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Orban’s Fall and Europe’s Rise

FA RSS·Ivan Krastev·3 days ago
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Sometime during the late 1800s, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire still stretched from the Adriatic Sea to modern-day Ukraine, a Hungarian entered a bookstore in Vienna and asked the clerk, “Can you sell me a globe of Hungary?” Although likely apocryphal, the story has been widely repeated because it so perfectly captures the hubris of a people who feel their nation is the world. Of course, within a generation, Hungary would be stripped of two-thirds of its territory by the Treaty of Trianon, making the globe-buyer’s pride seem less farcical and almost tragic in retrospect. But the story takes on yet another meaning today because, in the wake of the April 12 parliamentary elections in Hungary , it has been non-Hungarians who have been asking to see the globe of Hungary. Moderate and liberal political observers not only in Vienna but also in Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and New York see the crushing defeat of strongman Viktor Orban as signaling the ebbing of global illiberalism.…

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