Will Transcarpathia Be the Next Donetsk—or Crimea?

Even as the actual territory controlled by the pro-Russian puppet states of the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Lugansk in eastern Ukraine shrinks under pressure from the advancing national Ukrainian military, the fictive super-state of which these rebel provinces are a part is sounding cocky and thinking of expanding.

Pro-Kremlin separatists call the light-blue-colored oblasts in this map a federated Novorossiya.
Transcarpathia (Zakarpattia) is at the far west.

The foreign ministry of the Union of People’s Republics of Novorossiya (that term meaning “New Russia”) (formerly the Federal State of Novorossiya)—the federation that includes the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts (provinces) as well as six other Ukrainian oblasts where rebel republics exist only in name or not at all—agreed in a meeting in Yalta, Crimea, on July 6th and 7th, to accept as a member the so-called Republic of Podkarpatskaya Rus’.  A new pro-Russian organization called the People’s Front for the Liberation of Ukraine, Novorossiya, and Transcarpathian Rus’ released a manifesto at that conference.

Pyotr Getsko (left), “Chairman of Government Minister” (sic) of the Podkarpatskaya Rus’
“republic,” with Vladimir Rogov, chairman of the foreign-affairs committee
in the Novorossiya “parliament.”  At left is the current Transcarpathia oblast flag, also used by
separatists and nationalists, while the flag on the right is that of the Donetsk People’s Republic,
though the center blue stripe is so washed out that I first mistook it for the black, white, and red
tricolor of the former German Reich (and, briefly, the Third one).  Thanks to a reader who pointed
this out to me on the “Flags of the World (FOTW)” Facebook group.

Transcarpathian Rus’ the Ukrainian government calls Zakarpattia oblast, in its far west.  Rus’ refers to Kievan Rus’, the Medieval state based in Kyiv (Kiev, for Russians) which both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists (and Ruthenian ones; see below) regard as their ancestral state.  The Carpathia part refers to the mountain range that separates the province from the rest of Ukraine to the east.  Variously known as Podkarpatskaya, Subcarpathia, or Transcarpathia, the territory’s Pod- (meaning below) and Sub- prefixes refer to the territory’s position on the Carpathians’ foothills (as in the name of the adjacent voivodeship (province) of Poland, Podkarpacie), while Trans- refers to its position “across” or “on the other side of” the Carpathians—a point of view that implies (as with Transnistria) the perspective of Moscow or Kyiv, rather than Vienna or Budapest.  And indeed, Transcarpathia used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Kingdom of Hungary’s administration.  Slavic-speaking locals called Ruthenians, Ruthenes, or Rusyns tried to establish their own state when the Hapsburg empire was being dismantled at the end of the First World War, but had to settle for becoming the eastern tail of the new-born oblong composite state of Czechoslovakia.  When the Czech portion of Czechoslovakia succumbed to annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938, Slovakia and Ruthenia declared independence but were soon consumed by the Third Reich as well.  After the Second World War, the Yalta conference (not the one referred to above, but the other one, the big one) awarded Transcarpathia, as it was then known, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  Josef Stalin proceeded to stamp out Ruthenian cultural identity, declaring Rusyn a mere dialect of Ukrainian.  Ruthenians demanded an autonomous region like Crimea’s when Ukraine became independent in 1991 but did not get one.  A declaration of independence in 1993 as the Republic of Subcarpathian Rus’ got nowhere, nor did a similar declaration in 2008 as the Republic of Carpathian Ruthenia.  That second one was strongly suspected by the westward-leaning Ukrainian government of the time to be a result of Kremlin pot-stirring; this, of course, was around the time of Russia’s expansionist South Ossetia War in Georgia.

How today’s Ukraine was divvied up before the First World War.

