Disillusionment

The four East Central European post-communist countries, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland, that joined the European Union in the early years of the twenty-first century have recently been showing different signs of disillusionment, a loss of perspective and motivation, and of future prospects, as well as a lack of trust and self-confidence-based political and social relations. Twenty years after the peaceful regime change, it is perhaps not accidental that signs of exhaustion have become visible and have appeared almost simultaneously in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Fears on both the left and right that their umbrella parties might crumble are not unjustified. It is probably not unlikely that the Baltic States will show similar symptoms, too.

The EU's greatest political and economic achievement is undoubtedly the Franco-German reconciliation and partnership. Alas, it is a question of how far it has been able to fill European integration with a common identity. It would need a separate study to investigate how far the lack of future prospects in the European Union, its narrow-minded pragmatism and internal-technocratic decision making is responsible for these conditions of the four post-communist countries.

In what follows, I intend to analyze the different types of the image of the self and of the enemy in the Hungarian political languages of recent years. To anticipate the conclusion, we can observe a move from constitutional revolution to a symbolic civil/secular/religious war stemming from the forced repetition of negativistic political formulas, which are in turn rooted in the unelaborated traumas surfacing since the peaceful regime change and especially EU integration. The liberal consolidation of constitutional patriotism did not shift in the direction of republican public good. Instead, there is a turn from constitutional legalism towards forms of national collectivism, including ethnicist discourse, the demand for recompensing national grievances. This is not independent of the fact that Hungarian society has been split, the majority has lost its sense of security, and the parties involved in the constitutional regime change have exhausted themselves.

In 2002, the Hungarian Socialist Party and the Alliance of Free Democrats formed a coalition government, and did so again four years later. Now, after the 2010 parliamentary elections, the same Socialist Party is undergoing a deep crisis (with its but 15.28% result), tapering down from a mass into a medium or small party, possibly even disappearing. The Alliance of Free Democrats, a leading factor in the political transition, has vanished from the political scene, amidst various scandals. In contrast, the Young Democrats – Hungarian Civic Alliance (FIDESZ), a right-wing mass party, has had a landslide victory (68.13%), and gained the overwhelming majority at local elections later in the autumn, too. To top this, an apparently national-socialist, anti-Semitic and anti-Roma party (Jobbik) has risen to challenge the constitutional political system as a whole and compete with the other right-wing party. This new extreme rightist formation is the first one of its kind to have attained medium size (12.18%).

There are many explanations for how the left lost credit and the right advanced. In this discussion, I take another course. I attempt to uncover the deep-lying factors that have influenced power games and events. I approach this question from the aspects of symbolic politics, political languages, and the underlying grievances and fears, namely unprocessed individual and collective traumas and their consequences: different ‘political hysterias’, in other words, the unconscious, forced repetition of negativistic political formulas – something hardly rare in newly born democracies.Reference Bibó¹

The Scandal and its Political Context

On the 50th anniversary of the 1956 revolution, the Budapest streets were immersed in turmoil, scandal, hooliganism, and shameful extreme rightist emblems instead of dignified celebration. Finally, firm and hard-handed, the police put an end to the riot. Like a symbolic civil or religious war, the events profoundly shocked the Hungarian political public.

Riots had broken out after May 2006, when a confidential speech by the newly re-elected Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány was leaked. He addressed his message to the members of the socialist party's parliamentary group and not to the whole political community, to all citizens of the country, who had been deceived by both sides in the election campaign.

