On the 19 October, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna organised a debate on Hungarian politics between Prof. Charles Gati and myself. It was well attended, with around 60 people present. The debate was widely reported in the Hungarian media. What follows is the written version of my introductory remarks. Much of the debate was recorded on video and will shortly be available on my home page.
1. Before one can make sense of the dynamics of Hungarian politics, one has to understand the sociology, the history and the cultural norms of Hungarian society.
There exists a very deep cleavage in Hungary, which to some extent is similar to the experience of other late modernisers, and which is structured by the dilemma of how much to adapt from the West and how much to construct from one’s own resources. This goes back to the 19th century.
2. After 1989, the cleavage became mapped on to party politics and gave rise to a far-reaching polarisation. Neither side has a monopoly of virtue or of truth. It is simply untrue that there is a single, universal template of modernity that all late arrivals must copy. Equally, Hungary is not a closed society, it is a part of the spectrum of European cultures and partakes of that. But that is not, repeat not, how this cleavage line is lived. The left takes the view that Fidesz and its hinterland are betraying the Western, European tradition and does not hesitate to say so, repeatedly and, in a style that is contemptuous and patronising, as if to say that the left and the left alone has a monopoly of what is European, modern, just or virtuous. The left’s position, then, is universalist. The right resents this, insists that there are perfectly usable raw materials in the Hungarian tradition that are in no way inferior to any other . It takes, therefore, a particularist position. From a theoretical perspective, we can suggest that the left essentialises the West (constructs an imagined West, to use Benedict Anderson’s language), while the centre-right operates with an essentialised view of what Hungarianness is and regards the left as having betrayed this by reason of its links with the unreconstructed communist past.
3. Why the cleavage and why has it acquired this political role? The system change of 1989-1990 was overwhelmingly elite-led, with very limited popular input (the funeral of Imre Nagy was carefully choreographed), hence the elite divide was mapped onto Hungarian politics and acquired a party political shape, which it has retained to this date.
4. The consequence is that party politics are far more deeply divided than a surface analysis would allow – it amounts to an ontological divide, with strong closures. It can be termed a cold civil war. There are two contending reality-defining agencies, locked in an ongoing process of reciprocal potentiation; three, if we give Jobbik this status. Both sides are convinced of their rightness and rightfulness, and regard the other as irrational, dishonest and harmful. Value pluralism has no place here, epistemologies are closed or mostly so, there is no awareness of contingency or reflexivity, let alone of the double hermeneutic. There is a far-reaching intellectual conservatism - no Bourdieu, no Giddens, not much Habermas, hardly any Foucault etc.
5. In this cold civil war, all methods to weaken the other may be employed – discrediting (lejáratás); exaggeration (Hungarian hyperbole plays a role here); category error (muddying of categories - összemosás); giving every intiative the worst possible reading; black-and-white thinking; the constant demand that the right distance itself (elhatárolódás) from something or another (the left and Jobbik do not distance themselves from anything); dismissing the centre-right’s competence and professionalism (hence the successes of the centre-right become inexplicable); trivialisation, elbagatellizálás (issues that might discredit the left are dismissed as trivial ); silence, agyonhallgatás (not responding to counter arguments) – in all, no prisoners are taken, there is very little attention to the doctrine of self-limitation. Hence the democratic infrastructure is weaker than it might be.
6. In 2010, the party system was transformed. The left suffered a devastating defeat at the polls. Fidesz gained a two-thirds majority, the SZDSZ disappeared, Jobbik made its breakthrough and the LMP, a new eco-left party, entered parliament, though it is noteworthy that this is largely a Budapest phenomenon. The domestic support for and rootedness of the left is much eroded, hence the constant recourse to a somewhat mythicised, essentialised "West" or "Europe" or "progress", which has in any case long been a keystone of the left's ideology. But this does nothing to strengthen the left's domestic position . At the same time, the reiteration of the proposition that the left has a monopoly of being "'European" strengthens the inwardness of the right (kurucosodás). Western media, especially in Germany and Austria, have been significant allies of the Hungarian left and thus, a political actor in Hungary itself, but with zero Hungarian legitimacy. This breeds resentment on the right.
7. The left cannot, will not see that the real danger to democracy in Hungary is not Fidesz, but Jobbik, very largely because it never formulated a theory of what constitutes democratic conservatism, Christian Democracy and centre-right. In this context, with Fidesz regarded as the primary enemy of democracy, the offer by the LMP to forge an electoral alliance with Jobbik is quite logical and quite bizarre.
8. Hungary is a democracy, in that it meets both the criteria of rule by consent (elections) and democratic infrastructure; Fidesz has taken major steps to restore this, despite what the left argues. The stories spread by the left and taken up by the foreign media, which cannot check these narratives, can be regarded as mistaken, erroneous, false, mendacious (take your pick). Nevertheless, the ongoing questioning of power cannot be adequate in a cold civil war, when all critiques are seen as hostile and destructive. Left and right must agree on a basic minimum of what constitutes common ground, what is the national interest, the state interest, the social interest, but this is still outstanding (hence the earlier reference to ontology). There is, therefore, no dialogue between the two sides. To present only the one side of the Hungarian political scene, as the foreign media tend to, is thoroughly misleading, if not actually specious.
