Europeans are fiercely proud of their language. Hungary is a weird country in that less than 20% of the adult population speaks a foreign language (and I don't even know what speaking means in this statistic).
Before the iron curtain fell, Russian was the foreign language taught to most people until 8th grade. Most people who had to suffer through that period rejected mastering it on principle alone. It's not very motivating to learn the language of a superpower that keeps your country occupied. You could only really take up English in high school (14-19 yrs) and it's nearly impossible to learn a language properly at that age, especially in a country isolated from the English-speaking media. The result is this weird situation we found ourselves in. Because our domestic markets are somewhat restricted, we have to do international trade which necessarily requires another language.
The reason was pretty simple: bilingual education is free in Hungary as it's a part of our public school system. It's extremely difficult to get into one and it's very easy to drop out. However, public bilingual schools don't cost anything. (Our government is doing everything it can to dismantle it for budget reasons, which is understandable but unfortunate.) Most classes were held in both English and Hungarian until 4th grade. English becomes the main medium from 5th grade and the only subjects that were taught in Hungarian were Literature (a lot of Literature teachers in Hungary are also English teachers so I could read non-Hungarian books on the school reading list in English), Hungarian, and gym/PE. On one hand, the transition was pretty gentle so I didn't feel I was at a disadvantage compared to my peers.
On the other hand, since only 20% of Hungarians actually speak a second language, the concept of a bilingual speaker is incomprehensible to most people here. I remember this one occasion when I was at a train station, talking to someone in English, having a good time laughing at a story, only to hear two people next to me talking about how "these Americans don't respect Hungarian values" and things of that nature. Also, we were told off a number of times by students attending monolingual classes for code-switching, but that's about it. My national identity is entirely intact but my personal identity has definitely been shaped, for the better, I believe. I am happy with my parents' decision and I definitely wouldn't change anything if I had the chance.