Barely eight months have passed since the new parliament was formed – and since then the words and deeds of the party and government new in power have turned the political life and the workings of the state and the economy upside down. We keep being perplexed; we have not even woken up from the astonishment caused by a political step yesterday when shocked by another new announcement or measure today. It is difficult to absorb the whirlwind of events. Let us stop for a moment, let us take a deep breath, and let us re-consider what has actually happened. […]

The year 1989 in East and Central Europe was the year of democratic revolutions, of reforms flowing into revolutions and revolutions infused with reforms. Ideas of national independence and sovereignty were combined with a democratic, European transformation oriented towards the West. A new history However, the first nationalist ethnic revolutions came along as early as 1990-1991, proclaiming another kind of regime change, secession and separation, and attacking national minorities. It began with a pogrom in Romania’’s Târgu Mureș, was followed by the break-up of Yugoslavia and the coarsely velvety splitting up of Czechoslovakia, and it ranged from Csurka’’s ideology of international conspiracy in […]