The Half-Hearted Transformation of the Hungarian Military PA ´ L DUNAY Senior Researcher, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Solna, Sweden ABSTRACT The paper analyses the few successes and many failures of the defence reform of Hungary since the system change of 1990. It concludes that the failures have been due to objective reasons. Namely, due to the multiple changes that had to be carried out in politics, economy and the society the defence sector has been losing out in a largely threat-free environment. The shortage of human and financial resources is aggravated by the subjective mistakes, including waste and corruption. The difficulties Hungary has been facing */ similarly to most countries in East  /Central Europe */point to a pertinent question: why have defence reforms failed in most cases in the new democracies generally? When historians look back to the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe after the Cold War they will most probably conclude that the transition of Hungary was among the most successful. After severe economic decline the country recovered and by the end of the late 1990s the per capita GDP exceeded that of the late 1980s. Democratic institutions were established and have functioned properly in most cases. The support of the population for liberal democracy has increased and has no alternative. This irreversible development has been recognised by the West and its institutions. Between 1990 and 2004 Hungary joined a number of Euroatlantic institutions, ranging from the Council of Europe (1990), the OECD (1996), NATO (1999) and the European Union (EU) (2004). The grass root integration of the country has brought even more results than formal membership. Since the beginning of 2000 the EU has accounted for approximately three-quarters of Hungary’s total exports. This is higher than the share of intra-EU exports of 13 of the 15 member-states which belonged to the EU before May 2004. 1 In spite of these successes, however, a numberof problems remain in several areas. In particular, the capacity of the public sector has not developed sufficiently to make implementation and enforcement of laws particularly easy. Levels of corruption are still higher than in most Western European countries, Correspondence Address : Pa ´l Dunay, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Signalistgatan 9, 16970 Solna, Sweden. Email: dunay@sipi.org ISSN 0966-2839 Print/1746-1545 Online/05/0100017  /16 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/09662830500042429 European Security Vol. 14, No. 1, 17  /32, March 2005