This article was originally published in Vol. 6 No. 2 of our print edition.
The sovereign Hungarian state ceased to exist after 1541, even if the concept of sovereignty itself only came to be formulated in European thought later. Since then, a sovereign state in the Carpathian Basin has only been able to exist temporarily; every such attempt has eventually been crushed by one of the great powers. There were two more notable examples in earlier times, both connected to the Calvinist Transylvanian aristocracy: the Transylvania of Gábor Bethlen between 1613 and 1629, and the Hungary of István Bethlen between 1920 and 1944. Both were based on balancing between great powers—a strategy that dissatisfied critics labelled ‘swing politics’, the ‘Kállay double game’, ‘peacock dancing’, and the like.
For a while, at least, this will no longer be a problem. The ‘Twenty-Seven Points’ sent from Brussels are the modern equivalent of the Olmütz Constitution. The distinct Hungarian path has come to an end. The overwhelming majority of Hungarians voted for the global cosmopolitan lifestyle projected through the mass media—a lifestyle whose day may already have passed in the West itself,1 but whose seductive marketing still operates at full steam. And, if we wish to be honest, most young people who call themselves right-wing also live in much the same way as liberal or left-wing young people would like to live.
Flattering though the thought may have been, we are neither better nor fundamentally different from the other peoples of Mitteleuropa. In the end, they too succumbed to unrealistic promises and desires.2 At most, we may console ourselves with the thought that we held out longer than our neighbours. For a long time, we lived under the illusion that the Hungarian political tradition, and the experiences of the past thousand years—above all the salutary examples of Mihály Károlyi, Béla Kun, and Mátyás Rákosi—would protect us from political charlatans suddenly emerging from nowhere, from taking impossible promises seriously, and from the longing for miracles so characteristic of post-socialist countries.3
Belief in political miracles may perhaps have been weaker in Hungary than among its fellow sufferers, and this may explain why its political order proved more durable. But especially among the younger generation, personal experience is no longer supplemented by the inherited experience of earlier generations; instead, it is shaped by the messages of the global media. For a long time, Hungarian society was protected from the pop-up parties and movements manufactured by the media, and therefore we cannot say that there is no Hungarian political tradition. It resisted up to this point.
‘The Global media is replacing inherited experience and collective memory’
The global media is replacing inherited experience and collective memory. Although both moderns and post-moderns alike expect liberation from the erasure of memory and the past,4 Chingiz Aitmatov associated the destruction of memory precisely with servitude. Aitmatov recounts how the steppe peoples turned some of their captured enemies into mankurts—slaves. Camel hide was stretched over the prisoner’s head, and he was left for days in the open steppe, where the heat of the sun caused the hide to shrink tightly around his skull. Driven to the edge of madness, the victim lost his memory and judgement; his mind was shattered and severed from all recollection. Thereafter he remembered neither yesterday, nor his own name, nor his ancestors, nor what had been done to him, nor what he himself had done. Each day was as though he had been born only yesterday. Total forgetting, the loss of the past, and perfect servitude—the inability to resist—go hand in hand:
‘The mankurt did not know who he had been, whence and from what tribe he had come, did not know his name, could not remember his childhood, father or mother – in short, he could not recognize himself as a human being. Deprived of any understanding of his own ego, the mankurt was, from his master’s point of view, possessed of a whole range of advantages. He was the equivalent of a dumb animal and therefore absolutely obedient and safe. He never thought of trying to escape. For any slave owner, the most frightening thing was the possibility of a revolt of these slaves, since each slave was a potential rebel. The mankurt was the exception: he was absolutely impervious to any incitement to revolt, quite innocent. He knew of no such passions. As a result, there was no need to keep him confined, to guard him and even less to suspect him of having any sinister intentions. The mankurt, like a dog, only recognized his masters. He would have nothing to do with other people. All his thoughts were concerned with satisfying his belly’s needs. He had no other worries. He performed the work given to him blindly, willingly and single-mindedly.’5
Without the transmission of political experience preserved in tradition, successive generations are exposed to political charlatans and impossible desires; thus, peoples without political traditions are tossed back and forth between tyranny and complete disintegration.6 Both lead to the loss of freedom. Just as the Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Croatian states ceased to exist, the Hungarian government too will become little more than a postal and translation office for Befehle—orders. Following the example of Poland, Romania, and the other neighbouring states, Hungary too will become merely a geographical expression.
