House Speaker László Kövér highlighted the importance of recognising the right to a national identity as a human right in his address to the reopening ceremony of the Trianon Musem in Várpalota, in western Hungary, on Friday. “The first step in Hungary’s own way out of the [trauma] of Trianon and the first step in Europe’s avoiding its own Trianon are the same: recognising the right to national identity as a human right and mutually promoting that right by states,” Kövér said. Ensuring that right would allow Europeans to “freely inherit and pass on the language, culture, and homeland of their ancestors,” he added. The right to a national identity is “crucial in protecting a general human dignity” and key for “reinforcing peace, security, and stability”, he said.
Ensuring the right to a national identity could be “the cornerstone of rebuilding a European Union which has by now disastrously lost its way and purpose,” Kövér insisted. Kövér said the concept of Trianon was to “artificially, often violently change the ethnic composition of a geographical region, or strip communities of their national identity, to destroy them economically”, and said “the European Union itself is staggering towards its own Trianon”.
“Europe’s spiritual self-defence is in ruins, its inability to defend itself politically or economically is terrifying, and its military capabilities for self defence have been nonexistent since WWII,” he said. Europe is currently the target of “an operative manoeuvre disguised as illegal migration and aimed at a scheduled exchange of population,” Kövér insisted. That operation is aimed at “estranging Europeans from their own selves, their homeland and national identity,” he added. He also suggested that Hungarians were “survivors of Europe rather than its martyrs … ready to share the formula for survival”. “We don’t want anyone else to meet the fate of Trianon again in Europe … we believe that “Europeans could have no better and more secure lives than that offered by a cooperation of democratic states,” he said.