Transcarpathia has not been a particular hotbed of anti-Kyiv feeling, not does it have particularly many ethnic Russians, compared to all the other oblasts Novorossiya claims.  But this blog did suggest the tiny  province, as long ago as early March, as a future point of conflict between pro-Kyiv and pro-Moscow forces, a point I reiterated in another article, in early April.  (See also an article in which I report on Russian analysts’ predictions for an independent Transcarpathia by 2035.)  In particular, two factors make this enclave an inviting morsel for omnivorous Novorossiyan map-drawers, and indirectly perhaps for the Kremlin itself.  The two factors are demographics and geography.

A Transcarpathian flag (current oblast flag) at this year’s Novorossiya summit in Yalta.

First, demography.  Transcarpathia is more than 80% ethnically Ukrainian and less than 3% ethnically Russian, with Rusyns (Ruthenians) making up less than 1%—only about 10,000 people.  But this belies a possibly larger number of families of Rusyn descent who assimilated to Ukrainian and Russian culture and language in the Stalin era and may only now be dusting off their old ethnic identities.  Russia may be intending to use supposed oppression of Rusyns as a pretext for intervention, much as it did to “protect” Abkhaz and Ossete “victims” in Georgia in 2008 and ethnic-Russians in Crimea earlier this year.  (Compare also the Russian-speaking political forces in Latvia which have piggybacked their cause onto the question of autonomy for the traditional Latgalian people who live in the ethnic-Russian-dominated areas of Latvia.)

Are Transcarpathian Ruthenians ready for their ethnic revitalization?
Or does Moscow just wish they were?

More to the point, 12% of Transcarpathia’s 1.25 million or so people are ethnic Magyars (Hungarians), making them the largest non-Russian ethnic minority in Ukraine in any single oblast.  (Ukraine has more ethnic Belarussians and Moldovans (Romanians) than Magyars when taken as a whole nationally—but these other groups are more dispersed (though 20% of the less populous and smaller Chernivtsy oblast nearby call themselves Moldovan or Romanian).)  Concern for the Transcarpathian Magyars’ “plight” has become an obsession of Jobbik, the militant far-right party of xenophobes and anti-Semites that took more than a fifth of the vote in Hungary’s elections this April, making it the second most powerful party in that country.  Jobbik bloviators have been pushing Budapest to annex Transcarpathia if necessary to “protect” ethnic kindred there.  A lot of the rhetoric focuses on the Ukrainian government’s revocation of minority languages’ official status after Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, was impeached in April.  Even though the successor government quickly reinstated those rights, the original revocation is still Exhibit A of those, like the Donetsk and Lugansk rebels, who claim the current Ukrainian government oppresses minorities.  The fact that the armband-wearing, goose-stepping thugs of Jobbik and the southeastern “people’s republics” are working from the same playbook helps put the lie to Moscow’s lunatic assertion that it is the “junta” in Kyiv who are the right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis.

The far-right group Jobbik is the second-largest political party in Hungary.

Now to the geographic factor, which concerns central and western Europe’s dependence on Russia’s natural gas (hence the European Union’s toothless and half-hearted sanctions against Russia since the Ukrainian troubles began).  Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, would like to keep the gas flowing to Europe, but he would also like to be able to cut off the supply to Ukraine if necessary to bring it into line.  The trouble is the oil pipelines to western Europe for the most part run straight through Ukraine, and most of these go through tiny Transcarpathia in particular.  And Transcarpathia’s border with the Slovak Republic—an E.U. member-state friendly to Kyiv—is one of the few places where the pipelines could be used to send gas back into Ukraine as a way of making an end run around any plans by Putin to choke off Ukraine’s supply.