Size is the essential factor. The idea of sovereignty was formulated in states relatively protected from large and dangerous neighbours, and which were themselves dangerous to others; namely, France and the United Kingdom. It is no accident that political thought flourished and continues to flourish in these sovereign states, for political debates there genuinely have stakes. In satellite states, it is entirely meaningless to argue over political questions, since none of it has any real significance. The current great power decides what will happen. At most, we are permitted a half-hearted implementation of orders, and the ‘national statesman’ will be the one who, unlike the over-eager model pupil or comprador, does not carry out those orders with excessive zeal.
‘The paradox is that these efforts, presented as struggles for freedom, seek greater liberty from one’s own government while embracing the supposedly benevolent great power that promises liberation’
Part of the conditio humana is the constant dissatisfaction arising from unfulfilled ambitions, and the problems flowing from this have been further intensified by the hyperpluralism of our age. As Baruch Spinoza writes in his Political Treatise: ‘It is also beyond doubt that a commonwealth is always in greater danger from its citizens than from its enemies; for good men are but few.’7 Contentment—and with it political stability—has to be produced. That is what it means to govern. Good politics is only ever temporary, and is therefore a Sisyphean undertaking: it must always be begun anew, and there may always appear another Herostratus8—perhaps arriving in a German railway carriage—who transforms dissatisfaction into political force by promising a radically new and better future. Or perhaps merely an ambitious man for whom submission is not too high a price to pay in exchange for becoming king, like John Zápolya or Imre Thököly in Hungarian history. Contentment is fleeting, and conflict cannot be abolished through politics. Then, sooner or later, another figure with frontotemporal dementia invariably arises.9
The precondition for foreign-policy sovereignty—i.e. for not existing as a colony or satellite state—is domestic political sovereignty, which means that the central power faces no institutional, oligarchic, or other rival claimant (cf. Marsilius of Padua). In the early modern period, the most successful sovereign states were absolute monarchies. Today, this would be called dictatorship, while the modern ideal is that the state should be constrained in a thousand different ways, under many different names, from polyarchy to civil society and NGOs. The question is whether a divided and weak state can truly be sovereign in foreign policy.10 On the other hand, we observe that in countries that have lost their external sovereignty, order is either maintained through terror or not maintained at all. Politics does not exist in colonies.
The precondition for foreign-policy sovereignty is a strong government, and it is strong only insofar as it can manage the constantly reproducing forces of dissatisfaction. This management may take the form of continuous growth (the pressure to satisfy ambitions is what gives rise both to the territorial expansionism of empires and to the growth imperative of liberal democracy; once this growth falters, the liberal elite begins to practise illiberalism); or it may involve altering modes of thought in ways that moderate ambitions and the tendency toward rebellion (according to Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx, religion had such an effect; in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World drugs serve this role); or it may take the form of weakening alternatives. In the latter case, disorganized and ideologically incoherent outbursts of rage may emerge, such as peasant uprisings or the Yellow Vest movement in France.
The long-term survival of a form of government capable of managing the destabilizing effects of dissatisfaction is possible, but success comes at a price: nepotism, careerism, conformism, adverse selection, and, more generally, the absence of feedback, correction, and changes of direction. These weaken both adaptability and political effectiveness, while also generating internal struggles for power. At the same time, as Vilfredo Pareto described, a counter-elite may emerge from all those excluded from the governing elite. This counter-elite transforms the dissatisfaction that the ruling power manages ever more ineffectively into political force. Governance weakened by internal political causes—the loss of internal sovereignty—increases external vulnerability. It is a banal truth that a weakened and divided country will sooner or later become the victim of its neighbours or of a great power.
In the case of small states (though even large ones are not exempt—witness Russia in 1917 or 1991), the weakening of internal sovereignty attracts the sharks of political and economic great powers, who attempt to weaken and then externally direct the state by supporting particular groups, parties, or oligarchs. In our civilization, the roughly parallel loss of internal and external sovereignty is typically accompanied by some rhetoric of liberation and/or justice directed against the supposedly oppressive—that is, sovereign—government, right down to slogans such as ‘Free sodomy!’
The paradox is that these efforts, presented as struggles for freedom, seek greater liberty from one’s own government while embracing the supposedly benevolent great power that promises liberation—and in so doing simultaneously surrender external freedom. The lesson is that, because of the conditio humana, even a successful politics of defending sovereignty ultimately digs its own grave and leads to the loss of external sovereignty as well—unless it succeeds in mitigating the human condition’s constant frustration and dissatisfaction through religion, economic growth, or mind-altering substances. Of these, the first—religion—is a blessing where it exists, but in Europe, it generally does not; the second was Europe’s characteristic solution after 1945. Today, we are witnessing the disintegration of the sovereignty of European states.
