Jan-Werner Müller’s latest encounter with Hungary

Jan-Werner Müller has written a number of scholarly books and articles. I thought highly of several of his writings, but he loses all credibility when he writes about Hungary. And he does so often, it’s not going too far to suggest that he’s becoming obsessional about Hungary, the Fidesz government and, predictably Viktor Orbán.

His central message, in so far as one can be discerned, is that what the Fidesz government is doing is dangerous to democracy, it’s setting a terrible precedent (who knows, the Fidesz strategy might actually be working?) and is a frightful threat to liberalism.

One of his recent contributions appeared in the London Review of Books (paywall). It’s a meretricious piece of writing, spiked with half truths and decontextualised factoids. The underlying thinking, however, is rather more serious and raises vital questions of parity of esteem and respect for alternative ways of understanding political problems.

Not for the first time, someone coming with a liberal universalist epistemology seeks to impose the selfsame universalism on others who do things differently. The name for this is colonialism and it is an intellectual imperialist mindset that Müller epitomises, even to the extent of listening only to Hungary’s comprador intelligentsia. It’s something that Marx would certainly have been able to identify. By the same token, Müller’s liberalism does not include much in the way of tolerance and to judge from his writings on populism (here), his attitude to popular aspirations is strikingly elitist.

I wrote a letter to London Review of Books, challenging Müller on some his points about Hungary, but the LRB chose not to publish it. Here is slightly edited version of what I wrote:

Jan-Werner Müller relies on a sophisticated technique to create a less than reliable picture of Hungary under the Fidesz government. He provides plenty of information, but just not quite enough to give a balanced picture.

He starts by describing the events of 1956 as “an uprising”, evidently not being aware of the distinction between a revolution and an uprising (like the great French uprising of 1789 perhaps?). No Hungarian would ever describe 1956 as an uprising. Nor was the Kádár regime quite as agreeable as the rose-tinted view of it that Müller offers. He makes no mention of the petty humiliations of everyday life that much of the population had to undergo, of the way in which the communist system infantilised the people and denied them any concept of citizenship.

“Undermining the rule of law”, charges Müller, but offers no evidence; there is none. Then, allegedly, “paramilitaries in black uniforms patrol the streets”; no, they don’t, the Fidesz government banned them. Tourists are “liable to find themselves facing an angry crowd burning the EU flag”, he avers. Again, no. This happened once. And was the crowd really “angry”? Was he there? Just poetic licence, presumably, like so much else in his article.

“Shadow economy” and “tax evasion”, Müller asserts, yes, but these are diminishing thanks to the reforms passed by the Fidesz government. Or, a nice detail to make him appear authoritative, referring to the exit from communism, “which Hungarians simply call ‘the changes’”. No they don’t, though the few that Müller encountered might have simplified “rendszerváltás” for him. It’s best rendered as “system shift”. The “deep” v. “shallow” Hungarians contrast disappeared a long time ago; I haven’t heard it for 50 years. Incidentally, the word “shallow” is better translated as “dilute”. And in its time, in the 1930s, it was more directed against assimilated Germans, but never mind, why should Müller be accurate about Hungary?

And so it continues. The national theatre “on the banks of the Danube” (that bit’s right at least) may be “bombastic” to Müller, but one does not need accept him as a critic of the Central European aesthetic. Or Péter Medgyessy: yes, he was a banker, but rather more to the point, he had worked for the communist secret police. I’m not sure that Müller would have welcomed a former member of the Abwehr as German Chancellor in 1957, or would he? The parallel is exact.

Gyurcsány may have been charismatic to Müller, but then he is not Hungarian. And why, I wonder, does he not mention that Gyurcsány’s wealth was acquired during the semi-legal privatisations of state property of the late 1980s? Another missing detail – the initiative to have Gyurcsány prosecuted came from a member of the LMP, a leftwing, anti-Fidesz party.

The events of 23 October 2006 were really rather more than police “overreaction” to a demonstration. What took place was a massive attack on a peaceful demonstration, with the riot police firing tear gas grenades and rubber bullets directly into the crowd, with mounted police charges, the pursuit of dispersing demonstrators into the night and the torture of those caught – all this in an EU member state. It’s strange, though, that there was not a squeak about this at the time in the world media, even while since 2010 there has been constant criticism of the Fidesz government’s violation of human rights. A double standard? Well, some Hungarians can be forgiven for thinking so.

Or, again, Trianon; the problem was (and is) not that Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory, but that over 3 million Hungarians found themselves citizens of foreign states, something to which they never consented. This has seriously weakened the citizenship concept of the states involved, because they have proved incapable of accepting that their Hungarian population has ideals, aspirations, sense of the past that are different from those of the ethnic majority.

“It’s not clear how many responded or what they said” in response to the questionnaire about the draft constitution; both untrue. The figure is just under one million and the views expressed are freely available to anyone (who reads Hungarian).

Finally what Müller does not see is that constant attacks on Hungary from abroad, like his, do not go unnoticed. My constituents have become markedly more Eurosceptic and introverted in consequence, something I regret, and the attacks could well help to secure Fidesz a victory in the 2014 elections. No one likes to be criticised unfairly and that includes Hungarians.

Sch. Gy.

