Another Hungary tells the stories of eight remarkable individuals: an aristocrat, merchant, engineer, teacher, journalist, rabbi, tobacconist, and writer. All eight came from the same woebegone corner of prewar Hungary. Their biographies illuminate how the region's residents made sense of economic underdevelopment, ethnic diversity, and relations between Christians and Jews. Taken together, their stories create a unique picture of the troubled history of Eastern Europe, viewed not from the capital cities, but from the small towns and villages. Through these eight lives, Another Hungary investigates the wider processes that remade Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. It asks: How did people make sense of the dramatic changes, from the advent of the railroad to the outbreak of the First World War? How did they respond to the army of political ideologies that marched through this region: liberalism, socialism, nationalism, antisemitism, and Zionism? To what extent did people in the provinces not just react to, but influence what was happening in the centers of political power? This collective biography confirms that nineteenth-century Hungary was no earthly paradise. But it also shows that the provinces produced men and women with bold ideas on how to change their world.

The only country in the world with a line in its national anthem as desperate as “this people has already suffered for its past and its future,” Hungary is a nation defined by poverty, despair, and conflict. Its history, of course, took an even darker and more tragic turn during the Holocaust. But the story of the Jews in Hungary is also one of survival, heroism, and even humor—and that is the one acclaimed author Adam Biro sets out to recover in One Must Also Be Hungarian, an inspiring and altogether poignant look back at the lives of his family members over the past two hundred years. A Hungarian refugee and celebrated novelist working in Paris, Biro recognizes the enormous sacrifices that his ancestors made to pave the way for his successes and the envious position he occupies as a writer in postwar Europe. Inspired, therefore, to share the story of his family members with his grandson, Biro draws some moving pictures of them here: witty and whimsical vignettes that convey not only their courageous sides, but also their inner fears, angers, jealousies, and weaknesses—traits that lend an indelible humanity to their portraiture. Spanning the turn of the nineteenth century, two destructive world wars, the dramatic rise of communism, and its equally astonishing fall, the stories here convey a particularly Jewish sense of humor and irony throughout—one that made possible their survival amid such enormous adversity possible. Already published to much acclaim in France, One Must Also Be Hungarian is a wry and compulsively readable book that rescues from oblivion the stories of a long-suffering but likewise remarkable and deservedly proud people.

Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ

The victors of the First World War created Hungary from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but, in the centuries before, many called for its creation. Norman Stone traces the country's roots from the traditional representative councils of land-owning nobles to the Magyar nationalists of the nineteenth century and the first wars of independence. Hungary's history since 1918 has not been a happy one. Economic collapse and hyperinflation in the post-war years led to fascist dictatorships and then Nazi occupation. Optimism at the end of the Second World War ended when the Iron Curtain descended, and Soviet tanks crushed the last hopes for independence in 1956 along with the peaceful protests in Budapest. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, consistent economic growth has remained elusive. This is an extraordinary history - unique yet also representative of both the post-Soviet bloc and of nations forged from the fall of empires.

Brave New Hungaryfocuses on the rise of a “brave new” anti-liberal regime led by Viktor Orbán who made a decisive contribution to the transformation of a poorly managed liberal democracy to a well-organized authoritarian rule bordering on autocracy during the past decade. Emerging capitalism in post-1989 Hungary that once took pride in winning the Eastern European race for catching up with the West has evolved into a reclusive, statist, national-populist system reminding the observers of its communist and pre-communist predecessors. Going beyond the self-description of the Orbán regime that emphasizes its Christian-conservative and illiberal nature, the authors, leading experts of Hungarian politics, history, society, and economy, suggest new ways to comprehend the sharp decline of the rule of law in an EU member state. Their case studies cover crucial fields of the new authoritarian power, ranging from its historical roots and constitutional properties to media and social policies. The volume presents the Hungarian “System of National Cooperation” as a pervasive but in many respects improvised and vulnerable experiment in social engineering, rather than a set of mature and irreversible institutions. The originality of this dystopian “new world” does not stem from the transition to authoritarian control per se but its plurality of meanings. It can be seen as a simulacrum that shows different images to different viewers and perpetuates itself by its post-truth variability. Rather than pathologizing the current Hungarian regime as a result of a unique master plan designed by a cynical political entrepreneur, the authors show the transnational dynamic of backsliding – a warning for other countries that suffer from comparable deadlocks of liberal democracy.

Surveys Hungary's development from prehistory to the postcommunist era