Restricted country – open country (Hungary, 1914–2004)

Hungary is situated in the centre of Europe, which has always made it vulnerable to the interests of the great powers and sensitive to foreign cultural influence. Since 1920 Hungary has been a country of open economy but on the contrary time to time tendencies towards seclusion intensified and rolled back afterward.

The project aims to map the various kinds of cultural – but also political, economical and physical – contacts and exchanges between Hungary and the outside world from the interwar period to the post state-socialist era.

The main question of the interwar period is the whole-European phenomenon of Americanization, the spread of the US mass culture. We try to explore to what extent it could transpierce the Hungarian cultural life – both mass and elite culture – and what engines and obstacles of that process acted in that period.

During the state socialist period the deepening cold war and the Stalinist dictatorship made Hungary a closed country not only culturally, economically or politically but even physically. We examine the process of closing down the borders and also the melting of the ice of separation, the discreet turn of the Kadar regime towards the world beyond the iron curtain after the strike down of the revolution, which ended up in a relatively colourful picture of cultural, economic and political intercourse with the Western world.

After the transition the leitmotiv of the Hungarian foreign policy was the fulfilment of the Euro-Atlantic integration. In this regard the project concentrates on the changing and differing concepts of the Hungarian political and cultural elites on Europe and the West.

Coordinator of the project
Feitl, Istvan – Rakosi-era (1949–1956)

Participants of the project
Takacs, Robert – Kadar-era (1957–1989) ()
Weber, Attila – The Third Republic (1989–)

External researcher
Sipos, Balazs – Interwar period (1919–1939)

Publication:

Open/Closed Hungary. Political and Cultural Orientation, 1914–1949

Ed.: István Feitl (Napvilág, 2013)