The long shadow of the dissenter: Challenges to public intellectual practices after 1989 in Hungary

Liberty Bridge in Budapest. Photo: Jorge Franganillo Follow (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

As one of the Narodniks who had preserved ties with and repeatedly expressed respect towards dissenters of the “urban” liberal tradition, Csoóri never could quite process how he became, basically overnight, the textbook example of populist antisemitism in the wake of his admittedly offensive remarks. As his writings attest, he could not come to terms with the acute sense of loss of agency and control over the public self, the experience of seeing his words interpreted by an environment suddenly turned hostile.

Enemy of the people

György Konrád, to some extent, shared Csoóri’s fate. A liberal dissenter, perhaps the best known Hungarian opposition figure before 1989 in the “West”, his public utterances during the last, crumbling phase of the one-party system were meticulously measured to ensure that various political creeds uniting around a democratic platform would not be alienated. Of all “urban” liberals, Konrád was perhaps the one held in highest esteem by the Narodniks. By 1991 he nevertheless found himself unable to define and shape his public persona. As he tells us in The Melancholy of Rebirth, a particularly painful realisation for him was how he became the object of intense hate from the nascent Hungarian extreme right that identified him not just as a liberal Jew (both true, in his own words), but also – crucially – an enemy of “proper” Hungarians. Konrád never blundered in the transition years as Csoóri did. He never made a rash statement concerning some innate tendency for intolerance in Hungarian society. His reminders of the problematic, anti-democratic traditions of the Hungarian right remained measured and nuanced. This made the process, which turned him into a representation of the supposed “anti-nation” forces, all the more injurious and hurtful.

Csoóri and Konrád were two amongst a small universe of dissenting public intellectuals who had made a lasting impact during the communist regime of János Kádár. They both had to face the crumbling of their carefully constructed positions as commentators on the fate of the broader political community in which they claimed membership: the Hungarian political and cultural nation. This all happened well before and quite independently of the recent rise of quasi-sectarian “intellectual violence” in our current era of populist rhetoric. By the time this latest political wave reached Hungary, the damage had long been done. For this reason, the Hungarian story of how the role of public intellectuals was undermined there may help us make sense of what is happening elsewhere today.

To assess the tradition and standing of public intellectuals in Hungary, the image of the dissenter provides a logical starting point. A public intellectual in Kádárist Hungary – perhaps the merriest of all socialist barracks but nevertheless a dictatorship with a diverse toolbox to silence or marginalise critical voices – had the choice to dissent or find a very limited niche in a highly specialised field, likely academia. The third option was, of course, party-conform irrelevance. These intellectuals were ever reminding the powers that be of the radical disjunction between promises of a future, classless and free society and the realities of oppression. In a nominally “populist” regime – the rule of the proletariat – the dissenter could retreat and indeed had to retreat into radical anti-populism. Directing measured criticism against the bad, and proposing “new evolutionist” (à la Adam Michnik) solutions that weighed the benefits of limited, ethics-focused agendas against the revolutionary option of radical subversion, the dissenter was a figure that intrinsically carried aspects of political realism and unflinching normativity all at the same time.

Decade of the intellectuals

To inhabit this position, one did not need to resign ideological commitments. In Hungary, this usually meant that one was a reformist, a liberal or a Narodnik. It did, however, require “social credit” of the kind that would make all those open to hearing criticism of the increasingly sclerotic system willing to listen to the dissenting voice. The source of this credit was, at least in part, the willingness of the individual to endure harassment of the milder and harsher kind, and it was intellectuals’ broad valence in society that prompted András Bozóki, the preeminent scholar of intellectuals in Hungary, to refer to the years 1982-1993 as the decade of the intellectuals.

Bozóki also observed, however, that the last years of that great decade required the adaptation of public roles to the conditions of emergent democracy. Some public intellectuals accepted the new constellation of public life after 1989. István Csurka, another noted Narodnik, appeared fairly content in his newfound role as an actual populist. Playing the spectre to the conservative prime minister, József Antall from 1990 on, as vice president of the largest government party, Csurka haunted the Hungarian Democratic Forum with his increasingly radical antisemitism and ethno-essentialism until his expulsion in 1993. He then settled into his final role as the leader – de facto for life – of a right-wing extremist fringe movement.

