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.

A NEW ATLANTIC ALLIANCE

President Trump’s Commitment to Central Europe and its Co-operation “The Atlantic Ocean is not the frontier between Europe and the Americas. It is the inland sea of a community of nations allied with one another by geography, history, and vital necessity.”Walter Lippmann: US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston,

LIBERATION CANCELLED! – US POLICIES TOWARDS CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1956 AND AFTER

LIBERATION CANCELLED! US Policies towards Central Europe in 1956 and After1 … the region lies beyond the reach of American power. […] Does this mean that Poland and the Danubian states and Balkan states have no prospect of assured independence, and that they are destined inexorably to become satellites of

CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE FUTURE OF THE WEST

Arnold Toynbee, the deservedly famous British historian and philosopher, in his monumental A Study of History described the rise and fall of dozens of civilisations. Based upon that model it is easy to predict the fall of our western civilisation. But that was predicted already a hundred years ago by Oswald Spengler in his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) published in 1918, in

CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

Today it is apparent that the over-optimistic words of President G. H. W. Bush delivered exactly eleven years before the attack on the World Trade Center, announcing a New World Order, recalling the unfulfilled promises of the Atlantic Charter of 1941, were expressions of an illusion. Writing in the very

HUNGARY, NATO AND THE WAR IN UKRAINE

It is a risky business these days to write about Ukraine in a periodical; by the time the piece appears the situation has changed dramatically, as happened after the shooting down of the Malaysian aircraft on 17 July. But misunderstandings about the position of Hungary demand clarifications. From the outset

CHRONICLERS OF A VANISHED WORLD

As a teenager I was fascinated by Upton Sinclair’s World’s End, translated into Hungarian under the title Letűnt világ (“A World That Disappeared”). It was published in 1940, when Hungary was still a “non-belligerent”, hoping to protect its traditional political and social system both from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

HUNGARY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR: TRAGIC BLUNDERS OR DESTINY?

Among the many unfair or exaggerated criticisms Hungary has received recently it is often brought up that Horthy, Hungary’s Head of State (Regent) from 1920 to 1944, was an ally of Nazi Germany, who, with Hitler’s help, annexed territories from the neighbours, and permitted the murder of half a million

THE NEED FOR SATISFIED NATIONAL MINORITIES

It is both a revelation and a delight to read such an unorthodox essay as Roger Scruton’s “The Need for Nations”. The author is absolutely right to point out that “nation states […] alone inspire the obedience of the European people, and without them there is no way that the

BARONESS THATCHER AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF HUNGARY

1989, the annus mirabilis, when the communist dominoes rapidly fell one after the other, may already be a generation away, but we, both witnesses and participants, should not let it be forgotten just what a historical watershed it was. It was the end of the Cold War and the threat of

DOOMSDAY IN HUNGARY?

Since Christmas several reports and opinions have appeared in the international media painting a bleak picture of the state of democracy in Hungary, heaping heavy criticism on the government. The objects of the concern and the attacks are the new Constitution passed by the National Assembly in 2011, the media law of