 I had better start off by explaining my credentials talking about Hungary. It goes back a long way. When I was about 20, I got very interested in the Austro-Hungarian army, an old-fashioned romantic subject. And it wasn't at all popular. Back in 1962, the Dunning thing was to study, well, English history, the origins of the Industrial Revolution, all important. There were people who looked at John Locke and tried to discover Marxist elements in Locke. And here was I with my Holy Roman Empire and all that. Now, the Habsburg Empire has actually been a very good subject as an introduction to the modern world. Nowadays they've decided the Industrial Revolution didn't actually happen. And it's those people who now seem obsolete, not me. And it's a good subject because, you know, if you think about how nationalities have to get on together in some form, Austria-Hungary is a very good place to begin. I was always a bit embarrassed when Archduke Otto, peace to his soul, he was a wonderful man, used to say the Habsburg Empire was a model. It wasn't really. Something went very badly wrong. Now, I asked the British Council, in the days when the British Council did string quartets rather than rock music, were there any scholarships to Austria? And they said no. But some things just come up in Hungary. They're opening up for a language school in Debrecen. Would I like to go? And I did. And it was fascinating. Budapest was a terrible ruin at the time. The buildings were filthy. They were still pot-marked from 1956 and, of course, the siege. The royal castle in Buda was a ruin. It was hardly lit. There were very few shops open, all that. Dismal communist world. The trams rattled past at six in the morning with poor old workers being dragooned in for a 12-hour day, which began with an hour's propaganda. Dismal, dismal time. You said something going on. That it was actually underneath. It was a very interesting place. I won't talk about that too much, but I kept a weather eye on Hungary and picked up a bit of the language and didn't go in the 1970s. Started going in the middle 80s. And they've invited me regularly and said, did I want a fellowship to write about Hungarian history? I said, yes, good idea. So I've been there for the last three years. Now, the contrast between Turkey and Hungary, well, the Hungarian population would fit comfortably into Istanbul alone. And if I want to make the point, why Hungary? And this is a thing which I suggested to Margaret Thatcher when she had to speak about it. I said just, you know, she had to speak to people who probably couldn't find it on the map. And in some maps, it's difficult to find. I always say this, this is a country which has got more Nobel Prize winners than Japan. But then say there's a bracket in this. The really astonishing thing is the high proportion of non-Jews who are Nobel Prize winners, namely 17.5%. Because this is another side of Hungarian history which has to come up in one form or another. Now, as Viktor Orbán said in a recent speech, his speeches are very good, by the way. The decisive thing in Hungary is the Austrian border. And if I want to introduce Hungary, I think it's fair enough to repeat this. It's caused three great upheavals which have made the headlines. The Russians got out of their zone of Austria in 1955. That border then attracted the attention of a lot of Hungarians. And 1956, those 10 days of revolt in Hungary, they have to be seen in that context. And in the course of it, 200,000 extremely good Hungarians, you must have met them, emigrated to the west. Then comes the next Austro-Hungarian incident, which I won't go on about because it's too obvious, which is the hole in the iron curtain. That marvelous moment when thousands and thousands of East Germans just voted with their feet to get out of Honoka's little hellhole. And that eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and everything else. Again, Hungary. And a couple of years ago, we have the business of the refugees. I mean, I oddly enough saw them in Bodrum, and I saw them when I was on a boat in Koss and Leros, and I saw them again in Budapest as they came tramping through these endless young men, camping outside the Calate by Udvar in the rower station in Budapest, going on into Austria, getting that strange ecstatic welcome in Vienna and then in Munich from young Germans. And something, is it a million and a half? Now, at the time, there is a good book by a man called Robin Alexander whose the correspondence had developed about the circumstances in which Angela Merkel let them in. And it is in a way a judgment on how the world has treated the whole Nazi episode that no German was willing to take responsibility for having barbed wire searchlights, dogs, and the rest of it. They said, oh, what will the world think? So we get a million and a half refugees, and we now get Angela Merkel trying to persuade the Hungarians to take a quota of them in the name of Europe. Now this is the splash that Hungary made. Now I have to say that asking a country like Hungary, which is still patches of poverty you can see, you can see old men and women raking through the rubbish in