Constitutional definition of the Croatian-Hungarian State community on the basis of the Croatian-Hungarian Reconciliation

Abstract

For more than eight centuries, the Hungarian-Croatian state community was one of the most
enduring in European constitutional history, before it was dissolved in 1918 along with the then
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The two countries had not laid the legal foundations for it, so the
conflict of 1848 and the unilateral secession of Croatia (de facto, because the two countries
were still linked de iure by the person of the king) created a new situation. The Croatian-
Hungarian reconciliation was established to clarify this. However, the article did not clarify,
but partially obscured, the most important issue with the state community: whether Hungary
was a unitary state or whether it entered into a federation or real union with Croatia. The
emotive political debates of the Dualism era (especially in parliament) could not provide a
unified answer to this question, and then the inter-war and then the Cold War era did not provide
the opportunity for an objective analysis. This could only be done after Croatia's independence.
In this paper, we will examine the Croatian-Hungarian reconciliation and the constitutional
model it created from the perspective of state theory.