The Crisis in Europe Part I

What we are looking at is far more than an economic crisis and far more than a crisis of European integration, even if much of the analysis chooses to explore it from this perspective. While the perspective is valid in itself, it has the consequence of hiding other processes – political, cultural, sociological – that affect the crisis and, by ignoring them, we make the solution of the crisis less likely. In short, deep seated changes taking place in Europe and some of these are partly accelerated by the economic crisis, which has exposed the fragility of Western material well-being. It is in this sense that the word crisis is appropriate – social realities are increasingly out of alignment with institutions and elite thinking.

The crisis has also brought into question the reliability of both state and market as the central organising principle of Western democracy. After 1945, a great deal of trust was invested in the state as rational redistributor and allocator, as well as the ultimate source of rationality. By the late 1970s, this was being questioned and the dysfunctions of the state were to be eliminated by the market. The market, therefore, was seen as the supreme source of rationality. Note here that whereas as the state is and must be a political category, the market is understood as free of politics and is a primarily economic process, albeit culture, psychology and other factors are now recognised as forming a part of market behaviour. What this elevation of the market to paramountcy ignored, however, were and are the political implications of the shift, that this effectively amounted to abandoning politics and political inputs into the central processes of society. Democracy was thereby reduced to something narrower, almost to being a spectator with little legitimate points to make. At the same time, the functioning of the market was naturalised and to some extent sacralised. The supreme rationality of the market ruled and was above and beyond questioning; those who did raise objections were dismissed as “irrational” or as “dinosaurs” or “reactionaries”.

This supremacy of the market, together with the truth claim that market rationality would invariably produce the best answer, that these answers could be applied to any and all social problems, that markets would always return to equilibrium state became unquestionable and irrefutable propositions. One of the minor ironies of this is that it resembled Marxism-Leninism as the sole source of “truth” – all monistic systems do this – but unlike “real existing communism”, which relied on high levels of coercion, market liberalism “enforced” its legislative claims voluntarily, and it became a matter of something close to a faith or belief system. As with all monistic systems, akin to putting all one’s eggs into one basket, it became dangerously exposed to a single, overwhelming shock (cf. Taleb’s Black Swan).

Market supremacy did, however, generate a political counterpart, and this was what can be described as liberal individualism. The individual was invested with supreme, possibly sole, rationality, all interests were subordinated to economic, material or monetary factors, thereby ignoring the multiplicity of human motivations and the role of impulses like pride, the quest for power, status, aesthetics, religion (to name only a few) was simply screened out, regarded as tiresome irrelevancies.

Once the market is established as the paramount process, it then becomes important – possibly vital – to construct a discursive strategy that marginalises political activity, even while maintaining the appearance of politics and participation, as is proper in a democracy. This may be regarded as a shadow or penumbra of the market, a clear but fluid discursive strategy that offers the simulacrum of politics, operating in the preexisting institutional framework, but which is difficult if not impossible to interrogate. Unlike the language of Marxism-Leninism, which became dead, this liberal-market discourse remained and remains sufficiently open to be able to deal with challenges non-coercively. This may be seen as the outcome of the 1990s turn, the elaboration of a strategy that asserts that “politics is management”, or speaks of “good governance” or “benchmarking” and replaces political action with morality, a key aspect of which is to insist that the “spirit” of the process transcends all other possible readings, even while the definition of “spirit” remains in the hands of the dominant elite. It has proved to be an effective trick, because it is difficult to disprove, reverses the presumption of equal access to the truth, i.e. it is up to challenger to do this, and erodes the definition of the reality that might overturn the starting proposition. Thus alternative readings, other discourses are placed in a secondary, hierarchically inferior position and attempts to rely on, say, legal or administrative language can be set to one side. Arcadian shepherds and their semblables may be able to operate this system in a fair-minded way, but Arcadia is a very long way from contemporary Europe, hence the possibility (and reality) that arbitrariness, inconsistency and abuses of power can proliferate. The result is resentment on the part of those who do not agree with the quasi-belief system and are marginalised; and resentment is the breeding ground for polarisation, for the rise of counter-belief systems, for political hysteria and paranoia, all of which feed into extremism. Circumspice.

At the heart of the 1990s turn, the emergence of a vaguely centre-left consensus structured around liberal individualism, market freedom and the centrality of moral values (universalism, human rights, gender mainstreaming, citizenship replacing ethnicity, a democracy agenda). By this means, a morality-driven, value-centred discourse sought to create and sustain a particular concept of politics (the liberal consensus and moralisation are analysed in Chantal Mouffe’s work, notably in the book on populism edited by Francisco Panizza).

This concept can be regarded as an attempt at constructing a post-political politics, in that it sought to eliminate political conflict and preferred to resolve issues through “politics as management”, administratively or juridically. Crucially, this separated liberal democracy from the demos, because it necessarily excluded certain social strata, above all the semi-skilled working class. Those who would not or could not subscribe to the market-cum-morality concept of post-political politics – and there’s a contradiction in terms if ever there was one – were basically excluded from its remit. Although the proponents of this new order placed great emphasis on citizenship buttressed by the “empowering state”, in sociological reality, matters were different. Non-elite sectors of the demos were simply excluded from it, although they were certainly not seen as victims of social exclusion. Not surprisingly some of them turned elsewhere to find a political home – towards the extreme right and the extreme left.

Sch. Gy.