9. The reform programme launched by Fidesz can be termed a "compensatory revolution". The system change in Hungary was, as argued, overwhelmingly elite-led, with the result that too much was salvaged from the previous system - power, network capital, political skills, contacts, property, money. Fidesz's starting point is that there must be a level playing field, so that these relics (csökevények) constitute a major obstacle to the functioning of democracy, prosperity, civic values and agency (this above all). Hence the radical reform programme to bring the country up to date, an aggiornamento (felsorakoztatás) in economic, political, cognitive, semantic and intellectual terms in order to overcome the deficits in these areas, so that citizens can enjoy genuine agency. Estimates put around half to two-thirds of Hungarian society as having problems with coping with the demands of late modernity.
The two-thirds majority for Fidesz did not happen by chance and constitutes the legitimating basis for this compensatory revolution. And, for what it's worth, a year and a half after the elections Fidesz still enjoys majority support, Jobbik is overtaking the MSZP and the MSZP may well split before long (and did indeed split, after the Vienna debate).
Sch. Gy.
Saturday 29 October 2011
Tuesday 25 October 2011
What are cultures and what are they for
I was invited to give the keynote address at the Global Round Table conference in Budapest, on the 21 October. The theme was “The sustainability of cultures”. This is a written and somewhat expanded version of what I had to say.
What do we mean by cultures exactly? The word has many, possibly too many meanings. So, for example, we speak of high culture, of popular culture, of corporate cultures or a specific set of rule-governed activity like safety culture. However, I am using it in the broadest sense, the one favoured by sociology and anthropology, namely a web of shared meanings, forms of collective knowledge, much of which is internalised and naturalised. This is the world of common sense, the propositions that we take for granted, and can be said to be apodictic.
What, then, are cultures for, what are they there to do? In simple terms, they make the world explicable and legible, they create cosmos out of chaos, establish an ordering. However, this is invariably a particular ordering, the world is too diverse, too charged with inputs for any culture to be able to integrate them all, hence a range of sensations will be screened out, will be excluded from view by the norms of the particular culture that we are looking at. By the same token, there is no single universal human culture, one that encompasses the entirety of the world. The Enlightenment legacy, on the other hand, made a universalist truth claim and asserted that there existed a single universal human reason; in reality this was the imposition of the thinking of a particular epoch in European thought and was diverse in itself (French Enlightenment, English, Scottish, Dutch etc.).
What a culture establishes is a moral order. It regulates right and wrong, lays down what attracts reward and what attracts punishment, it offers a model of the good life and establishes a complex web of obligations, rights and duties.
However, every culture will be affected by the phenomenon of occlusion. Certain meanings, certain propositions will be screened out, made dangerous or appear irrelevant. Similarly, aspects of other cultures will appear impenetrable to us or perplexing or repellent and vice-versa.
Cultures are sustained by a series of interlocking social mechanisms, the significance of which may be occluded. The myth-symbol complex is probably the most important of these. Every culture will have its supraspatial and supratemporal narratives of the collective self and collectively shared memory; these should not be confused with history, though they may well refer to historical events. Myth in this context is not to do with fabulation or the opposite of logos, an untruth, but refers to shared narratives.
The myth-symbol complex will be accompanied by collective rituals, which are a way of celebrating the collective self and are a means establishing solidarity without consensus; note that we are seldom fully conscious of the significance of this mechanism, though we can see those of other collectivities.
Every culture will have boundaries, boundary filters, boundary markers. These mark out the time and space that the collectivity has constructed and will ensure that external messages are interpreted and filtered in ways that the collectivity regards as usable or appropriate. Thus anniversaries, special days, vistas, buildings, artefacts can all fall into this category – these are not some kind of empty navel gazing, but are closely and causally linked to cultural reproduction. Institutions are established to act as frameworks for these meanings and to help sustain them.
Once a culture in the sense of web of meanings is brought into being, it is extremely difficult to erase it, but it can change and be changed, though this requires time. All cultures undergo a continuous metamorphosis, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, as new experiences – whether from the outside or the inside – impact on it; innovation, like technological change affects the way in which we decode meanings. All cultures seek to preserve the appearance of unchanging continuity
Finally, there is the transfer of meanings a continuous process that has accelerated in late modernity with the impact of globalisation. Thus every culture is involved in a continuous process of translation (in the widest sense), interpretation and in the screening out of “unwanted” elements. Those who do this have a special role, they are bearers of knowledge, the creators of value and at the same time as they are active in translating, they are also reconstructing the moral order and, therefore, are involved in moral legislation.
