A public lettre signed by French intellectuals.

In 1999, the 50^th anniversary of the foundation of the Council of Europe gives a good reason to examine human rights. Now in the current issue of Eszmélet, we address social rights, more specially human rights concerning private life and sexuality. It is, of course, not a pure theoretical question – it is involved in many actual political questions both in Hungary and abroad. Such questions are discussed in this issue as the right for abortion or accepting homosexuality as ordinary human behaviour.

Sport is our second topic, of which relation to politics is of no less interest, especially the status of football, a frequent topic of our quarterly.

Table of contents

1. Hegyi Gyula : The social Europe. real chance or empty slogan?
2. Baráth Erzsébet : Who talks about undertaking here?
3. Yves Géry : Fresh met from the East
4. Andor László : Sex and politics in Amerika
5. Mark Findlay : The politics of ‘cruising’
6. Susan Zimmermann : The Hungarian women’s movement and the ‘sexual question’ in the early 20th century
7. Alekszandr Latisev : Lenin and Inessa
8. Graham Baugh : The sexual contract
9. Sut Jhally, Bill Livant : Sport and cultural policy
10. Andrei Markovits : The other American exceptionalism
11. Krausz Tamás : Sytem change and football in Hungary
12. BAL : Protest against the NATO attack in Yugoslavia
13. francia értelmiségiek : Stop the bombings!
14. Immanuel Wallerstein : Bombs away!

In the early 1990s, we have heared that socialism was the longest path between capitalism and capitalism. It was often forgotten, however, that the new capitalism would be a peripheral one, just like the one before the emergence of state socialism in Eastern Europe.

"Cultural struggle" is said to have been the blind alley that caused the derailing of the systemic change after the promising start of 1989. Tendencies of the early 1990s have also reappeared after 1998. The editorial board asked the renowned literary historian to provxle an analysis of the situation.