János Kis, the editor and publisher of the most famous samizdat journal Beszélő and prominent academic philosopher, temporarily acceded to the position of the president of the liberal party, the Free Democrats. As his sparse comments on this, the formal high note of his political career, attest, he was less than ecstatic about his role but accepted it as a contribution to the building of a new, democratic Hungary. Dénes Csengey, a poet associated with the Narodnik tradition but known mainly for his staunch anti-communism, became an MP and, as many would argue, died of it soon thereafter. Whatever the truth behind Csengey’s sudden death at the age of 38 in 1991, fellow intellectuals believed he came to symbolise the impossibility of transitioning into a position of power and influence from a marginal and/or threatened existence, while coming face-to-face with the inhumane “political machine” of multiparty politics and intraparty Machiavellianism.

But what was it that made the former dissenters, with a few exceptions, bitter about the nascent democratic order and the possibility of public philosophising under the freedoms guaranteed by it? What caused Konrád to experience a loss of control and the inability to shape his public persona? My argument, admittedly incomplete, points to the interplay of endogenous political cultures in Hungary with the systemic features of democratic politics – a much desired import from the historically more successful half of Europe.

Cold civil war

In 1989-1990 Hungary was emerging from the ruins of a dictatorship imposed by a foreign power. The four decades-long imposition, however, neither helped solve nor could destroy the pre-1945 legacy of Hungarian political culture, a de facto cold civil war with multiple sides and shifting allegiances. While both Narodniks and liberals opposed the interwar authoritarian regime, both were to some extent accommodated by it – or at least this was how the opposing camps often perceived their ideological competitors. Under the later, more liberal phase of Kádár’s socialist regime of the 1980s, the same binary logic re-emerged, if intermixed with calls for mastering the past and uniting into an intellectual front opposing the regime. Yet there existed some bridges to cross, and in 1985, in the rural township of Monor, the two wings of dissenters succeeded in having a joint discussion.

Still, the Narodniks dominated the next meeting in 1987, and mutual fears quickly spiralled into a political security dilemma: could either side be looking to discredit the other by allying with the regime (in the case of the Narodniks) or with the liberals of the West? By the time the dissenting individuals became public intellectuals, they not only had parties and broader socio-political networks behind them, but were also labelled as belonging to an ideological camp and were treated as such by a nascent and voracious political press.

One might argue that the challenges certain individual public intellectuals faced in the 1990s were no harsher than the ones any intellectual who enters the public sphere can expect in any consolidated democracy. If the former dissenters felt boxed in and hurt, it was because they entertained fanciful images of a democratic future where they could paradoxically continue to perform their public personae as augurs and ephoroi. While there is truth to this, in Hungary political competition – because of the aforementioned ideological legacies – extended to the delegitimisation of liminal perspectives from which the former dissenters were eyeing the world around them.

The tribalisation of some segments of the intelligentsia has been a regular occurrence in democratic parts of the world. But in societies that have more or less mended the ideological rift that followed the demise of the 19th century’s liberal elitist hegemonies, more permissive attitudes have prevailed towards patterns of non-conformist thought than in post-socialist societies after 1990. Individualist public thinking, ever the archetype as opposed to the intellectual toeing the party line, has been supported in consolidated liberal democracies by the press aiming to please intellectually adventurous segments of the large middle class. Compared to this, post-socialist Hungary was and has remained an “unmended” society with weak – or at least weakly independent institutions of – public opinion. Any effort by the dissenters to construct a common and critical historical vantage point regarding the last 100 years were quickly annulled by party competition and generalising statements about victimhood and innocence which were spreading rapidly, especially on the political right.

Era of technocrats and nationalists

The resuscitation of the ideological challenge of the radical conservative and the progressivist legacies co-framed the emergent politics of democratic Hungary after 1990. They were quickly instrumentalised by political actors and their extensive public appendages. These were the circumstances that made the position of Csoóri, Konrád and others as ever-dissenting but therefore credible intellectuals untenable. Csoóri’s public statements, in the two decades after the scandal, also demonstrated in his thinking a prevailing siege mentality. He would not publicly distance himself from the increasingly radical István Csurka, despite the chasm that had opened between them. After all, they were both Narodniks. He also bemoaned how barely any liberal voices had reminded readers to consider his oeuvre, rather than a few mistaken paragraphs. On both sides, in Csoóri’s reading, the primacy of the group had prevailed.