In his speech, he tried to convince his fellow party members of the urgent need to radically change the ways of managing public revenues and major redistributive systems, and did so in a style and with arguments that were unusual for their sincere commitment to reform. He stressed that, unlike his predecessors who had not dared to act upon these issues for 16 years, he was resolved to take the inevitable steps. He also confessed that neither he nor anyone else had clear concepts and ideas of the necessary reforms and of the ways how they had to realize them. Starting and following them up meant a leap into the dark. Nevertheless, he had made up his mind to embrace the improvements and tried to convince the members of his party group to support him. In the speech, he accused the opposition of demagogy, but also admitted that, during his one and a half years in office before the 2006 spring election, nothing had happened to promote the needed changes. During his first term, he had made every effort to prevent a victory of the rightist opposition at the 2006 elections. The rightist opposition, he emphasized, had rejected reforms in order to win the elections at any price. This made him take serious risks: he had not put forth improvements until his opponents had been beaten and a firm majority created to support the necessary reform steps. To this end, he had not told the truth to the public, he improvised.

How the speech was leaked remains unclarified, but what is sure is that its leaking, and its quotation out of context, led to demonstrations against the prime minister in Budapest and in some towns in the countryside, demanding his resignation. The opposition mobilized its followers. The radical right held a continuous demonstration outside Parliament from the 17th of September until the 23rd of October. Football hooligans and extreme rightists set cars on fire, hurled stones at the police, and besieged and occupied the headquarters of the Hungarian state television on the 17th and 18th of September. Quite unusual in Budapest, downtown streets became the place of turmoil, of regular clashes between trouble makers and the police. The early October local government elections were a walkover for the right-wing opposition. The result was proclaimed by its leader Viktor Orbán as tantamount to a referendum and therefore he demanded that the government resign. The disturbances died down when, upon the call of the head of the state, president László Sólyom, the prime minister requested a vote of confidence, which he obtained from the ruling coalition, and the rightist opposition gradually withdrew from street politics and the extreme right became isolated.

The story seemed to have come to a close in the spring of 2008, when the opposition won the so-called ‘fees abolishment’ referendum against the reform of the health care system which led to the break-up of the socialist-liberal coalition in the summer and to the resignation of the PM during the fall. By this time, the effects of the global financial crisis began to be felt in the country. National bankruptcy was staved off through emergency loans and major cut-backs by the provisional-managerial government of socialist Gordon Bajnai. The elections of April 2010 furnished FIDESZ with a two-thirds majority in the national assembly.

‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in the Language of National Self-Centeredness

The antithesis of nation versus traitors (aliens at heart, communists and Jews) sums up the images of the self and the enemy of the political right, which splits the Hungarian political community into good guys and bad guys. It follows from this that ‘the fatherland cannot be in opposition’ – a thesis that expropriates and degrades into kitsch the entire political community, the nation, national symbols and holidays.

Rightist public discourse, the language of national self-centeredness, bases itself on the decisive role of will to carry out the ‘unavoidable’ change of unjust relations, and claims a nation-based state redistribution, new regime change, and moral revival. The underlying conviction is that the nation is not emulative, but self-sufficient, having its own values, its past, and its character, and that its historical merits entitle it to make others adjust to it instead of adjusting to others. Its interpretation of history, traceable to ethnic political language and interpretations, holds that foreign rule (various occupiers) not only shifted the country's point of gravity abroad, but replaced its ruling stratum, intellectual elite and middle class. This led to an internal counter-selection: to the fetishization of the power relations, to waiting out, and to self-destruction. The vision of a distant glorious and a recent colonial past is paired with an image of the future which does refer to the need for truth and righteousness in theory, but is obviously based on a social Darwinist vision of the struggle for life between the nations. This conviction holds that the Hungarian nation deserves an extraordinary place, which must be fought for by every means because it is threatened by its internal and external enemies. In order to survive it has to fight and this struggle requires a strong, determined, and devoted leader. To this mind and emotional state, the cause of the community overwrites the cause of liberty.Reference Bibó²

