Volume 6 Number 2, 3

Spring & Summer 1997

Towards an explanation of 1989

Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution
By Rudolf L. Tokes
(Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Reviewed by Andras Bozoki

Rudolf Tokes, professor at the University of Connecticut, has written a unique book. Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive interpretation of Hungarian political history from the 1956 Revolution to the fall of communism, covering the early 1990s as well. The book combines two areas of political science—sovietology and transition studies—and is the most comprehensive discussion to date of the communist, postcommunist, and transitional politics that led to a “negotiated revolution.” Except possibly Nigel Swain’s Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism, all other books dealing with this subject—not to mention those analyzing the events of 1989-90—have either discussed Hungarian politics from a much wider historical perspective (for example Andrew C. Janos’s The Politics of Backwardness or Peter Hanak and Joseph Held’s “Hungary on a Fixed Course: An Outline of Hungarian History,” in Joseph Held, ed.: The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century), or stayed within the boundaries of elaborating the history of communism (for example Bennett Kovrig’s Communism in Hungary: From Kun to Kadar and Miklos Molnar’s From Bela Kun to Janos Kadar: Seventy Years of Hungarian Communism).

      At first glance, the title seems misleading, since the phrase “negotiated revolution,” borrowed from Laszlo Bruszt, originally served to describe the 1989 Roundtable Talks and the peaceful transition to democracy, while Tokes stretches the term to describe forty years of Hungarian politics, speaking about “stipulated” rather than “negotiated” revolution. The concept of negotiations used by Bruszt to describe the Roundtable Talks assumes formal rules, well-defined arenas of discussion, opinions recorded in the minutes, and formally equal parties, while the concept of bargaining has been associated with a set of complex, informal maneuvers that are often far from transparent for an outsider and would be difficult to reconstruct. “Stipulated” political changes, reforms, and revolutions in Tokes’s interpretation of negotiations, belong to the organic political culture in Hungary and go far beyond the short, negotiated revolution of 1989. In this light, successful Hungarian politicians—from Gabor Bethlen through Ferenc Deak to Janos Kadar—appear as the artists of stubborn bargaining (or, to quote the communist Gyorgy Aczel, as “slaves of compromises”) who have often been able to achieve more than more radical, revolutionary leaders.

      Following this approach, it may seem that the changes in 1989 involved not only a break with Kadarism and a return to the heritage of 1956, but also completed a period of lengthy bargaining begun in 1956. If, however, 1989 was to be the final stage in an evolutionary process, the group of players had to be enlarged to include all of those who had wished to maintain the old regime—with or without the reforms. In spite of this, the author has managed to avoid the traps of relativizing and, while he is describing the “processes of bargaining” as a basic feature of Hungarian political culture, he draws distinctions among the parts played by the different actors on the scene. An outstanding feature of the negotiations in 1989 was that the members of the Hungarian political elite themselves could—for the first time in many centuries—make decisions about the future of their country, in a rare moment of “grace,” without having to consider the interests of an external power threatening the country.

      Hungary could not have attained such an exceptional situation without the revolutionary euphoria and trauma of 1956, the memory of which had made indelible imprints on the minds of the transition elite. Tokes is right in saying that the 1956 uprising is necessary to understand the subsequent “long thermidor” and the motives of the self-restricting revolution in 1989. Thus, the author begins the story where it has to be started, but his book does not become teleological even “in hindsight.” Just as the English Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 cannot be understood except in the light of Cromwell’s bloodstained revolution some decades earlier, the strategy of the Hungarian, reform intellectuals during the Kadar regime could not be explained without the self-critical criticism of the reform communists of the period from 1953-56, and particularly without the example set by Imre Nagy. A “re-negotiation” of history could take place in 1989 in a legitimate framework, because dictatorship had already become unsustainable ideologically in 1956.

      The processes of bargaining going on among the members of the political and business elite are not easy to comprehend for outsiders. Rudolf Tokes, who left Hungary in 1956 as a college student, has done a lot not to behave as an outsider, although he became a political scientist in the US. He has become a scholar with real insight into the changes in Hungary. Following a book in the 1960s about the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Bela Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic), he published papers in the 1970s and edited a volume on Soviet politics (Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s, with H.W. Morton), and on opposition groups in Central and Eastern Europe (Opposition in Eastern Europe). Beginning in the early 1980s, he regularly visited Hungary as a well-trained sovietologist, conducted interviews with almost all the important representatives of the political elite, gave lectures, and frequently consulted with Hungarian analysts. He belonged to the few who had first-hand or second-hand knowledge of the views and assessments made by communist leaders like Janos Kadar, Karoly Grosz, Zoltan Komocsin, Bela Biszku, Gyorgy Aczel, Rezso Nyers, and Janos Berecz. The sections about the Kadar regime in his book are as graphic as they are for this reason. The author did not mine only the documents of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party to gain information; he also used what he had garnered in numerous analytical discussions.

      Sovietology reached a crisis following 1989, since it had been unable to foretell the deep crisis and subsequent collapse of the Soviet-type systems. Changes in the assessment of political scientists dealing with the topic were revealed in self-critical studies. Sovietology as a direction of research ceased to exist with the fall of the Soviet systems, but only a few political scientists studying the communist systems were able to go beyond the boundaries of their fixed presuppositions and cast off the “intellectual ballast” of their thinking.

      Rudolf Tokes was not taken unaware by the landslide of Hungarian politics and, unlike many others, was able to take a close view of the change of systems and elites, and clarified their major characteristics almost immediately. What is more, as a kind of political field work, in 1991 he spent six months as a consultant to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so was able to gather insider experience about the operations of the new, democratic government—in a rather exciting period when the idea of the Visegrad cooperation of Central European countries was beginning to take shape. He collected enough material to write a manuscript of over 1200 pages. Then the questions arose: how to cut the length of the volume to half its original size, to please his publisher; and which approach would be more effective from a methodological point of view.

      What connects sovietology, which is more closed, static in its views, and specific to a region, and transition studies, which have focused on political dynamism and the typical interactions of political changes without being attached to one region? What is the common denominator to link the two different issues and methods of research? The answer is that both approaches focus on elites. The great value of Tokes’s book is that it has provided the most thorough analysis to date of both old and new political elites. The book has been made coherent, logical, and enjoyable because its author has faithfully followed that train of thought. A critical remark follows, that is, if the magnum opus had to be shortened at the publisher’s request, it might have been better to trim the parts in which economic and social changes are analyzed, leaving more space for investigating the political sphere.

      The introductory part of the book condenses into six points (“The mainsprings of political change in Hungary”) the essence of the author’s ideas. The complicated issues of economic and social restructuring were obviously impossible to describe in similar terms. Their joint discussion, however, has made the book too comprehensive, almost like an encyclopedia. Admittedly, this has not made the quality of the book poorer, since the author also has analyzed these issues thoroughly and carefully. But the main merit of the book, in my opinion, is the analysis of the composition and political role of communist and postcommunist elites. Because of this, it is more important than regional or country assessments in general. It should be assessed as a valuable empirical contribution to the literature on elite theory—the creation of elites, change of elites, and preservation of elites—that has become, of late, increasingly significant.

Andras Bozoki is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Central European University, Budapest.

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