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National culture and structural anti-semitism
as a cultural attitude in Hungary
(published in: Inclusive Europe. Horizon 2020. Reader
of the conference, 17-19 November 2005, Budapest, ed. By
Yudhishthir Raj Isar. Kultúrpont Iroda, 2005, 80-83).
The
author is art historian, cultural manager, independent
academic researcher and writer; she is a member of the
steering committee of the
Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft e.V./ Landesgruppe Bayern
(Society for Cultural Policy, Bavaria Group). Having
written extensively on Hungarian culture, cultural and
media policy,
Hungary’s
integration to the EU and cultural ‘globalisation’, she
has also tackled the issue of anti-Semitism as a
cultural attitude. While her analysis of the recent
manifestations of this cultural attitude is confined to
her own country, the phenomena she describes are shared
in other European societies.
Anti-Semitism in Hungary is a form of cultural attitude
and (like modern anti-Semitism in general) it can only
be understood if the phenomenon is not interpreted in
the affirmative sense as an animosity towards Jews, but
in a wider, anthropological sense as a kind of ’cultural
code’ or ’weltanschauung’
(view of the world). This, however, is not only a
distinction of name, but of content. In the course of
the Enlightenment with its profound secularisation,
negative stereotypes, directed for centuries at a
certain, outwardly identifiable, religious community,
became independent and were now adopted also to people
who had nothing to do with the Jewish religion. In
Hungary too, anti-Semitism is not directed exclusively
at Jews or those assumed to be Jews, but at all those
who oppose the myth of ‘home’ and the ‘motherland soaked
in blood’ (Blut- und Bodenmythos) and represent
cosmopolitanism, urbanism and intellectualism. Thus
these thought structures can be directed at people
considered to be ‘outside standard norms’ and therefore
also at people who count as ‘foreigners’ so e.g. at roma
and homosexuals.
After the
fall of the Wall, the new post-communist right - from
which the first democratically elected government
1990-1994 was recruited - attempted right from the very
beginning to construct a new national identity to go
with the political independence achieved through the
change in regimes. Yet, the basis of this national
identity was a notion of people which did not mean “demos”,
that is, “a society of free and equal people”, but “ethnos”,
that is, an imaginary society based on descent and
affiliation. This then gave rise to an ethnic
understanding of culture whose point of departure was an
organic character immanently specific to “the Magyars”
out of which Hungarian national cultural ideas of values
should grow. This would be the standard concept of
culture also during the second national-conservative
government (1998-2002) against which international
culture could be measured with everything to be rejected
that is alien to the national culture. It went hand in
hand with a desire for a cultural homogeneity, which is
catastrophic because it perceives every kind of
‘foreignness’ as a disturbance and as a threat. In order
to be able to manage this feeling of threat, it emphases
its own greatness and turns its own people taken in the
ethnic sense into heroes. Here the points of departure
are partly clichés or myths, apocryphal history, that
is, through which the allegedly thousand-year-old
homogeneity in the culture of one’s own people can be
grounded and its greatness and superiority to other
peoples can be stressed. This heroisation also attains,
not infrequently with the help of the church, an
additional divine legitimation. The originally
romanticising ideals will then be incorporated in the
way of thinking of society increasingly deeply and
dramatically as a “völkisch”-nationalistic concept of
culture.
That was
how this cultural ethnocentrism came into being, which
led first and necessarily to the creation of ‘ingroups’
and ‘outgroups’, that is, to the creation of images of
the enemy in relation to the allegedly culturally and
ethnically homogeneous society. As the Magyar minorities
living beyond the boundaries of the country also belong
to the ‘ingroups’ who need to be culturally integrated,
secondly, Hungarian ethnocentrism automatically led to
the myth of greater Hungary. While at the same time it
created ‘outgroups’ within the existing boundaries,
thirdly, the (cultural) ethnocentrism led to
anti-Semitism. Yet, as mentioned before, the specific
feature of anti-Semitism is that it is not satisfied
with hatred against the Jews in itself, but it becomes a
problem of identity-anti-identity, that is, it is
directed not only against Jews or alleged Jews but
against the type of man who opposes the myth of ‘home’
and the ‘motherland soaked in blood’ (Blut- und
Bodenmythos). Incidentally, for Hungarian structural
anti-Semitism as a cultural attitude it does not matter
whether somebody has a Jewish identity or not. The code
words meaning ‘Jewish’ are used generally to slander the
entire intelligentsia that sympathises with the spectrum
of parties on the left, even though they are known not
to be Jewish.
