‘Occupy Brussels’
After years of ‘stop Brussels’ and campaigns against the émigré philanthropist George Soros, there was perhaps only one surprising element in this long-rehearsed anti-colonial narrative: this time Orbán took the offensive. Since Brussels was ‘worse than the Labanc [Habsburg troops] and the Muscovite leaders were’, he claimed, ‘if we want to preserve Hungary’s freedom and sovereignty, we have no choice but to occupy Brussels’. He declared: ‘Now we will march on Brussels and we will make the change in the European Union ourselves.’ Warning that ‘this time we will not stop at Schwechat’—implying this still was 1848—he said it was ‘time for the Council of Lieutenants in Brussels to see fit to tremble’.
‘It is time to rise up,’ continued Orbán, suggesting the tide was changing. Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands were already showing signs of a new ‘sovereignist turn’ and Donald Trump’s eventual return to the White House would ‘restore normality’ to America and Europe. Hungarians stood at a crossroads: they could traverse a boulevard of the ‘Soros empire’ or take a path to Hungarian justice, assume ‘Brussels’ baby-walking harness’ or assert Hungarian freedom, pursue war or peace. ‘You must decide,’ said Orbán following Nemzeti dal, ‘to be slaves or free.’
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Yet the idea of taking the ‘imperial capital’ was not altogether new. Last summer, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest, Orbán had already disclosed his ‘military strategy’ of taking Washington and Brussels from the liberals. In a December interview and another near Christmas, he plotted directly: ‘We must occupy Brussels.’
Provincialised victimhood
Orbán’s obsession with the ‘liberal west’ meant Russia and Ukraine were not even mentioned in his national-day speech (unlike in 2022). Nor for that matter were other global connections, from imported Chinese factories to Asian guest workers—even the Hungarian ‘freedom fight’ against persecution of Christians in Africa or west Asia. Indeed Orbán’s remarkably deglobalised critique of colonialism silences more than 500 years of Europe-led, global colonialism.
In this world, the ‘Hungarian colony’ remains a parallel universe. Yet this provincialised victimhood effectively builds on a deep history of nationalist memory politics seeking western recognition. We Hungarians have long been educated at school to think of ourselves as eternal victims.
Twelve years ago, Orbán introduced the ‘colony’ trope in his national-day speech. Victimhood became the government’s most effective, yet strikingly unacknowledged, propaganda tool in domestic and foreign affairs. Remarkably, the illiberal capture of anti-colonial arguments in Orbán’s conservative ‘culture war’ fell on the deaf ears of political commentators.
Instead, they relentlessly engaged in similarly ‘west’-centred catching-up rituals, which lamented Hungary’s ‘democracy deficit’ compared with liberal democracies: its illiberalism, populism, authoritarianism, hybrid regime and gender politics. Orbán’s colonial victimisation of the national collective ‘self’ and his macho ‘freedom fight’ for national sovereignty against imperial Brussels—the ‘Soros empire’, the ‘globalist leftist-liberals’—is often ridiculed in western media. But the opposition in Hungary also followed a ‘west versus the rest’ worldview, offering a binary choice between an enlightened west (Europe) and a despotic east (Orbán).
New global narrative
The critics missed that the ‘Hungarian colony’ constituted a new global narrative of the country’s semi-peripheral manoeuvring in the world economy. This is Orbán’s misunderstood ‘Hungarian model’.
Protesting against ‘liberal western’ colonialism could successfully frame the everyday experiences of the failed neoliberal transition after 1989. It effectively themed what became clear with the 2008 economic crisis: dependence on western finance, failed catch-up, deepening social inequalities. The ‘colony card’ is played not to withdraw from the EU—as with ‘Brexit’ in the United Kingdom—but for a better bargaining position within it.
A small-state, exceptionalist argument, that Hungary ‘never had colonies’ and ‘never held slaves’, has allowed an escape from white colonial guilt. Government propagandists, such as Márton Békés, have ahistorically divided the EU into western ‘colonisers’ and eastern ‘non-colonisers’—curiously, along the former Iron Curtain. This positioning rhetoric has helped carve out a new, illiberal central Europe.