An Unelaborated Past and its Repainting Underneath

Even without charismatic right-wing leaders, there is more than sufficient ground for seeking amends for past grievances, fears, pains, and shames: the Trianon peace treaty (1920), the suppressed shame of the persecution, dispossession and massacre of the Hungarian Jews/Jewish Hungarians (1944), the humiliations and deportations of the Hungarians living in neighbouring countries (1945–1946), the traumas of the Soviet occupation and Sovietization (1945–1956, 1956–1968), the suppressed grief for the post-‘56 reprisals (1956–1963), the opportunism of the Kádár era and its coverup (1956–1989), the disillusions after the regime change, and the experience of ‘feigned capitalism, capitalist exploitation of feudal relations’ (1989–2009).Reference Leopold³ These are all the unhealed wounds that continue to ache. Branding the opponent as the enemy allows the right to project upon someone all the shame, anxiety, and uncertainty that these wounds carried with them. The person of Ferenc Gyurcsány, radiating self-confidence and commitment, who humiliated and lectured the leader of the right, offered himself as it were for the personification of all the trouble, pain and shame of the people in the rightist camp. When they reviled him, they felt they received satisfaction for their grievances. When he disappears, they thought, everything will be solved and pain will cease at a stroke.

Repainting the past is nothing new. It has been a characteristic of constructing the national consciousness for nearly 200 years. What is new, however, is that the subsequent Soviet occupation has cast a shadow on Hungarian participation in the Second World War. That is how the disastrous defeat of Hungary's Second Army at the Don river bend in 1942/43 became the outcome of Soviet aggression, and the segregation, branding, deportation, and murder of more than half a million Hungarian Jews became only the Germans’ war crime, without the responsibility of the Hungarian state and its authorities. That is why the communist system has remained emotionally unelaborated in many people, and 1956 became prey to political profiteering. As a result of the Trianon peace treaty, three quarters of the lieux de mémoire of Hungarian historical consciousness has fallen into successor states and their visit is not obvious, nor is it devoid of bitter experiences. Hungarian patriotism was a cause of the left until the last quarter of the nineteenth century when anti-Semitism began to organize itself into parties.Reference Trencsényi⁴

However, if we take but one of the above-mentioned grievances, we find it is an extremely complex problem and trauma. The alternative to the disruption of historical Hungary is presumably not to have been its integrity but a federative reorganization of the Monarchy with the predominance of Slavs (a plan associated with Archduke Francis Ferdinand). Therefore, the idea of the relinquishment of areas devoid of Hungarians would have to be approved, if somebody were to take him/herself seriously. The status of areas with ethnically mixed populations would have needed thorough deliberation and some referenda. Since then, a great part of the areas concerned have lost their former Hungarian character, and this has made the above processes irreversible. What remains is the question of areas populated solely by Hungarians, and the memory, fate, and pain of those who lived and died or left altogether. They left but they took their pain with them. It remains with them and with their descendants, egging them on to seek amends. Where is the memory of the soldiers fighting against the Red Army in the Ukraine in 1942–44 competing with the Romanian military for the right to retain Northern Transylvania and occupy Southern Transylvania in the new peace after the war? Where is the mourning of those whose mothers, wives, grandmothers, daughters, granddaughters were raped, whose fathers, sons, grandsons were shot dead or taken captive by the soldiers of the Red Army in 1944–45? Where is the grief of the victims, sufferers, and survivors of Sovietization? Where is the grief of those whose homes were coveted, and who were thus denounced, ejected from their homes to be given to others, and deported – on the model of what had happened to Jews in 1944?Reference Bibó⁵

Anyone taking the trouble of finding out who the thinkers and examples of the Hungarian right are, will encounter a political kitsch that makes everyone and everything deplorable, ridiculous and frivolous. Power lust without limit – when someone wants to control others, albeit not him or herself – will hardly serve recovery. The organized exercise of timocracy (martial rule based on hunger for fame) combined with a threat of ochlocracy (mob rule) can only temporarily divert attention from the inner wound. But temporarily it does relegate it into the background.