Could Putin or the Russian-speaking thugs in Ukraine make an actual grab for Transcarpathia?  Not likely.  They weren’t even able to turn independence declarations into “facts on the ground” in two other oblasts—Kharkiv and Odessa—where the demographics tilt toward Russians.  (The so-called Odessa Republic of Novorossiya declared with little effect in late April granted diplomatic recognition not only to the Kharkov, Lugansk, and Donetsk people’s republics but, a little mysteriously, to what its “foreign ministry” called the Carpathian Ruthenian People’s Republic—as reported at the time in this blog.)  Those areas are firmly under Kyiv’s administration.  But many observers feel that Putin may not really want to annex any other chunks of Ukraine, that he would be happy to destabilize it and weaken its central government through agitation for federalism.  And an invasion and annexation of Transcarpathia is not entirely impossible either.  After all, a mere year ago anyone who predicting a Russian invasion of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk would have been laughed out of the room.  Ukraine’s war with Russia has not yet been won.  Not by a long shot.

The scene in Donetsk.  Could conflict spread to Transcarpathia as well?

[You can read more about these and many other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Slovene E.U. Diplomat’s Words on Vojvodina’s Status Ruffle Serb Feathers

Vojvodine nationalists rallying in Novi Sad, the provincial capital

Jelko Kacin, a Slovenian diplomat who is the European Union’s “rapporteur” for the Republic of Serbia, stepped on a landmine in the European Parliament last week by calling for a clarification of the status of Vojvodina, an autonomous—but not really—province within Serbia.  Then his remarks were interpreted with great alarm, putting the Serbian foreign ministry into damage-control mode.

Jelko Kacin

While speaking on a panel on Vojvodina at the E.U. legislature in Brussels, Belgium, Kacin said, “Having in mind upcoming negotiations on Serbia’s membership in the E.U., I believe this is the right moment to raise the question of the constitutional and statutory regulation of the autonomy of Vojvodina.  The present framework for autonomy is uncertain and vague, which prevents Vojvodina, and therefore Serbia, from developing its capacities.”

Map showing Vojvodina within the former Yugoslavia (the green countries)

Vojvodina, in the north of Serbia and forming the only Serbian borders with Hungary and Croatia, is historically and potentially one of the most multi-ethnic and contentious portions of the former Yugoslavia, but it largely stayed out of the fray of the Wars of Yugoslav Secession in the early 1990s.  Vojvodina was an ethnically-Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but when the empire was dismantled after losing the First World War the newly created independent Hungarian Republic set Vojvodina, including a portion of what is now western Romania, as a Hungarian-dominated Banat Republic.  Serbian and Romanian forces invaded the fledgling Banatia, as it was also known, and divvied it up: Romania got what is now its western Transylvania region, while Serbia absorbed the rest and made it the autonomous province of Danube Banovina within the Serbian part of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia.  (For a discussion of separatism in Transylvania, see a recent article from this blog.)

During the Second World War, the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state, and Hungary, then an Axis power, took over the province and tried to revive the Banat Republic, with ethnic Germans and Hungarians in charge.  It failed, and after the war Yugoslavia filled its vacant Nazi concentration camps with Vojvodina’s Germans, who were subsequently cleansed from the province, and Danube Banovina was renamed Vojvodina.

As the “Banat Republic,” Vojvodina (dark green, at center) almost achieved independence
in the aftermath of the First World War.

Yugoslavia’s Communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito, granted Vojvodina some genuine, but limited, autonomy in 1974, but then Vojvodina’s hopes of further loosening ties to Belgrade after the fall of the Berlin Wall were dashed when Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milošević, revoked its autonomy in 1990.  It has never been restored, so it is the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in name only.  Ethnically, the region is two-thirds Serb, but the 13% Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) minority feels that, with the de facto independence of Kosovo—once Serbia’s other “autonomous province”—they are the last colonized people in the Serb mini-empire.  Belgrade is ever alert to the possibility of the province flaring up in rebellion.

Vojvodina’s autonomy: Tito giveth, and Slobo taketh away

In Brussels, Mr. Kacin—a former independence leader during Slovenia’s “Ten-Day War” of secession from Belgrade in 1990—was not being inflammatory.  He merely pointed out that if Serbia is to get its bureaucratic house in order in preparation for E.U. candidacy, then it must sort out Vojvodina’s financial relationship to the central government.  If it is an autonomous unit, then it is eligible for special E.U. funds after accession, but if so, the implication went, it would have to start being treated autonomously, and its role in the levying and spending of tax funds must be clarified.  Pending resolution of the conflict over Kosovo, Serbia is considered close to the front of the line for E.U. enlargement, along with Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo itself.

