Halfway or no way?

Abstract

I am going to sketch a general picture of Hungary today. This will require to present in some detail the road on which we have arrived here: the peculiarities of the Kádár‑regime, i.e. the “goulash‑ communism” and of the Hungarian “refolution” (self‑ contradictory mixture of revolution and reform) i.e. the constitutional revolution of 1989; the features and failure of the liberal enterprise that to a large extent characterized the first 10‑20 years of the newly established democracy. I will describe the present situation in Hungary as a halfway in the learning process of a democratic political culture that already owes a lot to its established traditions: the state‑ centrism, paternalistic leadership, occasional outbursts of nationalism. The genre of this paper is properly called essay in its meaning of “attempt” at defining a concept of Hungarian political culture: “kádárism”.