The story of the last twenty years, of the period since the "change of regime" introducing a genuinely democratic system of government, is a novel one for Hungary. Yet, it is a very old story. God freed the Israelites from bondage in Egypt in order that they should thenceforth have no other God but Him: they must obey the law, so that they should no longer be enslaved to a despot. There was much rejoicing among the people to begin with. But when things did not go as smoothly as they had imagined, they immediately longed to be back with the fleshpots of Egypt and started worshipping the golden calf. That, in a nutshell, is also what has happened to Hungary over the last twenty years.
Those who have directly known servitude and oppression, and for whom freedom is the greatest value and gift, have not ceased rejoicing to this day. I myself am of that camp. Regime change, as far as I was concerned, was a miracle that one hoped for but did not expect to see, and a miracle it has remained. Whatever has happened since will not alter that. As János Vajda might have written in "Twenty Years On," his poem of 1876: whatever the woman he apostrophised may have done over the past twenty years, she was still the woman he had given his love to for ever. All I can hope—to stay with János Vajda—is that we too shall be able to produce an equally fine tale under the title of "Thirty Years On."
That hope is more than an empty longing. A skeleton of democratic institutions has been present virtually from the very start, and these institutions constantly offer themselves for adjustment and correction. Over these twenty years, Hungary has become a member state of the European Union, and in so doing it has almost got others to forget completely (as we ourselves, sad to say, have forgotten) that we fought on the wrong side in both world wars. I might even say that this time, for once, the country has joined the winning side. What is missing is a democratic spirit, a zest for enterprise, bravery and patriotism—scare commodities. And not among the political classes but among citizens at large, among the elderly as among the young. If I were to start enumerating causes, the list would be endless, especially when I know that others would cite different causes and blame other political figures. It therefore seems more advisable to describe circumstances and details.
Prior to the change of regime, most people in Hungary, if called on to think of a happy country with a democratic political system, would have thought of our happy and prosperous neighbour, Austria. Not primarily as a model of democracy, but as prosperous. If Hungary had managed to break free in 1956, maybe we too might be living in comparable prosperity. But living conditions would have improved even if we had jumped out of the Soviet camp in 1989 on our own, or if the Soviet Union had not imploded. Since that was not how things panned out, no Western state has had any political stake in Hungary’s prosperity. The country has stayed relatively poverty-stricken, inheriting the state debts that had been racked up during the last decade or more of the Kádár era; concurrently, the standard of living of a substantial segment of the population sank well below what it had been previously. Hardly surprising, then, that those losing out longed for the fleshpots of Egypt; ominous sign though it was, the socialist victory in the general election of 1994 was understandable. What it also signalled was the weakness of the democratic mentality, a devaluation of freedom. Could that landslide success be put down as a vote for the Hungarian Socialist Party itself, even a vote for the legacy of János Kádár?

[...]

Ágnes Heller,
author of numerous scholarly books in various philosophical fields, is one of the most
prominent of the disciples of Georg Lukács. She was dismissed from her teaching post
at the University of Budapest in 1958, but found refuge as a member of the newly
founded Sociology Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1963.
After Lukács’s death in 1971, there was no one to protect his followers against political
harassment, and many of them, including Ágnes Heller and her husband, Ferenc Fehér,
felt forced to emigrate in 1977. She taught at the University of Melbourne until 1986,
when she was appointed Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the New School for
Social Research in New York. Since 1989, she has also taught in Hungary.