Freedom or justice—the two slogans most commonly invoked by the dissatisfied—can only prevail in a limited way and only within an ordered framework. Once the intoxicating days have passed, this again produces dissatisfaction—perhaps among others, or perhaps among the freedom fighters themselves. The examples of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte show that gentle absolute rule—sovereignty itself—is typically replaced first by terror and ultimately by military dictatorship. In the name of checks and balances, every politically significant institution will end up being led by the same centre of power; dictatorship against dictatorship—that is, the rule of law, freedom, and justice—can be established through their very suspension. The same pattern repeats itself throughout political modernity.
Geopolitics and Kulturkampf: Is a Distinct Path Possible?
Is a distinct path possible in today’s world, or must smaller countries inevitably laugh and weep together with the great powers? In practice, only distinct paths exist; no two countries are identical. The real question is in what respects, and to what extent, the great powers permit deviation. Hungarian Schlamperei—a kind of improvised laxness or happy disorder—made the Austrian and later Soviet military occupations more bearable.
After 1990, Hungarians, like the inhabitants of other post-socialist countries, enthusiastically embraced the Western model, meaning the combination of liberal democracy and the free market. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of this combination—and with it the end of history—after which no task remained for us except to follow the model.11 The self-confidence of the West was exceeded only by the enthusiasm of its post-socialist imitators.
But the millennium never arrived. The first to turn away from the Western model were the star pupils of the 1990s: Poland and Hungary. In their cases, this meant a shift toward what was condemned as nationalist economic policy, while they increasingly clashed with the leftward-moving Western establishment over questions of lifestyle and culture. Central Europe became the place where Western ideologies, in practice, no longer meant what people usually imagined them to mean. Before 1989, socialism produced neither equality, nor economic prosperity, nor the abolition of exploitation; none of the things Marxism had promised. More of the promises of socialism were realized in the capitalist West, which preserved private property, than under socialism itself. Socialism was a military dictatorship which, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, consciously created a hierarchical, estate-like society crowned by the bureaucratic and ideological ‘New Class’.12
After 1990, it became clear that liberals are not primarily lovers of freedom: collective or national freedom does not particularly concern them, and there are certain freedoms they regard as hostile or illegitimate, which they are quite willing to restrict or suppress. Meanwhile, those who genuinely love freedom are not necessarily liberals. Liberals are much more fundamentally progressives, and it was in this—the continual reforms of a benevolent, Enlightenment-style bureaucracy—that they were able both to reconcile themselves with and continue the local socialist inheritance. However ideological their rhetoric may be, comprador liberals, like the comprador socialists before them, are first and foremost compradors. In the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky: ‘the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker.’13
And since it can no longer promise an attractive future, it instead tries to paint the past as ever more guilty and ever more deserving of rejection. This is why conflicts over historical memory have today become sharper even than ideological conflicts. In the post-socialist world, conservatives—contrary to the accusations levelled against them—are the defenders of neither the status quo nor of the existing elite and institutions. In 1990, the existing elite was not conservative, and the institutions themselves were hostile to conservative ways of life and habits of mind. For this reason, the conservative here certainly cannot be described as representing an interest group or class party. Rather than clear group interests, conservatism signified a mentality and way of life opposed to the dominant left-liberal one. In the words of Frederick D. Wilhelmsen: ‘We conservatives have lost our kings and our chivalry; our craftsmen are gone, and our peasantry is fast disappearing. Our horses have been shot from under us. We have nothing to offer the world but our vision.’14
The left today cannot be defended on class grounds, since its critics are generally poorer and far removed from institutional power. This is also one reason why the left now seeks to mobilize and legitimize itself not through ideology or a vision of the future, but through the rejection of the past and through moralizing.
In Europe, peace was imposed by two states that were only half-European in character: the United States and the Soviet Union, and after 1945, the geopolitical confrontation was accompanied by an ideological one. With the end of the Cold War, a Kulturkampf—a cold civil war between two ways of life and two mentalities—erupted in the United States, now left alone on the global stage.15 The critics of the left-liberal mentality, which declared itself victorious in 1990, came to power in the United States in 2016 and again in 2024 with Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s famous 2013 Valdai Discussion Club speech of 201316 and the line of thought described as ‘civilizational realism’ signalled that Russia—the other victorious great power—had likewise positioned itself against the dominant left-liberal mentality, while the European mainstream represented that victorious and hegemonic left-liberal mentality ever more radically. Geopolitical conflicts thus once again became intertwined with conflicts of worldview. As a consequence, Trump and later Viktor Orbán were both accused of being pro-Russian. Today, conservative criticisms of the left-liberal establishment are most commonly summed up in the politics of the ‘war on Woke’, a stance by both Trump and Putin, the two principal geopolitical adversaries of the European establishment.
