{"id":9470,"date":"2018-03-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-09T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aspeninstitutece.softmedia.cz\/article\/2018\/crisis-central-european-university-age-political-populism\/"},"modified":"2024-09-30T18:49:57","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T16:49:57","slug":"crisis-central-european-university-age-political-populism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/article\/2018\/crisis-central-european-university-age-political-populism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Crisis of the Central European University in an Age of Political Populism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Hungarian Parliament on the Danube was built in the late nineteenth century, in a Neo-Gothic style inspired by the British Parliament at Westminster, as the architectural embodiment of Hungary\u2019s legislative autonomy within the Habsburg dualist state of Austria-Hungary. After the abolition of the Habsburg empire in 1918, the parliament\u2019s legislative significance was tempered by long periods of political imposition during the interwar authoritarian government of Admiral Miklo\u0301s Horthy and the post-war communist party state.<\/p>\n

Ironically, numerous members of the Fidesz party\u2014 including Orba\u0301n himself\u2014had been supported by Soros\u2019s generosity as they pursued their educations, and many are alumni of CEU itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The parliament\u2019s relation to Hungarian political independence has taken on newly ambivalent aspects in the current era of political populism dominated by Prime Minister Viktor Orba\u0301n in Hungary and his Fidesz party which came to power in the elections of 2010.<\/p>\n

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Last April, parliamentary legislation on higher education seemed to target the Central European University (CEU), which has played an exceptionally important academic role in Budapest since its creation in the post-communist decade of the 1990s. This legislation opened the possibility of driving the university out of Hungary or simply shutting it down.<\/p>\n

Orba\u0301n waged a fierce\u00a0rhetorical campaign against the acceptance of Middle Eastern Muslim refugees in Hungary, and has encouraged the bizarre notion that Brussels is the \u201cnew Moscow,\u201d prescribing policies that interfere with Hungary\u2019s independence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The so-called \u201cLex CEU\u201d was strongly encouraged by Orba\u0301n, and was accompanied by a populist political rhetoric of national educational independence directed against CEU as a \u201cforeign\u201d institution, created and supported by the \u201cforeign\u201d (Hungarian-American) philanthropist George Soros. Ironically, numerous members of the Fidesz party\u2014including Orba\u0301n himself\u2014had been supported by Soros\u2019s generosity as they pursued their educations, and many are alumni of CEU itself.<\/p>\n

Orba\u0301n’s Rhetorical Campaign against Muslim Refugees<\/h2>\n

Official hostility to CEU in Hungary has been accompanied by a disturbing, very personal billboard campaign featuring Soros\u2019s photograph. Soros in Hungary has been targeted not just as the \u201cforeign\u201d sponsor of CEU, but also as a supporter of the European Union\u2019s measures on behalf of refugees, and the intersection of these issues is one of the interesting and perplexing aspects of the Hungarian populist puzzle. Orba\u0301n waged a fierce rhetorical campaign against the acceptance of Middle Eastern Muslim refugees in Hungary, and has encouraged the bizarre notion that Brussels is the \u201cnew Moscow,\u201d prescribing policies that interfere with Hungary\u2019s independence.<\/p>\n

This view has been echoed by other populist demagogues in Eastern Europe, even though the aspiration to EU membership once appeared as a cherished ideal there, back in the 1990s, fervently endorsed by most political leaders, including the young Viktor Orba\u0301n. Now the European Commission has criticized the Hungarian Lex CEU, and raised the possibility of taking it before the EU Court of Justice, while Fidesz has denounced the EU as presumptuous for interfering in Hungarian higher education as well as immigration policy.<\/p>\n

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The Government Seems in Little Danger of Losing Elections<\/h2>\n

While Lex CEU has been widely denounced\u2014also in American academic communities\u2014as an assault on academic freedom, threatening an institution\u00a0where professors sustained a critical perspective on Orba\u0301n and Fidesz, one might reasonably ask whether closing down CEU is actually the primary\u00a0imperative\u00a0of the government or whether Orba\u0301n is more interested in stoking the ugly rhetoric around this campaign as a political goal in its own right, anticipating the elections in April.<\/p>\n

One of the early lessons of political populism seems to be that ugly demagoguery may be pursued for its own sake, enhancing the malice of the political climate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One might recall that the image of Soros was also used in the final stage of Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign\u2014along with the images of Janet Yellen and Lloyd Blankfein\u2014in a piece of populist political advertising that was immediately criticized as implicitly anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n

