History Returns, with a Vengeance

In March 1990, I served as a member of an international team of observers to the first postcommunist elections in Hungary. It was a heady experience to bear witness to the crumbling of a totalitarian system and the dramatic, yet peaceful, emergence of a democratic transition.

One episode from that period: while walking along the fashionable Vaci utca pedestrian mall in downtown Budapest, I noticed numerous street vendors selling maps showing the pre-1914 borders of Hungary. This map included present day Slovakia, as well as Transylvania (now part of Romania) and parts of Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and even Austria. I knew that for Hungarians the peace treaty imposed by the Allied victors at Trianon in 1920 was a ruthless diktat that broke up their historical homeland.