The
increasing emphasis on the ‘national’ and the
‘Christian’ rakes up anti-Semitism as these notions
traditionally mean the negation of ‘Jewish’ in Hungarian
völkisch-conservative thinking. In this way, everything
that counts not as ‘real Magyar’ is discarded on the
political right as evil, as cosmopolitan, which means
finally as ‘Jewish’.
The notion
of the so-called “reversed assimilation”, that is, that
Magyars have in the meantime become a minority in their
own motherland because the attempt by the “(Jewish)
liberals” to align the Magyar nation with their own
style and way of thinking has been widely successful, is
an essential moment of Hungarian anti-Semitism.
Today,
there are two parallel societies in the country bitterly
fighting against one another in vigorous and at times
even violent conflicts. Fear plays the most important
role on both sides; both sides speak about exclusion,
yet with the difference that the völkisch-nationalists,
in line with the tenet of reversed assimilation, mean
the exclusion of Magyars by the ‘(Jewish) liberals’ in
their own home country.
Many
cultural events demonstrate with their ‘patriotic
concept’ this exclusion. Behind these ‘patriotic
cultural concepts’ is, however, hidden a kind of ‘worry’
for the ‘Magyarishness’. ‘To save the Magyarishness’, a
public-minded völkisch-nationalistic cultural network,
following the motto ‘one camp, one flag’, grew into a
mass movement over the past three years. After the
national conservative coalition was barely defeated at
the parliamentary elections in April 2002, their
‘leader’ Viktor Orbán founded an extra-parliamentary
opposition movement, so to speak a ‘bourgeois people’s
unity’ consisting of small civic circles. These ‘civic
circles’ were ‘institutionalised’ through their own
office, having their own homepage and a mailing list and
co-ordinate also regular demonstrations against a
‘homogenisation of culture by the left’. The slogan of
this public-minded cultural network is “Forward
Hungary!”
In
conjunction with other so called
‘Magyarishness-Organisations’ they aim
‘to save
Magyarishness’. It is meant first in a cultural sense
because, in the view of many, the cultural specifics of
the country would melt in a cultural ‘brew of unity’
after EU integration. Secondly, saving is meant as the
protection of the ‘real Magyarishness’, which also
defines itself as ‘real Christian’ from the ‘enemies of
the nation’ in its own land. These enemies, however,
comprise the entire political left in Hungary. One
example: after the lost elections, Orbán said “the
nation cannot be in opposition” and this “circumstance
temporarily stationed around us“ would soon be passed
again. This paraphrasing of the vocabulary of those in
power during the years of real socialism, who spoke for
40 years about the “Soviet troops temporarily stationed
in Hungary” suggests first and foremost a permanent and
straight-line continuity from the Stalinist dictatorship
to the current social-liberal government, the
“post-communists”, as they are referred to, and secondly
it also hints at the occupation of Hungary by
‘foreigners’. Accordingly, the socialists and liberals
(as governing coalition in power between 1994 and 1998
and currently since 2002), is the foreign power from
which the nation must be freed.
It seems
that the current social-liberal government is powerless
against the force, with which the cultural völkisch-nationalistic
movement is advancing and unable to stand up against its
war psychosis. The atmosphere is so explosive in the
country that even political scientists wonder how come
that it has not yet peaked in major conflict.
Historian
Ferenc Fejtö, living in Paris, believes that “there is a
civil war in Hungary which luckily has not yet been
expressed in bloody fighting, in which there has not yet
been armed violence. From the outside, the country seems
calm and stable, yet when you know the situation, you
perceive how explosive the atmosphere is”. He blames the
constellation that is referred to in Hungary as the
political right which, however, cannot be compared with
the political right in a West European sense as it has
radicalised itself continuously.
