Uh-oh, you remind me, years ago I got a two-volume Paul Lendvai book, and I still couldn't get myself to begin reading it...

I actually aborted my review half-way due to the match. First some clarifications to the first part, regarding the damned dam issue:

That the dam was a factor in the 1998 election loss was also because Hungarian nationalists, too, made it an issue, stealing it from environmentalists. The next right-wing government however did almost nothing in the dam issue. By "well-progressed works" I meant that the river was diverted around the planned dam site, but that back in the early nineties.

What I wanted to finish with was telling of the people. Relationship on that level is diverse. The "big picture" is one of blissful cultural isolation, by which I mean 99+% of people in Hungary (regrettably myself included) and surely 95+% of people with Slovak as mother tongue in Slovakia don't speak the others' language. However, tourism makes for a non-political connection: to a lesser part hisorical monuments like castles, and to a bigger part skiing sites attract people from Hungary, and providers increasingly aim for them, while I read just last week that Budapest became a tourist destination for Slovakians.

This contrasts with nationalists on both sides. However, the Slovakian nationalists vs. Hungarian-Hungarian nationalists is not important, not as the conflict inside Slovakia and the Slovakian-Hungarian--Hungarian-Hungarian relationship - and the interaction of these two relationships. I mean, the latter includes that when Hungarian nationalists from Slovakia and Hungary meet/communicate, they reinforce each others' paranoia and chauvinism by positive feedback; while the Slovakian nationalists use what becomes public of the latter in their overall rhetoric about ethnic-Hungarian organisations being traitors. You could call it an indirect Slovakian--Hungarian-Hugarian conflict.

I am not certain enough about people being mature Europeans to assume that the ratio of blissful ignorance, non-politised good relationship and nationalist paranoia won't change in the populations again (and if it does, the abovementioned indirect conflict will certainly turn direct). But both the EU and, well, ET could become vehicles for further lessening tensions both between governments and people. If the French and Germans could do it in half a century, why not reproduce that here?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}