THE JOINT PRESENCE OF HUNGARY AND POLAND IN AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1776–1989

In 2026, the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding. The occasion offers the Hungarian-Polish Freedom Institute a good opportunity to examine the American connections of the Hungarian and Polish traditions of liberty.

“We are nearing the end of a year that future generations will remember as a watershed, a year when the human spirit was lifted and spurred on by the bold and courageous actions of two great peoples—the people of Poland and Hungary.” With these words, President George H. W. Bush signed the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act into law on November 28, 1989. The act was intended to support Hungary’s and Poland’s political and economic transitions to democracy, and it consistently named the two countries together.

The SEED Act clearly illustrates that the Hungarian-Polish bond exists not only in the historical memory of the two nations. It is also a recurring feature of American political thought, which has repeatedly interpreted the Hungarian and Polish causes as manifestations of the same aspiration to liberty and self-determination on which the United States’ own political order was founded.

Although the SEED Act’s final title referred generally to democratic transformation in Eastern Europe, the bill had initially focused explicitly on the two countries: its original title was the “Polish and Hungarian Democracy Initiative of 1989.” This Hungarian and Polish focus also remained in the final act.[1] Congress did more than identify two states in need of support: it created a common legal framework for two countries whose transformation it regarded as significant for the region as a whole.

The immediate political antecedent of the SEED Act was Bush’s July 1989 visit to Warsaw and Budapest. From there, the president traveled to the G7 economic summit in Paris, where, among other things, he proposed coordinated Western support for reform in the two countries. The itinerary itself made clear that Washington regarded the Hungarian and Polish transitions as processes of shared regional significance.

The Hungarian and Polish struggles for liberty and self-determination did not first appear together in American political thought in 1989. At decisive historical moments, the causes of the two nations repeatedly stood side by side at the center of American attention. In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower discussed the Polish October and the Hungarian Revolution together, identifying their common essence as national independence and the right to choose one’s own government. In the nineteenth century, the Polish Uprising of 1830–1831 and the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence of 1848–1849 elicited comparable American sympathy.

One historical source of that sympathy was the participation of Polish and Hungarian officers—men who would later become famous—in the struggle for American independence. More important, however, was the young American republic’s particular attention to European struggles in which a political community asserted its self-determination and constitutional liberty against oppressive or foreign rule—the same values on which the United States’ own political system rested.

This study offers a concise survey of this recurring American interpretive pattern. The causes of the two countries came jointly to the fore in the United States when Hungary and Poland acted in defense of their liberty, national self-determination, and constitutional institutions. The study does not seek to catalogue every manifestation of this tradition; rather, it examines the most prominent historical junctures at which the causes of Hungarian and Polish liberty appeared together in American political thought. The SEED Act was one of the clearest legal and institutional expressions of this political tradition.