The
country needs a consistently communicated counter-vision
against the consistently communicated vision of the
national conservative side, which could only be the
vision of democracy. But the current socialist-liberal
governing coalition has no alternative vision and it
seems it has not yet dared to confront the basic evil of
the ethnic notion of culture which leads to cultural
nationalism, to ethnocentrism and to exclusion. Even
though its understanding of culture is much more
democratic, without effective communication, however,
its ever so vehement counter-measures have - at least to
date - been exhausted in a concept less gobbledygook.
Structural
anti-Semitism as a cultural attitude cannot be checked
with any kind of legal means, it should fall within the
competence of a democratically oriented cultural policy.
But since the years of real socialism, when as an
instrument of power it had a strategic function in
‘bringing up the socialist man-type’ and prescribed the
direction of cultural values and orientation with its
monopolistic violence, cultural policy has not really
been democratised. Fearing that a value oriented
cultural policy would lead to the continuation of a
paternalistic communication by the state whereby the
public would be told what it had to think with
monopolistic force, even social-liberal governments
trust the ‘healing’ forces of the market. They renounce
a creative cultural and media policy and in the name of
the freedom of the press they leave room even for right
radical views. In the meantime, the national
conservatives enabled to offensively communicate their
visions, dramatically strengthen their influence on
society and the media.
Through
the cultural infighting, the German word ‘Kulturkampf’
is also used for it, which has been raging between the
‘genuine Magyars’ on the political right with the ideal
of an ‘authentic’ and ‘organic Magyar’ value orientation
and the ‘cosmopolitans’, ‘urbans’, and ‘international
men’ on the political left, who are to be excluded,
since the change in regimes in 1989 and 1990, Hungary
has become a country divided in terms of
social-psychology.
‘Patriotic
cultural concepts’ therefore reflect identity problems
of the majority of society and the radicalisation of
Hungarian society is surely to be traced back to a
democratic deficit. Yet, it can also be associated with
the fact that over the last few years largely German and
American multinational companies strong on capital
bought up entire industries and, short of a local civil
society and proper representation of interests, they did
much for the creation of a wild capitalism.
Nationalism researcher believe that the way in which
integration has been carried out to date has not only
not contributed to the process of democratisation in
Central Europe but it has even impeded it and provided
the opponents of integration with additional arguments.
Because local discourse was neglected, without
conducting a normative dialogue, the candidate countries
were given ideas, rules, values and concepts which they
did accept but did not internalise and did not
integrate. In addition, the West supports certain
paternalistic attitudes in relation to Central Europe,
so the question arises whether the ways and means
whereby the EU has negotiated the enlargement with the
candidate countries would not lead to the export of the
democratic deficit of the Union and whether the EU does
not unconsciously contribute to the maintenance of the
liminal condition of post-communism. Researcher warn
that the integration will certainly be concomitant with
a cultural shock. In some cases, it will appear in the
form of xenophobia and in the rejection of anything new
– that is, in an increase in the activity of the new
radical right.
It appears
that despite this process
which endangers the whole of Europe, the EU fails to
rightly take into account what really happens ‘over
there’.
Thus the
EU condemns Hungarian Anti-Semitism,
policies
and actions concerning culture remain restricted to
‘harmless areas’ such as cooperation and exchange,
which on the one hand constricts the concept of culture,
and on the other hand reinforces the democratic
shortcomings in the structure of the post-communists
states’ cultural policies. The „Core Europe“- concept
developed by the old EU countries in reaction to the new
nationalist tendencies of Central – Eastern Europe,
promoted by European public intellectuals such as
Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Adolf Muschg,
leads to a vicious circle, as this in turn encourages
the nationalistic tendencies in the post-communist
countries.
What would be of real
value is to finally acknowledge what is going on „over
there” and to clarify the mutual interaction. One way of
doing this would be through an East-West dialogue
amongst the critical public,
which
could look into the cultural dimension of European
integration. This dialogue has to have a progressive
understanding of diversity, taking into consideration
not only the differences between the member states and
regions, but also the differences within them. That
means distancing themselves from thinking in national,
governmental categories, instead including
considerations of political, social and economical
developments, like migration and current processes of
increasing differentiation and individuation within
society, picking up on worries, fears and anomalies.
Because: a
cultural policy which is based on fear and consequently
on a ‘patriotic’ cultural concept, will always lead to
exclusion, and what is more, it will always reproduce
exclusion and render it automatic.
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