Hungary: How Liberty Can Be Lost

In: Social research: an international quarterly, Band 91, Heft 1, S. 265-286

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The story of Hungary can also serve as a warning for other nation-states on the European continent, as the years from 1989 to 1991 were a time of liberation for all the people of Eastern Europe who suffered from totalitarian political systems and ideological indoctrination. As the Bible teaches and Hannah Arendt warns, liberation is not yet liberty. The institutions of liberty have to be constituted, and people need to learn how to make them work while breathing spirit into them. Tyrannies always collapse, but whether Hungarians can escape with enough means for a new start remains to be seen.