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Through the change to a market economy and democracy, a long and painful restoration process has begun in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Due to her earlier economic experiments, Hungary was in a slightly better position at the outset yet this made little difference to Hungarians who have become increasingly frustrated as time went by. According to opinion polls, 33 per cent of Hungarian adults responded optimistically in 1987; this figure dropped to 11 per cent in 1991 and ten years after Hungary’s "negotiated" revolution it is still no higher than 18 per cent.1 The attitudes of Hungarians toward a market economy and political democracy have been annnually examined by the Taylor Nelson Sofres Modus Agency. Initially the response to a market economy was favourable. Two-thirds of the population approved the idea of introducing a market economy and only 2 per cent expressed disapproval. In 1998 the approval rate had dropped to 41 per cent and the disapproval rate had actually risen to 32 per cent. The favourable response to democracy has been no greater. In 1991, 60 per cent of the population were dis-satisfied with the pace of democratic development in the country and 30 per cent were satisfied. Nine years later there has been little change: dissatisfaction grew by four per cent and satisfaction grew by two per cent.

In comparison with people in other former socialist countries, Hungarians seem definitely more frustrated. According to a survey carried out in 1995, 75 per cent of adult Romanians expressed satisfaction concerning the general economic and political course of the country. The corresponding figure was the same in Albania and considerably higher rates of satisfaction were recorded in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia. Among Hungarians, only 14 per cent were satisfied with the post-socialist economic and political course. (In that year the most dissatisfied respondents were the Bulgarians.)

A tremendous change occurred in how and where Hungarians worked during the years of transition. Under state socialism there was no unemployment. Forty-eight per cent of the population were employed in 1970 and forty-six in 1988. In 1994, however, the employment rate had fallen to 38 per cent and in 1998 to 37 per cent. As a consequence, unemployment rose to 11 per cent in 1994 (and was between 7 and 8 per cent in 1999). The labour market has become increasingly constricted and those who dropped out of the market have had to resort to pensions or various other forms of welfare benefits, which have diminished in value. Due to Hungary’s low birth rate, the population is decreasing and this decrease is accelerated by a low life expectancy. The only good demographic news is a fall in the traditonally high suicide rate, which up to 1989 was the highest in Europe.

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The socio-psychological legacy of

backwardness

To explain the socio-psychological failure of the transiton process in Hungary, we have to turn to four categories of causes. The first is a set of socio-psychological causes which stem from Hungarians’ experience of their past.

n Authoritarianism. Those who live in the post-communist and democratic present were socialized in the socialist past and their families had grown up in a nationalist, authoritarian past. No experience of free-dom and responsibility could have been inherited. Survival in Hungary depended upon roles and values which are opposed to those of democracy and a full-fledged market economy. The socio-psychological legacy of backwardness still haunts the country. After all, authoritarianism had paid off. People inclined to behave as democrats were persectuted or forced into exile, with no place in the public sphere, being labelled as rebels or dangerous deviants.

n Paternalism. Paternalism was greatly preferred to risk-taking and the assumption of individual responsibility. State, Church and other institutions, all beyond individual controll were considered as major agents for the wellbeing of the individual; the individual was not supposed to do anything in order to improve his or her lot. Generations were brought up experiencing the futility of achievement and motivation. Regularly repeated economic collapses (in 1918–20, in 1944–45 and in 1989–90) demonstrated that there is no way to escape. People came to learn that both curse and blessing stem from the state.

n Learned helplessness. What develop-ed was a sort of learned helplessness that made it impossible for the individual to believe in the possibility of controlling his or her own destiny through internalized drives, such as motivation, effort, knowledge or skills. The legal constituents of a national identity centred around citizenship have never been in place. Hungary had no written constitution until 1949. Although that paid lip service to humanrights, it in fact took away these rights. There was no internationally recognized independentHungarian state before 1920. Consequently, before 1920 there was no such thing as Hungarian citizenship. Even after 1920 the semantic content of the category of Hungarian was subject to arbitrary judgment; it was also dependent on the actual pattern of discourse on national culture and ethnic identity. This made possible the enactment of a series of anti-Jewish laws (in 1939, 1939 and 1941) and these made easier the acceptance of the exclusion of persons with Jewish origins from the national community. Universal suffrage was introduced in 1920 but the right to vote in national elections was severely restricted. Local government authorities were overwhelmed by the power of the central government.

n Culture of complaint. The state had subjects rather than citizens conscious of their rights and duties. The tendency to be invisible to the state has developed as the most striking manifestation of the unbalanced relationship between the state and its subjects. Taxes were considered a tribute, an exorbitant charge levied by the state. Tax evasion was a virtue rather than a vice. As a consequence of the fear of retribution, people assumed a peculiar style of discourse, enabling them to present themselves more negatively then they really are. The socio-psychological benefits of complaint exceeded the costs stemming from depression and discontent. On the other hand, there were no financial institutions willing to provide credit. One of the greatest of Hungarian liberals, Count István Széchenyi, as early as 1830, pointed out the fatal sociopsychological consequences of the lack of credit: the complete lack of personal trust. Had institutions such as banks and markets provided credit, the patterns of complaint would have failed. Anyone interested in getting credit would have had to present him or herself in positive terms. Success, the drive to succeed or to dwell on eminent achievements, would have become leading motifs in a self-image. The tendency to a self-presentation in terms of failure, loss, trouble, suffering, catastrophe, illness, aloofness pays off only in circumstances where one has to constantly fear being coerced to pay by outside insitutions.