Budapest, a scene which I haven't seen since about 1948 as a small boy in Glasgow in Western Europe, asking then to take in refugees or migrants. I mean, think again, this is insanity. No. I want really to look at Hungary from, I think, two big perspectives. The first one is a study in post-communism. The big question comes up about post-communism is how much of it is actually post. And Hungary is quite an interesting case of a strange survival of communism in odd ways. I'm still struck by the contrast between Vienna and Budapest. And the other perspective I want to look at is how has Europe handled it? And this is worth thinking about. What has gone right, what has gone wrong? Now let me start off with an illustration of what I mean about post-communism. After I arrived here last night, I needed to buy some things from the supermarket on the corner, Migros. You go into that place, fresh vegetables, very beautifully arranged. Everything useful things, useful things on sale, very attractive and presented. The people very helpful with me carrying a steak at the basket. This is a turkey which, I've been here for 20 years and I know how it works and it's very impressive. It looks, you go to Ankara. Nobody's ever going to make Ankara a pretty city. But it works. The useful shops, people busy doing useful things, selling useful things. You can get a plumber or an electrician to do a good job at a moment's notice, this sort of thing. And the contrast between Turkey and I think where Turkey was in 1920 and Hungary is still pretty striking. So something works in Turkey. Now, I don't want to boast, really I don't. But I can, at a very primitive level, do both Turkish and Hungarian. And they're rather similar language. There's parallels, odd parallels in old words. The word for saddle in Hungarian is nereg. And in Hungarian it's, in Turkish it's eyer. In Hungarian nereg. The word for tent is şartor. And Hungarian çadır in Turkish, that sort of thing. And the grammar is rather parallel. And one way or another the Hungarians are rather fascinated by Turkey. And if I muddle up, if I mix the languages, I don't speak either of them at all well. If I muddle the languages, some of the taxi drivers will notice. And say, you're a Turk, are you? And I say, no. It's a bit difficult to explain. And they say that when they come to Turkey they're struck by the level of service, the way things work, decency of people, everything like that. They're very nice about the Turks in Hungary. Since you'll allow me a bit of history, in a sense it's true to say that far from being destroyed by the Turks, Hungary was actually kept in existence by them. They occupied or controlled in Transylvania about two-thirds of the country. And the Habsburgs had the rest, the north and west. And if you were under Habsburg rule in 1650, it's the counter-reformation. As it applied in Bohemia, a lot of Czech things which was wiped out, foreign nobility came in, all this. Hungary, in Hungary, and it's the big difference between Hungary and pretty well anywhere else, east of Switzerland, Protestantism survived. And it's Protestantism of a kind that I, as a Scotsman, have a sort of cousinly feeling for. If you go into a Calvinist service in Budapest, which I can't take too much of it, there's two bars of Bach. And then there's a very mournful prayer. And then there's a hymn. And George Bernard Shaw remarked of the Communists of the Internationale, that it was like the funeral music for a dead sardine. And it was with these hymns. And then the man gets up to speak and he speaks for an hour and a half. And the church is full. And there we are. And that kind of Calvinism, Massachusetts, Geneva, Amsterdam, well not Amsterdam, no, it was always Sin City. It went much of Holland. By God it's a creative force. Now they're provincial, but they get up in the morning, they read their Bible, they teach. If they're confronted with vagrants, they whip them out of town. Calvin devised this in Geneva. He would have a house for people, vagabonds. And if they still did nothing, he put them in a cellar which gradually filled up with water and gave them a pump. And that way they learned the work ethic. Now that kind of... That kind of Calvinism in Hungary sets up schools where peasant boys and girls sat down with the children of the nobility, much the nobilities complained. And Transylvania produced in 1600 the following statistics. Literacy. The Unitarians 100%. The Calvinists 85. The Lutherans 70. Catholics 30. Orthodox 10. And this is the kind of thing that goes on now. They speak Hungarian. It's archaic. It's very unsophisticated. But it works hard. And the language really survived there because elsewhere, if you're dealing with the Counter-Reformation Church, although it was never as anything like as harsh in Hungary as it was in Bohemia, because they were frightened of the Protestants and the Turks. The tendency would be simply to slip into German, which in a way is the obvious thing to do. I mean, if you... As the Austrian... Grill parts are remarked later on, why do they hang on to this language? There's only about a million of them that speak it and they don't write