At a time when we have become bleakly accustomed to political capital being made of militarising borders and building walls, it is a timely corrective to read a book devoted to the romance of the alternative. The Picnic re-examines events in Hungary in 1989 that precipitated the collapse of Soviet power in central Europe. In particular, it recreates, through intimate personal histories and eyewitness recollection, the ways in which one idealistic, grassroots protest – the staging of a summer party in a field near the Austrian border – became a catalyst for the dramatic peaceful revolutions that reunited the continent.
The idea for that summer gathering was first imagined by a young Hungarian radical, Ferenc Mészáros, at a meeting organised by a European figure from a very different age: Otto von Habsburg, heir to the long-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire, who was, in 1989, president of the pan-European movement. Habsburg was in the Hungarian city of Debrecen in June 1989 as a guest lecturer at a university founded by his ancestor and he used the opportunity to connect over dinner with covert groups opposed to the communist government. At that dinner, Mészáros floated to “Uncle Otto” his notion of a gathering near the border, perhaps an afternoon picnic, at which Hungarians and Austrians could be permitted to come together in a tiny gesture towards a new pan-European spirit.