Without wanting to overestimate their role, it may be worth thinking about erecting a statue to the “unknown interpreter”, whose role is frequently underestimated, (a suggestion that was made once by Gyula Décsy).
Sch. Gy.
What do we mean by cultures exactly? The word has many, possibly too many meanings. So, for example, we speak of high culture, of popular culture, of corporate cultures or a specific set of rule-governed activity like safety culture. However, I am using it in the broadest sense, the one favoured by sociology and anthropology, namely a web of shared meanings, forms of collective knowledge, much of which is internalised and naturalised. This is the world of common sense, the propositions that we take for granted, and can be said to be apodictic.
What, then, are cultures for, what are they there to do? In simple terms, they make the world explicable and legible, they create cosmos out of chaos, establish an ordering. However, this is invariably a particular ordering, the world is too diverse, too charged with inputs for any culture to be able to integrate them all, hence a range of sensations will be screened out, will be excluded from view by the norms of the particular culture that we are looking at. By the same token, there is no single universal human culture, one that encompasses the entirety of the world. The Enlightenment legacy, on the other hand, made a universalist truth claim and asserted that there existed a single universal human reason; in reality this was the imposition of the thinking of a particular epoch in European thought and was diverse in itself (French Enlightenment, English, Scottish, Dutch etc.).
What a culture establishes is a moral order. It regulates right and wrong, lays down what attracts reward and what attracts punishment, it offers a model of the good life and establishes a complex web of obligations, rights and duties.
However, every culture will be affected by the phenomenon of occlusion. Certain meanings, certain propositions will be screened out, made dangerous or appear irrelevant. Similarly, aspects of other cultures will appear impenetrable to us or perplexing or repellent and vice-versa.
Cultures are sustained by a series of interlocking social mechanisms, the significance of which may be occluded. The myth-symbol complex is probably the most important of these. Every culture will have its supraspatial and supratemporal narratives of the collective self and collectively shared memory; these should not be confused with history, though they may well refer to historical events. Myth in this context is not to do with fabulation or the opposite of logos, an untruth, but refers to shared narratives.
The myth-symbol complex will be accompanied by collective rituals, which are a way of celebrating the collective self and are a means establishing solidarity without consensus; note that we are seldom fully conscious of the significance of this mechanism, though we can see those of other collectivities.
Every culture will have boundaries, boundary filters, boundary markers. These mark out the time and space that the collectivity has constructed and will ensure that external messages are interpreted and filtered in ways that the collectivity regards as usable or appropriate. Thus anniversaries, special days, vistas, buildings, artefacts can all fall into this category – these are not some kind of empty navel gazing, but are closely and causally linked to cultural reproduction. Institutions are established to act as frameworks for these meanings and to help sustain them.
Once a culture in the sense of web of meanings is brought into being, it is extremely difficult to erase it, but it can change and be changed, though this requires time. All cultures undergo a continuous metamorphosis, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, as new experiences – whether from the outside or the inside – impact on it; innovation, like technological change affects the way in which we decode meanings. All cultures seek to preserve the appearance of unchanging continuity
Finally, there is the transfer of meanings a continuous process that has accelerated in late modernity with the impact of globalisation. Thus every culture is involved in a continuous process of translation (in the widest sense), interpretation and in the screening out of “unwanted” elements. Those who do this have a special role, they are bearers of knowledge, the creators of value and at the same time as they are active in translating, they are also reconstructing the moral order and, therefore, are involved in moral legislation.
Without wanting to overestimate their role, it may be worth thinking about erecting a statue to the “unknown interpreter”, whose role is frequently underestimated, (a suggestion that was made once by Gyula Décsy).
Sch. Gy.
Monday 17 October 2011
Trust and politics
The Friends of Europe held a fairly high-level one day round-table in Brussels on the 13 October and I was invited to participate as a discussant.
In the event, the session ran out of time and I wasn’t called upon to speak (even at the two-minute length that we are allocated at plenaries), but this is what I would have said had I been (or something close to it).
The problem of declining trust in Europe and EU institutions should not be looked at purely in the EU context, because it is a phenomenon that is affecting democratic politics everywhere. The reality is that the Western world is going through a paradigm shift and various transformations are taking place that we can only see in part or not at all (yet).
One of these processes, the one that bears most directly on trust, is that in the last two-three decades the parameters of politics have changed. Whereas, in previous times, politics was concentrated on party allegiance, elections, legislative activity, that concentration has been much diluted and power is, in consequence, far more fragmented than before (see also the blog entry “Where has all the power gone?”).
The most obvious new loci of power, as noted previously, are the new political actors (civil society, lobbies etc.), economic actors like the multinationals and the media. None of these is elected, yet they certainly exercise power. Citizens recognise that neither they nor legislatures have as much power over them as they might, so tend to become either disenchanted with politics as such or are radicalised (e.g. the rise of the radical right, the “Occupy” movements, the Tea Party). The complexity of interactions between global and local, between economic and political processes result in a clear sense of loss of agency. No one seems to have much idea how to restore this.