it. It's got no known close relatives in Europe. Why don't they just sit down and get on with German or something? It's not a national, this point. I mean, if I'm confronted with the business of... Celtic languages to be spoken in Scotland or Wales, I'm just reminded of a remark of the Great Norman Tebit that Welsh is like a Jurassic Park. You take a fossil, spend $100 million and create a monster. And still, after the Turks left, there is a hunger in existence with its old constitution, with its literate population, and then rather oddly in 1800. And this is a side of things where I think I've actually got something positive to add, because the Hungarian historians will never themselves notice it, that in effect reform era in Hungary is driven by Protestants. And they're the ones who remodeled the language. And I said I would mention the Jews, and of course Zionism came from Budapest. Well, Herzl did. And the experience of Zionism, taking a fossil language and turning it into modern Hebrew, is something which Herzl must have known about from Budapest, because you more or less have to invent things for modern words. And the result is that Hungarian is not nearly as difficult as you would think, because it's copying German a lot of the time. You don't see it in the written text. But if you think of how the Germans build up words, well, poor old Germany, I'm going to give it a bad time. The word for imagination says it all, zelbst ein Bildungskraft. And the Hungarian word is exactly that. They say self in picture, power. It's word for word. And it becomes funny after a bit, because you can almost invent Hungarian. But they sat down and they devised, they built themselves up a language with some very powerful poetry in it. And a country which has really put itself on a cultural map in Europe in a big way as a result of it. I'm frankly divided about this. I mean, I'm hopelessly in the world of the Scottish Enlightenment and really wish that the world would come down to 10 languages and not bother with anything else. The 10th, by the way, is Hebrew, so you have to make an enemy of the Jews. And still, I can accept, and it's worked in Turkey, I can accept that a vernacular language needs to be built up. There's no real way out of it. Well, the reform era, the recreation of the language, education spreads, they come the real ways. Things went wrong in 1848 when they went far too far against the Habsburgs than they should have done. Then they come right and away in 1867 when Franz Josef agreed to be crowned king of a sort of semi-independent Hungary. And they followed 50 splendid years. There's a book by John Lukacs called About Budapest, which talks about the build-up of this extraordinary place. It's around 1900 when the Hungarian architects get into their stride. It produces some very, very remarkable buildings and not just Budapest, also in Transylvania, some very good buildings indeed. It's a period when the Hungarian schools competing with each other start churning out those two generations which hit the world with great force. I think one of the great products of that period, we were talking about it last night, is the memoirs of Arthur Kessler, who's a Hungarian product. The Lutheran school, the Fochor Gymnasium, makes a great show of their number of Nobel Prize winners. It's all the tablets all over the place have celebrated. The Calvinist school, the Jewish ones, the girls' schools, producing troops of musicians, painters. I hope I don't need to go on on this subject. It's an endlessly interesting thing. Why did Hungary, in effect, produce the atom bomb? I suppose you've asked the same question in a way about Russia. They don't have the material to do it. What they've asked is the theoretical physics and the mathematics. Where do they get it from? At any rate, this is the period that produces the Hungary of the 20th century. Then things go wrong. In 1867, when they made their pact with the Habsburgs and agreed that the Habsburgs would be in charge of foreign policy and the army, Kosschuk, the big man of 1848, by this stage, an exile in Turin, wrote an open letter saying, if you give up foreign policy and the military to the Habsburgs, disaster will follow. And in 1914, Hungary was sucked into. The Prime Minister protested against it, couldn't stop it, sucked into the First World War. Tied to the court tales of the Germans right to the end and then Hungary collapsed. There's a communist revolution for a period. And then the Western powers did the... Well, with some competition, the Treaty of Triano is the stupidest of the post-war treaties. It cut the country's size by two-thirds, reduced it to a small Hungarian thing with Budapest, the capital. He lost... Well, it was a permanent force for instability when you've got Hungarians just over the border in Transylvania, in Slovakia, to some extent even in Yugoslavia, when you've got this situation and the whole country is mesmerized by it. A very good recent history of Hungary by an English ambassador, Sir Brian Cartledge, said that the Hungarians... They're not very religious, though they're not. What they are is very nationalistic, if you scratch them. I