IT WAS one of the defining moments of 1989, a year of great defining moments. Alois Mock, the Austrian foreign minister, stood beside Gyula Horn, the last foreign minister of communist Hungary, each with a pair of shears in his hands, and snipped through a wire marking the border between their countries. The Iron Curtain, physically and symbolically, had fallen.
Horn was the right man in the right place in the communist camp. Weeks before, during that summer of 1989, streams of East Germans in their rickety Trabants had begun swarming out of Honecker's oppressive republic. The question was whether they would be stopped, in a show of socialist solidarity, and returned home to face the consequences. His decision to allow them to travel through Hungary and cross the border into Austria was one of the first concrete signs that the communist system in eastern Europe was on the point of collapse.
Gyula Horn, now the prime minister of a left-wing democratic government has been at the centre of change in Hungary for more than 15 years. His official visit to Ireland yesterday is in connection with his country's application to join the European Union. That, and full membership of NATO, are two of the basic aims of foreign policy.
"My feeling is that the overwhelming majority of people support the European Union," he said last week in Budapest.
"There are some reservations about NATO because people remember the Warsaw Pact, which they were happy to get rid of. Quite a number support neutrality and there is also a fear that joining might cost too much. The government and the parliament have a responsibility to convince the people that it is necessary."
Horn is a deceptively mild-looking man, a shrewd politician with an ingrained sense of irony, and his commitment to democracy includes a strong rejection of the irredentism linked to the status of ethnic Hungarian minorities in Slovakia and Rumania. Shortly after taking office two years ago, he pointedly differentiated himself from his predecessor, Jozsef Antall, who had described himself\ to Slovak and Romanian outrage, as "prime minister of 15 million Hungarians", including those outside the state.
"I am prime minister of 10.5 million Hungarians, those entitled to vote," Horn declared. He has urged ethnic Hungarians to make it clear that they accept the Trianon borders (those established by the Trianon treaty at the end of the first World War). Eliminating quarrels between neighbouring states, he points out, is also a condition of EU membership.
At 64, Horn has lived through the fascist regime of Admiral Horthy; the war-time alliance with Nazi Germany; the German occupation in 1944 during which his father, a resistance fighter, was killed by the Gestapo; and the ruthless battles across Hungary as the Red Army pushed its way through to Vienna. As a bright young man of impeccable working-class origins, he was tailor-made for head-hunting by the post-war communist government consolidating its power in the late 1940s.
He was sent to the Don-Rostov college of economics and finance in the Soviet Union, graduated in 1954 and became a senior clerk in the Ministry of Finance in Budapest. After the rising in October, 1956, he joined a police militia, in his own words, "to restore law and order". Families were split by the political upheaval, and one of Horn's brothers was among the insurgents. "It became clear," he explained later, "that this region belonged to Soviet dominance, and the West did not interfere."
It is one of the ironies of Hungarian history that, as prime minister, he has responsibility for marking the 40th anniversary of the rising. The Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), which he has led since it was set up in October, 1989, was created "to do away with the previous state party and its policies and everything that party represented, including its evaluation of 1956".
Some months earlier, the process of re-examining the record had already started, and Imre Pozsgay, a reformist ideologue, had thrown the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (the communists) into its terminal crisis by declaring that 1956 had not been a counter-revolution but a popular rising. By June, 1989, Imre Nagy, the communist reformer who came to power in 1956 and was executed as a traitor two years later, was rehabilitated and reburied with honour, and he is now regarded as the spiritual ancestor of the HSP.
"Of course, there are extremist elements," Horn says of the right-wing radicals who are using the anniversary as a launching-pad for an attack on his "nation killing" socialist/liberal coalition, "but let me tell you this. It was this government which intervened materially to recognise those who were represented in the national opposition and also the fighters who actually participated in 1956. A dialogue is going on and a genuine reconciliation can take place."
He takes a similarly pragmatic view of the effort required to turn round the Hungarian economy in which about one-third of the population live below subsistence level. "In the 1980s we did not consider ideology but the country's political and economic interests. Our fundamental objective now is to bring order to the budget, for internal needs but also because it is what our international partners expect.
"Naturally, Hungarian society had to pay a high price, but we have already reached the stage that in 1997 real wages and internal consumption need not-further decrease and pensions will keep pace with inflation. We are taking more and more steps that reflect social needs, but this can only be done on the basis of output. To create social solidarity we need the national economy to perform well."
There is an ambitious series of targets to meet in the next few years. By 2000, Horn says, Hungary should be able to meet most criteria of EU membership. Inflation remains the biggest challenge, and many economists doubt if it can be reduced, as the government hopes, from 28 per cent to under 20 per cent this year. An overdue repricing of energy and the ongoing currency depreciation are having an adverse effect, but the target by the end of the millennium is to reduce inflation to single figures.
Horn spoke recently of people beginning to lose belief in politics because of the fall in living standards. "There are mixed impressions," he told The Irish Times. "In this country a lot of people are becoming richer. There is also unhappiness, there are demonstrations, but I do not sense any political instability."
His own sights, inevitably, are set further ahead than the next parliamentary elections, in 1998. "What we do now is primarily for the children and the children of our children."