Hungary Archives - Page 2 of 4

Feature

A Ticket for the Rome Express

A Strategy for Democracy

September 27, 2019 • by Andrew Arato

In Budapest, and shortly before local elections, some of my friends now speak of the Istanbul Express. As readers know, in that enormous city, followers of the slightly left Republican People’s Party (CHP), of the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and a small nationalist grouping, “the Good Party,” united to ...

Europe & Central Asia

Hungary: How Liberty Can Be Lost

Tyrannies always collapse, but whether Hungarians will escape with their sanity and sufficient clarity for a new start remains to be seen

July 23, 2019 • by Agnes Heller

As the Bible (Exodus) teaches and, more recently, Hannah Arendt warns, liberation is not yet liberty. The institutions of liberty must first be constituted, and people need to learn how to make them work while breathing spirit into them. The years 1989–1991 were a time of liberation for all the people ...

Europe & Central Asia

Democracy in Hungary

The Alliance of State Autocracy and Neoliberal Capitalism

April 10, 2019 • by Attila Antal

Looking at the last few years in Hungary – overflowing as it is with hate against refugees, migrants, liberals, George Soros, leftists, homeless people, NGOs, public intellectuals, and the political opposition – we can easily recognize that the political system is as far from a democracy as it was during ...

Feature

The East in You Never Leaves

We self-censored. We followed the rules. We complied.

March 16, 2019 • by Julia Sonnevend

There is a certain type of post-Soviet anxiety that manifests itself in fear of state authorities, border controls or even doormen. The memory of 1989 may have largely faded, but the feeling of being ‘eastern’ has stayed with many – not least those who have built up lives and careers ...

Europe & Central Asia

Democracy in Hungary?

The Orbán regime is clearly not democratic

March 5, 2019 • by Zoltán Gábor Szűcs

There is no democracy in Hungary anymore. If you have a hegemonic party that has gained a constitution-making majority in the parliament three times in a row, in increasingly rigged elections, one does not have a democracy. If the power of all major independent institutions is curtailed, or they are led ...

Feature

Policing the Womb 2.0

Why Hungary and Poland’s pro-natalist policies won’t work

February 28, 2019 • by Maria Bucur

Fifty years ago, neo-Malthusian demographers and politicians warned that overpopulation would wipe out all efforts to modernize the world, especially the postcolonial Global South. Rapid population growth in India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Iran were depicted as impediments to development. Republicans (Richard Nixon) and Democrats (Lyndon B. Johnson) worked with Planned ...

Democracy

Authoritarian Parasitism in Turkey and Beyond

Erdogan and the rise of strongman politics

February 6, 2019 • by Utku Balaban

What makes this phenomenon perplexing is the fact that these governments come into power in countries that are anything but similar. For instance, the United States has a long-lasting political system backed by its strong institutions and semi-holy texts such as its Constitution. Hungary reframed its entire political regime after ...

Authoritarian Parasitism in Turkey and Beyond

Feature

How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

An interview with Kim Lane Scheppele and Daniel Hegedűs

January 27, 2019 • by Daniel Hegedűs, Kim Lane Scheppele and Krisztian Simon

The Hungarian regime has a wide range of tools to repress its people and it deploys them cleverly to avoid drawing too much criticism at home and abroad. The Green European Journal spoke with Professor Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University and political scientist Daniel Hegedűs about Hungary’s autocratic turn ...

How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

Feature

A Public Seminar Happy New Year?

Reflections between hope and despair, with musical accompaniment

January 4, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I wanted to declare, without hesitation: Happy New Year! But I couldn’t, as New Year’s celebrations passed. I fear a very unhappy one, with more of what we have been experiencing. Democracy, free speech, academic freedom, human rights, and the movements for class, gender, sexual, and racial justice are all ...

Education

Hungary’s Attack on Gender Studies

A threatening online message and institutional inaction exposes the official illiberalism

November 29, 2018 • by Andrea Petö

Abby L. Ferber, in her 2017 presidential address at the meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society, analyzed the threats and harassment educators face in institutions of higher education in the United States -- quoted Malcom X: “If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out ...

Feature

Orban’s Government vs. The Social Sciences

Censoring scientific lectures in Hungary

November 5, 2018 • by Balazs Vedres

A public talk that a PhD student, Orsolya Vasarhelyi, and I were scheduled to give on November 8, 2018 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ (HAS) “Hungarian Day of Science” was censored by the Academy’s deputy secretary-general Beáta Mária Barnabás. In English, our talk’s title could be translated as “The ...

Orban’s Government vs. The Social Sciences

Democracy

Censorship or Right Wing Infighting or Both?

Hungary in 2018

September 27, 2018 • by Ivan Szelenyi

The editor (Tamás Demeter, a distinguished and conservative philosopher) and his editorial group were fired. As far as I can tell the last time an issue of a journal was destroyed to prevent its circulation was in 1984. Do we see the return of the past; is this a case ...