mean, it's understandable in various ways. What does it do to a child? Once it grows up, realizing the language that it speaks, has got no possible connection with anything that it sees on foreign televisions or football matches or anything, it must create a very peculiar consciousness somewhere. And they are pretty nationalistic. Now, the period between the wars is not a happy one at all. There are some good things that did come out of it, but it's not happy. And Hungary is distinguished by having the highest suicide record of any modern country. It was, I think in 1986, it reached just 4.5 per 100,000, makes sense. Anyway, very high, very high suicide rate. That suicide rate dropped by two-thirds in 1938 when Hungary, an alliance with Hitler, was able to get back some of the lost territories. I don't know what on earth the connection is, but it's always taken as an example of how national morale improved. Now, then comes the disasters. Second World War, and Holocaust in Hungary was pretty bad. I mean, I'm sometimes taken to task by people who are hostile to Viktor Orban about the Holocaust in Hungary, and it's true that roughly half the Jews, maybe a bit more, went. And they say, that was the fault of the Hungarians. Now, the answer to that is this. There were six SS officers in Amsterdam. 90% of the Dutch Jews were wiped out. It's not an argument I'm ever happy getting into. How could one be? But I don't think that Hungary was worse than anywhere else. We put it that way. And the record of Jews in Hungary, the contribution to Hungarian culture, it's almost unimaginable. For instance, Bartók, when he made himself unpopular in 1910 by using Hungarian music, the Hungarian music, was almost being thrown out of the concert, and he was protected by a group of mainly Jewish ladies who could understand what he and Kodai were doing. I won't go on on this theme, but it is, as a friend of mine says, whatever you say about the Jewish question in Hungary is wrong. I won't go on on this. Then comes 1945. I'm slightly running ahead. Can I have another five minutes? Then comes 1945, a viciously bad experience of communism in Hungary. Here's a country which, left to itself, would just have followed some kind of Austrian pattern, prosperous agriculture, ingenious use of energy, that sort of thing, and instead it became a kind of appendix of the Soviet Union. And Khrushchev's idea was to have a vast green field stretching from the Borghenland to Kazakhstan. Now, a lot of Hungary is only suitable for options. So it went down and the workers were dragooned and it comes to the revolt of 1956. And then the Russians sat back and thought, well, we better go easy on these Hungarians. And in any case, they're just next to Austria. We can hold up Hungary as some kind of model. And you have this odd phenomenon in the late 60s and 70s of what, in that awful phrase, it was called goulash communism. And you could sell Hungary to the West. If you were able to decently tell, give them something to eat, the Hungarian educated classes were extremely good. Read things, sense of humor, everything. And the regime could say we've got full employment. You don't really see the police on the streets. Here's some literature which is not on our side. And the French journalists in particular would come cooing away and saying, oh, Hungary's like Sweden. This happy period started coming apart in 1980. And it did so mainly because they got into a lot of debt. They had the highest debt in the Eastern Bloc per head. And that began to cause troubles. And in 1982, long before Corby, they applied to join the World Bank and their IMF. Now, if you do that, you're accepting certain, well, I won't say handcuffs, but certain controls. And it meant that the World Bank and the IMF could actually tell them what to do. So you get a mixture of communism and a second economy, as they called it, where people are working very hard for something that looks like real money. And they actually statistically measure the economy. It can't really be understood. No one really knows what's happening. But the trade with the West goes up and up. And the Iron Curtain had really collapsed long before Corby came when John Paul did a mass on the Noiseedler's way. 60,000 Hungarians turned up to it. The Iron Curtain was not a reality in Hungary after around that time. But of course it does mean that you have people who are used to dealing with what the Germans call Zeilschaften, of networks within networks in what is purportedly a communist system. And it was often described how people could quite legitimately take machinery from factories and use it for private production. And the whole thing became somehow corrupted. The Hungarians still very divided about this. I mean, as an outsider, I would say they have not much choice. But they have to live with it and they don't like the consequences. And this is a context in which Viktor Orban has to be understood that he's dealing with networks of this sort which can torpedo what any government would like to do. He must be understood in that context. Now... Yes, I mustn't go on too long. On the other hand, I can't miss out a cultural