At the Dec. 14-15 summit of European Union (EU) leaders, Hungary’s soft Euroscepticism took center stage when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán refused to vote in favor of opening accession negotiations with Ukraine. In addition, he blocked the EU from giving…
The current Western worldview has slowly relapsed back to the cozy “rules-based international order” shared by the intelligentsia of the Great Powers before 1914. According to that perspective, diplomacy was too sophisticated, the global economy too interwoven, technology too advanced,…
Based on its last experience approving a new NATO member, it is no wonder that so many in Hungary’s conservative government have been wary about doing so again. Just a little over a week after Hungary gave the green light…
Pope Francis has returned from touring Hungary, a bastion of European conservatism, where his mixed messaging is seemingly at odds with national sentiment. At a Mass celebrated Sunday in Budapest, His Holiness called on the Hungarian government — led by…
Pope Francis made the short trip from Vatican City to Budapest on Friday, April 28, much to the consternation of the New York Times. Their narrative is simple: By scheduling a papal visit, the Vatican has unwittingly played into the…
Terrible is the situation of a small country that stands alone. — Miklós Bánffy, Twenty-Five Years (1945) It is May 26, 2006, and the Hungarian Socialist Party is holding its annual congress in the bucolic lakeside village of Balatonőszöd. The attendees…
I’m writing from Budapest, the beautiful, Danube-bestriding Hungarian capital. Hungary, though a faraway land and modest in both size and population, has played an outsize role in the American conservative conscience for the past half-decade or so. After just a…
Until this past fortnight, I had no idea how many American Spectator readers were emotionally attached to Hungary. I’ve heard from people who live there and people who want to live there and people who think that everybody should live…
Ideologues at both political extremes, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, on the left and Fox News host Tucker Carlson on the right, have recently pointed to pet foreign countries as exemplars of what America should strive to be. Yet Sanders…