So... ok. I've really really really been falling behind.

First up, the long awaited Hungarian identity. This is something that has been really difficult for me to try to understand. Going on study abroad means that you want to get outside of your culture and into someone else's, and in a country where almost no one speaks the native language except for it's citizens, that experience for me has been found more among my fellow exchange students. These are kids from all over the world, but mainly from countries within the EU who are here on the Erasmus program. My friend Colin has some... interesting... roommates. One of which is Gergo, (Pronounced "gehr-goo") from Hungary. I have never had the opportunity to talk to him about his national identity, but I have heard the results of these conversations from Colin while he tries to wrap his head around them over dinner or coffee with our little traveling gang. For Gergo, Hungarian identity is intertwined with ethnicity and you cannot separate the two. Because of this, the presence of Gypsies in his country is very upsetting to him. In our class on EU Enlargement, he asked if there was a way for Hungary to make it so that only Hungarians could buy land, because they don't like "others" to come in and take it. The situation in his country is this: couple the dying out of his ethnicity (following what seems to be a pan-European, including Russia, trend) with an influx of immigrants (the most visible in their poverty being the Gypsy population) and you have a paranoid nationalist like Gergo, who believes that all Gypsies are evil and that the only way to save his country is for a civil war to break out that wipes the Gypsy population off the map. Gergo has had four bad encounters with Gypsies, at least one of which was a mugging, so I can see how his experiences would lead him to believe the stereotypes. But what I can't understand is how a country's identity can be so firmly based on one type of people, because this system seems bound to fail in our changing world. He looks at our system, one that I have realized through considering his differing point of view is based on a civic identity instead of an ethnic or really cultural one, and sees us as bound to fail. In times of real crisis, he says, we will turn against each other and rely on our ethnic identities instead of our nationalistic ones. His ideas scare me, because he is an incredibly intelligent guy otherwise, but he completely and totally believes that the Gypsies will bring the downfall of his country. He also believes in the civil war that is coming between the Hungarians and the Gypsies. Whenever this comes up in conversation, it makes me feel very uncomfortable, because national identity based on racism and prejudice never seems to get anyone anywhere good, and in my opinion is just wrong. It takes a lot of control for me not to tell him that, and the reason I feel like i shouldn't is because we come from entirely different backgrounds. My understanding of what is right and wrong (and obviously so) is different from his at least on this one point, and we both feel that we have the truth on our side.

In my own mind, though, I do think that identity struggles like these will be the economic downfall (and slow population death) of countries like Hungary if some new ideologies aren't embraced in the next few generations (and in the case of the economy, the next few years). When your work force is getting progressively smaller due to declining birth rates, it negatively affects the productivity of your country and your economic stability. Young immigrants who become a part of society can help reduce the economic impact, but only if they are allowed to work and succeed in society without being made into social lepers. It seems to me that Gergo's way of thought, though completely focused on Hungary's salvation, can only really lead to it's eventually collapse.