In September 1989, the regime opened the Hungary-Austria border, allowing tens of thousands of East German refugees who had flooded into Hungary passage to West Germany. This destabilized the East German regime and unleashed a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, and of Europe. “It was in Hungary that the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall,” Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, later recalled.

These were unforgettable days for us. In the summer of 1989, President George H.W. Bush visited Budapest and assured the leaders of the new opposition that the United States would not let Hungary down like it did in 1956. Free elections were finally held in 1990, and the representatives of the old regime were voted out of office. The Soviet Union withdrew its last troops from Hungary, and we left the Warsaw Pact.

Excited to regain control of our destiny and emerge from the Iron Curtain, we Hungarians naïvely believed that Western Europe would share in our elation. We thought that other nations would empathize with the suffering we had experienced under Communism and offer us a helping hand in overcoming the challenges we faced.

Sadly, instead of treating us as potential allies who were finally joining the free world, the nations of Western Europe treated us as vanquished losers of the Cold War who had to defer to their wisdom. They used economic power to gain control of our markets, then kept us waiting in the antechamber of the European Union for 15 years. We did not experience a genuine reunification with Western Europe. Instead, we were forced to adapt ourselves to the West. It never occurred to the West that perhaps it should adapt itself to us.

During this time, Brussels and its neoliberal economic agenda gained increasing sway over the member states of the European Union, effectively denying citizens the right to make their own economic choices. In doing so it degraded national elections across the Continent, reducing them to formal exercises in changing governments, not policies.

Meanwhile, in Hungary some of the successors of the old Communist regime managed to retain significant influence over the nation’s economic and cultural institutions.