Aleksandar Vučić

Serbia was furious at this interest in its internal structure, however, and by September 19th, Serbia’s first deputy prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, had bullied Kacin into appearing alongside him at a special press conference, where he intoned sternly that Kacin’s statement was liable to misinterpretation, adding, “I can say this in Kacin’s presence, because I know he also believes that Vojvodina cannot be separated from Serbia.”

One wonders if Kacin, during this, thought to himself, “Where have I heard those words before?  Oh, yes—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo ...”

[You can read more about Vojvodina, Kosovo, other sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]

Fatmir Limaj to Face War-Crimes Charges (Again); Fiji Recognizes Kosovo; Vojvodina Leader Arrested: Kosovo & Serbia Update, 18-24 November 2012

Fatmir Limaj will now have to face war-crimes charges.

Kosovo Politician Arrested on Corruption Now to Face Retrial on War Crimes.  The supreme court of the partially recognized Republic of Kosovo ordered on November 20th that a former cabinet minister who was arrested last week by NATO police on corruption charges be retried on charges of war crimes, including the murder and torture of Serbian prisoners during the war for independence from Serbia.  The minister, Fatmir Limaj, Kosovo’s former minister of transport and communications and currently a parliamentarian and the deputy chairman of the republic’s ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo (P.D.K.), was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army (K.L.A.) during the 1998-99 Kosovo War.  Limaj was originally tried in May on the same charges but was acquitted after the former prison guard, Agim Zogaj, who was chief witness against him was found hanging dead from a tree in a park in Germany.  His written testimony was deemed inadmissible, but this week’s ruling reverses that and brings Limaj back to court.  Three other former K.L.A. rebels will be retried with Limaj.

Fiji Becomes 95th Country to Grant Kosovo Diplomatic Recognition.  The Republic of Fiji has become the 95th country to grant diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Kosovo, according to a November 20th announcement by the office of Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaçi.  This follows closely on the heels of recognition by Timor-Leste (reported on last week in this blog), Burundi, and Papua New Guinea (as reported earlier in this blog).  Now Kosovo is only three short of 98, which would make it recognized by a majority of the world’s 193 generally-recognized sovereign states.  The Republic of Serbia still claims Kosovo as its territory.

Grenade Explodes at Kosovar Administrator’s Home in Serb-Ruled North Kosovo.  Another grenade blast rocked the Serbian-administered sliver of the Republic of Kosovo called North Kosovo on November 19th, according to police.  The grenade went off in the town of Zvečan (spelled Zveçan in Albanian), the residence of Dušan Milisavljević, deputy chief of the Republic of Kosovo’s administrative office for the town.  Zvečan is a Serb-dominated town which is administered through the Republic of Serbia, though officially it is under Kosovar sovereignty.  Police were investigating.  The following day, incidents of stone-throwing between Serb and ethnic-Albanian construction workers in Kosovsko Mitrovica, North Kosovo’s de facto capital, led to gunfire, but no injuries were reported.  At issue in that incident was the controversy over construction of new homes for ethnic Albanians in North Kosovo.  Eight Serb police in North Kosovo were suspended in the wake of that incident.

