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.