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Category: Current

CRISIS AFTER CRISIS – ANY LESSONS LEARNT?

It is now more than half a decade since first a local American turbulence and then a global one shook the world of international finance. Half a decade should have been enough time for all those involved – politicians, economists, bankers, analysts, entrepreneurs and consumers – to digest the events

OUT OF THE STORM

NT: The government’s critics say that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is only friendly towards the European Union or Russia when he wants something from them – the rest of the time he is rather generous with his criticism – is that true? ZsN: I think it would be a mistake to

FICO’S SLOVAKIA: THE FORCE RESTRAINED

It has been three quarters of a year since Robert Fico regained power in Slovakia by winning a decisive, uncontested majority in Parliament. So far in this cycle, though, he has kept a lower profile than is his wont, perhaps for reasons beyond his busy schedule of tasks in managing

THE EUROPEANS BEFORE AND AFTER THE COLD WAR

Sometimes I am asked: why history? In so many places, history is a sort of primary-school nationalist propaganda, and serious people do something else. One of the best lines in Robert Skidelsky’s life of John Maynard Keynes is a remark made to Lytton Strachey in Florence, when he was writing

EUROPE WITHOUT EUROPEANS

In the 1990s, the European Union aimed to achieve two ambitious goals: to end the wars of Yugoslav succession and to lead the former communist countries in Eastern Europe toward economic and social prosperity. Both of these goals proved elusive. The Dayton Accord, brokered by the United States in 1995,

THE ENDANGERED DANUBE

The Government Commissioner’s mandate is to coordinate tasks between different ministries, and to coordinate the strategy with 14 countries, 8 of which are in the EU. The 11 priority areas include transportation and conventional security, tourism and culture, energy, infrastructure, environment and water issues, social and labour market inclusion, and

WARMER DAYS IN VOJVODINA

In addition to our extensive gathering of data, the investigations of two brave Roman Catholic Priests offered the most reliable source of information. Márton Szűcs, retired Dean of Bácsszőllős, and József Kovács, retired Parson of Martonos, dedicated the last years of their lives to gathering data about the innocent Hungarians

HUNGARY’S ‘OPENING TO THE EAST’ AND TURKEY

There is huge potential in the East, but fantasy remains more exciting than reality. There will not be any buying of Hungarian bonds by Turkey, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan. Growth in trade volumes stagnated this year. Most of Hungary’s exports to the East come from multinationals based in Hungary. In order

RUSSIA’S ENERGY WEAPON

In 2011 and 2012 Vladimir Putin said on more than one occasion that Russia had managed to avoid the world economic and financial crisis thanks to the policies of the Kremlin. In several respects, this was true – but not so much in the energy sector, so vital to Russian

BUDAPEST AS A REGIONAL HUB?

Missed Changes and New Prospects The Hungarian economy has lately lost ground to its neighbours and economic rivals – a phenomenon I wrote about recently, when I looked at the very hard landing of the Hungarian national airline (Magyar Szemle, 2012, issues 5–6). So if we ever had the ambition