Géza Jeszenszky

Géza Jeszenszky

GÉZA JESZENSZKY (Budapest, 1941). Historian, D.Phil. (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest). Was schoolteacher and librarian; from 1976 to 2011 taught modern history at what is today Corvinus University of Budapest. Was Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara in 1984–1986. Also taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Pacific Lutheran University at Tacoma, WA; College of Europe, Warsaw, Poland; Babes-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 of America in 1998–2002, and to Norway and Iceland in 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, coming 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 to 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 co-author of a book on the history of skiing in the Carpathian Basin (2016). He is an editorial adviser for Hungarian Review.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE
AND COMMUNISM

Like all Hungarians of my generation, I grew up and lived during the Cold War in a country under Soviet domination. In our optimistic moments we believed that our offspring would live to see the end of that domination, and of communism. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall

RANZ FERDINAND
HAD NOT DIED IN SARAJEVO

A Counterfactual History of Hungary, 1914–1919* Alternative or counterfactual history is not merely fiction or wishful thinking. According to E. H. Carr in his seminal What is History? (1961), the historian’s task is to ‘explain why one course was eventually chosen rather than another’. But while he—like so many other

THE VISEGRÁD COUNTRIES AND THE MIGRANTS

A New East–West Divide in Sight? Hosted by the King of Hungary, Caroberto of Anjou, in October 1335, the kings of Poland and Bohemia (today’s Czech lands), Kazimierz the Great and John of Luxemburg, met at the royal palace of Visegrád to coordinate their various policies. After the collapse of

OVERCOMING THE BANEFUL LEGACY OF TRIANON

On 29 April 2020, the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis (a Transylvanian Saxon, i.e. German, by birth) came up with the charge that the Social Democratic Party of Romania was ready “to give Transylvania away to the Hungarians”. The accusation would be considered ridiculous if it were not coming from

ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF BORDERS

In the 2019 issues of the present journal several essays discussed the importance of borders and their protection. It is fitting to remember that most wars were not only started by violating borders but were about borders and the determination to change them. Since the Second World War European inter-state

THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT JULY 1944

“There were rumours in town that the pro-Nazi and rabidly anti-Semitic State Secretary László Baky was planning a coup to remove the Regent and to continue the deportations. Koszorús, having received an order from Horthy, entered Budapest with his troops and sent a courier to Baky threatening him with military

WHAT THE EUROPEAN UNION COULD DO – OPEN LETTER TO CLAUDE JUNCKER

“On 23 October 2018, the very day when Hungarians and many others remembered the 1956 uprising of the Hungarians against the Communist dictatorship, you called the unification of Transylvania, a province which had belonged to the Crown of Hungary for a thousand years, with the Kingdom of Romania ‘a great

UKRAINE’S CONFLICT WITH TWO OF ITS NEIGHBOURS

It is not the first time that I write on Ukraine in this journal, and most probably it will not be the last. It has been a long way since President George H. Bush told Ukrainians in Kiev in the summer of 1991 to remain within the Soviet Union, together

UKRAINE’S BLUNDER – A NATIONALIST EDUCATION LAW LEADS TO INTERNATIONAL UPROAR

In the early 1990s diplomacy was indeed a growth industry: as independent countries proliferated, so did diplomatic missions and their staff. The unexpected, sudden and relatively peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union introduced, or rather re-introduced Ukraine to the international community as a sizeable power that even had some nuclear