{"id":4262,"date":"2010-12-06T11:33:04","date_gmt":"2010-12-06T10:33:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4262"},"modified":"2010-12-06T11:37:39","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T10:37:39","slug":"forgotten-world-226-hungary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4262","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten World (226): Hungary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s one of the regular weeks of postings in  my   long-running series  called Forgotten World \u2013 a look at parts of the    world that too rarely  feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the  previous 225  entries <a href=\"..\/..\/2010\/currentaffairs.shtml\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the reason why <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hungary\">Hungary<\/a> &#8211; a nation of 10 million &#8211; is not so much in the public mind as some other others of Central &amp; Eastern Europe is that, unlike many of those countries, it did not experience a revolution in 1989 &#8211; it had a long process of gradual political reform &#8211; and arguably kick-started those revolutions by allowing East Germans to flee through its territory to Austria.<\/p>\n<p>Hungary&#8217;s post-communist economic transition was achieved relatively  smoothly. Within four years of the collapse of communism, nearly half of  the country&#8217;s economic enterprises had been transferred to the private  sector, and by 1998 Hungary was attracting nearly half of all foreign  direct investment in its region.<\/p>\n<p>Ten years later, the picture  looked rather less rosy. A high level of both private and state  borrowing left the country particularly vulnerable to the credit crunch  of 2008, and in October of that year the government was forced to appeal  to international financial institutions such as the International  Monetary Fund and the World Bank for massive loans in a bid to stave off  economic collapse.<\/p>\n<p>Dissatisfaction with the centre-left  coalition government&#8217;s handling of the economy from 2002 to 2010  coincided with the rise of the right-wing nationalist party Jobbik,  known for its anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s one of the regular weeks of postings in my long-running series called Forgotten World \u2013 a look at parts of the world that too rarely feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the previous 225 entries here. Perhaps the reason why Hungary &#8211; a nation of 10 million &#8211; is not so [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4262"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4279,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262\/revisions\/4279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}