The strategy of negative self-presentation has developed as a means of survival. Strategies of positive self-presentationcould not develop because there were no incentives. Indulgence in negative self-presentation rather than pride or striving for succcess has permeated the dominant patterns of discourse on the individual and the collective identity. The proverbial Hungarian was someone able to cry and laugh simultaneously. Women were not involved in this discourse. Moreover, in the nature of a socio-psychological construct, the image of the self has a tendency to be internalized. Negative self-presentation on the individual and collective levels has become a self-fulfilling prophecy which made the worst nightmares come true.

n Enslaving liberation. Strengthening the socio-psychological patterns of backwardness, state socialism added new elements to the behavioural stock of survival. Modernization was not an organic change but a series of forced and ill-fated acts of coercion. Elemér Hankiss was right to characterize modernization under state socialism as a negative process which was more successful in abolishing theremnants of a feudal social structure than in creatingnew institutions with a potential to produce intense economic growth. State socialism was based on redistribution of goods and resources. The design of redistribution was conceived as something rational. In this system of social reproduction no space was left for public control, individual responsibilty and initiative. No manifestation of autonomy of the actors was tolerated. Under János Kádár’s leadership, however, a second economy emerged which was more flexible in fulfilling individual needs and provided a separation between reality and the system. Individualization was on the way. Because there were no autonomous communities, and civic society was not allowed to strengthen, individualization proved to be a trajectory where individual actors played their zero sum game according to the rules of the prisoner’s dilemma. The Church was deprived of its earlier privileges and secularization took place. People living under state socialism abandoned God and, simultaneously, they were also abandoned by God. Values disappeared, transcendence was considered a liability.

n Negative identity. As a result of negative modernization, social identity became negative, too. Confronted with the question "Who am I?" instead of referring to themselves inaffirmative terms, people formulated negative statements. They knew only who they werenot. Categories of self-identification such as gender, class, professional group, generation, religious affiliation, region, political value orientation, cultural preference were not to be communicated in public. Choosing official categories such as proletariat, Communist, worker, peasant and "socialist intellectual" wasnot appealing.

n Doublespeak. The public world and the private world never met. The people living in these two worlds were of course the same and they learned how to switch from one world to the other.

The results of a study on political socialization illustrate the "doublespeak" of the age of state socialism. A representative sample of teenagers is Budapest was questioned on the evaluation of the words "socialism" and "capitalism". The teenagers echoed the official pattern of evaluation and, consequently, they characterized socialism in excessively positive terms while attributing negative traits to capitalism. After the completion of these questions the same respondents were asked about the countries where they would have liked to stay with their families for at least a year. They were also asked about those countries, where they would not have liked to stay at all. Ironicallly, the teenagers show-ed a tendency to prefer capitalist countries. Socialist countries were mentioned as places where they had no desire to go.

n The enduring category. The category of nation was an exception. People continued to identify with the nation. Because there was no public discourse on the concept of the nation the people, under the umbrella of a shared national category, were unaware of the diverse and profoundly conflicting images of the Hungarian nation. There were Hungarians who, referring to the nation, included the Hungarian minorities abroad and there were Hungarians whose national identity rested upon citizenship. The clash of ethnic and legal definitions of the nation gained importance only later.

n Patterns of behaviour. The unexpected and abrupt change of system in 1989/90 found people completely unprepared. In fact, the socio-psychological legacy of backwardness and the socio-psychological patterns of behaviour developed under state Socialism were in conflict with the expectations of a new system which stressed entrepreneurship, risk-taking, achievement, responsibility and self-help.

n Passivity. In the twentieth century, Hungarians experienced at least eight changes in their political system. All these changes were instigated from the outside. Systems have come and gone like the seasons. Hungarian political culture, as a consequence, lacked patterns of responsibility and individual causation. An individual can only be held responsible for those events which the individual had caused. The turning points in Hungarian history are embedded in narratives where the only actors are alien, mostly impersonal, powers. According to the dominant narrative, Hungarians suffer or feel happiness. The narrative undoubtedly gives much more room to the former than the latter. Neither of these states are perceived as the results of internal causes.

From 1989, the same pattern of experience was set in motion. As if by a miracle, Soviet troops left. The constitution was rewritten. For the first time in the history of the country the rule of law was established. Freedom arrived. People, however, had not experienced self-liberation. They may have felt liberated, but no sane Hungarian could claim that victory was the result of the efforts of Hungarians themselves. The heroes of the success were Gorbachev, Reagan, Kohl. Victory could not be called "our" victory. Freedom was again brought by others, just as it had been in 1945.

