Woven memory
An art exhibition conjures up the silent spectre of the Holocaust in Hungary to explore apparently incompatible recollections, confront contradictory perspectives and engage with conflicting...
View ArticleAn era of constitutional reform?
It is no coincidence that in both France and the US, nations uniquely proud of their democratic traditions, debates are emerging about constitutional reform. Recent articles explain why. The post An...
View ArticleYou can’t lose democratic elections if they don’t exist
It would have taken a miracle for Viktor Orbán to lose the election. Hungary is a fortified kleptocracy where the ruling party has captured the state and controls 80% of the media. It certainly didn’t...
View ArticleTeaching diary
Teachers in Hungary are on a wildcat strike and pupils are demanding their pedagogues be paid. Public education has long been at the forefront of the Orbán administration’s centralizing frenzy, which...
View ArticleThe life of a dog
Born into a cosmopolitan Jewish family, Ferenc Fejtő lived a turbulent youth as a Marxist and social democrat in Horthy’s Hungary. Having fled just before the fascist rise to power, he led a more...
View ArticleHow democracies transform, fast and slow
For all its acuity, John Keane's theory of democide risks confusing democratic degradation with a transformation of the political debate. Not only that, it fails to account for the radicalization of...
View ArticleHungary: From housing justice to municipal opposition
Hopes raised in 2019 of municipal counter-hegemony in Hungary have been disappointed. But in Budapest, the idea of progressive local government is kept alive by the movement for housing justice. The...
View ArticleOur daily nation
Despite decades of socialist internationalism, Hungary’s nationalist narrative has since become one of the most prevailing in Eastern Europe. While scholars may define the coexistence of nationalism...
View ArticleLiving dead democracy
Overlapping crises, enforced political passivity, a new political normal: all things that gradually dismantle a democracy. Ferenc Laczó talks democide in a new episode of Gagarin. The post Living dead...
View ArticleWhat is to be done when nothing is to be done?
Higher education is a prime target of illiberal state capture. The assault on scientific freedom is sometimes couched in the jargon of neoliberalism, at other times it uses the language of nationalism...
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Orbán’s assault on academic freedom
The very existence of the private, internationally renowned Central European University (CEU) in Budapest is under threat. Following attacks by the state controlled Hungarian press, a newly drafted law...
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Now who’s living in truth?
Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Pankaj Mishra encouraged readers of the New Yorker to turn to the work of a Czech anti-communist dissident, Václav Havel, for guidance in our troubled times....
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Decriminalizing childbirth
The leader is slain but the war is won: after 60 years of illegality and decades of persecution, home birthing is now legal in Hungary, in large part due to Ágnes Geréb’s advocacy and activism. Yet...
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Is there illiberal democracy?
A spectre is haunting Europe and the United States; the spectre of illiberal democracy. More from Eurozine, analysing the context of this result: Holly Case looks at the role of native Americans in...
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The ‘Bangkok of Europe’
Hungary is a major player in the European sex trade, not only as a host country for sex tourism and domestic punters, but also as a major provider of the labour force that works in western European...
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Populism in power in Hungary
In the past decade – starting around 2006, accelerating and seemingly consolidating in 2008-11, but radicalizing even further, especially since 2015 – populism has gained ground in Hungarian politics...
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Hungary’s real Indians
When he was younger, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán famously feathered his speeches with pithy and satirical references to the wisdom of the ‘Dakota Indians’: ‘If you find yourself sitting on a...
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What happened in Hungary
The Hungarian election on 8 April saw an exceptionally high voter turnout, which at one point seemed to augur well for the opposition. Over 68 percent of voters cast a ballot, but in the event Viktor...
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Ubu Roi in Hungary
Metaphors from football and war reporting have become popular in Hungarian public debate since Orbán came to power in 2010. Every day brings news of ‘raging battles’ and ‘great victories’; a well-known...
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Intellectual paths in central Europe
At the latest Eurozine conference of European editors of cultural journals in November 2018, an English participant remarked, a bit puzzled, how only in central Europe do people still talk in all...
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Fidesz, Hungary, and the EU
The Traders drive Jesus away from the Temple. (Oil on canvas, 2019.) Courtesy of the artist, Balázs Pálfi. László Győri says that Orbán’s total offensive on the Hungarian cultural establishment...
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The Great Substitution
The same year (1877) Dostoevsky wrote his famous short story, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,’ in which the title character has to leave the planet and actively participate in the Fall from Grace in...
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A betrayal by the intellectuals
In the late 1980s I was a lecturer in social anthropology at Cambridge University. Well before the internet, we did not even have a television at home. For news I was dependent on BBC radio, the papers...
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The fear of being torn apart
Fidesz underlined the limits of euroscepticism in Hungary with an EP campaign that earned the party suspension from the European People’s Party. However, central government’s tight control over the...
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Remembering to forget
The mass murders in New Zealand mosques in March have once again raised questions on how far narratives shaped by media frenzy or political campaigns affect or animate brutality and violence. The...
