Category: The last twenty years

HUNGARY AND THE BREAK-UP OF YUGOSLAVIA – A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY – PART I

When in 1989 political change swept through Central Europe and the communist dominoes fell, Yugoslavia was in a deep economic crisis, aggravated by growing tensions between the six “Socialist Federal Republics,” or rather between the national groups which constituted the Southern Slav State. Many Slovenes and Croats hoped to achieve

THE LAST REFUGE

Anti-Communist Partisans in the Romanian Mountains In 1990 in Romania, soon after the fall of the Ceauşescu dictatorship, 34 year old Ioana Voicu began searching for her real parents. She had been brought up in an orphanage, to which she now returned with a simple question. She wanted to find

M. S. GORBACHEV: THE LAST PLOY? – OR WHAT WAS REALLY GOING ON

Hungary and I go back quite a long way, in fact some fifty years, and I have learned a vast amount from the country. I first came here in 1961, to attend a Hungarian language course in Debrecen. Back then I was taken up with the Habsburg Monarchy and the

THE HUNGARIAN PATIENT

István Mikola, is chairman of the Health Committee of the Hungarian Parliament, and was Minister of Health in the first Fidesz government from 2000 to 2002. This conversation took place during a break in a conference entitled “The rebirth of birth”, organized by the Semmelweis Movement at the Hungarian Academy

LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION – THE HUNGARIAN EXPERIENCE

The drive for historic change and development in Europe had set in motion in these countries forces of revolutionary spirit that pressed for freedom and human dignity, for national independence, and for such political, material and cultural conditions which would allow a bearable quality of life for all citizens and

ONE DAY

According to Marcel Proust, – perhaps this is the most exciting message of his work – there are extraordinary, magical moments of wonder in every lifetime, which interrupt the never-ending string of grey and painful seconds, and thereby give meaning to life. He was of course referring to private life

TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE ‘NEW WORLD ORDER’

“At the turn of the millennium political fundamentalism will proliferate everywhere in the world. This political fundamentalism could manifest itself not only in the Islamic world, but also in other cultures, and will, as the 21st-century equivalent of Bolshevism, pose a grave threat to our world.” (Prime Minister József Antall

JÓZSEF ANTALL AND THOSE WHO DID NOT WANT HIM

These last, however – and let us not fool ourselves – are not great in number; the political and social lives of so many people were unaffected. The greater portion of society deals only occasionally and rather superficially with affairs over and above those affecting their daily lives. This is