Borvendég Zsuzsanna: Fabulous Spy Games. How international trade networks with the West developed after 1945 - A Magyarságkutató Intézet Kiadványai 24. (Budapest, 2021)
FINAL THOUGHTS – TRAPPED IN THE NETWORKS
FINAL THOUGHTS - TRAPPED IN THE NETWORKS Now, 30 years after the change in political system, we are experiencing increasingly clearly that the patterns of connections meshing and affecting current domestic political and economic relations are rooted in the socialist era or even earlier. This leads experts from different areas of science to question how real the transition was, while the man in the street does so based on his own everyday experience as he is probably faced with the consequences brought on by the presence of such surviving networks’.510 In my book published in 2017, The Age of the ‘ Impexes, I already pointed out that the socio-economic background and political history of Kádár-era Hungary cannot be interpreted without understanding the activities of the interest group I call the ‘foreign trade lobby’. This informal network was embedded in the state hierarchy and we saw that several of its members played a decisive role in the economic governance of the country and infiltrated the secret service apparatus so deeply that their machinations are nearly impossible to untangle. The Cold War created a previously unknown system of political relationships in which the divided nature of the bipolar world brought about an extreme situation for the global economic players. The approach of the majority of historians looking into the era is fundamentally defined by the animosity and competition between the separated regions of the world, probably attaching much more significance to the ideological and political division than it actually played. This book suggests that, in spite of the genuine division actually embodied by the Iron Curtain, global networks continued to operate undisturbed even after World War Two. The strict, hierarchical order of the dictatorship even offered protection for their expansion, and the proliferation and disruptive impact of the networks protected by the regime eventually contributed to the sloppiness’ of Kádár ’s dictatorship. The latter sentence requires some explanation as the picture of the networks built to protect the hierarchy appears to conceal a controversy. 510 Ágnes Hankiss published a book under this title in 2013, looking primarily into the survival of the Communist state security networks. Hankiss 2013. Ferguson argues that hierarchy and networks have always existed side by side during history, but their functioning and philosophy sets them fundamentally apart. For most of human history, the rules of co-existence 185
