The Conflict in a Nutshell

At the end of March 2017, the Hungarian government introduced a bill issuing new criteria which foreign universities need to meet in order to operate in Hungary. The most demanding new condition is an international agreement between the government of Hungary and the government of the respective university’s country of origin. This requirement practically means that the right to conduct educational activities will no longer depend on professional criteria (e.g., on the decision of accreditation boards), but on the preferences of the government. Furthermore, the bill restricts the possibility for non-European universities to enter into cooperation with Hungarian universities. It also requires that foreign universities wishing to operate in Hungary must conduct actual education activities in their home country. Finally, it eliminates exemptions for work permits and requires that the name of the university differs clearly from the name of already registered universities even in foreign languages. Universities that do not meet even one of these new criteria will lose their license to operate. The bill was quickly named “Lex CEU” because most of these criteria affected only a single institution: Central European University (CEU).

CEU is a U.S.-chartered university that was established, along with another two dozen higher education institutions, with the explicit goal of delivering American-style education outside of the United States. It connects to the Hungarian higher education system through a legal entity whose name is the direct Hungarian translation of CEU. Its large number of non-European (mainly Americana and Canadian) professors benefitted from then-existing work permit exemptions.

The events that surrounded the bill’s introduction made it abundantly clear that the changes in the regulations had a political motive. A couple of hours before the bill was made public a pro-government website accused CEU, and other foreign universities operating in Hungary, of cheating on the basis of an unpublished government audit that was not even shared at that time with the affected universities. The bill itself was prepared in complete secrecy and was pushed through the legislature within a few days—relying on an expedited procedure—giving lawmakers fewer than twenty-four hours to debate the new rules. In the following days government officials and the representatives of the ruling party, Fidesz, accused CEU (or as they suddenly started to call it, the “Soros university”) of being a “virtual” or “fake” university. Some officials alleged that CEU, as part of a network of NGOs sponsored by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, is part of an international conspiracy against Hungary.

Despite the immediate negative reactions from domestic and international academic institutions and from American and EU diplomats, the parliamentary procedure was used by the ruling party to amend the law to make it even more difficult for CEU. As a university based in a federal state, its continuous operation now required the successful negotiation of two treaties, one between the Hungarian government and the State of New York, and another one between the Hungarian government and the U.S. federal government. The date of compliance was moved earlier, to January 1, 2018.

All requests for more reasonable deadlines, or for removing the necessity of federal-level agreements (given that education is not a federal matter in the United States and therefore the executive branch has no authority to sign such an agreement) were brushed aside. The protest of more than 20 Nobel laureates, many hundreds of universities and university associations across the globe, and a demonstration of close to 80,000 citizens in Budapest on April 9 in defense of CEU and academic freedom were dismissed as a coordinated campaign against the Hungarian government for its bravery in daring to reject the pro-refugee policies of the European Union. While some officials claimed that the purpose of the new regulation is simply to keep low-quality foreign universities out of the country, on April 5, the Minister of Human Capacities in a radio interview bluntly stated that “we do not want Central European University to continue operating in this form. There is no need to deny it. It must be openly stated.”^{Footnote 1}

Widespread public and international criticism of the law followed. During visits to CEU at the height of the crisis, both former German President Joachim Gauck and Nobel Prize-winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa, condemned the law. Many other public figures contributed to the growing worldwide protest. On April 19, nine American senators, including John McCain and Chuck Schumer, sent a letter to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, arguing that the legislation threatens academic freedom and calling on him to work with CEU to find a solution.

The most important political statements came from the European People’s Party (EPP, the center-right bloc in the European Parliament) and the spokesperson for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The U.S. State Department also expressed its clear support for CEU and for academic freedom, and rejected the threat to an American university abroad. The Hungarian authorities came to understand that the attempt to blacken the reputation of the university with the new American administration by associating it with George Soros was not effective and they gradually shifted back to calling the university by its proper name.

Parallel to American diplomatic efforts, the European Commission condemned the law as a violation of EU regulations and core European values, including academic freedom. Subsequently, the People’s Party called on Hungarian authorities to drop the law, in line with the Commission’s recommendations. After meeting with the Hungarian Prime Minister, Joseph Daul, the president of the EPP made a strong statement to that effect on April 29:

The conflict remained frozen in the subsequent months despite attempts to negotiate a resolution. The European Commission filed a lawsuit against the Hungarian government at the European Court of Justice. The university launched—through a cooperation agreement with Bard College—a new certificate program in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The government decided not to demand a formal agreement from the U.S. government (though it kept the relevant clause in the bill, further undermining legal certainty), and agreed to conduct negotiations with the Governor of New York. The negotiations concluded in early September 2017 with a mutually accepted draft-agreement.^{Footnote 3} Yet the Hungarian government declined to sign the treaty and prolonged the university’s legal limbo by extending the deadline of compliance to January 1, 2019. Despite this, CEU continued to recruit and admit students, not knowing when—or whether—its license to operate would be renewed.