Orba\u0301n, after making some adjustments to Hungary\u2019s judicial and political system, seems in little danger of losing elections in the currently somewhat eroded conditions of Hungarian democracy, even as the parliament serves to further the ruling party\u2019s demagogic campaigns with legislation like Lex CEU. One of the interesting political features of Vladimir Putin\u2014whom Orba\u0301n, like Trump, openly admires\u2014is that he has been politically so much nastier in his political persecutions and vendettas than he needs to be in circumstances where he is very unlikely to lose elections. One of the early lessons of political populism seems to be that ugly demagoguery may be pursued for its own sake, enhancing the malice of the political climate, even without an immediate Machiavellian political purpose in sight. The campaign against CEU\u2014with its unpleasant billboards\u2014may fall into this category of apparently gratuitous political nastiness intended to help shape a nastier populist public.<\/p>\n

A Laboratory for Democracy for All of Central Europe<\/h2>\n

For the moment, CEU seems to have satis ed the principal condition of Lex CEU by establishing a relationship with Bard College in the United States, a presumptive American home base, though anyone who knows the history of CEU knows that Budapest is its true home. However, the Orba\u0301n government has demonstrated that it can pull the rug out from under the university at any time by arbitrary interpretation of the law or by instigating new laws in the complicitous parliament on the Danube. Whether the university can continue to function successfully with such a sword hanging over its head is di cult to determine, and some would say that CEU might do better to pull up stakes and move up the Danube to Vienna in search of a more appreciative political context. Yet, it might also be argued that there is no place right now that needs the liberal values of CEU more desperately than the democratical- ly-challenged Hungary.<\/p>\n

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In November, New York University hosted a discussion of the crisis surrounding CEU with the former Rector of CEU, John Shattuck, and with the celebrated Hungarian-American television and radio journalist Kati Marton, who is also a trustee of CEU. Shattuck, who was formerly the US ambassador to the Czech Republic, spoke of CEU as a laboratory for democracy for all of Central Europe in the aftermath of communism, a place where post-communist values could be tested and evaluated.<\/p>\n

For that very reason the university was now menaced by the hijacking of Hungarian democracy under the Orba\u0301n government in a climate of newly intense nationalism. Marton spoke of the stoking of fear and hatred in the current climate. Attending the session was the Hungarian Consul in New York, Ferenc Kumin, a CEU alumnus who nevertheless had to defend his government\u2019s assault on the university before an academic public of professors and students who were not inclined to be sympathetic to the Orba\u0301n agenda. The exchanges between Kumin on the one hand and Shattuck and Marton on the other were pointed but civil. The consul insisted, somewhat ingenuously, that Hungary was only asking CEU to abide by \u201cthe rule of law\u201d\u2014that is, Lex CEU\u2014but he did not acknowledge that that law was passed in parliament precisely to target CEU and threaten its existence in Budapest.<\/p>\n

Yet, it might also be argued that there is no place right now that needs the liberal values of CEU more desperately than the democratically-challenged Hungary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Role of Liberal Universities in Increasingly Illiberal Societies<\/h2>\n

The circumstances surrounding the crisis of CEU in Hungary do not so much teach lessons as pose questions. First, what is it that Orba\u0301n finds so disturbing about CEU, and, if not so disturbing, then what makes it such an attractive target? Second, what is it about Hungarian nationalism that makes the rhetorical disparagement of the \u201cforeign\u201d such a potent political force? And should we understand this as the long-lived resentment that derives from the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, the treaty that dismembered Habsburg Hungary after World War I, a treaty that is still invoked in a contemporary discourse of Hungarian victimization?<\/p>\n

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The circumstances surrounding the crisis of CEU in Hungary do not so much teach lessons as pose questions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Third, does some sort of Trianon complex also explain the unexpected potency of Euroskepticism in a country that, according to Milan Kundera in his famous essay on the tragedy of Central Europe, stood ready to \u201cdie for Europe\u201d in 1956\u2014 in a country that seemed to celebrate unanimously its entry into the European Union in 2004? Fourth, how did Orba\u0301n\u2019s Hungary with its much-vaunted \u201cilliberal democracy\u201d develop from the seemingly liberal decade of the 1990s, when communist society and economy gave way to democratic and liberal forms of government and economy, when the young Viktor Orba\u0301n seemed to represent the post-communist liberal vision of Hungary? And, finally, what is the proper role of a liberal university like CEU\u2014 with its commitment to free intellectual inquiry and free academic discussion\u2014 within the political and social context of an increasingly illiberal society? This last question is one that other universities in other countries\u2014 including the United States\u2014 may have to consider in the coming decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hungarian Parliament on the Danube was built in the late nineteenth century, in a Neo-Gothic style inspired by the British Parliament at Westminster, as the architectural embodiment of Hungary\u2019s legislative autonomy within the Habsburg dualist state of Austria-Hungary. After the abolition of the Habsburg empire in 1918, the parliament\u2019s legislative significance was tempered by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7277,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[289,102,97,93,101],"class_list":["post-9470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-central-european-university","tag-comment","tag-hungary","tag-politics","tag-populism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9470"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10505,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9470\/revisions\/10505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}