Illiberal Statecraft in Hungary
My current project builds on my previous work on the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary but shifts and expands its focus. Whereas in my earlier work I focused on the role of right-wing intellectuals, media, activists and politicians in articulating social conflicts and discontents generated by processes of depeasantization and liberal emancipation politics and shifting public opinion towards the rejection of liberalism and the espousal of exclusionary policies, I am now looking to understand what happens when right-wing currents take control of the state. My interest lies in mapping some of the key strategies whereby the country’s rulers seek to authorise their rule - such authorisation being key for a regime which relies on a populist legitimation strategy, portraying itself as reflecting the will of the people.
The primary focus of this research is on the transformation of a limited welfare state into an illiberal workfare state. While the previous liberal regime sought to guarantee the social rights of citizens (but without seeking to address the structural causes of socio-economic marginalisation). the new regime lays the emphasis on social merit and obligations, reserving welfare support for gainfully employed citizens, reasserting social control over ‘surplus populations’ and policing those who fall outside the purview of welfare and workfare (the homeless, those involved in the informal economy, etc.). Relying on ethnographic evidence collected in two small towns, I am looking to understand how rural populations have responded to the most visible aspect of this broad transformation: the introduction of local workfare schemes under the management of local mayors. The hypothesis driving this foray is that workfare is widely perceived to have offered tangible solutions to the contradictions of (neo)liberal governance on the level of everyday life.
The project fits within a broader multidisciplinary effort to theorise the stability of illiberal rule in Hungary. I am of the opinion that existing conceptualisations suffer from severe limitations. Magyar’s influential conceptualisation of the mafia state vastly overstates the case for political corruption. As for political scientists, while they are right to point to the tilting of the political playing field towards the ruling party and the monopolisation of state resources, their emphasis on domination and coercion underplays the relevance of popular support for the current regime. Critical political economists who have focused on a new stage of neoliberal capital accumulation emerging after the 2008 economic crisis have, on the other hand, veered close to the opposite pole by neglecting the role of political agency in a political field wherein a dominant party enjoys a great degree of freedom in responding to socio-economic pressures and opportunities. This creates space for an ethnographically informed research program, which seeks to decipher how flagship policies and initiatives shape and interact with lived experience in diverse settings, and draws on this empirical evidence to formulate strong hypotheses about their political functions and effectiveness.
