presidential election were used to discredit
Mazowiecki (he was ‘smeared’ as being of Jewish
descent, though he was not), so the Democratic
Forum denigrated the Alliance of Free Democrats
for its supposedly intellectual ‘Jewish’ influences
(anti-Semitism has remained a flourishing evil in
Eastern Europe). When the free elections were
held in March 1990, the communists – now calling
themselves the Hungarian Socialist Party – suffered
a humiliating defeat, which also sealed the fate of
Pozsgay. Thus in Hungary as in Poland, there was
a peaceful end to communist rule and a transfer to
a Democratic Forum government in May. The
prime minister, Forum’s leader Jozsef Antall,
stressed that he would follow a gradual route to a
market economy. But Hungarian nationalism was
reviving, which threatened to isolate Hungary and
exacerbate the problems with its neighbours,
Slovakia with 600,000 ethnic Hungarians, Serbia
with 150,000 and Romania with 1.8 million. In
1993 moderation prevailed and neo-fascist appeals
for Lebensraum were being rejected; prosperity
came before conflict.
Hungary also experienced difficult years in the
mid-1990s. Inflation and unemployment were
high, relations with Slovakia strained after sug-
gestions from the Slovak leader, Vladimír Mecˇiar,
that the Hungarians in his country should be
forced to return to Hungary and the Slovakians
in Hungary repatriated to their homeland. With
other neighbours, however, good relations have
been established and Hungary has avoided
involvement in the destructive ethnic disputes in
the Balkans. Hungary has the most consistently
strong economy in Eastern Europe. Its accession
to the European Union on 1 May 2004 will
strengthen it further. Politically Hungary has
become a stable democracy with the electorate
polarised between the two major parties. The
socialist MSzP won the 1994 election and Victor
Orbán, more nationalist Fidesz Civic Party won
the election in 1998 only to lose to the socialists
in 2002. Undermined by scandals, Fidesz looks
to win the elections of 2006. The major parties
each head coalitions. As a member of NATO
(2003) and the EU, Hungary takes pride in a
strong sense of national identity and opposes the
federalist trends of the Union.
The Czech and Slovak peoples had to acquiesce
in Husák’s rule after 1968, with the Red Army
troops stationed in Czechoslovakia ready to back
it. Stability brought a measure of economic
improvement in the 1970s and for a time rising
standards of living, but by the 1980s the Czech
economy was in deep crisis. As was the case
throughout Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia was
relying on increasingly outdated factories and
methods of production. Once, in previous years,
Czechoslovakia had been a model of economic
progress in Eastern Europe, comparable to
Western countries; now it had been turned into
a characteristic Soviet-bloc economy – stagnant,
with an over-emphasis on heavy industry, and so
unmindful of the environment that industry was
creating in parts of the country an ecological dis-
aster, rendering the air so polluted that it made
the population sick.
But Czechoslovakia had one positive aspect in
common with its heavy-handed Soviet mentor: an
immensely lively and distinguished group of dis-
sident writers and intellectuals. Their courageous
spokesman was a playwright, Václav Havel. The
Helsinki Agreements, promising human rights,
provided the dissidents with a unifying pro-
gramme with which to attack the communist
regime. In January 1977 they formed the Charter
77 movement, whose manifesto demanded re-
spect for human rights. Its leaders, who met
informally in each other’s houses, were arrested,
harassed and imprisoned for anti-state activities.
But their protests reached a wide audience in the
West and kept the spark of resistance alive in
Czechoslovakia.
As the 1980s drew to a close, Husák could not
isolate Czechoslovakia from the stirrings of
freedom in Poland and Hungary or from the
reformist impact of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’.
The old reactionary communist stance had had its
day. But Husák did not give up. He resigned
from the leadership of the party in December
1987 only to hand it to another hardline com-
munist, Milos Jakesˇ, while he himself retained the
presidency. In 1988 and during the early months
of 1989, Czechoslovakia seemed still to be firmly
in the communist grip, out of tune with all the
other East European states except Romania which894 GLOBAL CHANGE: FROM THE 20th TO THE 21st CENTURY