The causes of community and liberty ought not be pitted against one another, but cross referenced.Reference Bibó⁶ This, however, is conditional on everyone becoming a free individual, which, in turn, requires much effort, supportive reference groups, positive models, a tolerant atmosphere, and, first of all, reconciliation with oneself. This depends on the free choice of identities and free persons able to choose their self-identity freely.Reference Tamir⁷

‘Us’ and ‘Them’ in the Language of Adopting the European Model

By contrast, leftists see themselves as modernizers (civilizers, reformers and Europeanizers) as opposed to reactionaries (regressors, populists and fascists), their enemies. Consequently, they proclaim to be committed to controlled modernization, and their exclusiveness rests on the lack of alternatives, and their policy being the only salvaging variant. Their public discourse applies the language of the adoption of the European model.

Their formula has been to adopt the European pattern and reach ‘Europe’. The preconditions of achieving this were ensured by the peaceful, constitutional regime change, the establishment of liberal democracy, the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, the practice of four-year election cycles, and joining NATO and the European Union, but the attainment of this goal is not as easy as it might seem from without.

Europe comprises a wide variety of patterns, from the Scandinavian countries to Greece, from democracy to technocracy and oligarchy. It is definitely not a one and indivisible entity, and the legal frames of a democracy themselves do not automatically entail democratic socialization.

The emulative discourse is based on a fetishization of Europe, on the task of catching up and bringing the country abreast with it, and on a controlled modernization of the country reminiscent of the enlightened absolutist traditions.Reference Walicki⁸ The forces of power must live up to the historic possibility of integrating the country, themselves, and those they govern into European civilization, the realm of progress and economic growth. Their work and efforts are threatened and jeopardized by demagogy, irresponsibility, unrealistic Hungarian emotional politicizing built on illusion and neglect of reality. According to their self-image, the chosen few, with their modernizing mission and their followers, the taciturn majority, are opposed by the power hungry, unscrupulous, and seditious minority. The main antinomies of their political language constitute the basis of their self-identity: reason versus emotion, statesman versus demagogue, reality versus unrealism, responsibility versus irresponsibility, order versus anarchy, progress versus stagnation, construction versus destruction, and civilization versus backwardness. They are convinced that they alone are called and able to carry out the historic task. Otherwise, the country falls into uncertainty, chaos, anarchy, mob rule, and all that they were and are afraid of.

Experiences Underneath

Such an attitude is fed by different experiences: by the experience of Kádárist functionaries who had believed they were fighting on two fronts, against Stalinist restoration and against the crushed revolution of 1956; by the fear that this manoeuvring and the resulting delicate balance was threatened by both the Soviet empire and irresponsible demagogues; by the experience that, unlike the other parties of the regime change and their following, it was they who nevertheless represented the possibility of creating a liveable life and that next to them there was no serious and responsible political factor. That is why Hungary's prime minister from 2002 to 2004, and with him other MSZP officers, were proud of their former party-state and secret-service role – apparently unaware of the shame this might imply. They thus propagated the legend that the regime change was the crowning of the reforms of the ancien régime, the peak achievement of its reformers. In fact, those reforms sooner or later ran into the stone wall of the absolutism of the system. As long as the extensivity of the system could be sustained, reforms were adjusted to the absolutism; to achieve their aim, reforms soon had to target absolutism, but that proved to be per se unreformable.

Undoubtedly, the totalitarianism of the party state was oligarchic, the rule of the influential few over the many without property. It could just as well have derived its legitimacy from Divine Grace and selection by birth, as an aristocracy or meritocracy. However, losing its traditional revolutionary or lacking any charismatic Divine-Grace legitimacy, the increasingly pragmatist oligarchy deflated and gradually gave up its ideology. As regards its unprincipled pragmatism in the late party-state period, we might justly recall the Conservative Party of the 1830s, the Liberal Party under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and the Unified Party of the interwar years, all creating their clientele politics.Reference Bibó⁹ In all these parallel instances, the One Party, with its totalitarian origin and character, rejected the concepts of parliamentary government and political pluralism.

