Hungarian Review September 2011 [antikvár]

What did both Hitler and Stalin admire about Hungary? It sounds like the question in a university quiz show which no contestant can guess the right answer to. "The water-polo team?" hazards one contestant. "The women?" offers another. "Goulash?" asks another, desperately. The right answer, however unlikely this may sound, is "leadership". In contrast to Yugoslavs, Romanians and Bulgarians, Hitler flattered the newly appointed anti-Nazi Hungarian Prime Minister, Miklós Kállay in 1942, that the Hungarians created "a strong, well- organized state", thanks to "the natural leadership qualities of the old nobility". The quotation is from Charles Fenyvesi's thoughtful portrait of Kállay in this edition of Hungarian Review. And the quotation itself is a curious echo of Stalin's comment to the Yugoslav Communist (and later dissident) Milovan Dilas, about why he admired Hungarians and Poles. "He (Stalin) said to me on one occasion that nations which had been ruled by powerful aristocracies, like the Hungarians and the Poles, were strong nations. Stalin was a great admirer of powerful states and powerful institutions, even when he was opposed to them; and his fear of the Hungarians and the Poles was a revealing backhanded recognition of Polish and Hungarian stamina." Stalin's comment may have been more honest - unlike Hitler, he had no ulterior motive in flattering the Hungarians - and his comment was an aside to a Serb. But if the two great ogres were right in the twentieth century, what lessons can we draw, if any, for Hungarian leadership in the twenty-first? György Granasztói argues in this edition that Fidesz are by and large providing the strong leadership which the country needs today. He suggests that what he calls the civil war in the intellectual and public life of the country, which had lasted for much of the past twenty years, ended with the massive Fidesz victory in last year's election. Far from stamping its own, awful image on the country as its critics allege, Granasztói suggests that the margin of the Fidesz victory established the conditions for "the recreation of the political, which is one of the preconditions of the proper functioning of a democracy". On the economic front, our regular contributor Péter Ákos Bod explores the history of business-government relations during the past twenty years of transition. Foreign firms, he points out, now account for a quarter of Hungarian FROM THE EDITORS 3