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ABSTRACT
Drawing on four decades of field research on the Danube-Tisza interfluve, the Western zone of the Great Hungarian Plain, this paper places the “overheating” of the post-Cold War era in a longue durée perspective. The first section traces a millennium of history in terms of multi-directional migrations and civilizational encounters of various kinds: between sedentary agriculturalists and pastoral nomads, between Christian and Muslim agrarian orders, and between capitalist and socialist industrial orders. The Hungarian variant of Marxism-Leninism (unlike most other variants) relied considerably on material incentives to households. It attached high priority to transforming the countryside, which experienced an effervescent involution or “overheating” in the last decades of socialism. Since 1991, however, the market socialist synthesis has given way to a peripheral variant of Western market capitalism. Overheating is no longer a phenomenon of the rural economy, which has lost the dynamism of the socialist decades and experiences deprivation in absolute as well as relative forms. Rather, overheating is to be observed in the symbolic dimension of political legitimation, as populist political parties vie with each other in nationalist rhetoric. This overheating was evident in negative attitudes towards strangers seeking to transit this part of Hungary in the summer of 2015, a migratory process which provided a challenge to the whole of the European Union. It is argued that these attitudes in rural Hungary can be explained in terms of the ressentiments of a population which has been palpably thrown back into an underdog position on the margins of Western capitalism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Shanin (Citation1987, 3–4). The author specifies as an additional general characteristic “specific cultural patterns linked to the way of life of a small rural community” (Shanin Citation1987). He has in mind the social controls exercised in a nuclear settlement. Scattered resettlement of the puszta obviously produced conditions very different from those found in traditional villages; but immigrants brought their normative and “cognitive” dispositions with them and Shanin’s general type retains its basic validity for the colonists of the interfluve in the pre-socialist generations.
2 Ironically, this Park was initiated in the socialist era, the brainchild of leftist populist Ferenc Erdei (see Hann Citation2015b).
3 Orbán regularly gives interviews to the mass media in Germany, well aware that his views concerning migrants and Christian Europe command widespread support in German society. In one particularly inflammatory contribution at the height of the crisis he spoke of civilizational competition and alleged that, unless corrective action was taken, Muslims would threaten the kulturelle Identität of Europe. See “Am Ende werden die Muslime mehr sein als wir”, Die Welt, 16th September 2015 (interview with Boris Kálnoky).