This question is at the center of Marcell Kovács' latest analysis, which examines how a recent U.S. export-control decision has introduced a new geopolitical risk for companies and investors relying on artificial intelligence.
Five hundred years after the Battle of Mohács, one question continues to captivate Hungarians reflecting on history: Could the defeat have been avoided, or had the fate of the Kingdom of Hungary already been sealed long before 1526?
This question is at the center of the research conducted by Anna Tápai, Student at MCC, during her three-month research stay at the Sport Research Institute of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
We tend to view Mohács as a single lost battle, but in reality, it was the disparities in resources and state organization, developing over decades, that ultimately determined Hungary’s fate. By the summer of 1526, the balance of power had shifted so drastically in favor of the Ottoman Empire that defeat had become almost inevitable. Mohács was not a one-time historical accident, but the outcome of long-term economic, military, and logistical processes. In terms of resources, the two sides were following fundamentally different trajectories of development, and it is this divergence that ultimately determined Hungary’s destiny.
“More was lost at Mohács!”— as the old Hungarian saying goes in times of hardship. But how much was actually lost there? Is Mohács truly the source of all our problems? The search for a primordial catastrophe has been a centuries-old tradition in Hungarian public thought.
Shein encourages overconsumption by offering thousands of new products every day at extremely low prices. However, these low prices come at a heavy cost. In fact, a significant proportion of these products contain potentially toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in concentrations exceeding EU safety limits by many times. Furthermore, the platform’s operations could pose serious data privacy risks as the app could hand over Western customers’ data to Chinese authorities. The company has also been accused of deliberately exploiting regulatory loopholes. In response, the European Union has launched formal proceedings to curb these violations.
Until now, the fashion giant Shein has relied on “intermediary neutrality” as a shield against responsibility for unethical – and in some cases illegal – products appearing on its platforms. The proceedings launched by the European Commission against Shein in February place the protection of children and young people at the center of the investigation, considering it as a core value that must be safeguarded in relation both to the products sold by the company and to the architecture of the platform itself.
The outbreak of the latest Iranian War on February 28 is far more significant and dangerous than the 2025 Twelve-Day War. The stakes have been raised considerably: the United States has been directly involved from the outset, Iran’s head of state has been killed, and there is an explicit attempt to overthrow the regime established by the Islamic Revolution forty-six years ago.
Europe’s current crisis can no longer be explained solely in economic or migratory terms. What began as a pragmatic decision to sustain economic productivity has evolved into a profound demographic, cultural, and spiritual transformation that threatens historical continuity. An aging, secularized, and fragmented continent appears to have lost confidence in itself. Declining birth rates, large-scale immigration from predominantly Muslim-majority societies, and the erosion of Europe’s Judeo-Christian identity are not isolated phenomena but symptoms of a deeper existential crisis.
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