Konrád was perhaps the voice that most persistently continued to plead for preserving a zone, once more on the margins, for the dissenter. His work in the 1990s – analysed by Noemi Marin in her 2007 monograph on public intellectuals after the fall of the Iron Curtain – contains recurrent reflections on the difficulties of constructing a new author figure that could inhabit the same liminal position from which dissenters had challenged socialism. As for the various paths that the former dissenters and the first public intellectuals of democratic Hungary took in the 1990s and 2000s, it is fair to say that they either left “professional” politics (many never entered it in the first place) or resigned their public intellectual status in the period which Bozóki describes as the era of technocrats and nationalists (between 1994 and 2006). Both types of intellectuals presented one-dimensional answers to issues whose complexity was easily and frequently covered up by the preconceptions animating the competing discourses.

New model intellectuals

The most recent transformation of the field where public intellectuals could make their voices heard has been ongoing since the end of the second “decade” identified by Bozóki. It is characterised by the construction of alternative media universes inhabited by exchangeable voices. This process resulted in the crowding out of the nuances by the monochrome discourse of propaganda in public (media) spaces. The outcome has been one of levelling, where the usual markers of critical intellectuals are disqualified by groups of “new model” public intellectuals. This transformation unfolded – in an ironic twist of history – just as the double crisis of domestic institutions and the global recession after 2008 re-established the demand in Hungary for a public discussion on the fundamental and often abstract questions about the directions the political community should take: questions that had seemed moot during the “straightforward” period of the EU and NATO accession and in their immediate aftermath.

With the multiplication of platforms, there is ample room for “new model” intellectuals to relay largely homogenised messages that focus on discrediting their opponents and on eliminating any vestiges of respectability for critical intellectuals through unremitting invectives and irony. Silencing may be achieved not only by preventing an address from being delivered, but also by preventing a speaker from being heard – a phenomenon more characteristically at play today.

Reflections of a sense of having become marginal observers, at least within Hungarian public life, echo from recent texts. Most recently, Transylvanian-born Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a former Free Democrat who bid farewell to both party politics and liberalism in favour of a New Left perspective, reiterates the limits of the nonconformist intellectual in today’s society. In an expansive interview published by index.hu, Hungary’s most influential news site, he explicitly argues that a rebuilding of communities and the critique of prevailing power structures represents the boundaries of action for critical intellectuals. If the old guard of public intellectuals visited TV screens too often in the early 1990s, today it is a case of too many new public voices colonising essentially all fields of contestation in the media by reproducing predictable messaging that hangs together in their respective ideological bubbles only.

Potential for destruction

If the Hungarian case offers any insight into the broader geometry of relations between society and public intellectuals, such insight is likely to be multi-levelled. On the surface, it might appear that the social media explosion, in conjunction with the radicalisation of political discourse in the wake of the global economic crisis, explains the situation in the country fairly well. Should we, then, not apply Ockham’s razor and accept this explanation as satisfactory?

Yet as we have seen above, the domination of political party tribalism in shaping imaginaries, the lack of a niche for critical commentary due to legacies of a cold civil war, and the successful integration of authors into political controversies had destroyed the old role and the prestige of the public intellectual before the crisis hit. The lesson, if there is one, suggests that, while the challenges of the present may be the same across the continent, the potential for destruction is amplified when the political community – the polis understood as the composite body of citizens – is no more. The ordered polis ceases to exist with “tumult” or stasis, when factions arise and attributions of value and meaning become unreflective, dependent on group affiliation. Little by little, consolidated democracies seem to have mended the great rift of early 20th century ideological contestation after 1945. During the same period, parallel Hungarian mentalities were, at best, hibernating. They returned with a vengeance, narrowing the possibility of critical discourse from the vantage point of the dissenting public intellectual. With the coming of democracy and the re-activation of the old political mentalities, the former dissenters had to realise: the national subject that had seemed to be emerging out of the resistance to “real existing communism” had vanished, with a deeply divided intelligentsia ever eyeing its ideological Other appearing in its place.

It was well after the fracturing of Hungarian society that modern technology and the new reactionary populism hit the country in tandem. The Hungarian case helps to highlight that the real danger to critical commentary being able to fulfil its role in society arises not out of new media platforms, but out of the demise of the democratic multitude and the devolution of the societies of the second, post-1945 liberal hegemony into antagonised factions through the provocations of reactionary populism.

Gergely Romsics is a senior fellow with the Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His interests include the study of ideologies and political theory in Central Europe.

Hungarian intellectuals, Hungary, Viktor Orban