If in doubt, blame those meddling foreigners

„Many Hungarians may think it, but only one has made the sentiment into his online pen name. One of the angriest contributors to the Eastern Approaches blog on The Economist website rejoices in the tag ‘What Can You Possibly Know About Us?'. His contributions, punchily expressed in capital letters, are among the hundreds posted following a recent series of articles about Hungary.

Small countries with difficult languages are particularly prone to assume that no outsider can possibly understand them. It is only a short step for them to assume that the information vacuum is being filled by poisonous propaganda from elsewhere – unfriendly circles in Moscow, or Berlin, or wherever, who are skilfully poisoning foreign public opinion.

Many countries have grown out of this. Poland's first black member of parliament, the Nigerian-born John Abraham Godson, has helped Poles realise that their language, national culture and political system are not a mystery accessible only to the sons of Piast's soil, but also to a visitor with a keen eye for injustice and a tongue ready to bend itself to complex consonant clusters. Furthermore, as millions of people from the ex-communist world have gone to live, work and study in the West, they have learned that by far the biggest problem there for the countries of central and eastern Europe is apathy, not enmity.

But Hungary is becoming something of a special case. The supporters of the government of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party seem particularly convinced that the world is out to get them.”