Nevertheless, as in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s, the oligarchy grew old, and slowly lost its self-confidence, its young successors being technocrats; and when the system went bankrupt and it turned out that the Soviet Union would not give military aid, it was forced to bargain.

Historical Traumas, Fears and Narratives

Some protagonists on the left have come to regard unprincipled pragmatism, the emptiness or lack of ideology, as a legitimate and progressive strategy. They supposed that Western integration was the chance for the country, endowing economic growth and consumption with a value per se. At the same time, they were convinced of the demise of their political antagonists and rivals. The descendants of the political clientele of the party state, which had lost its class-struggle character after Stalinism and the suppression of 1956, again felt that they were the lesser evil compared with their trouble-making rightist opponents as far as peaceful governance, parliamentary democracy and social partnership are concerned. Their self-image included that they were the only professional leaders. They claimed to be the founders of modern Hungary, and that their opponents were obstacles to this process of modernisation. Instead of the pragmatic self-justification of the oligarchy, their ideology evolved into a peculiar admixture of republicanism and neo-Josephinism following the election of Ferenc Gyurcsány as prime minister. From the summer of 2006, the initial republican stress began to shift towards an enlightened absolutist commitment, with a self-image of being the only repository of civilization, progress, Europeanness, and the commander of the country's development – without alternatives.Reference Madeuf and Sindzingre¹⁰

Earlier on, in both 1994 and 2002, the left had attempted to fill the ideological hollowness of pragmatism with the self-justification of the successor-party oligarchy and the claim to the supposed social protection of the Kádár regime. Its external cementing force was the rightist hysteria built on the nationalism of the Horthy regime and the use of modern marketing techniques, which tried to defuse unrest by moves to realize the promises of the election campaign to the full. However, these fear-generated measures led to immense indebtedness.

The task has remained to tackle the spiralling public debt and to reform the major redistributive systems, which would have required a matter-of-fact approach and a supportive public opinion.Reference Kis¹¹ Instead, the public is confused, and shudders at the very idea of reform.

It is relatively easy to identify the grievances and amends seeking on the right. It is harder to identify the traumas, fears and pains on the left. It is harder, but not impossible. For grievances, fears and shames are many and varied on this side, as well.

Quite a number of people, the first generation of the survivors, their children and grandchildren, live with the inherited trauma of the Shoah. More bear the shame that the validity of their individual mobility during the Stalinist period and the post-1956 era can be questioned, as it was connected to the suppression and intimidation of others. There certainly were and are people who were simply afraid in 1956. There must be many whose suppressed shame includes gestures and acts of collaboration with the Stalinist and Kádárist regime. There certainly are many for whom the regime change was no liberation. Many might have been hurt by the mistakes and offences committed by the rightist governments (1990–1994, 1998–2002). Even more suffer from the loss of existential security. Very many are irritated and even frightened by the surges of symbolic civil war and the absurd game of ‘competing victimologies’. It might have been momentarily gratifying to brand and verbally annihilate the diabolized leader of the right as the embodiment of their grievances. But this gratification indeed could not last long. Alas he has come back with much greater support than his leftist counterpart ever had. At the same time, his right wing extremist challenger has pushed him to the middle of the political scale.

