| Summary/Abstract |
The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse,” as Edmund Burke warned us, and sure enough the recentralization of political and economic power in Hungary under the post-2010 governments of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has reversed many of the gains of the 1989 revolution. The Polish anticommunist dissident Adam Michnik, a great hero to the younger, more liberal Orbán, once argued that nationalism was the last stage of communism: Both could deploy demagogic language denouncing “the enemies of the people,” but the prioritization of national pride was a far more malleable proposition than the achievement of communism. What needs to be explained, therefore, is how, over 20 years after becoming the first country to cut a hole in the Iron Curtain (by allowing East Germans to cross the border into Austria), Hungary has been returned to authoritarianism.
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