Foreign Policy Review 1/2002. [antikvár]

Hungary's Policies Towards Its Neighbors and Perspectives of Hungarian Foreign Policy Kiss /. László Relations between Hungary and its neighbors have been of special importance since the peace treaties ending the First World War. The disintegration of the great domestic market of the Danubian Monarchy and the emergence of a system of several competing states brought about fundamentally new conditions for Hungarian development. The collapse of the dynastic empire encouraged on the one hand isolationist, among themselves contesting nationalist attitudes instead of the forces of modernization inherent in regional cooperation. On the other hand, the area became an object of the paternalism of the security policy of external great powers, more exactly, a part of the zone of influence of Nazi Germany and then Russian great power politics. Since Trianon, Hungarian's policies towards its neighbors has become inseparable from the relations with the Hungarians living in neighboring states and the normative requirement of reconcilability of good-neighborly relations, minority policy and regional cooperation. Ethnic diversity of historic Hungary was radically curbed after the First World War. Hungary became an ethnically almost homogeneous country which had never existed in history while, in spite of the declaration of the nation state, midtinationalism became a part of the history of the successor states. Ever since, the problem of Hungarian regional and minority policy, the incongruity of Hungarian state and nation, and the compatibility of regional stability have become crucial questions of Hungarian foreign policy Between the World Wars, the policy of revisionism was the answer to question on the relationship of nation and state and it turned out to be disastrous for Hungary After the Second World War, Communist policy neglected the issue completely in fear of nationalism which questioned the legitimacy of the system. However, this only prolonged the problem instead of solving it, although CSCE, with its cooperation encompassing the blocks, started a process which rendered human and thus, minority rights part of the thematic of the "politics" of Europe. Only the political transformations subsequent to the shifting of points of world politics in 1989/90 made it possible for an already independent and democratic Hungar-