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Dissidence – doubt – creativity
In November 1983, Milan Kundera published his famous essay on ‘The tragedy of Central Europe’. He spoke of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland as the West’s forgotten eastern border, ‘un occident...
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The miracle that never materialized
Photo by kumoma lab on Unsplash The EP elections in Finland reflect the fallout from four years of highly unpopular rightwing rule, with the Centre Party losing the support that had previously secured...
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A dream is not nothing
A Hungarian writer, known worldwide; a political thinker who greatly influenced the intellectual life of the last fin de siècle; the third member of the great Central European triad, together with...
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The war on rough sleeping
Penalizing and criminalizing homelessness is nothing new in many European countries. The 2018 seventh amendment of the Fundamental Law of Hungary nonetheless caused local and international uproar.Shaun...
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Unaltered dilemmas and novel challenges
Since 1989, eastern European countries have made enormous efforts to adopt political, economic, and cultural models from Western free-market liberal democracies. They mostly pursued this by imitating...
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Gender craze
On October 12 2018, the Hungarian government forcibly discontinued university programmes and the MA in Gender Studies through Decree No. 188/2018 (X. 12.), published in the Hungarian Bulletin. Since...
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Gone viral
Conspiracy theories and rumours often spread in the wake of negative events, especially if these events are new and partly unknown. This is exactly what happened in the case of the coronavirus. The...
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Orbán’s political product
Eurozine newsletter 6/2020 Disease control Mapping violations of free speech under the cloak of the coronavirus crisis Jemimah Steinfeld We created this beast The political ecology of COVID-19 Bram...
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Blind in one eye
The ‘Hungary question’ has been hanging over the EU ever since the European Parliament voted back in September 2018 to call on the Council to trigger the Article 7 procedure against the country....
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Populism in power
Eurozine review 7/2020 The long relationship Ord&Bild 1-2/2020 Eurozine Review What happened to democratic socialism? Il Mulino 1/2020 Eurozine Review Populism in power Esprit 4/2020 Eurozine...
View ArticleParadox Europa
Ladies and gentlemen, we have just heard Ágnes Heller’s voice. Tonight is dedicated to the lasting echo of her words and thoughts. It is, therefore, most fitting that my remarks remain with her – this...
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Watch your mouth!
The collapse of independent Hungarian news site Index.hu in July, following the politically motivated sacking of its editor-in-chief and resignation of its entire staff, focused attention on a...
View ArticleWatch your mouth! Journalism now and tomorrow
Market upheavals and media change, state capture and ownership concentration, political interference and self-censorship – the issues facing journalism today are many. The first part of the 31st...
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The drainpipe of destiny
Read more from our 23/2020 newsletter A feminist revolution? On the female face of the Belarusian protests Olga Dryndova Pandemic rape in India The corona crisis, informal gendered support and...
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A country of grumblers?
Something is rotten in Hungary, as the international media seems keen on pointing out. Why it is rotten, however, is rarely explained. Foreign interest in Hungarian politics has increased, especially...
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The Hungarian comic tradition
Partisan strategies Eurozine Review 01/2021 Power and protest in Belarus Osteuropa 10–11/2020 Eurozine Review Dialogues with the archive La Revue nouvelle 8/2020 Eurozine Review Brexit’s revivalist...
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A muscle memory of misery
One benevolent lie popular with Hungarians is Palma sub pondere crescit, ‘the palm grows under weight’. It suggests something similar to ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, another outrageously...
View ArticleTo each their own censorship
Eurozine · Under pressure: CEE journalists on how to deal with political interference How do journalists, academics and artists react to political pressure in their profession, on their institutions?...
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Viktor Orbán’s war on the media
A good part of the international audience only became familiar with the ongoing anti-democratic project in Hungary when the political upheaval of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election broke a narrative...
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The domination of football
This article was originally published in Eurozine’s German partner journal Blätter, issue 6/2021. When the 16th European Football Championship takes place between 11 June and 11 July, the European...
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Writing in opposition
Rosie Goldsmith meets writers Zsófia Bán and A. L. Kennedy to discuss upheavals in Hungarian cultural policy, the future of post-Brexit Britain and the status of literature in politicized societies...
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When all hope is lost, why not be optimistic?
Recently in Hungary, the decision to transfer ownership of the state-run University for Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest to a private, Fidesz-allied foundation spurred loud protests. Are there...
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Journalism under duress
Réka Kinga Papp: Irina, you are from Moscow and have lived there most of your life, with occasional trips of a couple of months or so outside Russia. Your connection with Eurozine dates from your stay...
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Curtailing academic freedom
Rüdiger Görner: Arthur Koestler famously argued in The act of creation that we should be creative about freedom. It is something we can and should create. This was a remarkable statement, I think, from...
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Women under the banner of friendship
The concept of friendship played an important role in the creation of a new world order amidst post-WWII reconstruction efforts. In countries such as Hungary, just as the Communist Party was...
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