In the wake of the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the aborted Prague Spring of 1968, dissidents in the state socialist regimes of eastern Europe ceased to invest hope in revisionist Marxism and, as a result, set out in search of a new ideology. In this extensively researched and clearly written study, Victoria Harms focuses on the historical evolution of dissidence in Hungary and the United States. Her choice of Hungary was dictated by the relative liberty Hungarians enjoyed under the rule of the once hated János Kádár.

Although sometimes reined in, that room for action made it possible for Hungarian dissidents to establish and maintain contacts with Americans who held similar Enlightenment-inspired views, and were critical of their own country. Together they created an east-west network of organizations, institutions, and publications—centered around The New York Review of Books. Harms introduces readers to many of the Hungarians and Americans who were active participants in that network, but she identifies the novelist György Konrád as the pivotal bridge between the two dissident groups.

Repudiation of state socialism went hand in hand with opposition to the Cold War divide between western and “Eastern” Europe; the latter, dissidents began to insist, should refer only to Russia. Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia would be better thought of as “Central Europe,” thus positioning them closer to the west—mentally at least. In the western world, this view was advanced most insistently by British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It did not follow for him and the dissidents, however, that the west itself was above criticism. America might be anticommunist, but it was, in their view, too prepared to tolerate other anti-democratic governments. What was needed, they concluded, was an ideology that was universal in its claims—and they found it in “human rights,” rights remote from human authorship. As Konrád put it, “the worldwide defense of human rights is a new ideology that lies outside the conceptual framework of communism versus anticommunism” (167). He and his network friends were as one in their commitment to that problematic faith. Where, for example, can one look to find the granting authority? The answer given by János Kis, one of the more philosophically sophisticated of the Hungarians, was that human rights are innate to all humans; they exist even if governments fail to recognize them in law. Where, then, is the enforcing agency?

In time, the union of “Central Europe” with “human rights” prepared the way for Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia to join the EU and NATO, but as Harms makes clear, there remained obstacles for them to overcome. Dissidents in Poland, which maintained a historic friendship with Hungary, remained tightly restricted until the election of a Polish Pope, John Paul II, and the rise of Solidarność, an independent trade union that Harms describes as “the game changer” (108). In Hungary, the government’s relaxed control did nothing to mitigate its hostility to 1956. Only when the Party removed Kádár from power in 1988 were the dissidents able to challenge the official view of the Uprising as a “counter-revolution” and, on June 16, 1989, to organize a reburial of Imre Nagy, the reform communist who, however reluctantly, led the Revolution—and paid for it with his life. Among the speakers at that ceremony, described by Harms as “the cathartic moment for Hungary,” (300) was the young Viktor Orbán.

In the following year, Hungary held its first free parliamentary elections since 1945, but the Alliance of Free Democrats, the party representing the dissidents, finished behind the conservative Hungarian Democratic Forum. And although it achieved a few successes in the early years of the new century, the Alliance lost regularly to Fidesz (Federation of Young Democrats), a center-right party that Orbán led.

Membership in the EU did little to alter the situation, for in a 1990 New York Review of Books review of Garton Ash’s The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, George Kennan warned that the dissidents, as they confronted political responsibility, were likely to discover that their idealistic standards would not be easy to uphold in the everyday realm of democratic government. Harms shows that he was right. It was not long, she writes, before the dispirited dissidents “felt overwhelmed by the new responsibilities and the incompatibility of their ideals and intellectual habits with everyday party and parliamentary politics” (300–1).