Borders, De-Borderization and Migration Narratives in Hungary

The events and processes of the recent decades drive us to awake from the hypnotic illusion of the ‘end of history’. The ‘return of history’ is not only a necessary step that has to be taken, but it is ontologically inevitable. Blinded by the mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms, we need to see that the processes of the 21st century are no different from the old politics which were recorded in history, thus it is unavoidable to think within the ‘dialectics of Old and New’. Globalization, relativization of values, removal of borders and the re-narration of borders in previously unseen areas lead us to an existential zero point. Borders play significant self-determining and self-definition role in our life and society, thus their relocation, reorientation and blurring of their meaning is a question that has to be analysed and closely watched. Together with the narration of borders, the narration of security plays major role. Migration and the question of open, permeable borders have become one of the most important security narrations of our everyday life.

Formation of a New Person as a Formational Meaning. The Era of Transformation in the History of Europe

The article draws attention to the fact that the phenomenon of marginality is the formation of one's own environment, although not completely dissolving into it. Traditional culture goes into the "basements" of society or manifests itself in the life and mentality of marginals. In a society affected by crisis, several cultural trajectories collide: descending, ascending and, for the marginalized, breaking traditional ties and creating their own, completely different world. In fact, marginality is the third culture, a special socio-cultural state. The article discusses its corresponding components. The prerequisites of global transformation are considered. The situation in Europe begins to change fundamentally at the turn of the I-II millennia. The formation of the era of European Transformation can begin with the XI-XIII centuries, when "Catholic" Europe appears. Phenomenal in its results was the "Renaissance of the XII century", the first truly pan-European Revival at the origins of the era of Transformation. With this, the movement towards a High Renaissance began. The Crusades (XI-XIII centuries) are particularly highlighted. After the Crusades, two variants of capitalism become promising and predominant in Europe and North America, and then their slow convergence continues. The XIII century became a milestone for contemporaries. On the one hand, Europe, it would seem, reached the end of history by creating some kind of optimal model. On the other hand, the reverse side of the idea of the "end of history" became clearly visible. The Mongols, having captured most of Eurasia, reformatted the ethno-political space. In this century, capitalist Europe is born, in fact, as a special development option. Highlighting the era of transformation does not mean that we should abandon the usual division of European history into known periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, modern times. This periodization successfully emphasizes social and economic aspects and provides a chronological understanding of transitional processes. The era of Transformation is more voluminous, since we are talking about the transition from a centuries-old traditional society to a new stage of human development. Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation created a new culture, the so-called bourgeois culture will have many faces, both international and national. The main thing is seen in the liberation of man from the former powerful civilizational model, Latin-Christian, i.e. Imperial-ecclesiastical, and ultimately - in the formation of a new type of man.

Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalist Christianity: History, Identity, and the Falsity of Peripeteic Dialectics

The recent upsurge of European nationalism is partially an attempt to address the ongoing identity crisis that began with the Bourgeois revolution, which expressed itself through positivistic scientism and aggressive secularization, and culminated in the post-World War II “liberal consensus”: representative democracy and free-market capitalism as the “end of history.” Due to the needs of capitalism after World War II, coupled with the liberalization and Americanization of European societies, there has been a growing presence of “non-identical” elements within Europe, which itself is reexamining the very geography of what it means to be European. In this essay, I explore the historical context of the current identity struggles that are facing Europeans. From a Critical Theory perspective, I challenge the idea that Christianity or a Christian age can be resurrected by ultra-nationalists in their attempt to combat the cosmopolitanism of Western modernity. Moreover, I demonstrate how such attempts to return to an idealized Christian identity are rooted in a false possibility: Peripeteic Dialectics, or “dialectics in reverse.”

The Phonostate at the End of History: Language, Nation, and a Scheme for World Peace in Edwardian South Africa

This article tells the story of the eccentric and unknown writer Albert William Alderson (1880–1963), a British South African office clerk whose father had helped found the De Beers diamond mining corporation with Cecil Rhodes. Alderson, despite having no academic background, wrote two books and several pamphlets arguing that world peace could be achieved by eliminating all the languages in the world other than English; he buttressed this claim with an elaborate account of the causes of war taken from his reading in world history, but also with extraordinary statements on the relation of language to personal agency. Although Alderson's arguments cannot be taken seriously, they are illuminating as an example of “naïve” liberalism pushed to its limit; that is, as a case-study in heterodoxy comparable to Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio. I conclude by suggesting that his work helped inspire one influential reader—C. K. Ogden, the founder of Basic English.