Because no causal relation was seen between people and freedom, there was no drive to reduce the cognitive dissonance resulting from the harsh economic measures introduced and the ensuing hardships. The new system was not chosen, it was given to the people by a stroke of fortune which turned into misfortune. Frustration and resentiment deepened and nostalgia for the good old socialist days (when everybody had a job, there was no delinquency, equality was the dominant value) developed. Security turned to be more important than liberty. People were increasingly anxious because of their living conditions. Anxiety repressed the desire to be free.

n Loss of security. Under state socialism, there was a sense of security in both living conditions and in the epistemology of life. People did or did not believe in the official political and ideological formulations that propagated the superiority of socialism over capitalism and in the benefits of being occupied by the Soviet Army. At the same time, there was an alternative belief system that propagated the superiority of capitalism over socialism and the benefits of belonging to the free world. It was taken for granted that one of these belief systems was true and the other one was false. No one was in doubt about the existence of Truth and people differred only as regards the belief system they considered to manifest Truth. Naturally, the truth per-petuated by the system was perceived as a lie by subjects, andwhat subjects thought as truth was labelled as lies by the autho-rities.

With the arrival of freedom of speech, competing values and ideas emerged in public; newspaper readers, radio listeners and television viewers were confronted by an embarrassing diversity of messages. Epistemological security was lost forever. People were irritated to discover that, except for the sciences, there is no belief which could be proven as false or true. It is up to the individual to choose among ideas and values.

n The frustrations of over-abundance. There was hardly any experience of choice in the past. Under state Socialism, even the choice of goods and services was limited. Choosing between ideas and competing beliefs was unheard of. The outside dictatorship over society was internalized. Unable to choose, because of their past socialization, people became increasingly uncertain at discovering a world in the making which made them to choose between goods, services, values and ideas. An abundance of new questions were raised in the public sphere and no answers were found. These questions were of vital importance. Lacking the deeply-embedded political and ideological value systems that stem from mainstream European political ideologies (such as social democracy, liberalism, and conservativism), tendencies such as populism, demagoguery, ethnocentrism disguised as nationalism and racism developed and resorted to nationalism as a means to finding answers to all questions. People were forced to realize that there are no final answers to the historical and social realities which surrounded them. What is equality and inequality? Were Hungarians responsible for the deportation of Jews in 1944? Can Communism be compared with National Socialism? Should the Trianon Treaty be revised? These and many similar questions were raised; startingly enough people discovered there are as many stocks of equally valid knowledge as interests.

n Nationalism. As already pointed out, nationalism was the only category which sustained itself all through the vicissitudes of the state-Socialist period. Those who lost in the transition foundjustification and explanation in the stock of knowledge that nationalism provided. National commitment was conceived as a shield against the dangers and threats unleashed by the political and economic globalization which was perceived as enemy number one. Those who won and those who lost during the transition from state Socialism to a market economy and political pluralism have created a polarity between parochial nationalism and openess to the world. Only the future will show which will be dominant.

The legacies of backwardness and state Socialism had much the same influence in Hungary as elsewhere in Central Europe. The socio-psychological balance of benefits and costs in all Central Europan countries was negative. The institutional and structural successes of the transition, however, were blurred in Hungary by two additional factors, which can be related to the national character.

n National Character. The first was referred to earlier as the culture of complaint. Due to the lack of credit-oriented self-presentation, generations of Hungarians were socialized to present themselves in negative terms, in order to avoid paying tribute. As a result, a dominant pattern of collective self-presentation has evolved which centered on misfortune, suffering, negative self-evaluation, discontent and criticism for its own sake. The transition to Europa will be complete when Hungarians discover how dysfunctional and harmful the strategy of complaint is as the dominant method of selfpresentation.

A second factor has also been mentioned. Under state socialism, Hungarians were convinced that their country was, as the saying went, "the gayest barracks in the Gulag". Hungarians evaluated their standard of living, satisfaction with the socialist system, sense of justice, human rights, even freedom by comparing Hungary to other countries in the Soviet Empire such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania or Bulgaria. The comparisons in all dimensions and at all times were unequivocally positive. But with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, this Eastern frame of reference was no longer valid and was suddenly replaced by a Western frame of reference. This shift of frames of reference immediately caused frustration. The individual remained the same, his car remained the same, nor did his salary change. Comparing themselves to Austrians, Germans or to the Dutch, Hungarians could not help feel frustrated.

As against Mór Jókai’s prophecy, the twentieth century was not a century that Hungrians could enjoy. The question is, however, what conclusions canbe drawn. Unless Hungarians realize that what they have to reconquer and rebuild does not rest in the material dimension but in the world of the spirit, progress will be unlikely. They will have to recreate themselves to end the long downward trajectory imposed on them by history. Should they manage to do so in our new century, the result will certainly be of more interest than Jókai’s vision of 1872.