scholarly journals Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Robert S. Wistrich

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have been as shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler, the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentially cosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of this region. It was this small nation par excellence which added the quintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz further to the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his own macabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of this fructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of the smaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since the European revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from a semi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identities and historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.


1982 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 125-139

Leonard Hawkes, during the past three decades one of the elder statesmen of British geology, was one of the few remaining leaders in the subject who received their training before World War I. A lifelong academic, he devoted his best years to the service of Bedford College in the University of London. A very active field-worker in early years, he became in his time a leading authority on the geology of Iceland, pursuing studies in volcanology, igneous petrology and glaciology. He served as a Secretary of the Geological Society of London for a long period at a critical stage in the history of that Society, and was later on its President. He will be remembered as one of the most amiable of characters in the post World War II scene.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-131
Author(s):  
MÁRIA HIDVÉGI

What impact have government policies had on the private sector’s response to economic crises, in particular on its decisions for restructuring and adaptation? The Hungarian machine-building industry from 1919 to 1949 provides an interesting case study for these interrelations between business and politics. The study focuses on the role of cartels in organizing responses to crises. The case study is based on a survey of the cartel agreements and investigates why cartels provided solutions only to short-term crises, if they provided solutions at all. The hypothesis is that government policies played a substantial part in the story, as they did not provide enough incentives for coordinated responses to structural change. The years 1919 to 1949 encompass the crises caused by the territorial and political change in East Central Europe after World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II and its aftermath. Depicting the responses of the machine-building industry through the experience of one of its key companies and its cartels—Ganz & Co.—this article analyzes the influence of the institutional framework on short- and long-term adaptation to crises.


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