Another dimension of these processes of depoliticisation is the longer term (and obviously unintended) consequence of the collapse of communism and the dissolution of class-based politics. The outcome has been a technocratisation and bureaucratisation of areas of decision making, removing them from the political perspective, the rise of “politics as management”, which in reality is not politics at all, and the ever more widespread reliance on technical language and procedures that eliminate participation and agency.
To these may be added a particular facet of media power (see also the earlier blog entry), that the media drive the growing distrust of politics by their sensationalist and often hyperbolic exposures of abuses of power. Sometimes these abuses are real, sometimes they are trivial, at others these accounts of politicians misbehaving attack form rather than content; in such cases politicians may not actually have done anything wrong, but the media presentation is such that they are held responsible for something, i.e. whatever it is they are doing, it’s dubious or wrong.
The evidence may be thin, the narrative may be full of holes or actually mendacious, but the media have succeeded in establishing and sustaining a climate of suspicion in which the exercise of power is widely seen as inherently dubious. In other words, there is virtually no burden of proof needed where politicians are concerned, even if this is not applied to non-elected agents of power. Besides, the emphasis placed by the media on persons rather than issues devalues institutional authority and transforms politics into clashes of people, rather than making it the target of rational debate, as democratic theory supposes.
This state of affairs has brought about an evident discrediting of politicians and with that, of politics itself, which then has had a knock-on effect in accelerating the distrust sketched above. The outcome is paradoxical. There is a depoliticisation in some areas, but this is paralleled by a radical repoliticisation elsewhere. Overall, taken together with the complexity factor and the fragmentation, it is hardly surprising that the distrust of and frustration with politics is as widespread as it is.
Sch. Gy.
In the event, the session ran out of time and I wasn’t called upon to speak (even at the two-minute length that we are allocated at plenaries), but this is what I would have said had I been (or something close to it).
The problem of declining trust in Europe and EU institutions should not be looked at purely in the EU context, because it is a phenomenon that is affecting democratic politics everywhere. The reality is that the Western world is going through a paradigm shift and various transformations are taking place that we can only see in part or not at all (yet).
One of these processes, the one that bears most directly on trust, is that in the last two-three decades the parameters of politics have changed. Whereas, in previous times, politics was concentrated on party allegiance, elections, legislative activity, that concentration has been much diluted and power is, in consequence, far more fragmented than before (see also the blog entry “Where has all the power gone?”).
The most obvious new loci of power, as noted previously, are the new political actors (civil society, lobbies etc.), economic actors like the multinationals and the media. None of these is elected, yet they certainly exercise power. Citizens recognise that neither they nor legislatures have as much power over them as they might, so tend to become either disenchanted with politics as such or are radicalised (e.g. the rise of the radical right, the “Occupy” movements, the Tea Party). The complexity of interactions between global and local, between economic and political processes result in a clear sense of loss of agency. No one seems to have much idea how to restore this.
Another dimension of these processes of depoliticisation is the longer term (and obviously unintended) consequence of the collapse of communism and the dissolution of class-based politics. The outcome has been a technocratisation and bureaucratisation of areas of decision making, removing them from the political perspective, the rise of “politics as management”, which in reality is not politics at all, and the ever more widespread reliance on technical language and procedures that eliminate participation and agency.
To these may be added a particular facet of media power (see also the earlier blog entry), that the media drive the growing distrust of politics by their sensationalist and often hyperbolic exposures of abuses of power. Sometimes these abuses are real, sometimes they are trivial, at others these accounts of politicians misbehaving attack form rather than content; in such cases politicians may not actually have done anything wrong, but the media presentation is such that they are held responsible for something, i.e. whatever it is they are doing, it’s dubious or wrong.
The evidence may be thin, the narrative may be full of holes or actually mendacious, but the media have succeeded in establishing and sustaining a climate of suspicion in which the exercise of power is widely seen as inherently dubious. In other words, there is virtually no burden of proof needed where politicians are concerned, even if this is not applied to non-elected agents of power. Besides, the emphasis placed by the media on persons rather than issues devalues institutional authority and transforms politics into clashes of people, rather than making it the target of rational debate, as democratic theory supposes.
This state of affairs has brought about an evident discrediting of politicians and with that, of politics itself, which then has had a knock-on effect in accelerating the distrust sketched above. The outcome is paradoxical. There is a depoliticisation in some areas, but this is paralleled by a radical repoliticisation elsewhere. Overall, taken together with the complexity factor and the fragmentation, it is hardly surprising that the distrust of and frustration with politics is as widespread as it is.
Sch. Gy.
Friday 7 October 2011
Democratic Transition
A book launch was held on 6 October in Budapest, for two books published by ICDT (International Center for Democratic Transition). The two books are;
Heltai András, ed. Elbeszélt történelem: huszonöten a közép-kelet-európai demokratikus átmenetről, [Narrated history: 25 interviews on democratic transition] (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011)
Iván Bába ,The Hungarian Transition: Parties and Movements in the Political Regime Change in Hungary between 1987 and 1994, (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011).
