On the State of the EU Integration Process - Enlargement and Institutional Reforms 2. [antikvár]

The State of EU Integration of the Hungarian Society - Seen from the Viewpoint of a Hungarian SociologistRudolfAndorkaI would not think that it is an overstatement that since the Hungarians joined Western Christianity about a thousand years ago, their desire and goal was to be integrated as fully as possible into European culture, society and the community of Western European nations.During the thousand years, there were more and less successful periods from the point of view of this integration.The "short" 20th century from the First World War until the system change in 1990 was surely one of the most unsuccessful, nay catastrophic periods from this point of view. With the collapse of the totalitarian and authoritarian systems in Eastern Central Europe in 1989-1990 new possibilities to achieve integration were opened up. The big question is at present whether this time the attempt of integration will be more successful than previously.Successful integration obviously depends on economic conditions, like the recovery of the economy, a reasonable economic growth, a low level of inflation, a balanced budget, balanced foreign trade and current account etc. (Palánkai, 1995). Legal hármonisation in a lot of fields, as described in the "White Paper" (Európai Közösségek Bizottsága, 1995), is a precondition of integration.In the present paper I shall deal with the integration of the Hungarian society into European society. In this field there are not strictly formulated preconditions, for a sociologist, however, it is obvious that the Hungarian society has to approach the characteristics of the modern and democratic Western European societies.Our vision of Europe is a multicultural society, where each national - and also subnational - society maintains its specific cultural features, nevertheless a global European society will develop which will be the basis of a European collective identity (Münch, 1993).We used to emphasize that the Hungarian society has been, indeed, European for a thousand years, so that we did not need to be "Europeanised". Nevertheless it has to be recognised autocritically, that in several respects the present Hungarian society is still, mostly in consequence of the totalitarian regimes of the 20lh century, not completely "European".In the following, I shall try to demonstrate by some sociological research findings the similarities and dissimilarities of the Hungarian and the Western European societies.157