![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Recent political science literature has identified the emergence of a new form of authoritarian regime, in which formal democratic institutions continue to exist but the playing field becomes seriously tilted towards the incumbents. This article offers an interpretation of the recent turn in Hungarian cultural policy in such a competitive authoritarian context. It focuses on state interventions that seek to limit the autonomy of the cultural sphere. They have the following features: 1) the growing significance of nationalist ideology (‘culture wars’), 2) an increasing instrumentalisation of cultural policy, and 3) no clear separation between cultural policy and politics (the emergence of political patronage and the replacement of the former cultural elite). The article explores the means, actors and institutions through which these interventions have occurred and the extent of their success.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Hungary is often compared to Poland but the majority of authors of hybrid regime literature claim that Poland is still a backsliding democracy and not a stabilised hybrid regime (Bozóki and Citation2018). Other comparisons refer to the Putin regime (with the leader of which Orbán is on friendly terms) that is definitely much more authoritarian than its Hungarian counterpart (Csillag and Citation2015a).
2. For example, the average circulation of contemporary literary fiction in Hungarian was 3–4 000 copies in the 2010s. Ten thousand copies make a real best-seller (https://mkke.hu/en/2017).
3. Cultural participation (attending cultural events or visiting cultural sites) is 50 percent in Hungary, which is below the EU average (64 percent) (EU-SILC 2015) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/culture. However, government expenditure on cultural services was 1.2 percent of GDP in 2017, which was the highest proportion in the EU. State funding increased in the 2010s: in 2009 it was only 0.6 percent of the GDP, which was around the EU average in that year. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Government_expenditure_on_recreation,_culture_and_religion
4. The legal predecessor of the Ministry of Human Resources was the Ministry of Education and Culture. The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour were merged into it. The contracted Ministry has seven thematic state secretaries responsible for: Sport, Social affairs and social integration, Family and youth, Health, Religious, ethnic and civil affairs, Education, Culture.
5. .” Viktor Orbán: Megőrizni a létezés magyar minőségét [To preserve the Hungarian quality of existence]. Nagyítás,February17 2010.
6. Hungarian minorities in Ukraine, Serbia and especially in Romania have a special role in Hungarian nationalist ideology: they are represented as a source of tradition, true Hungarian spirit, patriotism and Christianity. Vidnyánszky puts these values in the focus of his aesthetic agenda and also embraces the image of the ’trans-border Hungarian’ with his own outfits inspired by traditional folk costumes.
7. Attila Vidnyánszky: Beszéljünk nyíltan! [Let’s speak openly!]. An interview by Ádám Sztankay, In: Közéleti közelharcok. Budapest: Scolar, 2011. pp. 180–188.
8. Son of Saul, Best Foreign Language Film (2016), Sing, Best Live Action Short Film (2017)
9. https://forbes.hu/extra/50-leggazdagabb-magyar-2018/#/
10. „’I don’t give a damn for this modern democracy as it’s not modern and it’s not democracy, because it wants to put minority power over majority power; it’s anti-democracy.” (György Fekete) with English subtitles, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PErD2Bm5Des date of the video: 2012.
12. In the understanding of Barna et al, these stories represent the struggles between two strategies inside the intellectual circles loyal to the government on how incorporative cultural policy should be (Barna et al. Citation2019).
13. http://www.terrorhaza.hu/en/museum
14. On the efforts of previous Eastern Bloc countries to create a legitimate anti-communist vision of History, see (Zombory Citation2017).
16. mki.gov.hu (no english website)
17. https://www.magyaridok.hu/belfold/szetvalik-a-magan-es-az-allami-egeszsegugy-3564611/The academic consensus on the Finno-Ugric origin of Hungarian language is 150 years old but in the lay public there is a relatively strong support for allegedly more glorious alternative versions such as Hunnic, Scythian or Turkic linguistic affinity.
18. Though it is not unconnected, for example, one of the slogans on billboards was: ‘If you are coming to Hungary, you must respect Hungarian culture.’
19. Ironically, in 1989 Viktor Orbán, as a young leader of the new democratic party Fidesz, studied for a semester at Oxford University with a scholarship from Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Moreover, his government spokesman Zoltán Kovács, who had the task of publicly explaining Lex CEU, had obtained his PhD degree at Central European University in 2002.
20. Letter from the state secretary of the Ministry of Human Resources, in answering the written question of a liberal PM https://www.parlament.hu/irom40/14056/14056-0001.pdf
21. ’It would be hard to deny that the main line of research in the Centre for Social Sciences is full of ideology. It is characterised by a strong liberal point of view.’ (Figyelő. 2018. június 19.)The article listed the allegedly liberal researchers by name.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Luca Kristóf
Luca Kristóf obtained her PhD degree in Sociology. She is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest. Her research fields of interests are elite studies, sociology of culture and cultural policy.
![Supercharge Your Next Research Paper: Research and write your next paper with Jenni AI.]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/112444/Skyscraper-humanities.png"})