an Indo-European language (Polish) and someone who can speak fairly fluent Hungarian, as well as having taken several philology classes for Hungarian, the Slavic languages and English, I would say that Hungarian is quite Europeanized. Only about 1000 core root words in modern Hungarian are actually derived from the old Finno-Ugric Magyar; the rest have derived from a massive lexical infusion from medieval German, Latin, and the Slavic languages. For instance, nearly all the names for the surrounding peoples in Hungarian are from the Slavic: Germans - Német (Polish - Niemiec), Italians - Olasz (Polish - Wlochy), Poles Lengyel (Lithuanian Lenkija), etc. Modern Hungarian has also been heavily influenced grammatically by medieval German and Latin. Heres an indication of how Europeanized Hungarians have become: The first Western chronicles to mention the Hungarians in the 9th and 10th centuries described them as Asiatic, Mongoloid-faced people with jet black hair and short, stout bodies. Modern Hungarians are still generally dark haired but have fully Caucasoid facial features and, in western Hungary especially (the old Roman Pannonia), many blondes can be found. In central Hungary there is an area called the Kúnság (Cumania) dating from the 13th century when the Hungarian kingdom allowed Cumanians, Pechenegs and Iasians to settle within its borders, and there is a general facial type in this region that is a bit darker and the faces are a little rounder than elsewhere in Hungary.
I think the problem is that you define a "European" language narrowly as strictly from the Indo-European language family. By this definition, Armenian, Iranian (Farsi), Urdu and Georgian (Gruzy) are "European" languages because they are linguistically related while Hungarian, the language of a country that played an active role in the Renaissance and modern European history, is not "European". As linguistics repeatedly emphasizes, languages and peoples do not always match up evenly. In fact, they often do not. For instance, English is the native language for most Americans today but fewer than one-fifth of them have an English ethnic background; there are more German-, Irish- and Italian-Americans today than Anglo-Americans. I might suggest you take a look at Colin Renfrew's writings on the Indo-European language family, in which he makes clear the distinction between a language family and the people who speak it. If you take a look at my posts in the recent Celtic thread you'll see some of the ideas on ethnicity and languages that have been circulating over the past few decades that increasingly dis-associate our modern ideas of ethnicity from some of the linguistic and material evidence we've been finding. I think it is absurd to assume that the speakers of a language automatically subscribe to any given set of cultural beliefs, like those of the West.
The Hungarians have maintained a state in Europe since the early 10th century, meaning for more than a thousand years. How long does one have to live in Europe before being called European? There was a Hungarian state in place centuries before Guillome/William conquered England, before the beginning of the Spanish Reconquista, before the formation of the Holy Roman Empire (Remember that Otto I used his victory over the Hungarians at Augsburg/Lechfeld in 955 to begin his empire), before Burgundia joined France, before any Papal states were formed. This Hungarian state adopted Christianity under its first Western-recognized king, István (Stephen) in A.D. 1000, and today still Hungary is fairly evenly divided between Roman Catholics and Calvinist-Protestants (Reformists).
When you say It has nothing to do with nationalism, ethnicity, religion and the false feeling of cultural supriority I think you misunderstand me. I have never raised the issue of nationalism or feeling of cultural superiority. As for religion, that's almost the only cultural element that binds Hungarian with other Europeans, like it does between Germans and Italians or Spanish. Of course, Hungary does have the same socio-politico-economic system as other European countries, because of it's comon history (Austro-Hungarian Empire, etc.).
So you assume that people cannot be changed, that throughout the 10,000 years of human civilization humans cannot change values or civilizational characteristics? This is absurd. This means that, as all hominids ultimately derive from African ancestors, we all today only carry African cultural values and therefore there is no cultural difference between any two groups of humans. Do Babylonian, Assyrian and Chaldean cultural values still dominate in modern Iraq? How did the various societies of the Americas, all heavily-laden with foreign immigrants, ever form with all those innate cultural differences? And of course most Europeans are really just Asian immigrants the Germanic peoples, the Slavs, the Celts, all migrated from the East. So theres really no such thing as a European, or perhaps maybe the Basques are the only true Europeans. The rest of us are just Asian squatters.
Laci reacted with a certain sensitivity that is common among Eastern Europeans, because Westerners often like to pretend they are the only ones in Europe. Numerous books on European History today only talk about Germany, England, Spain, Italy and maybe the Netherlands. The British historian Norman Davies describes this phenomenon in his introduction to his 2000 book Europe: A History. For as much as Europeans like to complain about how Americans know so little about European history, Western Europeans have proven in my experience (with a few exceptions) to have an equally ignorant understanding of the history of anything east of the Elbe River, save perhaps modern Russia. Kraków (the medieval Polish capital), Buda (medieval Hungarian capital and half of modern Budapest) and Prague/Vysehrad (medieval Bohemian capital) are all centuries older than Vienna, Berlin or Madrid. (Prague is also west of Vienna.) Medieval Prague was once for Europe what Brussels is today, an informal European capital. The common history that has fashioned Hungarian, Polish and Czech social, political and economic institutions goes back much farther than the 19th century; these countries were fully integrated into the Western feudal order by the 11th century. Polish town development is the same as French or German until 16th or 17th centuries, when wealth from the Age of Exploration catapulted Spanish, Dutch, English and French development past Polish and German. Western Europe left Central Europe in the dust. Poland and Hungary were continental powers in medieval Europe, intervening in state affairs regularly; for instance Poland allied with the Austrians to halt the Ottoman Turkish advance on Vienna in 1683 while the Hungarians decided who would be Holy Roman Emperor in the late 15th century, even taking Vienna as their capital. The largest Renaissance library in 15th century Europe was the Hungarian kings, while Prague and Kraków (14th century) both had universities before most German cities did. Hungary and Poland generated as much wealth as the Western countries did in medieval times, and in Hungarys case briefly it was among the wealthiest states in Europe. A century before Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door in Worms, the Czechs launched a mini-Reformation of their own when a local Czech priest Jan (John) Hus challenged Catholic church corruption. Hus was murdered by the local bishops but his followers (led by Jan Zizka, who is credited with inventing the tank and is rated among the top ten medieval European generals) forced the authorities in Bohemia to accept the autonomy of the Czech church and it remained free until German Catholics destroyed it in 1618-1620 in the opening battles of the Thirty Years War.
To argue that these countries are not European is absurd; they are as fully European as the Portuguese or French. I would argue they are just as Western, but that requires defining what Western means and thats the point of this thread. You dont seem to be drawing any distinctions between European and Western, which is a fatal error Bulgaria is a fully European country, but one only mildly touched by the West. When you travel today between Hungary and Romania, you can feel a dramatic difference in values between Western and Eastern Orthodox societies. (Ive done ethnographic projects among Hungarians, Germans and Romanians in Transylvania.)
As for communism and socialism, both Laci and I have lived in Eastern European communist societies and are not likely to learn much from a Westerner who has never experienced one first-hand. Before you berate the East for its recent era as a Soviet communist colony though, you should remember that modern communist theories are Western in origin, principally deriving from a German who wrote while studying English industrialism.
I must check with my neighbours, who're still burning paper money during the Chinese Ghost Month, or going to mosques, or speaking Mandarin Chinese in the home, or burning incense for Hindu deities - that's a very unWestern thing to do. 
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