Restoring What Never Existed: The Role of Familism in Narratives of Return in Hungary

Abstract

This study seeks to provide an insight into the mechanisms of familism in the landscapes of Hungarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs), public and higher education, and academia. By contextualizing the growing importance of familism as a governing ideology and an effective political tool used by the current government aiming to offer an alternative to the insecurities rooted in the economic restructuring and cultural transformation in Eastern Europe in the last few decades, we show how “academic familism” and “NGO-familism,” often intertwined, reproduce the ideological underpinnings of the Hungarian neoliberal gender regime. The article’s novelty is in, first, revealing how recent institutionalization tendencies show that Hungarian academia, especially in the field of Social Sciences, is shifting to reproduce and legitimize familism, risking the autonomy of science even in the short term. Second, the study highlights that besides some government-friendly NGOs dedicated to promoting familism, the ideology of the importance of families is strengthened even by some bottom-up civil organizations that campaign for a more inclusive family concept as a reaction to the government’s idealization of the nuclear, heterosexual, and marriage-based family formations.