From Transition to Globalization: New Challenges for Politics, the Media and Society [antikvár]

Preface After seventeen years of system change, the new democracies of East and Central Europe are still coping with the tasks of democratic consolidation. During the transition period, a new constitutional framework and democratic institutions were established that were able to withstand the vicissitudes of the subsequent economic and social transformation. Membership in the security community of NATO and the prospect of European integration helped to stabilize the new democracies. The Eastern enlargement of the European Union opened new channels for development and prosperity. The processes of globalization and EU-integration, however, confront the new democracies, including Hungary, with new challenges and pressures. The Institute of Political Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was established in 1990 at the same time as the new democracy. At the Institute, researchers have discussed and analyzed this seminal transformation process and reflected on its social and political consequences from the very beginning. They analyzed and partly documented the birth of the new democracy, describing and discussing its constitutional framework and basic institutions, the election processes, the changes of the party system, and political culture in numerous volumes and studies. The Institute became a center for political science networking in Hungary. It publishes the Hungarian Political Science Review, hosts the Hungarian Political Science Association, and organizes conferences around different research projects. The studies presented in this volume locate the system change in Hungary in the wider perspective of modernization and globalization and give a critical analysis of the social and political conditions of democratic consolidation. Reflections on the different scenarios of the system change and the role and self-understanding of its major actors are followed by historical assessments of the winding passages of crises and consolidation, modernization and globalization in our region. The new constitutional and electoral system, both parliamentary and local, their achievements and shortcomings are evaluated in the second three studies. Party politics and the media are central to the functioning of new democracies and therefore their changes deserve continuous scrutiny. The changing party system, the mediatization of politics and the political campaigns are the subject of the subsequent four studies. Accession to the European Union was a crucial step in the transformation process. Studies in this volume analyze the impact of the EUon the development policy of the country, the nature and democratic potential of the "European Construction", and the new international context of Hungary since its membership in the EU. The volume ends with three studies about the globalization process and its impact on development and democratic governance and civil society.