HUNGARY: THE DISADVANTAGES OF GEOGRAPHY
HUNGARY: THE DISADVANTAGES OF GEOGRAPHY

Summary/Abstract: Hungarians didn’t settle in wartime America “for the climate”, as Ferenc Molnár famously reminded other exiles in the Plaza Hotel, New York, in 1944. But is climate the reason why today’s Hungarians live where they do? Wars, invasions, rebellions, occupations, and (above all perhaps) peace treaties have moved the country around the map in the centuries since the original Magyar encampment. But the end result is that a highly intelligent people, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically distinct from their neighbors, now inhabit a flat plain with few natural defenses (ideally suited to invasion by horsemen or tanks), surrounded by no fewer than eight countries, of which at least four have a grumbling ethnic or irredentist dispute with Budapest. When the mythical Irishman, giving directions, says “I wouldn’t start from here,” it is seen as a mark of dim-wittedness. So why did Hungarians, perhaps the least dim-witted nation in Europe, outdo him by ending up here (if it wasn’t for the climate)?

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