To these two should be added two more, likewise dealing with the end of communism in Hungary:
Iván Bába Békes átmenet? Adalékok a kialkudott rendszerváltoztatáshoz 2007 [Peaceful transition? Addenda to the bargained system shift], (Argumentum, 2007)
Iván Bába, ed. Felgyorsult történelem: 18 beszélgetés a szocializmus bukásáról [Accelerated History: Eighteen interviews about the fall of socialism] (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011)
This was my introductory address:
Iván Bába was involved in all four books, while András Heltai edited the volume of interviews; and I have a very small interest to declare. I discussed the English translation of Iván’s text with particular reference to the word “népi”, how to render it into acceptable English. Borbándi could use the word “populism” in the 1980s – Der ungarische Populismus – but subsequently the word acquired such negative connotations that something else was needed. I was the one, the guilty party, who suggested “demotic”.
Some thoughts about methodology and content of these books
[1] Memory, oral history is inevitably only partly reliable; memories fade, distort, beautify the past, maybe turn self-exculpatory. When a particular event or set of events has been rehearsed, retold several times, we inevitably give them coherence that they did not have at the time – this is well known to social psychology. But this does not mean that the entire exercise is useless. Where it becomes valuable is in two areas. They can point towards particular events and give them a saliency that they would not otherwise have, and thereby allow us to see processes that would possibly remain latent. This doesn’t mean that people are lying. That particular trope that whatever we disagree with or see in a different light should be dismissed as mendacious, that attitude is a particular dysfunction of post-communist thinking, that every cause must have an effect, that if something has happened, someone made it happen. That is the ideological thinking that Hannah Arendt identified. No, there is accident, coincidence, happenstance, error, chance in the world. This does not mean, however, that there are no covert processes, there are, but we should be careful in making distinctions.
I think that the political significance of the 1990 taxi blockade illustrates this proposition, how it was seen at the time and what we know now are very different. It was seen as spontaneous – and fortuitously I was in Budapest at the time, I recall that I had great trouble getting to the airport – but after the events, we can now see the hand the of the security services operating against the Antall government and we can also see the way in which the Free Democrats sought to take advantage of the upheaval. It didn’t become a putsch, but it could just have been.
[2] Then, when several memories are placed side by side, some of the distortions become visible, a kind of intellectual triangulation takes place and this can be very helpful in the construction of a cogent account. The various interviews in these collections do exactly that, they allow us to put together a persuasive narrative of the past and, not least, they can let us see some of the aetiology of events, without ideological thinking.
[3] To this I would add a bit of genealogy. I don’t know how many people here remember the late György Urbán, formerly head of the Hungarian section of RFE. I knew him well in London. Among other activities, he put together a series of interview collections with a great variety of people and these are still of value. Indeed, they have been unjustly forgotten. So, maybe oral history and the exploration of the past through recalled memory has a particular Hungarian dimension – we should register it as a Hungaricum, perhaps.
[4] The key shared feature of late communism, the 1980s, that comes out of these volumes is the decay of the system. Leszek Kołakowski described it as the “decomposition” of both system and ideology. What this generated was a mounting impatience on the part of the middle generation with the system stability that had become stasis – a commitment to no change, whereas the middle generation of technocrats wanted change and wanted power. This was a shared feature of late communism more or less everywhere. They wanted the old, ideological, very conservative rulers out of the way, in order to launch something more dynamic. Crucial here was that they were not democrats, they firmly believed that they knew better than society – this is a universal feature of technocracy – and they sought power to put their ideas into practice.
Some of the cultural intellectuals did want democracy, though they too were chary of handing too much power to the people. That, of course, is the standard dilemma of reformers, how to redistribute power without the process sliding out of control and the previous holders of power ending up swinging from the lampposts or on the guillotine. The memory of the Terror of 1793-1794 in France haunts Europe still. We can see analogies in the Arab spring today.
[5] There is something unusual, even striking about these works. The thought that the participants in a major historical turning point should be ready and able to sit down and recall their activities in tranquillity, well after the events, is new. A small thought experiment. It is quite inconceivable, it seems to me, that, say, in 1825 Robespierre, Danton, Louis XVI and Napoleon would have been able to do likewise; not least, they were all dead. And the possibility of Lenin, Trotsky, Martov and Kerensky doing so in 1937 is even more bizarre. So this tells us something about the temper of our times and, it seems to me, about the legacy of non-violent political change, as well as the imperative felt by historical actors to leave their version of the story on the record. These books have taken full advantage of this shift; I see it as a quintessential quality of our post-modern age.
