Imre pozsgay biography of michaels
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Another day, another speech. Earlier I briefly mentioned that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Pan-European Picnic has been one of the important topics in the German press lately. The interest is understandable. It was the very beginning of the German unification process.
During the summer of 1989 Otto von Habsburg, who at the time was a member of the European Parliament, gave a lecture in Debrecen extolling the benefits of a Europe without borders. A couple of MDF activists came up with the idea of organizing a picnic right at the border between Austria and Hungary, symbolizing the artificial nature of borders. The organizers convinced Otto von Habsburg and Imre Pozsgay, a member of the Németh government and high-ranking party functionary, to attend the gathering to be held on August 19.
It turned out to be more than a simple picnic. Some East Germans who happened to be in Hungary heard about the event and decided to crash it in more than one way. They ran to the gate between
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A reluctant and fearful West
From 1945 to 1990, Hungary was part of the Soviet Union’s buffer zone that extended from the Baltic states to the Balkans, a zone in which Moscow had imposed clones of the Stalinist political struktur after 1945. It was a zone of political, military and economic interest, containing Marxist-Leninist client states whose leadership equated national interest with that of the world Communist movement and the Soviet Union. They performed imperial services – economic and military – for the Soviet Union. Hungary’s sovereignty was usurped bygd the Soviet Union, which possessed unconstrained control of its utländsk policy and its territory for military purposes. Initially Hungary, like other countries in the zone, constituted Soviet economic space and supplied the imperial centre with financial resources and raw materials. In later years the Soviet Union loosened its economic stranglehold but still kept Hungary in its commercial and economic o