It is an idea torn apart by diverging reactions to the horrorific war in Ukraine: while Poland affirms a ‘prewar Europe’, Hungary ‘wants peace’ through denying Russian aggression. Yet west-oriented critics miss how this ideology of in-betweenness serves the global intermediary position of a Hungarian developmental state.
Orbán’s anti-colonialism has secured Hungary’s energy and security interests vis-à-vis Russia and underpinned its ‘eastern opening’ to lure east-Asian investments through the ‘Chinese new silk road’, thereby diversifying an economy dependent on the west, formerly ruled by International Monetary Fund loans and German capital. While critics highlight Orbán’s growing political isolation and democratic backsliding, his anti-colonial rhetoric has helped recruit anti-western allies by rebuilding relationships with the global south originally established—in another historical irony—through the similarly west-denouncing anti-colonialism of the state-socialist period.
‘Off whites’
Race has also loomed large within this anti-colonial jargon. While the government has condemned migration as a sin of western colonial history, the racialisation of ‘migrants’ has not only allowed articulation of an EU-imposed ‘border guard’ role, but also—as seen during Brexit—growing competition with post-colonial, non-European diasporas in the EU labour market. Performing whiteness and competitive colonial victimhood could thus underline that Hungarians should be the deserved recipients of EU benefits. EU funds could be reframed as the deserved privilege of subjugated ‘off whites’ to receive ‘colonial reparations’.
The Hungarian reception of the killing of the African American George Floyd by a white policeman in Minneapolis in 2020 demonstrated how Orbán’s comments on preserving ‘ethnic homogeneity’ in 2017 had segued into avoiding ‘racial mixing’. Gergely Gulyás, a minister in the prime minister’s office, called the Black Lives Matter campaign arising from several such incidents a ‘racist movement’ and the suspension of EU funds for Hungarian universities due to political interference ‘racial revenge’ against Hungarians. Government propagandists wore ‘White Lives Matter’ tee-shirts.
But Hungarian conservatives have also played with anti-colonial ideologies of racial in-betweenness, which have a deeper history I have called ‘semi-peripheral whiteness’. Orbán’s nativism has summoned old anti-western tropes of ‘Hungarian Indians’ living in a ‘reservation’, a metaphor resonating with Hungarian minorities in the Carpathian basin. His government has also resurrected the image of ancient, nomadic Magyar warriors having a long-lost ‘Turanic’ racial brotherhood with central-Asian peoples, as in the now state-funded Kurultaj festival. This has become a cultural-diplomacy tool in support of Hungarian co-operation in the Turkic Council (since 2018) and ‘building Eurasia’ under Chinese expansionism.
Colonial wars
The government’s anti-colonial propaganda has only been mirrored by the helplessly fragmented opposition. Its components have found unity against Russian or Chinese ‘colonialism’ in their protests against the Paks II Russian nuclear investment, Fudan University’s campus plans or recently the so-called ‘battery colonialism’ of importing environmentally hazardous battery and electric-car production from China and east Asia. However, their controversially Eurocentric ‘east-west’ polarity has also reproduced a reductive view of colonialism.
‘Gender wars’ have given way to ‘colonial wars’. Yet the Hungarian public continues to evade any critical discussion of their country’s complicated, semi-peripheral relationship with global colonialism and decolonisation. The exceptionalist myth of having nothing to do with colonialism, because Hungary ‘never had colonies’, is shared by all political identities in Hungary. Yet this just shows a systematic lack of knowledge and critical reflection.
Today, the fear of becoming a colony in Hungary only articulates a desperation for western recognition and a racial panic of losing long-sought ‘Eurowhite’ privileges. Meanwhile, the political capture of anti-colonial arguments by the illiberal conservatives goes unchallenged.
Zoltán Ginelli is a human geographer and global historian at the Ludovika University of Public Service in Budapest, focused on coloniality and race in Hungary and the political, economic and cultural relations between eastern Europe and the global south.
Source link : https://www.socialeurope.eu/misunderstanding-hungarys-anti-colonial-turn
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Publish date : 2024-04-24 07:00:00
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