[6] Where the books launched today add further insights is into how the technocrats and cultural intellectuals, which includes the democratic opposition of the 1980s, evolved once the basic architecture of democratic institutions was laid down. I think we can characterise this evolution as a double disappointment. The people involved were disappointed because – I would suggest this, though this can certainly be read from today’s volumes – of Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity”, people just didn’t and wouldn’t behave as they should have done, as the intellectual constructs would have had them behave. They were contrary, difficult and unpredictable. The other disappointment was political power itself, which turned out to be more complex and more contradictory than anyone predicted. The technocrats were irritated at what they regarded as the irrational behaviour of both society and the politicians who had constituencies to satisfy. And they still are.
[7] What further emerges from these volumes is that the collapse of communism was heavily elite-led. While there was indeed popular participation in some countries, like Czechoslovakia and Estonia, in Hungary the role of society was at best secondary. This feature of the Hungarian transformation necessarily meant that the new system would reflect the cleavages within the Hungarian elite. And the key cleavage turned out to be the one that has been a part of the Hungarian scene since the early 1900s, the one between those who argued that Hungarian modernity should be constructed largely or entirely on the basis of Western experience, the urbanists, as against those who insisted that Hungarian modernity should be defined by Hungary’s own resources, the demoticists. This cleavage remains with us to this day and it has been mapped onto party politics. Iván Bába’s account is essential reading here, as it provides a thorough and judicious assessment of both. András Heltai’s collection implies that while not absent elsewhere, this cleavage was much less important in other former communist states.
[8] Finally, a word on nomenclature. What to call the events of 1989 is itself in dispute. Was it a revolution? Not in Hungary it wasn’t, though the Czechs had a velvet revolution and the Estonians a singing one, so here we speak of regime change, system shift, possibly of political metamorphosis. Precisely because the popular input was limited, many features of the previous system survived and were salvaged, above all where power and resources were concerned. This also says something about the Western analyses of the regime transition, namely that if new institutions are set up, that would in itself ensure that democratic behaviour and values would rapidly take root. This turned out to be illusory, at any rate in part, to be a confusion between form and content. Content does not invariably follow form, there are façades, appearances and the externalisation of behaviour, where the new forms are maintained, but hide a different reality.
It may be that it really does need a revolution to secure the meeting of form and content. The word revolution should not be understood in its literal sense of barricades in the streets, crowds, violence and blood – the models left us by the French and Russian revolutions; rather it should be seen as a thoroughgoing breach in the flow of history, a disjunction, a caesura. Twenty years later, the compensatory radical shift – historians can decide whether this constituted a “voting booth revolution” - can be said to have arrived in Hungary with the two-thirds majority gained by Fidesz and the Christian Democrats in the 2010 elections. Let’s hope that the participants of these events will give their version of what happened and what is happening well before another 20 years have passed.
Sch. Gy.
Heltai András, ed. Elbeszélt történelem: huszonöten a közép-kelet-európai demokratikus átmenetről, [Narrated history: 25 interviews on democratic transition] (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011)
Iván Bába ,The Hungarian Transition: Parties and Movements in the Political Regime Change in Hungary between 1987 and 1994, (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011).
To these two should be added two more, likewise dealing with the end of communism in Hungary:
Iván Bába Békes átmenet? Adalékok a kialkudott rendszerváltoztatáshoz 2007 [Peaceful transition? Addenda to the bargained system shift], (Argumentum, 2007)
Iván Bába, ed. Felgyorsult történelem: 18 beszélgetés a szocializmus bukásáról [Accelerated History: Eighteen interviews about the fall of socialism] (Demokratikus Átalakulásért Intezet, 2011)
This was my introductory address:
Iván Bába was involved in all four books, while András Heltai edited the volume of interviews; and I have a very small interest to declare. I discussed the English translation of Iván’s text with particular reference to the word “népi”, how to render it into acceptable English. Borbándi could use the word “populism” in the 1980s – Der ungarische Populismus – but subsequently the word acquired such negative connotations that something else was needed. I was the one, the guilty party, who suggested “demotic”.
Some thoughts about methodology and content of these books
[1] Memory, oral history is inevitably only partly reliable; memories fade, distort, beautify the past, maybe turn self-exculpatory. When a particular event or set of events has been rehearsed, retold several times, we inevitably give them coherence that they did not have at the time – this is well known to social psychology. But this does not mean that the entire exercise is useless. Where it becomes valuable is in two areas. They can point towards particular events and give them a saliency that they would not otherwise have, and thereby allow us to see processes that would possibly remain latent. This doesn’t mean that people are lying. That particular trope that whatever we disagree with or see in a different light should be dismissed as mendacious, that attitude is a particular dysfunction of post-communist thinking, that every cause must have an effect, that if something has happened, someone made it happen. That is the ideological thinking that Hannah Arendt identified. No, there is accident, coincidence, happenstance, error, chance in the world. This does not mean, however, that there are no covert processes, there are, but we should be careful in making distinctions.
