GUSZTÁV BÁGER, poet and economist. He is professor emeritus at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. Between 1990 and 1992, he was the head of the Economic Policy Department of the Ministry of Finance, and in 1992, he became the head of the International Finance Department of the Ministry of Finance. From 2003, he was the director general of the Research Institute for the State Audit Office, then its scientific adviser. Between 2015 and 2020, he was a member of the Monetary Council of the Central Bank of Hungary. At present, he is the Chief Advisor to the Governor of the Central Bank of Hungary. He received the prestigious József Attila Prize, a literary prize for excellence in 2012.
GÉZA JESZENSZKY, historian, D.Phil. (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest). From 1976 to 2011, he taught modern history at what is today Corvinus University of Budapest. From 1984–1986, he was a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He also taught at the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor; Pacific Lutheran University at Tacoma, WA; College of Europe, Warsaw, Poland; and Babeș-Bolyai University at Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). He was foreign minister of Hungary in the first non-communist government (1990–1994), ambassador to the United States (1998–2002) and to Norway and Iceland (2011–2014). He is the author of a large number of scholarly publications and political writings, including Lost Prestige: The Changing Image of Hungary in Britain, 1894–1918 (Budapest, 1986, 1994, 2020 in Hungarian; the volume came out in English in 2020); Post-Communist Europe and Its National/Ethnic Problems (Budapest, 2005, 2009); July 1944: Deportation of the Jews of Budapest Foiled, ed., (Reno, NV: Helena History Press LLC, 2018). His book on Hungary’s relations with its neighbours in the years of the regime change (Kísérlet a trianoni trauma orvoslására. Magyarország szomszédsági politikája a rendszerváltozás éveiben) came out in 2016. He is also the co-author of a book on the history of skiing in the Carpathian Basin (2016).
LONNIE R. JOHNSON is a native of Minnesota and graduate of St. John’s University, who has lived and worked in Vienna since an initial year of study abroad in Vienna in 1973–1974. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna, and is the author of books and articles on Viennese, Austrian, and Central European history—including the third revised edition of Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (Oxford University Press: 2011)—and he has served as the executive director of the Fulbright Program in Austria since 1997.
DAVID MARTIN JONES is a political scientist, writer, and commentator. He is an honorary reader in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, and a visiting professor and teaching fellow in War Studies at King’s College, University of London. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics, and has taught at the Open University, National University of Singapore, and the University of Tasmania. His works include Political Development in Pacific Asia (1997); The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought (2001); with N. Khoo and M. L. R. Smith The Rise of China and Asia Pacific Security (Edward Elgar 2013); with M. L. R. Smith Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age (Macmillan 2014); and The Political Impossibility of Modern Counter-Insurgency (Columbia 2015). His most recent publication, History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics (C. Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd. 2020), examines the progressive ideas behind liberal Western practise since the end of the twentieth century.
BORIS KÁLNOKY grew up in Germany, the United States, Holland, and France. His family left Hungary in 1947. He studied politics and history in Hamburg and went on to work at the German daily Die Welt from 1987. In 1995, he became Balkans correspondent for Die Welt, based in Budapest, and moved on in 2004 to become Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul. He is the author of Ahnenland (Munich: Droemer Verlag, 2011), a book about what had happened to his family and Hungary since 1952. He returned to Budapest in 2013, still working for Die Welt. He also writes for a number of other media organizations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Since September 2020, he has been head of the Media School at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Budapest.
