European Document/The New Hungarian Revolution

...The country's economic planners, trying to bring Hungary's hard-currency debt under control, have been stunned by the hemorrhaging such private imports have caused in its payments balances with nonsocialist countries...

...In April the government tightened foreign-exchange regulations, imposed higher tariffs, and devalued the currency 11 percent in two stages...

...Inflation, job insecurity, and widening income disparities, meanwhile, pose increasing threats to political reform...

...About 20,000 have fled from Romania to Hungary in recent years...

...Movement in these directions will be far more difficult and dangerous, as the status quo forces within the country and within the Eastern bloc have not yet made their final stand...

...With responses from: ALLAN BLOOM • PIERRE HASSNER GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB • IRVING KRISTOL DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN STEPHEN SESTANOVICH Also featured in our Summer issue: A Manifesto for Democrats • Cornell and the Khmer Rouge Loving the Missile Crisis • and much more...

...As work proceeds through next year, patrols will be stepped up to prevent illegal crossings, which in most cases involve non-Hungarians...

...Nor will they do much for the country's general economic deterioration: real incomes are at about 80 percent of the level ten years ago, and seven percent of the population lives below the official poverty level...

...The most notable problem, however, is the presence of the Red Army, notwithstanding the recent departure of 450 tanks and 10,400 of its 65,000 troops in the country...

...But the reformers are resisting...

...A national reconciliation over the 1956 revolution now seems possible...

...He now lives in New Jersey...

...Caravans of cars with Siemens, Philips, and Sony cartons strapped on the roofs created 10-to-15-mile backups at the Sopron border crossing...

...Similarly, despite the introduction of a bankruptcy law, the state's obsolescent industries continue to swallow massive subsidies, as politicians and worker organizations take a second look at the prospect of huge numbers of people suddenly left jobless...

...Called Odenburg in German, it lies in a historically contentious region, control over which passed back and forth between the Hungarians and the Austrians, and later between the German and Russian armies...

...Particularly alarming has been the way citizens have been cashing in on their right to use Hungarian forints to purchase several hundred dollars worth of hard currency every three years—a potential drain of $4 billion on the state treasury, according to the National Bank...

...But beware: dismantling the freakish apparatus institutionalized during the Iron Curtain's existence will require crossing a no man's land no one has yet survived...

...Political reform is a prerequisite to any peaceful overhaul...

...The Czechoslovak portions are almost complete...

...He would like to see the party consolidate and embrace social democratic principles before parliamentary elections, scheduled for next year...

...But replacing the coercive political monolith with genuine pluralism and a run-down command economy with a market-oriented one cannot be accomplished by fiat...

...The tightenedimport rules will not solve the country's fundamental inability to produce goods that are competitive on the Western markets and to earn hard currency...

...FIVE ISSUES FOR THE PRICE OF FOUR Enclose payment of $21.00 and receive five issues of America's most important foreign affairs quarterly...

...asks Heti Vilaggazdasag, the weekly economic review of the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce, in its April 29 issue...

...Hungarians are champion bargain hunters...

...NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP The National Interest P.O...

...north...

...For one thing, no rival group to the Communists exists that could call itself a party—with a program, with candidates, and with an organization...

...Secondly, it's unlikely the current Communist party would modify its traditional behavior just because honorable men like Pozsgay and Nyers dominate the Politburo...

...In a perversion of protectionism, draconian export levies and quotas have been established against private exports, often trapping day shoppers at the borders...

...127 293AM THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 29...

...Drivers on roads near the frontier who stop to stretch their legs will continue to attract the attention of police in unmarked cars and will be ordered politely to move on...

...Besides revamping the Political Bureau in favor of the reformists and sweeping the Interior Ministry of some of its more dangerously orthodox elements, the party has even decided to place its 60,000-member Workers Guard under the command of the armed forces (though it stopped short of disbanding the militia...

...Anticipation of the action prompted another shopping exodus into Austria in early April, doubling Black Monday's...

...Consumer items unavailable or prohibitively expensive in one country can be found in a neighboring one, often much more cheaply...

