Description

The great turning points in history always have more than one cause. This is true for the changes of régime of 1989 in Eastern Europe as well. They were brought about by the concetanation and interplay of several internal and external factors. Fundamental among these was the realignment of international power relations. The Soviet-American rivalry, ongoing since the end of WW II, culminated in voctory for the United States. Of the ame, or at least similar, importance was the historic defeat of the centralizted planned economy, based on state and communal property, at the hands of capitalism, founded on private property and rules of market mechanisms. And finally, one cannot fail to mention those individual initiatives and internal social movements that, taking advantage of the available opportunities, or even creating them, contributed to the change of regime by subverting and/or reforming it from within. In my lecture I intend to analyze these above mantioned factors focusing on the transformation having taken place in Hungary.