Serbia’s Ex–Deputy Premier, a Vojvodina Nationalist, Nabbed on Corruption Charges.  A former deputy prime minister and nationalist politician who represents the Republic of Serbia’s ethnic Hungarians was arrested on November 20th on corruption charges.  The politician, József Kasza (that’s is Hungarian name; Serbs call him Jožef Kasa), used to head the Union of Vojvodina Hungarians and was part of the democratic reforms that swept the Serbian nationalist war criminal Slobodan Milošević out of power in 2000.  The province of Vojvodina is home to Serbia’s Hungarians and was part of the Hungarian-aligned Banat Republic after the First World War and, under the name Danube Banovina, an expanded Axis-aligned Hungary during the Second World War.  Kasza is accused of intentionally issuing bad loans while managing a state-run bank.  Critics point out that the Serbian government’s aggressive anti-corruption campaigns, which are part of its attempts to qualify for membership in the European Union (E.U.) seem to focus exclusively on opposition parties.

József Kasza

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Transylvanian Separatism Haunts Romania, This Time via YouTube

Just when the Republic of Romania is being embarrassed in front of its European Union (E.U.) pals by an impeachment scandal that doesn’t seem particulary first-world and democratic, Transylvanian separatists in the country’s west have risen from the grave to haunt Romanians and to threaten to suck the blood from its aspirations for political stability.

Within Romania, Transylvania is shown in light yellow.  Dark yellow counties are the regions of Banat, Crişana, and Maramureş—which, like Transylvania, are historically ethnic-Hungarian-dominated.

Romania’s interior minister, Mircea Duşa, was obliged to go on record to calm public concerns this week over a new video that surfaced online advocating the violent secession of Transylvania, Romania’s historically ethnic-Hungarian-dominated region.  Duşa called it a matter of concern that should be discussed at high levels, “in view of the cooperation between the Romanian and Hungarian governments and their good ties.”  In the video, a marksmanship training camp, with both adults and children, is combined with the words, “We are from the Székely-Hungarian National Guard [Székely-Magyar Nemzetőrség], designed to liberate Transylvania from Romanian occupation. If you want to join up, seek us at Borzont’s E.M.I. camp.”  (Watch the video here.)

Training to secede from Romania?

The Székely are the Magyars of Transylvania, considered a part of the Hungarian nation that got stranded by history outside the bounds of the Republic of Hungary.  E.M.I. stands for Erdélyi Magyar Ifjak, or Transylvanian Hungarian Youth, a group with autonomist and sometimes right-wing leanings.  Police have now been ordered to look into who may have uploaded it—possibly from Hungary, Romanian police offer hopefully—and the ethnic-Hungarian (a.k.a. Magyar) youth camp in question has assured the public that they are not training Magyar militias.

The Székely-Hungarian National Guard’s insignia.  That’s the old Székely Land flag on the left and the Austro-Hungarian-imperial-era Kingdom of Hungary flag on the right.

Transylvania was run by Hungarian élites during the Austro-Hungarian Empire as part of the empire’s Kingdom of Hungary, but after the First World War the region was reattached to the other two of the three traditional regions of Romania, Wallachia and Moldavia, which had broken free of the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s as the Kingdom of Romania.  At war’s end, ethnic Hungarians outside Hungary proper united as an unrecognized very-brief-lived Banat Republic in what is today Transylvania and the adjacent Vojvodina province of Serbia, to the west.  Banat’s capital was Timişoara, which is the main city in Transylvania and also, incidentally, where, later, the 1989 anti-Communist revolution in Romania was born.  Small patches of territory in eastern Transylvania, called the Székely Land, are today the heartland of what is left of Magyar Romania, where Hungarians, though they are only 6.5% of Romania as a whole, form the majority in two of Romania’s 42 counties.  These counties once formed the core of a larger, Soviet-installed Magyar Autonomous Region within Romania—until the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, in a fit of jingoism, erased it in 1968.

Romania’s ethnic geography.  Magyars (Hungarians) are dark green, Ukrainians are light green, and shades of purple show proportions of a county’s population that is ethnically Romanian.

There has also been a resurgence of Hungarian ethnonationalism in Vojvodina, just over the border from Transylvania, since the Yugoslav Wars of Succession began in the 1990s.  Kosovo, Serbia’s other “autonomous province,” is now de facto independent and under NATO protection, so Vojvodina’s Magyars, though they have a much smaller population share than Kosovo’s Albanians, are naturally getting ideas themselves.