...An even earlier withdrawal would be a worthwhile goal for the Vienna talks, and for President Bush to bring up during his expected visits to Hungary and Poland this summer...

...But during the past four decades East-Central Europeans have been compelled to crawl, swim, and balloon to freedom, braving minefields, automatically firing rifles, and electrified fences...

...Enterprising souls seek out pensioners and others with no intention of going abroad and convince them to exercise their valuta (or foreign exchange) allotments...

...The presence of Soviet troops in Hungary can thus only be linked to the May 1957 Soviet-Hungarian agreement that gave the Soviet Southern Army stationing rights for an undefined period...

...Decisions such as the one on the Iron Curtain are within the capacity of the Hungarian party leadership...

...This spring numerous high-level old-timers, including former party boss Janos Kadar, were sent packing...

...conomic overhaul, in short, will prove to be far more difficult to achieve than the evidently contentious changes in the political structure...

...It refers to the 60,000 Hungarians who took advantage of their new world passports and a holiday weekend last November to invade Austria armed with hard-currency and to bring back household appliances, electronics, and food items in scarce supply in Hungary...

...Relations with Czechoslovakia are also strained, as exemplified by the recent protest from Prague over Hungarian television's airing of a documentary on the 1968 Prague Spring...

...This summer, in a brilliant and provocative article in: NT ZoNAL INTEREST FRANCIS FUKUYAMA asks: HAVE WE REACHED THE END OF HISTORY...

...In the Hungarian Socialist Workers party, as in the Polish and Soviet Communist parties, Gorbachevite reformers such as populist Imre Pozsgay and erstwhile Social Democrat Rerso Nyers seem to be gaining the upper hand...

...Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth said in an interview on March 31 that the world passport, "for all its beneficial political effects, has been a far bigger economic headache than anyone had expected...

...How were Soviet troops 'forgotten behind' after World War II...

...Gleeful soldiers and local civilians began to tear down and cart away the barbed wire and electrified warning fences along the 150-mile Austro-Hungarian border...

...Hungary in March signed the Geneva Convention on refugees, giving it access to United Nations funds to set up camps...

...The new foreign minister, Gyula Horn, who has talked about the possibility of a Finnish type of neutrality for Hungary, holds out hope that, as a result of the Vienna conventional arms talks, all Soviet troops will be gone from Hungary by 1995...

...Black Monday here has nothing to do with the stock market...

...For more than a year now Hungarians have been issued passports for travel throughout the world, replacing red passes valid only for visits to other Communist countries...

...His remains and those of four of his colleagues were exhumed in March from unmarked graves in lot 301 of Budapest's New Public Cemetery...

...Hungarians are taking advantage of the runaway press freedom to raise questions about the Soviet occupation...

...Iron Curtain or no, it is Western currency that makes travel to the West possible, and it is becoming increasingly scarce...

...Questions will remain even if the opposition succeeds in holding off balloting until rival parties can organize and fair elections—supervised perhaps by international poll watchers—can take place...

...No less significant is that the moves are isolating the current party chief, Karoly Grosz, who would like to see the Nyers-Pozsgay faction leave the party...

...Moreover, the Warsaw Pact, signed on May 14, 1955, makes no mention of deploying troops on the territories of other countries...

...It's one thing to embrace the principles of property rights and market economics in a broad sense, as the Soviet, Polish, and Hungarian Communists have been doing for some time now...

...Organizers, wary that some of the authorities may be looking for an excuse to crack down, will be on the lookout to prevent provocations...

...It would emphasize to the Hungarian Communist party that it must prepare to stand or fall on its own under democratic procedures...

...Hungary is at odds with its eastern neighbor over the maltreatment of the 2.5 million-strong Hungarian minority in Transylvania...

...Pozsgay is pushing constitutional reforms that will bring about multiparty elections and establish a state presidency...

...In an by Peter Keresztes interview earlier this year in Budapest, Pozsgay pointedly noted that "our party leaders have made clear that they are willing to risk their leadership positions...

