“Coloniality of power” in East Central Europe: external penetration as internal force in post-socialist Hungarian politics

Abstract

Joining a series of analyses of effects of othering, orientalism, or coloniality in East Central

The Rise of ‘Illiberal’ Democracy: The Orbánization of Hungarian Political Culture

“…Objectively class is fundamental to a capitalist society -subjectively discussing or analysing it in political debate has, as the Hungarian dissident Gaspár Tamás argues, largely disappeared in East Central Europe(Fiala 2016). Instead political debate is dominated by such issues as: the nation, migrants, the unemployed, the EU and the community (Gagyi and Eber 2015).Fidesz's quasi-developmental state aims to be a form of national capitalism that will aim to protect sectors of the Hungarian population from the pressures of the market, enveloping this move in an argument about reclaiming Hungarian sovereignty from the EU and the threat of globalization(Ablonczy 2015;Gagyi 2016). As with Jobbik, Fidesz's economic policies are not a fundamental challenge to neoliberalism.…”

Crisis of Capitalism and (De-)Politicisation of Monetary Policymaking: Reflections from Hungary and Turkey

“…Both countries underwent substantive restructuring in the pre-2008 context in line with both the framework of the Washington consensus and subsequent EU accession requirements (Sadler and Swain, 1994: 390-1;Bedirhanoglu, 2007: 1246-8; Bohle andGreskovits, 2007: 109, Bakir andOnis, 2010;Sonmez, 2011;Gagyi, 2016).The global crisis from 2008 onwards has similarly witnessed the emergence of a period of questioning and revision of the pre-2008 policies. Even though Hungary is an official EU member and Turkey is a candidate country, we contend that, within the scope of the management of money, the positioning of both economies outside the immediate Eurozone and official control of ECB makes them plausible cases for exploring the common and divergent strategies of the monetary policymakers within the structural constraints and autonomy provided in such a context.…”

“…In the case of Hungary, the integration into the global circuit of capital visibly accelerated from 1989 onwards when the country officially became one of the Central and East European 'transition' countries (Borocz, 2000;Gagyi and Eber, 2015;Gagyi, 2016;Gerocs and Pinkasz, 2017). Gerocs and Pinkasz (2017), with specific reference to the accumulation dynamics in the automative industry, argue that this integration has increasingly taken a dependent form with large scale privatisations, the foreign direct investment flows especially in electronics and car manufacturing sectors and European Union transfers as part of the global restructing of capital and labour in this period 4 .…”

Introduction

“…A recent stream of historical political-economic analyses depicted the Orbán regime is a novel attempt to bolstering capital accumulation in reaction to the 2008 crisis of the neoliberal world order (Antal, 2019 ; Éber, Gagyi, Gerőcs, & Jelinek, 2019 ; Fabry, 2019 ; Gagyi, 2016 ; Gerőcs & Pinkasz, 2018 ; Rogers, 2020 ; Stubbs & Lendvai-Bainton, 2019 ; Wilkin, 2016 ). These studies identified two competing political and economic interest groups.…”