Political Languages – Political Hysterias

Those that re-create the old enemy images of the two major political languages, that instigate political hysterias, undoubtedly benefit by it, but they are only apparently their masters and makers. They themselves fall in the forced repetition of negativistic political formulas, they themselves participate in the ‘political hysterias’, which are rooted in the political disasters emotionally, but not yet consciously democratic communities encountered in the process of nation building – hysterias easily leading to further catastrophies.Reference Bibó¹² These repetitions are as many as the grievances, fears and pains their forbears have left to prevail in their unprocessed private and collective memories, or as the traumas that they have experienced, or that their parents and grandparents had suffered and suppressed, passing them down to their descendants unarticulated and unwittingly. Every grievance keeps hurting and poisoning them like an unhealed wound. Like live shells, such grievances may explode any time. Their presence and effects distort the assessment of their situation, perpetuate their unintentional and often savage search for amends. They feel strongly driven to identify those who caused the loss and grievance in order to take revenge on them, whereas those who were responsible for the traumatic experiences are most probably no longer alive. The victim sticks to his role as victim more and more doggedly, afraid of losing it, but this psychic process requires that the one-time offenders are not confined to human proportions. The offenders are never flesh-and-blood figures, but rather mythic beings exempt from the rules of human coexistence and communication. The whole process is embedded in the forced repetition of negativistic political formulas, as witnessed by almost the entire prepolitical or political community of Hungary. It goes back to disastrous experiences of political terror, mass murder, military occupation, or territorial loss (cases, such as: Italy, 1796–1797, 1809; Germany, 1806, 1918, 1945; Spain, 1808–1809, 1936–1939; France, 1793, 1870, 1940; Poland, 1795, 1831, 1863, 1939, 1947; Hungary, 1849, 1920, 1944/1945, 1949, 1956/1957). And these instil an overwhelming fear of the possibility of their reoccurrence, the whole community trying to avoid this at any price and by any means. Its usual concomitant is a conspiracy theory with the victimized image of the community self and a diabolic image of an enemy bent on conquering, exploiting or annihilating it.

As a consequence, those immersed in such discourses lose their sense of reality and their problem-solving abilities, and imprison themselves in the forced repetition of negativistic political formulas. Finding amends and taking revenge, they are unable to stop until they run into chaos and catastrophe.

Some of the countries that have fallen into this negativistic process have managed to climb out of it, such as Finland for a long while, Spain and Greece in the 1960s, France and West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, the unified Germany after 1989. Other countries, such as Belgium, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Ireland, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, continue to be bogged down by it – Hungary among them. Of course, it is not only a European problem.

Overcoming

The vicious circle of reproducing these mythic roles can be stopped neither by forgiving nor by forgetting. There is no-one to forgive when no-one asks for forgiveness. There is no forgetting when the subject of forgetting is constantly reproduced in verbal aggression and symbolic politics. The way out lies in clarifying and working through the situation. Such working through requires painful decisions, and much inner mental work and effort. People need to explore the traumas they have suffered, and let them out in groups or in partnership with people with similar experiences. They also need therapeutic reference groups to help them understand the genuine pain of the traumas of others, instead of seeing them as repressing their injuries; to help them live with their grief and acknowledge that of the others. In this way they may achieve that their lives and deeds will not be governed by their grievances. It is not easy to transcend the forced repetition of negativistic political formulas, political hysteria, even in this case, but it might make people aware that unconscious traumas lurk beneath hysterical excitability and political machinations.

It is against this backdrop that some 20 years after the regime change, the ‘mock 1956’ was enacted in the streets of Budapest, and the hysteria stirred and exploited against the government of a free and independent country with a democratic legislature and an independent judiciary.

Of course, I do not believe that, at that moment, everyone bears equal responsibility for this negative process. Nor I do think that the exploration and comprehension of the traumas underlying the hysterias will solve everything. That will only mitigate the collective madness. In a democracy, the source of power is not Divine Grace, but the collective will, which, however, does not assert itself as it is supposed to, but goes awry as we now experience it. The shaping of this will is framed by the constitutional order of liberal democracy, and its content is the order of liberty.Reference Bibó¹³ This is what makes the coordination of different modernities and traditions and the more or less free choice of identities and free people choosing identities possible – experiencing this, free people will not use their freedom for going mad and driving others into madness. This requires not only the constitutional frames of a liberal democracy, but also the processes, models and experiences of democratic socialization, all the many efforts that underlie it, including exploration and comprehension of collective traumas. A comparative European research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas is therefore not only an area that might shed new light on political phenomena, but a requirement of democratic functioning.