...After thirty-two years, it may be reasonable to modify the agreement by specifying the duration of the effective occupation...

...There are stories of fur coats being taken off the backs of travelers by Polish border guards and of a recalcitrant Hungarian who consumed sixand-a-half pounds of bananas in one sitting rather than surrender the bunch to Czechoslovak customs agents...

...The regime is promising not to deny visas to anyone for the occasion, not even to personages such as Lech Walesa, or Bela Kiraly, who was sentenced to death in absentia for commanding the Hungarian forces in 1956...

...C ommunist reactionaries may well feel desperate...

...Like Sopron, Hungary itself has been torn between East and West over the centuries and once again is trying to make a switch: on May 2 scores of Western and Hungarian photographers and correspondents were invited to witness an unprecedented assault on the Iron Curtain...

...Accounts abound of Poles willing to pay a 100 percent export duty on Soviet refrigerators and color television sets, obviously expecting to recoup their investments on the home resale market...

...Lacking an adequate capital, technological, managerial, and marketing base, the old, inefficient enterprises will not soon be replaced by new ones that can compete on world markets...

...NI Denville, NJ 07834 For credit card orders, please call 1-800-543-4860, Dept...

...This nonpartisan post appeals to Pozsgay, probably the most popular Communist in Hungary today...

...So while Hungary is scrapping its segment of the Iron Curtain, borders within the bloc itself are becoming increasingly menacing...

...The reasons are not only political but also economic, having to do with the widening disparities in living standards among the Warsaw Pact countries...

...This is not to belittle the changes that have occurred in Hungary—and in Poland and the Soviet Union, for that matter...

...The speculator then takes his clients for a quick round trip across the border to validate the withdrawal and buys their hard currency for resale...

...From the Great Wall of China to the Maginot line, boundaries historically were fortified against outsiders, and not to trap citizens on the inside...

...Czechoslovakia is also incensed over the Hungarian government's decision, made under intense grass-roots pressure, to stop construction of joint dams across the Danube...

...A clampdown became unavoidable...

...Box 3000 Dept...

...The government has released a list of 270 freedom-fighters executed during the 1957-58 reprisals, and Budapest is bracing for hundreds of thousands to attend the belated funeral of the revolutionary prime minister, Imre Nagy, on June 16, the thirty-first anniversary of his hanging...

...The curtain is of course a uniquely Communist creation...

...The largest movement, the Democratic Forum, with 12,000 members, is known to be infiltrated by Communists, and in March put off declaring itself a party...

...bat we may he w itnessing is not lust 4 he end ot the Cold War hut the universalization of Uesterit liberal democrace as the final form of human government...

...The frontier was frequently a convenient spot for pursued or pursuer to make a last stand and to do away with prisoners and the wounded...

...While the East Germans still shoot at those who try to escape, in the Sopron region it's been years since Hungarians have found it necessary to bolt across the mile-wide no man's land or sneak through the reeds of Lake Ferto shimmering to the Peter Keresztes is deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal/ Europe...

...There is talk in the party of moving the elections forward, stacking odds in its favor...

...Austrians and Hungarians don't even need visas to cross their common frontier...

...I t would also send a message to Hungary's nominal allies (though bitter post-Habsburg-era adversaries), Czechoslovakia and Romania...

...Neither Yalta, nor Potsdam, nor the 1947 Treaty of Paris provided the Soviet Union with any right to station troops in Hungary (other than a contingency to guar28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 antee transit rights to Austria during its occupation period, which ended in 1955...

...These moves reflect an uncharacteristic responsiveness to public sentiment...

...It's far trickier, however, to redistribute farmland collectivized decades ago—and Budapest has yet to move on this fundamental reform...

...While the party reform has had noticeable effect on the top in Budapest, the old cadres thus far have been all but untouched in smaller towns and the countryside...

...Furthermore, as HVG suggests, the issue should be raised publicly: "If Hungary really intends to become such a legal state where the parliament is at the center of its political life, the national assembly will sooner or later have to make a determination concerning the stationing of foreign troops in Hungary and its terms, particularly in openly promulgated laws...