I think that the political significance of the 1990 taxi blockade illustrates this proposition, how it was seen at the time and what we know now are very different. It was seen as spontaneous – and fortuitously I was in Budapest at the time, I recall that I had great trouble getting to the airport – but after the events, we can now see the hand the of the security services operating against the Antall government and we can also see the way in which the Free Democrats sought to take advantage of the upheaval. It didn’t become a putsch, but it could just have been.
[2] Then, when several memories are placed side by side, some of the distortions become visible, a kind of intellectual triangulation takes place and this can be very helpful in the construction of a cogent account. The various interviews in these collections do exactly that, they allow us to put together a persuasive narrative of the past and, not least, they can let us see some of the aetiology of events, without ideological thinking.
[3] To this I would add a bit of genealogy. I don’t know how many people here remember the late György Urbán, formerly head of the Hungarian section of RFE. I knew him well in London. Among other activities, he put together a series of interview collections with a great variety of people and these are still of value. Indeed, they have been unjustly forgotten. So, maybe oral history and the exploration of the past through recalled memory has a particular Hungarian dimension – we should register it as a Hungaricum, perhaps.
[4] The key shared feature of late communism, the 1980s, that comes out of these volumes is the decay of the system. Leszek Kołakowski described it as the “decomposition” of both system and ideology. What this generated was a mounting impatience on the part of the middle generation with the system stability that had become stasis – a commitment to no change, whereas the middle generation of technocrats wanted change and wanted power. This was a shared feature of late communism more or less everywhere. They wanted the old, ideological, very conservative rulers out of the way, in order to launch something more dynamic. Crucial here was that they were not democrats, they firmly believed that they knew better than society – this is a universal feature of technocracy – and they sought power to put their ideas into practice.
Some of the cultural intellectuals did want democracy, though they too were chary of handing too much power to the people. That, of course, is the standard dilemma of reformers, how to redistribute power without the process sliding out of control and the previous holders of power ending up swinging from the lampposts or on the guillotine. The memory of the Terror of 1793-1794 in France haunts Europe still. We can see analogies in the Arab spring today.
[5] There is something unusual, even striking about these works. The thought that the participants in a major historical turning point should be ready and able to sit down and recall their activities in tranquillity, well after the events, is new. A small thought experiment. It is quite inconceivable, it seems to me, that, say, in 1825 Robespierre, Danton, Louis XVI and Napoleon would have been able to do likewise; not least, they were all dead. And the possibility of Lenin, Trotsky, Martov and Kerensky doing so in 1937 is even more bizarre. So this tells us something about the temper of our times and, it seems to me, about the legacy of non-violent political change, as well as the imperative felt by historical actors to leave their version of the story on the record. These books have taken full advantage of this shift; I see it as a quintessential quality of our post-modern age.
[6] Where the books launched today add further insights is into how the technocrats and cultural intellectuals, which includes the democratic opposition of the 1980s, evolved once the basic architecture of democratic institutions was laid down. I think we can characterise this evolution as a double disappointment. The people involved were disappointed because – I would suggest this, though this can certainly be read from today’s volumes – of Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity”, people just didn’t and wouldn’t behave as they should have done, as the intellectual constructs would have had them behave. They were contrary, difficult and unpredictable. The other disappointment was political power itself, which turned out to be more complex and more contradictory than anyone predicted. The technocrats were irritated at what they regarded as the irrational behaviour of both society and the politicians who had constituencies to satisfy. And they still are.
[7] What further emerges from these volumes is that the collapse of communism was heavily elite-led. While there was indeed popular participation in some countries, like Czechoslovakia and Estonia, in Hungary the role of society was at best secondary. This feature of the Hungarian transformation necessarily meant that the new system would reflect the cleavages within the Hungarian elite. And the key cleavage turned out to be the one that has been a part of the Hungarian scene since the early 1900s, the one between those who argued that Hungarian modernity should be constructed largely or entirely on the basis of Western experience, the urbanists, as against those who insisted that Hungarian modernity should be defined by Hungary’s own resources, the demoticists. This cleavage remains with us to this day and it has been mapped onto party politics. Iván Bába’s account is essential reading here, as it provides a thorough and judicious assessment of both. András Heltai’s collection implies that while not absent elsewhere, this cleavage was much less important in other former communist states.
[8] Finally, a word on nomenclature. What to call the events of 1989 is itself in dispute. Was it a revolution? Not in Hungary it wasn’t, though the Czechs had a velvet revolution and the Estonians a singing one, so here we speak of regime change, system shift, possibly of political metamorphosis. Precisely because the popular input was limited, many features of the previous system survived and were salvaged, above all where power and resources were concerned. This also says something about the Western analyses of the regime transition, namely that if new institutions are set up, that would in itself ensure that democratic behaviour and values would rapidly take root. This turned out to be illusory, at any rate in part, to be a confusion between form and content. Content does not invariably follow form, there are façades, appearances and the externalisation of behaviour, where the new forms are maintained, but hide a different reality.
