Mission

Central European Horizons is a peer-reviewed open access journal dedicated to Central European affairs published by the Institute of Central European Studies at the National University of Public Services in Budapest.

What is our objective?

The set of phenomena that we call Central Europe undergoes a renaissance. This is a welcome development for academic enquiry with a comparative approach.

Central Europe has been the regional and mental framework of Hungarian history, politics and Hungarian livelihoods in general ever since the beginning of Hungarian statehood. Hungary is one of the focal points of Central Europe. We need to make use of experiences that have shaped the region, and the different countries in it, in the past hundred years. We need to identify similarities and differences. We also need to examine those behavioural, mental, political and social patterns, as well as psychological and economic conditions that still have an impact in the present and that make the region Central Europe.

We focus our research activities on the countries of the Visegrad Cooperation, but we also include Croatia and Slovenia and, of course, the German-speaking Central Europe such as Austria and Bavaria, to some extent. We do not exclude efforts to make contacts towards East. We do not need to argue hard why the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Transylvania and Partium make us include Romania in present day Central Europe. It is also for the common fate that half a century of communist oppression brought about and for the shared interests that small nationhood create that we are interested in the Baltic nations.

We make effort to cooperate with public policy and academic think tanks of Central Europe in order to realise workshops and projects, and, possibly, launch training programs. Through our activities we aim to create networks of cooperation that analyse the relationship of countries, historic conditions of their common actions, converging aspects and differences of their public policy, economic, security and cultural experiences and expectations towards the EU, Euro-Atlantic integration, China and the emerging Asian countries.