A Culture War?

One way to interpret the conflict between CEU and the Fidesz government is as a Cultural war (or in “good” Central European tradition—kulturkampf). CEU’s mission statement contains a commitment to the values of an open society. Being one of the most diverse international universities in the world,^{Footnote 4} it is widely seen as embodying the spirit of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. In conrtrast, Hungary’s ruling party Fidesz is a conservative and nationalist party that has moved sharply to the right in the last decade, and has adopted most of the ideological characteristics of a far-right party.^{Footnote 5}

Curiously, the issue that angered pundits and politicians on the right was not the university’s attitude towards nationalism, but the fact that it has a Gender Studies Department with both MA and PhD programs. This fact was presented as evidence that CEU is not a serious university (otherwise why would it teach pseudo-sciences?), and as an indication that the university intends to undermine family values in the region. The pro-government press discussed the titles of the theses written at CEU on LGBTQ issues with such regularity and fervor that the ordinary Hungarian reader must have thought that all other departments, from Mathematics to Environmental Sciences, are maintained only to provide a platform for “homosexual propaganda.” In some Eastern European countries, particularly in Poland, the gender-debates have robust religious underpinnings, but in Hungary, a more secular country, the salience of this issue within the conservative right rather signals opposition to the moral-cultural transformation of developed societies. CEU became a symbol of the West’s “moral decline.”

The media attacks against CEU are part of the growing climate of anti-intellectualism. Because most of the fields taught at CEU belong to humanities and social sciences, its detractors often claim that nothing useful—such as medicine, veterinary sciences, engineering, chemistry, etc.—is taught at the university. This line of attack was surprising as humanities traditionally are highly valued in Hungarian culture, but this approach accords with the Orbán government’s policy of tying priorities in education to the needs of business.

Similar themes emerged in the attacks on the European University at St. Petersburg, another higher education institution originally supported by the Open Society Foundations. The administrative ruling that led to the loss of its license to teach started with the complaint of an MP, Vitaly Milonov, who initiated the “anti-gay propaganda” bill.

Compare the arguments against the European University:

with the arguments against CEU:

Despite the position of these universities^{Footnote 9} in comparative international educational assessments, they are frequently dismissed by the right-wing forces in their countries as “intellectual bootcamps” of liberalism.

Soros, the Ideal Scapegoat and the Campaign against Civil Society

While clearly relevant, the culture-war frame cannot fully explain the attacks on these universities. After all, both are small, graduate institutions. In the case of CEU, 80% of its students are foreigners. These universities are hardly threatening to the harmony of patriarchal families favored by the right-wing ideologues. The campaign against George Soros, the founder and honorary chairman of CEU and an early supporter of the European University in St. Petersburg, adds to our understanding of what is at stake. Both Orbán and Putin have been self-declared opponents of the idea of an open society for many years. Within Europe they are among the most established advocates of the strengthening of national sovereignty and of hierarchical governments.

The long-standing tensions between Orbán and Soros, his erstwhile mentor,^{Footnote 10} escalated into an open conflict in 2015, at the beginning of the refugee crisis. Since then virtually the entire discourse of Orbán’s party, Fidesz, is structured around the issue of migration and the person of Soros, as allegedly responsible for the wave of migrants to Europe. The government’s opposition to further European integration is also pursued through its anti-Soros campaign, often by allusions, if not outright recapitulations, of long-standing conspiracy theories.

The redeployment of this ideological construct is apparent in a recent radio-interview given by Zsolt Semjén, the deputy Prime Minister of Hungary. In the interview, after claiming that the European Commission is in the pocket of George Soros, he blamed freemasonry for the refugee crisis. Freemasonry, he reminded the listeners, had Jacobin and Bolshevik versions, and now it had mutated into “the Soros-type extreme liberalism which hates Christian traditions and, if possible even more, nation states.” The minister concluded that leftist and liberal parties needed to import millions of foreigners in order to defeat their nationalist opponents and, in cooperation with immigrant Islamic forces, to rule over the nations of Europe.^{Footnote 11}

This discourse is not only an expression of the ruling party’s ideological preferences but also serves its electoral goals given the present domestic political configuration. By the time of the introduction of the Lex CEU, Hungary had become a one-party state. Fidesz loyalists occupied all relevant political, judicial, and financial institutions, including the office of the public prosecutor, the central bank, the auditor general, and supervisory boards of public radio and television and the opposition was in disarray. The outcome of the April 2018 election was widely seen as a foregone conclusion, and the biggest worry of the government was whether enough of its supporters would bother to vote. The mythical figure of George Soros, a Jewish financial speculator who can single-handedly move millions of immigrants to Europe, served as a mobilizing device for the party’s core electorate.

