At a time when we have become bleakly accustomed to political capital being made of militarising borders and building walls, it is a timely corrective to read a book devoted to the romance of the alternative. The Picnic re-examines events in Hungary in 1989 that precipitated the collapse of Soviet power in central Europe. In particular, it recreates, through intimate personal histories and eyewitness recollection, the ways in which one idealistic, grassroots protest – the staging of a summer party in a field near the Austrian border – became a catalyst for the dramatic peaceful revolutions that reunited the continent.
The idea for that summer gathering was first imagined by a young Hungarian radical, Ferenc Mészáros, at a meeting organised by a European figure from a very different age: Otto von Habsburg, heir to the long-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire, who was, in 1989, president of the pan-European movement. Habsburg was in the Hungarian city of Debrecen in June 1989 as a guest lecturer at a university founded by his ancestor and he used the opportunity to connect over dinner with covert groups opposed to the communist government. At that dinner, Mészáros floated to “Uncle Otto” his notion of a gathering near the border, perhaps an afternoon picnic, at which Hungarians and Austrians could be permitted to come together in a tiny gesture towards a new pan-European spirit.
Mészáros’s idea was originally dismissed as trivial in the earnest politics of the underground Hungarian democracy movement, but over that summer it gained support and traction, eventually becoming a pivotal – and exhilarating – moment in late 20th-century history. As Matthew Longo’s book deftly dramatises, great geopolitical shifts always happen at both a macro and a micro scale. The possibility of relaxing border controls had been set in motion that March by Hungary’s communist leader Miklós Németh in a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow at which the Soviet leader suggested he would not stand in the way of greater openness.
Németh’s government took a series of tentative steps to test that commitment, first symbolically shutting off power to part of the electrified border fence in May; then convening a ceremony for the reburial of Imre Nagy, who had been executed by the Soviets for his role in the counterinsurgency of 1956. The political ripples of those two provocations were the backdrop for the proposed picnic, a spontaneous possibility that would have seemed hopeless only a year before, but which was now given tacit approval by Németh’s ministers.
The inside story of this history is brought to thoughtful and sometimes vivid life by Longo, an American politics professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His book is a welcome prequel to his previous study, The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security and the Citizen After 9/11, which examined the ways in which the advances of freedom that ended the cold war were undone in the name of the “war on terror”. In both books, Longo uses close reading of the postwar debates about individual and collective liberty – in particular in the work of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin – to underpin his narrative, and to reflect on what has been won, and what lost.
Here, he works backwards and forwards from 1989 to unpick dreams of liberation and their consequence in Hungary and beyond. His story is informed by interviews not only with important political figures from the period – he interviewed Németh, for example, at his retirement cottage beside Lake Balaton, south-west of Budapest – but also with the organisers of the picnic and many of those who found their lives transformed by it. There is a slight sense of frustration in some of these confrontations – old party men such as Németh never quite spill all their secrets – but the story nevertheless becomes a gripping case study of how determined local activism can take on a global life of its own.
Mészáros had no real idea when he proposed his summer party that by the time it came about – on 19 August 1989 – tens of thousands of East Germans, sensing the change of political mood in their neighbour, would have taken the opportunity to “holiday” in Hungary (shadowed by Stasi agents) in the hope of escape to the west. The courageous tales of some of these couples and young families who happened to pitch up at a campsite near the picnic site at Sopron are lovingly retold by Longo; their stories are set alongside those of the border guards – also interviewed by the author – who, having been ordered to relax the sentry posts for a few picnicking Austrian officials, found themselves instead confronted by hundreds of East German men, women and children stampeding for freedom.
Those chaotic moments of decision-making – to shoot or not to shoot – fell in particular to a man named Árpád Bella, who still lives in a village near Sopron. He was the commanding officer at the checkpoint, where a mass breach occurred on the day of the picnic, a man still unnerved by the gravity of that ancient history, where he became an unwitting hero by standing aside. Within three months, the breach he allowed at Sopron became the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Longo uses his later chapters to bring his story up to the Hungarian present. Though there isn’t the scope here to fill in all the holes between dreams and reality, his narrative does linger pointedly on one of contemporary history’s more profound ironies. Among the fellow travellers of the picnic protesters was a young firebrand who publicly demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops, the opening of all borders and free and fair elections. That young protester was Viktor Orbán, since engaged, as Hungary’s authoritarian president, in erecting hundreds of miles of razor wire along his nation’s southern perimeter and threatening to veto EU aid to Ukraine in its war to repel Russian aggression.
Freedom is precarious; you hardly need the author to tell you that, three decades on, Orbán uses the anniversaries of the pan-European picnic to promote those repressive aims.
• The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
