The White Terror in a Global Context: Miscarriages of Justice and the Origins of the Racial State in Hungary, 1919–1923

Abstract

The study interprets Hungary’s counterrevolutionary interwar regime at the intersection of paramilitarism in the immediate aftermath of World War I and the rise of the modern racial state. It traces how the failure to prosecute perpetrators of antisemitic and political violence and the enactment of exclusionary laws marked a decisive turn from the Rechtsstaat to the Rassenstaat. Drawing on judicial archives and comparative cases, the essay argues that Hungary’s miscarriages of justice created both the precedent and the source of institutional habits for later racialised governance and persecution. The impunity granted to paramilitary perpetrators reshaped interwar political culture and fed into later extreme right-wing political cultures, including the political cultures and ideologies cultivated by Hungarian collaborators in the Holocaust. By contextualising Hungary’s experience in transnational histories of race, law, and modernisation, the article redefines the White Terror as a formative episode in the global genealogy of the racial state.