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• How should we think about Europe? The model adaptation and model formation strategy of the Hungarian political elite

  110-133

  Ervin Csizmadia

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  In the past decades, researchers in Hungary have looked at almost all segments of the behavior and organization of elites, nevertheless they have dealt surprisingly little with how external actors (Europe, the West) affect the actions and way of thinking of the elites. The lack of approaches from this perspective is so apparent because the European orientation of the elites has changed twice in the past thirty years. (In the 1980s and starting from the second half of the 1990s.) The essay focuses on presenting two concepts of Europe, of which one is based on model adaptation (the opposition represents this approach) the other on model formation (which is characteristic of the governing parties). The essay shows the origins of both, as well as their connections to macro and micro political motifs. Within the frameworks of this, the study touches upon why the appearance of the model adaptation perspective was adequate in the 1980s as well as to why the model forming approach to Europe appeared on the right in the middle of the 1990s as its challenger. The analysis does more than just dynamically present the past thirty years, it also aims to show that we have to integrate Hungarian political history in a broader sense into our studies if we want to understand the changes that have occurred in the past decades concerning the relationship of the elites to the West. The stratum which Fidesz has brought to surface lays deep in Hungarian political history. We have to take this stratum into consideration even if we find this perhaps unattractive and we reject it.