A joke told often in Budapest says that World War III will be lost by whichever side Hungary is on. Balázs Orbán, the political director for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (the two are not related), notes in his new book, Hussar Cut, that the political compromise of 1867 that incorporated Hungary into the Austrian Empire “involved the voluntary surrender of our independent foreign policy, so we had no say on whether or not to participate in the first great global military conflagration of the twentieth century.” Hungary had little choice in the Second World War, either: in 1944 it fell under German occupation, followed by Soviet occupation.
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