“From Adaptation to Emancipation”: The Twenty Years of EU Membership in Hungary

• In Event: Central and Eastern Europe Twenty Years after EU Enlargement

Abstract

This paper analyses Hungary's twenty years of membership in the European Union, highlighting the milestones of these two decades, with a special focus on the politics, policy, and polity aspects. The paper also examines the attitudes of the political actors to the European Union including governments, parties, and the citizens. Europeanisation is taken as the overall conceptual framework to explain the post-enlargement period of Hungary. When the Central European countries became full members of the European Union in 2004, Europeanisation occurred mainly as a top-down process, but from the 2000s onwards, the bottom-up direction of it became more and more prominent. When discussing Hungary’s membership in the Union, this paper interprets Europeanisation as a multidirectional process where the member states and the EU institutions continuously interact with each other (Olsen 2002, Radaelli and Pasquier 2006). How can we interpret Hungary's performance in the EU? What are the most important lessons of these two decades? This paper provides answers to these questions.

Author

• Boglárka Koller, Ludovika University of Public Service