In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counterconcept to set against 'bourgeois nationalism' which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra-nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid-1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.

Socialist democracy appeared in the theory of democracy as an eminently non-western form of democracy in the period of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The concept of socialist democracy based on the theses that can differentiate socialist democracy from liberal or parliamentarian democracy: (1) the unity of the power of the proletariat, led by its vanguard political force of the communists, and (2) the setting of the framework of democratic decision-making in the field of labor. Socialist democracy was indeed a form of directed democracy beyond that it had systemic aspirations to create an alternative socio-economic model. This article aims to trace the historical-semantic formation of socialist democracy and discuss its main institutions in the years of post-totalitarian socialist Hungary between 1956 and 1989. What is remarkable in the case of Hungary is that the development of socialist democracy was accompanied by economic reforms to the planned economy from the first half of the 1960s. Thus, socialist democracy focused on the democratization and institutional system of the workplace, mainly as factory democracy and cooperative democracy. With the liberalization and capitalization of socialist economy in the eighties, however, these forms failed to manage the problems of economic incentives and social atomization.