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
FABULOUS SPY GAMES hanging after the change of political system, because the forces driving these changes dismantled the one-party state hierarchy, even though the influence of this hierarchy had been dwindling since the early 1970s. If we follow the train of thought expressed previously that an increasingly sprawling influence of these networks can be observed from the turn of the 1970s, then 1989/1990 could never be a genuine root-and-branch social and economic transformation as the networks were unaffected by the transition. There was nothing to replace them, so their system remained intact. (I believe it was the first Orbán government that first made an attempt to eliminate this network after 1998, probably to no avail.) If we understand the forces in play in Hungary prior to 1989, we will probably come closer to finding an answer to the question of what happened subsequently. Exploring these networks can help us interpret the present and point us in the right direction when it comes to looking for answers to the challenges of the 21st century, because as Kierkegaard put it: “Life can only be understood backwards.” 192
