Why did Hungary, a country that shared much of the religious and institutional heritage of western Europe, fail to replicate the social and political experiences of the latter in the nineteenth and ...early twenties centuries? The answer, the author argues, lies not with cultural idiosyncracies or historical accident, but with the internal dynamics of the modern world system that stimulated aspirations not easily realizable within the confines of backward economics in peripheral national states.
The author develops his theme by examining a century of Hungarian economic, social, and political history. During the period under consideration, the country witnessed attempts to transplant liberal institutions from the West, the corruption of these institutions into a "neo-corporatist" bureaucratic state, and finally, the rise of diverse Left and Right radical movements as much in protest against this institutional corruption as against the prevailing global division of labor and economic inequality.
Pointing to significant analogies between the Hungarian past and the plight of the countries of the Third World today, this work should be of interest not only to the specialist on East European politics, but also to students of development, dependency, and center-periphery relations in the contemporary world.
The new Hungarian Basic Law, which was ratified on 1 January 2012, provoked domestic and international controversy. Of particular concern was the constitutional text’s explicit claim that it was ...situated within a reinvigorated Hungarian legal tradition that had allegedly developed over centuries before its violent interruption during World War II, by German invaders, and later, by Soviet occupation. To explore the context and validity of this claim, and the legal traditions which have informed the stormy centuries of Hungary’s constitutional development, this book brings together a group of leading historians, political scientists and legal scholars to produce a comprehensive history of Hungarian constitutional thought. Ranging in scope from an overview of Hungarian medieval jurisprudence to an assessment of the various criticisms levelled at the new Hungarian Basis Law of 2012, contributors assess the constitutions, their impacts and their legacies, as well as the social and cultural contexts within which they were drafted. The historical analysis is accompanied by a selection of original source materials, many translated here for the first time. This is the only book in English on the subject and is essential reading for all those interested in Hungary’s history, political culture and constitution.
Examines the social and political history of the Jews of Miskolc-the third largest Jewish community in Hungary-and presents the wider transformation of Jewish identity during the eighteenth and ...nineteenth centuries. It explores the emergence of a moderate, accommodating form of traditional Judaism that combined elements of tradition and innovation, thereby creating an alternative to Orthodox and Neolog Judaism. This form of traditional Judaism reconciled the demands of religious tradition with the expectations of Magyarization and citizenship, thus allowing traditional Jews to be patriotic Magyars. By focusing on Hungary, this book seeks to correct a trend in modern Jewish historiography that views Habsburg Jewish History as an extension of German Jewish History, most notably with regard to emancipation and enlightenment. Rather than trying to fit Hungarian Jewry into a conventional Germano-centric taxonomy, this work places Hungarian Jews in the distinct contexts of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Danube Basin, positing a more seamless nexus between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This nexus was rooted in a series of political experiments by Habsburg sovereigns and Hungarian noblemen that culminated in civic equality, and in the gradual expansion of traditional Judaism to meet the challenges of the age.
This collection is the most comprehensive account of the Fundamental Law and its underlying principles. The objective is to analyze this constitutional transition from the perspectives of comparative ...constitutional law, legal theory and political philosophy. The authors outline and analyze how the current constitutional changes are altering the basic structure of the Hungarian State. The key concepts of the theoretical inquiry are sociological and normative legitimacy, majoritarian and partnership approach to democracy, procedural and substantive elements of constitutionalism. Changes are also examined in the field of human rights, focusing on the principles of equality, dignity, and civil liberties.
Lisa Pope Fischer looks at ways the Communist era fit present-day society revealing an aging population's life experiences, the politics of everyday practices, and social change in a modern global ...world.
In the last two decades a large amount of previously secret documents on Jewish issues emerged from the newly opened Communist archives. The selection of these papers published in the volume and ...stemming mostly from Hungarian archives will shed light on a period of Jewish history that is largely ignored because much of the current scholarship treats the Shoah as the end of Jewish history in the region. The documents introduced and commented by the editor of the volume, András Kovács, will give insight into the conditions and constraints under which the Jewish communities, first of all, the largest Jewish community of the region, the Hungarian one had to survive in the time of the post-Stalinist Communist dictatorship. They may shed light on the ways how “Jewish policy” of the Soviet bloc countries was coordinated and orchestrated from Moscow and by the single countries. The archival material will prove that the ruling communist parties were restlessly preoccupied with the “Jewish question.” This preoccupation, which kept the whole issue alive in the decades of communist rule, explains to a great extent its open reemergence in the time of transition and in the post-communist period.
In Slavery in Árpád-era Hungary in a Comparative Context, Cameron Sutt examines servile labour in the first three centuries of the Hungarian kingdom and compares it with dependent labour in ...Carolingian Europe.
In the early 1990s, scholars voiced skepticism about the capacity of Eastern Europe's new democracies to manage simultaneous political and economic reform. They argued that the surge of popular ...participation following democratization would thwart efforts by successor governments to enact market reforms that imposed high costs on major elements of post-Communist society. David Bartlett challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the hazards of "dual transformations": far from hindering marketization, democratization facilitated it. Bartlett argues that the transition to democracy in East Central Europe lowered the political barriers to market reforms by weakening the ability of actors most vulnerable to marketization to manipulate the existing institutional structure to stop or slow down the process.
Although the analysis focuses on Hungary, whose long history of market reforms makes it an ideal vehicle for assessing the impact of institutional change on reform policy, the author shows how his findings call into question the use of "shock therapy" and arguments, based on the experience in East Asia, that economic development and democratization are incompatible.
This book will appeal to economists, political scientists, and others interested in transition problems in formerly communist countries, democratic transitions, and the politics of stabilization and adjustment.
David L. Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University.
Stable carbon and oxygen isotope values of structural carbonate (δ13C, δ18OCO3) and phosphate (δ18OPO4) in bio-apatite were measured for fossil mammalian teeth from Slovakia and Hungary. Oxygen ...isotope compositions of enamel provide new quantitative records of the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene paleoclimate in the Pannonian Basin (PB). The δ18OPO4 values were used to study the temporal variations in the oxygen isotope compositions of precipitation and the changes in temperature over the PB. The new O-isotope data suggest that surface air temperatures between 4.5 and 2.0Ma were 1 to 4°C warmer with about 700mm/yr more precipitation compared to the present. C-isotope analyses of samples from proboscideans (Anancus sp., Mammut sp.) and perissodactyls (Stephanorhinus sp., Tapirus sp.) from the Pliocene (MN15–MN16) and Early Pleistocene (MN17) suggest that they were primarily C3 browsers. The mean δ13C value is high at 4.5 to 3.7Ma (MN14–15) during the Pliocene Warm Period and decreases at about 3.5 to 3.0Ma (MN16; mid-Pliocene Warm Period), with the onset of more humid conditions in Europe. The δ13C values return to higher values from 2.5Ma onwards (MN17), most likely reflecting more arid conditions as a consequence of the onset of the Northern Hemisphere glaciation.
•δ13C values support a dominance of C3 plants in the Pannonian Basin in East Central Europe at 4.5 to 2.0Ma.•δ13C and δ18O values suggest a shift to drier conditions from 3.0Ma.•Temperature estimates for the Pliocene Pannonian Basin were 1 to 4°C higher than today.