It may be that it really does need a revolution to secure the meeting of form and content. The word revolution should not be understood in its literal sense of barricades in the streets, crowds, violence and blood – the models left us by the French and Russian revolutions; rather it should be seen as a thoroughgoing breach in the flow of history, a disjunction, a caesura. Twenty years later, the compensatory radical shift – historians can decide whether this constituted a “voting booth revolution” - can be said to have arrived in Hungary with the two-thirds majority gained by Fidesz and the Christian Democrats in the 2010 elections. Let’s hope that the participants of these events will give their version of what happened and what is happening well before another 20 years have passed.
Sch. Gy.
Sunday 2 October 2011
Developments in the Middle East
The European Parliament held debates on the Middle East on the 14 and the 27 September. These were my contributions.
I
Most of the attention attracted by the Arab Spring has focused on internal developments, as is right and proper. However, from the perspective of the Middle Eastern region as a whole, it is vital to recognise that the Arab Spring is also transforming the geostrategic environment. The balance of power between Israel and its neighbours has shifted.
Mubarak’s Egypt was committed to a policy of zero change and this included relations with Israel. But this is moving in a different direction as hitherto marginalised political forces in Egypt are emerging. Israel likewise had a stable neighbour under the repressive Assad regime in Syria, where the outcome of the pressure for change remains unclear. There is no guarantee that a putative end of the Assad regime will be of benefit to Israel. At the same time, Turkey has initiated a far-reaching improvement of its links with the Arab world and has inevitably downgraded its relations with Israel.
In an ideal world, this should provide an incentive for Israel to find a settlement with the Palestinians and to do so quickly. Time is running out and it is vital for Israel’s future security that it come to terms with the changes; if not, it will very likely be coerced into them, in much less favourable circumstances.
II
The Middle East is undergoing a palpable transformation - the Arab spring, the democracy movements, the decline of the autocrats - all testify to this and demand an urgent reassessment. Certain givens have changed and there are, therefore, new factors that determine action.
In this context, the bid for the full recognition of Palestinian statehood has become reality, whether the United Nations accepts this or not. Hence it is irrelevant that the United States has already signalled that it will veto the Palestinian application, because the idea of a Palestinian state has garnered substantial support around the world. Probably a majority of the members of the UN are in favour. So this acceptance of Palestinian statehood is almost certainly irreversible as a political fact.
Legally, of course, nothing has happened, but political realities and legal status are often at variance, as in this case. What is puzzling is Israel's stolid rejection of the Palestinian position, despite all the evidence that the much discussed two-state solution is the most likely outcome - true, a long term outcome - of the process.
The implication is that Israel will eventually be constrained to accept the Palestinian bid for statehood, so the sooner it does so, the better for all concerned. It is regrettable, then, that Israel and its supporters are basically disregarding a new political fact, the coming of Palestinian statehood.
Sch. Gy
I
Most of the attention attracted by the Arab Spring has focused on internal developments, as is right and proper. However, from the perspective of the Middle Eastern region as a whole, it is vital to recognise that the Arab Spring is also transforming the geostrategic environment. The balance of power between Israel and its neighbours has shifted.
Mubarak’s Egypt was committed to a policy of zero change and this included relations with Israel. But this is moving in a different direction as hitherto marginalised political forces in Egypt are emerging. Israel likewise had a stable neighbour under the repressive Assad regime in Syria, where the outcome of the pressure for change remains unclear. There is no guarantee that a putative end of the Assad regime will be of benefit to Israel. At the same time, Turkey has initiated a far-reaching improvement of its links with the Arab world and has inevitably downgraded its relations with Israel.
In an ideal world, this should provide an incentive for Israel to find a settlement with the Palestinians and to do so quickly. Time is running out and it is vital for Israel’s future security that it come to terms with the changes; if not, it will very likely be coerced into them, in much less favourable circumstances.
II
The Middle East is undergoing a palpable transformation - the Arab spring, the democracy movements, the decline of the autocrats - all testify to this and demand an urgent reassessment. Certain givens have changed and there are, therefore, new factors that determine action.
In this context, the bid for the full recognition of Palestinian statehood has become reality, whether the United Nations accepts this or not. Hence it is irrelevant that the United States has already signalled that it will veto the Palestinian application, because the idea of a Palestinian state has garnered substantial support around the world. Probably a majority of the members of the UN are in favour. So this acceptance of Palestinian statehood is almost certainly irreversible as a political fact.
Legally, of course, nothing has happened, but political realities and legal status are often at variance, as in this case. What is puzzling is Israel's stolid rejection of the Palestinian position, despite all the evidence that the much discussed two-state solution is the most likely outcome - true, a long term outcome - of the process.
The implication is that Israel will eventually be constrained to accept the Palestinian bid for statehood, so the sooner it does so, the better for all concerned. It is regrettable, then, that Israel and its supporters are basically disregarding a new political fact, the coming of Palestinian statehood.
Sch. Gy
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