minister called Oddsale. You see, in Hungary, if you went there from Western Europe, you would find really lively films. The music, the pianists, I don't need to go on about. And there were, you know, serious literary journals. It wasn't like going to Romania or anything of that kind. You could find a lively cultural life. Now, the man behind that was a man called Oddsale. And it's a characteristic Hungarian life. Born... Born as a Jew in a quarter where there were no educated people. His father was a carter or something. He died. The mother remarried. The husband couldn't bear Oddsale and put him in an orphanage. He got out. He was wanted to train as a psychiatrist. Couldn't. Because there was a law that was helping Jews from entering professions. So he became an actor. A very successful actor. Then comes 1944. And his acting skills served him in very good stead because he could ride around in a German staff car. He didn't speak any German, but he could imitate the noise of a German army officer in a very bad mood indeed. And so he saved a number of people like that. Then subsequently in 1948 he was put in prison by Rakhushi like so many. After five, six years out, saved by Qadar, and being a man of vast versatility and charm, he would tolerate certain playwrights, encourage certain cinema, but it's through him. And again, obviously through Zeilschaften, a certain kind of independent and very interesting cultural life developed in Hungary. And what do you make of a man like that? The Russians hated him. They wanted to get rid of him, but they couldn't fight. Now something has gone wrong at that level and it's held Hungary back economically to the point at which it's still behind Austria. Now the other thing which I will gather through I think, I'm sorry, I really have to thanks for being indulgent. The other thing is how the Europeans have handled it. And I must say I just don't think it's been handled intelligently at all. Hungary's great strength is agriculture. It was a great grain exporter before 1914. The wine very good, you've all heard of that guy. But there are others. Very good raising pork, this kind of thing. Now the agriculture is still noticeably behind the Austria. You see the difference on the border when you leave the Burgen land. You can even see it in Slovakia when you cross over. Hungarian agriculture has somehow languished as it didn't in the 1980s or there's so the pricing policies and the common agricultural policy have not been working for Hungary's benefit at all. The other side of it, and again I'm afraid to understand Hungarian politics, this has to be said and it's gypsies. Companies like Tesco big ones came in, bought up land subsidized by the European system in one form or another. The village is empty and are taken over by gypsies. They make up 20% of the population of Eastern Hungary now. Now the Orban government does what it can. It's got gypsy members of parliament. It encourages a proper kind of gypsy culture. It'll get gypsy mayors to try to discipline the gypsies into not producing so many children. But the problem has got out of hand. In communist times they used to sterilize the gypsy women after three children. The rights of men of the European courts don't allow you to do this sort of thing. And the result is that huge numbers of places in Eastern Hungary are voting for the extreme right party, Jobik and it's to do with problems like this. I don't know what the answer is but at least the problem needs to be stated. And the other side of Europe is well, opening the gates. Is it 6,700,000 educated and the education system is very good. Educated Hungarians energetic working all over Germany and in England. And what that does to a country to find it's so many of its energetic young people leaving we can only hope that the effect will, the pendulum effect will take place. But meantime Budapest is left with an awful lot of poor old souls living on pensions shuffling through the streets with walkers and the sound you hear at night and the big boulevard his ambulance is on the way to the hospital. Now, I'm painting a pretty gloomy picture I know but I think to see what things the robot is trying to do that gloomy picture has to be pictured because he's not responsible for it if there is but in that particular responsible it would be his predecessor Manuel Ducci said at the private gathering we've done nothing but steal it was silly enough to let it be recorded and the Europeans went along with this and they stole too there's a particularly nasty set of buildings which is no place what so ever in Budapest which were put up by the EBRD the European Bank of Reconstruction Development Giacatelli's monstrosity if you can imagine among tunnels next to the Astor Hotel that says it all or a hideous glass pavilion next to the National Museum this kind of horror has been voiced in the monument of that period and whatever you say about Big Dump it has done no full lot to make Budapest the great city that it was and we can only hope that at some point somebody will be able to write a book about Budapest 1900 and see if it's happening again today I think they're also thanking me