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Contents

Foreword and Echo
We Need a Dialogue With the Whole Nation / Imre Pozsgay
Only If We Shoulder the Present Conflicts / Miklós Németh
The Rights of the Citizen / György Fejti
How Do You Conceive the Reform / Rezső Nyers
The Costs of the Bargain / Imre Tarafás
In Whose Interests? / Dr. Sándor Nagy
What Should the New Constitution Be Like? / Kálmán Kulcsár
Creating a Market and Increasing Competition / Tammás Sárközy
Society and the New Law of Association / Miklós Németh
Will There Be Free Competition Among Enterprises? / Ferenc Vissi
Who Can Interfere in Company Affairs? / Tamás Beck
Can Agriculture Develop? / János Márton
Why is Hungary's Foreign Debt On the Increase? / Imre Boros
What Shape Is Our Foreign Trade In? / Péter Balázs
Self-knowledge / Dr. Mátyás Szűrös

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Foreword

In 1988 a change took place in Hungary. There were personal changes at the highest levels of the party, state and central leadership through which power came into the hands of more competent, politically more able new leaders who are carrying out the new wave of reform. Parallel to this public discussion is growing rapidly, democracy is taking root in a wide strata of the people, and market competition among entrepreneurs is becoming stronger.

Hungary is again showing the way of progress in Central and Eastern Europe. The father of glasnost and perestroika, Mr Gorbachev, has stated several times how the often radical social and political changes in the Soviet Union are drawing from the Hungarian experience.

Hungarian diplomacy has never been as active as in 1988. The new leader Mr Károly Grósz has visited not only the two major powers but important countries in key positions such as Great Britain and Poland. Foreign Prime Ministers and leading political figures are arriving almost daily in Hungary.

But Hungarian policy cannot be considered as complacent. The 11 billion dollars foreign debt, a scarcely developing economy, a 17% inflation rate, unemployment at our doorstep, the obsolete structure of industry, stalling CMEA-cooperation, dependence on western technology are all heavy burdens on Hungarian society. Nevertheless, the chances for breaking out of this are good, because Hungary is so deeply set in international cooperation, so integrated into European culture, respecting humanitarian causes to the extent that it can undoubtedly count on the advantages of international cooperation to help it out of the critical condition it has got into, mainly because of its own mistakes and because of unfavourable factors in international economic development.

In 1988 the people and the leadership entered into a new consent. The political and economic leadership claimed that it would stabilize the situation and would, at the earliest possible time, perhaps in the early 90s, establish the basis of a future prosperity. The people, though under constraint, accepted reasonably and realistically the worsening situation, took up the task of creating firm political cooperation with the Party and the Government, and as a material condition for fulfilling these tasks will not withhold its sanction.

The title of this book calls this consent a bargain. And now we are in a situation after the bargain.

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