The issue also had the potential to split Fidesz’ strongest opposition—the erstwhile radical right party Jobbik. The party had been openly anti-Semitic for many years and it defined itself as the opponent of everything for which George Soros and his foundations stood. After the publication of the bill, the party’s hardline vice president called for the immediate closing of CEU for being a threat to national security and for ploughing its ruins under with salt.^{Footnote 12} Yet the party leadership condemned Lex CEU and its MPs joined left-wing and liberal MPs in petitioning the Constitutional Court to examine the law’s constitutionality. This move was widely considered in Hungary as a signal that Jobbik was serious about its ambition to become a moderate party.

The hope that the treaty with the State of New York would be signed in the fall of 2017 was crushed by the escalation of the anti-Soros campaign. In the run up to the elections of April 2018 the whole country was covered with large anti-Soros billboards and the citizens received questionnaires from the government in which they were asked whether they rejected Soros’s plan to flood Hungary with millions of migrants. By this time it became obvious that George Soros was assigned the role that Fetullah Gülen fulfills in Turkey, and any person or organization associated with him was treated as a public enemy.

The most vehement attacks targeted NGOs, especially the ones active in areas such as government transparency, corruption, rule of law, human rights, and minority rights.^{Footnote 13} These watchdogs have been critical of government practices for many years, no matter which party was in power. Orbán often relied on these organizations when in opposition, but during his current term in government he “discovered” that all of them were directed by foreign interests. The meetings of the parliamentary committee on national security, for example, were boycotted by the governing party simply because one of the opposition MPs had worked, ten years earlier, for an NGO that supported (legal) immigrants and accepted donations from Soros. The president of the supervisory board of the relevant NGO became the target of a governmental smear campaign because he noted that immigrants have higher education and better employment rates than natives. He made this statement as a sociologist of migration, but this fact did not stop the Prime Minister to describe him in his 2018 State of the Union speech as a typical “Homo Sorosensus” who despises Hungarians. The professor’s photograph was used in a 2018 electoral campaign video of Fidesz to illustrate the danger posed by Soros agents.

The “observation” that civil-society organizations backed by Soros are part of a global conspiracy is not unique to Hungary. Other countries in the region, such as Russia, Romania, and Macedonia, have also sponsored anti-Soros campaigns. In Macedonia even a “Stop Soros” movement was established. Developments in Russia had a particularly heavy influence on the strategies and techniques of the Fidesz government. The Lex CEU was launched shortly after Putin visited Orbán in Hungary, and two weeks later a Russian undercover TV crew filmed a report alleging that CEU trains activists to impose cosmopolitan values on all the nations of the world. In the parliamentary debate of the Lex CEU, the minister responsible for education stated that “we are committed to use all legal means at our disposal to stop pseudo-civil society spy groups such as the ones funded by George Soros.”^{Footnote 14}

Next to singling out specific organizations supported by the Open Society Foundation, the conflict between the government and the NGOs led to a profound reconceptualization of what democracy means. While earlier officials paid at least lip service to the importance of a civil society, by 2018 the governmental rhetoric questioned the legitimacy of NGOs. The new argument was that in order to have the right to influence politics, one needs to be elected.^{Footnote 15}

Playing the American Card

Hungary’s authoritarian government not only received encouragement from Eastern Europe but also was encouraged by developments in the United States. As the think tank Policy Solutions stated in its yearly report, “while CEU was clearly part of Soros’ overall vision of an open society, it is nevertheless first and foremost an academic institution. It has never meddled in Hungarian politics or even in policy debates . . . . .But there is a growing perception that Orbán is now using the window of opportunity created by Trump’s election to ‘localise’ Putin’s authoritarian programme, including an all-out attack against Soros-supported activities and institutions.”^{Footnote 16}

Viktor Orbán was the only European head of government openly supporting Donald Trump. Tired of Obama’s scolding on matters such as corruption and press freedom, Orbán celebrated Trump’s victory as an endorsement of his own nationalist course and as an opportunity to free himself from the yoke of political correctness. The timing seemed perfect for a clampdown on NGOs, particularly those which are supported by one of Trump’s opponents. Fidesz’s Vice President Szilárd Németh openly said that “every means must be employed to hold back such organizations, and I believe they should be cleaned out of here. And to this end, I feel, the international opportunity has arrived with the election of the new U.S. president.”^{Footnote 17}

American influence is present not only in the timing but also in the ideological content of the confrontation with Soros. In Macedonia the founder of operation “Stop Soros” claimed that “our inspiration comes from the United States, from the American conservative organizations, media and congressmen with the same views, especially the new administration of President Trump.”^{Footnote 18}

Consequently, the move of the Hungarian government against CEU appeared first as a safe and clever gesture: either the American administration would care little about it, or, if the Americans did mind the fact that an American university was discriminated against, then the Hungarian government could ask for a quid pro quo in exchange for allowing the university to continue to operate in Budapest. A personal meeting between Orbán and the American president, something that had so far been denied to the Hungarian Prime Minster, was widely rumored to be the price for the compromise.

