Hungary's Expats: Insufferable Monsters, or Boring Nobodies?

Ever since the first Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin and started calling these parts home, Hungary has suffered from a foreigner problem. In fact, the entire history of this country has been one of foreigner problems. From the Turks and the Austrians to the Germans, Russians and post-1990 westerns, it's been one long nightmare of unintelligible outlanders showing up and acting all bossy. Which is why it is a bit surprising that it took until now for the first website to appear that is specifically dedicated to trashing foreigners, and in a language many of them can actually understand.

The site - expattwats.blogspot.com - appeared online sometime last month, with a smattering of rather general observations about the heinousness of expatriates, by which the pseudonymous author Mrs. Moto seems to mean western, English-speaking expat-types. Then last week came the first direct hits on specific targets. It was, as you can imagine, mean, nasty and thoroughly enjoyable stuff, only marred slightly by some less than reverential references to me.

I say "was" because late Friday afternoon I posted a brief item on the explosive issue and within a few hours expattwats was gone in all but name. Apparently the publicity led Ms. Moto to re-think her enterprise, both because of the risk of getting her mean ass sued for libel, and because her mean ass wasn't actually so mean after all: between 03:22 and 04:52 on Saturday morning I received no less than five emails from her, each sounding more contrite than the next.

All of which is a damn shame, because the thing was compulsively readable, even if you had never heard of the alleged twats getting bagged and mounted. Not that there wasn't a downside to the whole enterprise, this being the rather obvious fact that western expat-types are actually on whole deserve more pity than scorn.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, some serious foreign jerks have slunk into Hungary from the west over the past 15 years expecting to be treated like pashas or rock stars, and at the beginning of the modern expat era the temptation to get bigheaded must have been overwhelming. But I honestly think that the bigger story these days is how utterly marginal and even pathetic most westerners living in Hungary are. Certainly this is true in financial terms. Whereas the average Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary a dozen years ago had more loose cash than the average bank manager, most members of the current "generation expat" have their noses pressed firmly against the window of the Hungarian high life, and often find themselves having to scramble just to keep up with the Kovácses.

Times are equally tough when it comes to social status, and that most important of alleged expat perks, sex with people who are younger and better looking than you. Truly, it's hard to think of a group of individuals who have fallen farther faster than Hungary's more privileged foreigners. We are, in a word, lúzerek.

So while I'm the last person to call foul on someone for having a little editorial swipe at people they think are insufferable, I think that if Ms. Moto gets her mojo back, she should show a little mercy towards these fragile and deflated Saturday night DVD-watchers, and pick on those foreigners who really are acting like they just rode in for a little rape and pillage.

I am speaking of course about the…. the… Well, lets just say that certain citizens of a certain country where the word for lúzerek isn't "losers" have apparently been systematically taking over a certain part of town where the aforementioned lúzerek/losers are known to hang about hoping not to be snubbed again by cute young Hungarians who aren't impressed that they can watch most DVDs at VideoMania with the subtitles shut off.

Speaking of people who can't watch most VideoMania DVDs unless they are feliratos, I noted last week that the French Labor Ministry is mulling a proposal by Hungary to open the local labor market to more Hungarian workers, while monitoring the numbers of French and Hungarian citizens working in each others' countries. Nothing strange about that, until I noticed the numbers of workers currently being monitored, after which I had a glorious little gloussement. By last count, there are 58 Hungarians legally working in France, and 180 Frenchmen and Frenchwomen with Hungarian work permits, which by my guesstimate is half the number of Hungarian and French bureaucrats charged with monitoring them.

This leads me to another, more crucial question: are Hungarians who live in France "expats"? No, seriously - what does this term actually mean, and who is allowed (or forced) to wear it? Are Romanians who are not ethnic Hungarians but live in Budapest anyway "expats"? How about first generation Hungarian-Americans who can watch a Hungarian-language DVD without the subtitles, and hold Hungarian passports as well? Latvians living in Lithuania? Malians in the Maldives? Turkmen on temporary assignment in Tuvalu?

And what if an "expatriate" is, like a surprising number of Budapest expats, likely to spend the rest of their lives in their adopted home? When do you stop being an expatriate and start becoming an immigrant? "Expatriate" can't just mean rich people, because as we've already demonstrated, many leading "expats" are just this short of dumpster-diving. And it certainly shouldn't be synonymous with English-speakers, because the word "expatriate" is the same in French, where it is apparently tied in with expatrier, to "banish."

All of which seems like a good reason to just banish the word expat, and instead stick to "foreigners" - or damn foreigners for whenever you feel like sending the lot of us back to where we came from.