Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s illiberal democracy

This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism.

Democracy revisited? Prospects of (liberal) democracy (not only) in the East-Central Europe

Scholarly debate about the prospects of democracy have undergone a fundamental change in the last three decades. While the period of the 1990s might be distinguished by extensive optimism, in the 2000s we can observe a distinct change towards a more restrained perception. Furthermore, the last decade might be evaluated as pessimistic in the social sciences on the grounds of economic recession after 2008 as well other crisis in an economic, societal and political senses. The rather distinctive terms used for the expression of doubts about the pro-democratic development and consolidation, such as ‘semi-consolidated’, ‘new’ or ‘young’ democracy, or de-democratisation, were replaced with more dramatic expressions such as illiberal democracy, democratic backsliding, hybrid, regime, soft dictatorship and ‘the light that failed’, as Krastev described the recent image of East-Central Europe in an almost dystopic manner. While in the 1990s the Slovak version of democratura – Mečiarism – was perceived as the exception, in the late 2010s populist neo-illiberal regimes became the dominant shape of regimes in (East)Central Europe. This review essay presents three recent analyses of the democratic backsliding and state capture (not only) in East-Central Europe and frames this presentation into the more extensive literature review.

Political thought in Central and Eastern Europe: The open society, its friends, and enemies*

A review essay of key works and trends in the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe, before and after 1989. The topics examined include the nature of the 1989 velvet revolutions in the region, debates on civil society, democratization, the relationship between politics, economics, and culture, nationalism, legal reform, feminism, and “illiberal democracy.” The review essay concludes with an assessment of the most recent trends in the region.

Populist discourse and active metaphors in the 2016 US presidential elections

In recent years, the specter of populism has grown increasingly restless in the Western world and beyond. This new populism has been observed in different political movements in Europe; the Brexit movement in the UK, Podemos and Vox in Spain, Rassemblement National in France, Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, and Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy in Hungary. Inevitably, it is most commonly associated with the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA in 2016. In this paper, a pragmatic interaction theory of metaphorical utterances is applied to a corpus of speeches given by candidates during the American 2016 presidential elections. First, speeches and candidates were graded for populism according to a holistic grading method. Secondly, speeches were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate if and how active metaphorical language was used to construct the populist frame. The findings suggest that active metaphors can be useful for politicians who wish to counter the dominant conventional frames, and so can serve the ideological purposes of populists and non-populists alike. Therefore, this paper also argues that novel metaphorical concepts and active metaphorical utterances make important contributions to the communication of ideologies in political discourse and should not be overlooked by analysts.