Itt-Ott, 1991 (24. évfolyam, 1-2/118. szám)
1991 / 1-2. (118.) szám
be truly representative of all sectors, groups and strata of Hungarian society, and its frequently sensationalists, confrontational and polemic content and tone reflects more competition and power-struggle at times than responsible assistance rendered to enable a wellinformed public to formulate factually-based, objective decisions. •Numerous parties have been organized and innumerable political, cultural, social, religious, charitable, scientific, educational, youth and other organizations, associations, clubs and foundations announce every week that they have established themselves and that they seek to expand their membership, while they appeal for financial assistance. •Parliament’s deliberations are continually televised. Notwithstanding the repulsive and ludicrous images of occasional demagoguery and posturing, this can serve as an ongoing educational process about how democratic legislative deliberations really work — sometimes in a spectacular, sometimes in agonizing, or in simply boring ways — and it also increases the direct accountability and responsibility of the elected legislators. •The recovery process is hindered by Hungary’s grave economic difficulties. With repeated price increases the cost of living is steadily rising, and so is the number of the unemployed (currently, in March, 1991, 130,000 people). The number of poor is between 2.5 and 3 million, almost 30% of the population. Approximately 50,000-100,000 of the poor are homeless in Budapest and other major cities. •The local self-governing bodies have started their post-election functioning, with grave difficulties, but also with great hopes and plans for decision-making opportunities for the local populations about their own communal affairs. The problems are not only economic, but also personal-political. Some of the old-guard Communist cadre or carrierists are still in positions of decision making. Some of them are hard to replace because they have expertise in certain fields, but some of them may obstruct or even sabotage the new, democratic processes. This situation is fairly widely characteristic of the entire society: there was no revolutionary firestorm to sweep away all the functionaries of the dictatorial apparatus, and so presently the previous perpetrators and their victims live side-by-side and try to compromise somehow, to cope, and if not forgive, at least forget or struggle to push the former regime’s people out of their positions peacefully. •New contents and new forms of Hungarian national identity have started to be articulated, debated, proposed and formulated. The central core of this emerging national identity seems to reject the servile satellite-identity forced upon it bey the previous dictatorship, as well as the territory-centric, isolationistic and national supremacist identity promoted by some of the pre- World War Two regime’s spokesmen. The mainstream of the presently developing Hungarian national identity shows definite signs of democracy, liberalism and tolerance together with patriotism, loyalty and solidarity, of reaching out to the other nations of the region, and affirmations of being a member of the European community. The 1848 Hungarian Revolution was preceded by a twenty-year “age of reform.” Hungary’s peaceful revolutionary transformation of 1988-1990 appears to have begun to be followed by an age of reform. Let us hope that this new reform era will be able to accomplish the modernization of Hungary’s social consciousness as well. □ The editorial hoard of 1TT-OTT will be pleased to consider for publication academic articles and reviews in English on any aspect of Hungarian Studies. Please submit typescripts, Macintosh text-only (ASCII) or MS Word files following Chicago Manual of Style format for the social sciences to: Editor, ITT-OTT, P.O. Box 15126, Portland, OR, 97215-0126. 44 rrr-OTT 24. évf. (1991J, 1-2. (118.) szám