RAY KINSELLA received his PhD from Trinity College Dublin. He began his career as an economist in the Central Bank of Ireland and worked as an economic adviser in the Department of Industry and Trade. He was appointed professor of financial services at the University of Ulster, and subsequently returned to Dublin to the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business. He has written and published extensively and is co-author with Dr Maurice Kinsella of Troikanomics: Autonomy, Austerity and Existential Crisis in the European Union (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
CALUM T. M. NICHOLSON holds an undergraduate degree in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, a masters from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Human Geography. He is a former visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, and has also served as a researcher in the British Parliament. He is a specialist and consultant on climate migration, as well as on the historical significance of social media. He is currently teaching courses on international development, international migration, and the impact of social media at the University of Cambridge. He also writes and speaks on a wide range of social, political, and cultural issues for various outlets, including The Economic Standard, The New Humanist, and the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN is editor-at-large of the National Review in New York, where he served as editor-in-chief for ten years. He was a special adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, and later assisted her in the writing of her two volumes of memoirs. He has held a wide variety of senior editorial positions in the media on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the founder and co-chairman of the Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan organization dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies, launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Václav Havel and Margaret Thatcher. Until 2011, he was the executive editor of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague. Currently he is the president of the Danube Institute, Budapest, and an associate editor of Hungarian Review and Hungarian Conservative. His latest collection of essays, The Woke versus the West: Awkward Questions for a Progressive Age, was published in 2020.
NICHOLAS T. PARSONS is a freelance author, translator, and editor based in Vienna. A graduate of New College, Oxford, he spent two years in Italy teaching at the British Institute of Florence and as reader in English at the University of Pisa, before returning to the UK to work in publishing for ten years in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984, he settled in Central Europe with his Hungarian wife, the art historian Ilona Sármány, and has since published some eighteen books on cultural topics, writing also as Louis James. These include the Blue Guide Austria and the Blue Guide Vienna as well as the first English guide to Hungary to be published following the regime change of 1989. His essay-length Xenophobe’s Guide to the Austrians (Louis James) has been in print for twenty years. His more recent books are Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook from Pausanias to the Rough Guide, Vienna: A Cultural and Literary History, and A New Devil’s Dictionary, which updates Ambrose Bierce’s satirical take on disingenuous language. In 2019, he published Civilisation and Its Malcontents: Essays on Our Times (Hungarian Review, 2019).
BENCE X. SZECHENYI is a Fulbright finalist who spent the 2021/2022 academic year in Budapest, Hungary, working as a researcher and writer. He graduated from Bates College, Maine, USA, in 2020 with a degree in English Literature, and previously worked in strategic communications. Following the completion of his Fulbright fellowship, he hopes to continue living in Europe and begin a career in investigative journalism.
ANDREAS UNTERBERGER received his law degree from the University of Vienna in 1972. He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Ford Institute and started working for the independent Austrian daily, Die Presse, where he was editor-in-chief between 1995 and 2004. He also lectured in political science and international relations at the University of Vienna between 1989 and 1998. From 2005 to 2009, he was editor-in-chief of Wiener Zeitung. Since 2009, Dr Unterberger has been an independent, conservative, free-market blogger (andreas-unterberger. at). He is the author of numerous books and articles focusing on the topics of integration, minorities, security issues, and all aspects of neutrality.
PETER URBANITSCH studied history and English at the universities of Vienna and London, and received his PhD in 1967. Until 2007, he was senior scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He was co-editor of the multi-volume work Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918. He has written numerous publications on various aspects of the history of the Habsburg Monarchy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. He is currently working on a monograph on education in the western part of the Monarchy.
ERICH WEEDE was professor of sociology at the universities of Cologne and Bonn until his retirement. He has academic degrees in psychology and political science. From 1982–1983 he was president of the Peace Science Society, and vice-president of the International Studies Association from 1985–1986. From 1986–1987 he was visiting professor of international relations at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University, USA. He served on the editorial boards of various journals, including the Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, International Interactions, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Korea and World Affairs, and New Asia. He has authored 11 books and about 300 other publications in German and English. He has studied the causes and prevention of wars, the rise and decline of nations, Asian civilizations, the invention of capitalism, the spread of economic freedom, and economic growth and income inequality. His books include Economic Development, Social Order and World Politics (1996), Asien und der Westen (Asia and the West, 2000), The Balance of Power, Globalization, and the Capitalist Peace (2005), and Freiheit und Verantwortung, Aufstieg und Niedergang (Freedom and Responsibility, Rise and Fall, 2012). He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and a founding member of the Hayek Gesellschaft.