Eventually the American authorities, led by the State Department, groups of senators and congressmen—and ultimately the White House—did not react in the manner expected. They all called upon the Hungarian government to suspend the new rules and treated the CEU affair as a major obstacle to the improvement of U.S.-Hungarian relations. The Orbán government’s hope that this position would change once Obama-appointees were replaced has not materialized so far.

Having said that, it is undeniable that the CEU conflict is part and parcel of the same phenomenon that led to Trump’s victory: the backlash against elite liberal institutions, the rise of populism, and the general weakening of the self-confidence of liberal democracy.^{Footnote 19} The crisis of European integration also added to the removal of the existing taboos, making universities potential targets for political maneuvers.

Universities Strike Back

Democratic backsliding affects universities as much as any other institution in a society. A former minister in the first Orbán government—and former rector of the prestigious Corvinus University—has recently claimed that “striking examples of political influence, not only on the operational, but also at the academic level in some cases” are visible in Hungarian higher education.^{Footnote 20} Since 2010, education has become strictly centralized. In some instances the Minister of Education imposed his own candidate for rector of universities and political appointees without any academic record were promoted to professorship at state-controlled universities. The allocation of scholarships and tuition waivers has also become a ministerial prerogative, and a mandatory system of government-appointed financial directors (“chancellors”) was established. “Chancellors are not only hired and employed by the Minister, but they are regularly invited to conferences in the Ministry, where they get their instructions,” reported a leading expert.^{Footnote 21}

University leaders operating in such an environment need to be very careful in defending the remnants of academic freedom. Understandably, confrontational strategies are avoided. The European University in St. Petersburg, for example, appealed directly to Vladimir Putin for support against the state apparatus. While this accommodative strategy contributed to the survival of the university as a research institute, the license for teaching was temporarily withdrawn and the university’s original building was seized.^{Footnote 22}

Hungary is not Russia, and CEU’s international connections allowed the university to follow a different course. The university authorities protested against the new law, presenting counter-arguments to the media. CEU received overwhelming support from fellow universities. The Prime Minister was particularly surprised to see the solidarity of Hungarian students, academics and university administrators because he originally framed the governmental intervention as a response to the “unfair advantage” that CEU has vis-à-vis Hungarian universities. But even professors known to support Fidesz condemned the blatantly political intervention in the academic sphere. The interpretation of the spokesperson of Human Rights First that “this is a brazen attempt to score political points on the backs of students”^{Footnote 23} became the dominant one in the streets of Budapest where tens of thousands of demonstrators, many of them students, marched under the slogan of “Free country! Free University!”

CEU was also helped by its double membership in American and European higher education. It received strong support from many liberal institutions such as Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, MIT, NYU, Duke, Princeton, Columbia, etc., but from some conservative ones like Brigham Young University as well.^{Footnote 24} In Europe the protest campaign was supported by many individuals and universities, but also by a number of educational associations such as the European University Association, the Academia Europaea, and the European Students’ Union.

The public discourse triggered by the struggle went beyond letters of support addressed to CEU and letters of condemnation addressed to the Hungarian government. It also provoked a number of discussions on how to effectively defend academic freedom at the international level. Many academics saw the issue as a challenge to the pan-European Bologna aimed at ensuring comparability in the standards of higher-education qualifications. In one particularly passionate article, two London School of Economics professors wrote that “the attack on academic freedom at a university at the heart of Central Europe could be a call to arms for Bologna.”^{Footnote 25}

Some of these reactions indicate that universities increasingly realize not only that they have a common social and political agenda, clustered around the defense of academic freedom, but also that this agenda converges with the protection of freedoms in general. Moreover, the cross-national cooperation of students, professors, and university administrators around a particular cause reveals that together they form a significant social force. After centuries of national isolation, universities are discovering the power of working together for goals that go beyond the research and teaching of particular subjects. Whether the worldwide protest and collaboration among academics will save CEU is an open question at the time of this writing (May 2018), but the fact that academic freedom became one of the most talked about criteria for judging the Hungarian regime shows the impact of collective action by students, professors, and university administrators.