‘The Spanish Analogy’: Imagining the Future in State Socialist Hungary 1948–1989

Abstract

For four decades Spain played an important role in debates over the future of politics, culture and economy in state socialist Hungary, particularly for the left: first as the fascist and underdeveloped ‘other’ against which the state socialist regime legitimised itself, then as a similarly peripheral country that had managed to integrate into global economy, return culturally to Europe and peacefully establish democracy. Close relationships developed between the Spanish socialists and Hungarian communists in the 1980s and offered the latter the hope they would survive any political transition. This article demonstrates the importance of Eastern–Southern European connections – both concrete and imagined – in sustaining, and then overcoming, Europe's post-war divides.