Minister of State Péter Sztáray from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade called Hungary’s membership of NATO an exceptional and unique issue at a book launch on Tuesday, stressing: There is a decades-long and deeply rooted agreement between the mainstream political forces concerning the fact that we must participate in the organisation.

The Minister of State said the volume of documents, edited by Gusztáv D. Kecskés entitled “Reporting from Brussels – Secret NATO Reports on a Transforming Eastern Europe, 1988-1991” and published by the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Humanities Research Centre and the Institute and Archive for Research on the Regime Change, filled a gap.

Mr. Sztáray stressed that the book is an excellent portrayal of the hope and cautiousness of the Brussels experts, and of their fears with relation to the strategic transformation that took place with relation to the processes that occurred in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, noting that by around 1994-94 NATO had implemented the transformation required by the new situation.

It is evident from the assessments evaluating eight six-month periods how western analysts attempted to develop a picture of events and what lay behind them using limited information and groping in the dark, and by 1989 came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union is disintegrating and a transformation that is leading to multi-party systems is occurring within the region.

It is also clear from the book that there was a huge fear concerning “how they national problems that had by hibernated for forty years would slowly appear” within the region, he said.

Although we were regarded as the front-runners of this transformation, it may also be felt from the documents that “there is a certain level of traditional distrust” towards Hungary concerning the fact that the Government could take foreign policy in a direction that is “chauvinist and overly laden with nationalism”, and this existed despite the fact that the measures introduced by the government were in total opposition to this.

Deputy Director General of the Institute and Archive for Research on the Regime Change Sándor M. Kiss spoke, amongst others, about the fact that the organisations participation in the development of the region was important, but new governments “sometimes worked against a NATO headwind”, while Professor Emeritus László Valki from the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Humanities Research Centre highlighted the “totally sober thinking” of the writers of the assessments.

“NATO’s experts regarded stability and continuity as the main elements of the transformation in view of the fact that if these are not present, the whole process will run aground, as threatened to occur in the late summer of 1991 during the Moscow coup attempt.

As an element of this way of thinking, he mentioned that NATO no longer had to act against aggression, but against destabilisation, and accordingly on some occasions the experts recommended that processes be slowed.

(MTI)