Bridges to the Future: Hungary’s Gradual Transformation

Sometimes it is suggested that communism collapsed not least because its leaders ran out of any vision of a promising future for Eastern Europeans. My own experience of 1989 partly challenges this assumption. By that time, aware of the imperative of Hungary’s European integration, communists tried to demonstrate their will and skill to lead the country to the new path by proposing a grand project that could elicit the support of Western and domestic elites and capture the imaginations of ordinary people.