The flash-in-the-pan Banat Republic straddled the border between modern Romania and Vojvodina province in modern Serbia.

It is important to keep aware of who these Magyar nationalists in Romania are.  They are not an oppressed group.  They are descended from Transylvania’s former minority élites, who a century ago ruled over a Romanian majority who were treated as second-class citizens.  The Banat Republic experiment was sponsored by ultra-nationalists in Hungary, where jingoists nursed the same grievances of dismembered empire that, in Germany, eventually gave rise to Nazism.  Both Hungary and Romania were Axis power during the Second World War, but Romanians had fewer close cultural and historical ties to Austria, the birthplace of Nazi ideology, than Hungary had, so Romanians were less ardent in their capital-F Fascism.  Romania switched sides near war’s end in 1944 and turned on its former friends, Germany and Hungary.  Hungary stayed on Adolf Hitler’s sinking ship till the bitter end.  Stranded on the east side of the Iron Curtain, Hungarians did not participate in the soul-searching and contrition that came to define post-war Germany; they merely congratulated themselves that their newly imposed ideology, Communism, defeated Hitler in the “Great Patriotic War.”

Modern Transylvanian nationalists’ feelings of former empire and historical wrongedness have a whiff of Nazi-style irredentism that is far less pronounced in expressions of Romanian hypernationalism—even when it comes to Romania’s lost province, Moldova.  Sure enough, groups like E.M.I. do not look like a disenfranchised minority struggling to breathe free when they hold their marches.  They wear masks and hoods, their flags feature a swastika-like black-and-white Celtic cross, and they are openly homophobic and anti-Semitic.

These Transylvanians are scarier than Dracula.

Luckily, E.M.I. and their allies are a fringe in Romania, but they are also not as anomalously freakish on the Romanian and Hungarian political landscape as analogous swivel-eyed, foam-flecked neo-fascists and skinheads are in places like Norway or the Netherlands.  Surveys show Hungary itself to be the most intolerant of all modern industrial European democracies.  We can expect that Hungarians stranded bitterly in modern Romania probably score higher than the 63% rate of anti-Semitism that the Anti-Defamation League (A.D.L.) found in Hungary itself in a survey this year.  Romania as a whole is not much better on this score.  Romanians, too, paper over their Nazi past.  It was Romanians and Magyars, not Germans, who decimated the local Jewish population in the Holocaust.  The move to restore King Michael I to the throne after 1989 never gathered momentum, but the 90-year-old royal pretender, exiled today in Switzerland, remains disturbingly popular given that he was friendly with Hitler and Benito Mussolini and didn’t really switch sides until Soviet troops were pouring through Romania’s eastern borders in 1944.  Michael—who last year grudgingly ditched his other title, Prince of Hohenzollern—has been invited to address Romania’s parliament, and surveys show him to be Romanians’ most trusted public figure.  The current, embattled president of Romania, Traian Băsescu, has gone on record saying that he regards Michael’s abandonment of the Axis cause as treason brought about by Soviet bullying.  In 2007 he called a journalist a “dirty Gypsy.”  And none of those comments really hurt him in his current struggles to avoid impeachment (though it is slightly embarrassing that someone videotaped Băsescu at a campaign rally slapping a 10-year-old boy in the face).

King Michael I (left)

So what to make of this new E.M.I. video?  Are there really Magyar paramilitaries training to wage a war of secession against Romania?  Probably not.  The reality is likely one of the following scenarios: either some nationalists in Hungary or in the Székely Land mashed up the video to make a political point, or, perhaps more plausibly, some more progressive Romanian created the clip to embarrass E.M.I. and to alert the public to the disturbing political undertones to some of the expressions of ethnic pride like these youth camps.  We may never know, but if it makes Romania take a harder look at its right-wing Hungarian-nationalist fringe and what it represents, that may be a good thing.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]