Financialization and state capitalism in Hungary after the Global Financial Crisis

Karas, David G.

doi:10.1177/10245294211003274

Cited by 36 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…First, the general cultural politics and policy of the Orbán-regime have been recently examined by several scholars (Kristóf, 2017;Barna et al, 2018;Bonet & Zamorano, 2020;Nagy & Szarvas, 2021). This article joins the thread in the literature that emphasizes how the regime's cultural politics should be studied as an integral part of its comprehensive restructuring of the internal and external dependencies from financial policy (Karas, 2022), to housing (Gagyi et al, 2021), from labor-relations (Meszmann & Fedyuk, 2020) to its integration into global value chains (Szabó & Jelinek, 2023). Altogether this shift can be described as a rise of state capitalism in which authoritarian measures serve capital accumulation and national cultural apparatuses of both elite and popular culture-such as the HAA or the subsidy of national pop music-are prioritized.…”

Section: Culture and State Formation In The Orbán Regimementioning

confidence: 88%

Remaking civil society under authoritarian capitalism: The case of the Orbán regime’s Hungarian Academy of Arts

Nagy

2023

Intersections

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Authoritarian regimes are known for their attacks on civic organizations; however, this article demonstrates how such rules also set up and operate new forms of civil society. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork at the cultural flagship institution of the Orbán-regime, the Hungarian Academy of Arts (HAA), this research engages with civic organizations often labeled as ‘uncivil,’ ‘dark,’ or ‘illiberal.’ Instead of applying the normative notion of civil society, it joins a century-long body of literature that, following Gramsci, stresses the integral nature of political and civil society. The article contributes to this research trajectory by spotlighting a new hegemonic regime’s dynamic remaking of civil society. The article conceptualizes the process of remaking civil society and reveals four facets beyond top-down command (1) the making of clientelist social relations that affect both the privileged and the rank-and-file actors, (2) the managed articulation of dissent toward the regime that pacifies discontent (3) the relative autonomy of regime-allied civic organizations and (4) the orchestration of pre-existing bottom-up initiatives. By coining the concept of recivilization, this article contributes to understanding how emerging regimes remake civil society and mobilize voluntary social practices to maintain their rule. Through this understanding, this article highlights that authoritarianism is more than top-down ruling and suggests the novel notion of recivilization as a concept to capture the pro-systemic role of civil society.

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Section: Culture and State Formation In The Orbán Regimementioning

confidence: 88%

Remaking civil society under authoritarian capitalism: The case of the Orbán regime’s Hungarian Academy of Arts

Nagy

2023

Intersections

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“…In addition, some illiberal financial nationalists must influence the judiciary to stave off challenges to their policies. As Karas (2022) demonstrates, Hungary this process involved the Orbán government's creation of a "financial vertical" that consolidated state control over the central bank, credit provision, and domestic financial institutions. Persuasively arguing that having a subordinate position in the international financial system does not mean that domestic actors lack agency in confronting it, he shows that Orbán was able to turn Hungary's financialized system to his own political and economic ends.…”

Section: Policy Choice and Implementation: Constraints And Enablersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, although illiberal financial nationalism positions itself in opposition to the universalist claims of the international liberal order, it is also fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within that order. Just as financialization makes it possible to create a domestic "financial vertical" (Karas 2022), financial globalization and its institutions not only constrain the policy options of illiberal financial nationalists but also provide opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance their nationalist cause. Illiberal financial nationalists must strategically deploy international relationships to benefit national insiders and their allies, and in fact successful financial nationalist strategies are often actively enabled by the liberal international institutions.…”

Section: Sources Of Financingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Financial Nationalism in Theory and Practice

Johnson,

Barnes

2024

Nationalities Papers

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The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal in its conception of political economy. At the same time, it is fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within the international liberal order, which both constrains the policy options of financial nationalists and provides opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance nationalist causes. This article offers a conceptual analysis of contemporary financial nationalism that explores its fundamental characteristics, explains what is distinctive about it, delineates its four major policy subtypes, identifies the resources and capabilities required to successfully engage in it, and discusses the implications of doing so. It aids researchers in thinking about financial nationalism’s internal workings across different contexts, in understanding why it has lasted as long and spread as far as it has, in considering how it may evolve, and in contemplating how it can affect domestic and international political economies.

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“…We, however, abstain from defining either Hungary, or Serbia (or China) as state capitalist regimes per se . Instead, following studies which describe the parallel neoliberal and protectionist nature of the Hungarian regime (Gerőcs, 2021; Karas, 2022), in which the state has a particular balancing role, we rather focus on the state capitalist modalities (Alami and Dixon, 2021) in both countries. That is, in accordance with the relational research program of ‘uneven and combined state capitalism’, we aim to analyse the dynamics and complexity of processes in which ‘the state’ and ‘the capital’ nexus (van Apeldoorn et al, 2012) are constantly reconfigured across a variety of scales.…”

Section: The Political Economy Of State Capitalism and Large-scale In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

State, capitalism and infrastructure-led development: A multi-scalar analysis of the Belgrade-Budapest railway construction

Szabó¹,

Jelinek²

2023

Environ Plan A

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The 2008 financial crisis allowed for the rising power of China to expand deeper into more (semi-)peripheral regions: in the past decade, the role of China and Chinese SOEs has increased markedly in Eastern Europe. This has been in step with China's geopolitical and geoeconomic expansion, hallmarked by the Belt and Road Initiative; the reconstruction of the Belgrade-Budapest railway line constitutes one of its flagship projects in Europe. This paper aims to explore the complexities of the current reconfiguration of state-capital nexus through an empirical analysis of this particular development project; in doing so, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate about the heuristic use of ‘new’ state capitalism in three specific ways. First, instead of conceptualizing the state as a territorially confined power container, we propose to scrutinize the state-capital nexus from a multi-scalar and relational perspective. Second, we claim that the study of funding, financing and governing of large-scale infrastructural investments is a fruitful analytical entry point to theorize the changing relations between ‘state’ and ‘capital’. Finally, we argue that from the perspective of contemporary shifts in global power structures, the emergence of state capitalist modalities in the Eastern peripheries of Europe should be understood as a ‘co-production’ of the geopolitical rivalry and elite capture of domains of infrastructure. In terms of methodology, in order to show how state-capital relations are produced, enacted and redrawn, the study builds on the analysis of media sources, policy documents, company networks, semi-structured interviews, and non-participant observations.

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Financialization and state capitalism in Hungary after the Global Financial Crisis

Cited by 36 publications

References 54 publications

Remaking civil society under authoritarian capitalism: The case of the Orbán regime’s Hungarian Academy of Arts

Remaking civil society under authoritarian capitalism: The case of the Orbán regime’s Hungarian Academy of Arts

Contemporary Financial Nationalism in Theory and Practice

State, capitalism and infrastructure-led development: A multi-scalar analysis of the Belgrade-Budapest railway construction

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