ABSTRACT
Despite the doubts expressed by certain commentators, the present author included, concerning the viability of the democratic regimes established in East-Central Europe in the aftermath of the ‘people’s revolutions’ of 1989, not one of the countries where democratic multi-party systems were formed has yet seen a reversal to single-party or authoritarian rule.1
Yet there has been a recognition by many of the new political leaders that the tasks facing them in establishing and consolidating democratic political systems are far more difficult than they had at first imagined. In Hungary, for example, the leader of the Alliance of Young Democrats, Viktor Orbán, speaking at the Liberal World Congress meeting in Budapest in November 1993, said that the bricks of the Berlin Wall have been snapped up by Japanese and American tourists, while here the remains of the wall have remained in people’s spirits, in their way of thinking, in the economy, in the social system, in education and in many other areas of social life.2