The Western status-quo elite criticizes the West because of its past, whereas today’s conservatives criticize the West because of its present. The dilemma facing Western conservatives arises from the contradiction between their geopolitical interests and their criticisms of the contemporary West. Thus, any criticism of the ruling Western elite coincides with criticisms directed at the European establishment by its geopolitical rivals, which is why Trump and Orbán were branded ‘Russian stooges’.
Geopolitical considerations may therefore lead to the abandonment of right-wing or conservative positions, as in the case of European Christian Democrats or the American RINOs.17 Should the right defend an establishment it criticizes—one which openly attacks the institutions, ways of life, and relationships cherished by the right? Should it defend, for geopolitical reasons, a Western ruling elite that has turned against its own past?
The elites of what are called democratic ages are generally rather coy about their power, since according to their self-image, it is ‘the people’ who rule. They dislike having their power described not as the natural order of things, the realization of truth and beauty and every earthly good, but simply as power. One need not even question their power directly: merely calling it power is enough to provoke anger and sanctions. We experienced this during the socialist era, and the situation does not presently appear fundamentally different. Earlier great powers, by contrast, were proud of their power and their success.
Just as during the socialist era, speaking about Soviet domination was regarded as ‘subversion’ or ‘hostile propaganda’, so today speaking about the rule of the Eurocrats or of imperial Germany—as well as about the idea of cultural sovereignty—is dismissed as ‘Russian propaganda’. And in both cases, the defenders of great-power interests did and do possess one grain of truth: it weakens a great power’s position if people begin openly speaking about its power because that strips it of its unquestioned ‘naturalness’. Once power ceases to appear natural, it has to be legitimized—and that is always a dubious undertaking.
Conquering empires often, though not always, seek to spread their own culture as well. This tendency only intensified in the modern era, when states became increasingly bound to particular ideologies, and moral, religious, or ‘justice’-based criticism became a defining feature of everyday political life. Local elites represented the ideology of the great power with varying degrees of enthusiasm; indeed, this was precisely how they became elites. Typically, they wrapped all this in the rhetoric of liberation and freedom—thus it was under Mátyás Rákosi and János Kádár, the principal autocrats of Hungarian socialism, and thus it was again after 1990.
The comprador elite typically internalizes the interests, language, and tastes of the current great power; it experiences representing them not as coercion but as something positive—progress, freedom, equality, democracy, and so forth. Reading Étienne de la Boétie, one realizes there is nothing new in the condition of servility:
‘The tiller of the soil and the artisan, no matter how enslaved, discharge their obligation when they do what they are told to do; but the dictator sees men about him wooing and begging his favour, and doing much more than he tells them to do. Such men must not only obey orders; they must anticipate his wishes; to satisfy him they must foresee his desires; they must wear themselves out, torment themselves, kill themselves with work in his interest, and accept his pleasure as their own, neglecting their preferences for his, distorting their character and corrupting their nature; they must pay heed to his words, to his intonation, to his gestures, and to his glance. Let them have no eye, nor foot, nor hand that is not alert to respond to his wishes or to seek out his thoughts.’18
Does a specifically Hungarian national interest exist, distinct from the ‘European’ one? And does a genuinely ‘European interest’ exist that is not merely the interest of a bureaucracy elected by no one? Great powers and their local representatives have always preferred the universal to the local. According to this logic, there is no distinct local or Hungarian interest, and therefore no possible conflict between Hungary and the sovereign great power. If no separate Hungarian interest exists, then there is nothing to defend and nothing to bargain over.
The idea of the One and Supremely Good way of life and political order was a proud product of the age of modernization. Yet multiculturalism and the rise and eventual advance of Asian countries rendered this notion ridiculous. While the social sciences began speaking of ‘multiple modernities’, the core countries of the European Union accepted multiculturalism at home, yet in the countries dependent upon them they continued insisting on exact imitation. This was revealed most openly in the local modifications demanded before EU accession.
Because the politics of a non-sovereign country, per definitionem, functions differently from that of a sovereign one—in the former case, the task is to execute received instructions, and the stakes of political conflict concern not the direction of government but the winning of support from the patron great power against rival domestic groups—a dependent state can never essentially become a true follower or replica of the great power. It may adopt the political language dominant in the great power, but because of its situation it will never function in the same way. In practice, it will inevitably diverge. The ‘distinct path’ therefore signifies not merely difference, but open divergence, perhaps even disobedience or resistance—a troublesome form of otherness rather than a reliable and obedient one.
Translated by Thomas Sneddon
NOTES
1 See Emmanuel Todd, The Defeat of the West (Gallimard, 2024).
2 Mitteleuropa was originally the plan of Friedrich Naumann, which was subsequently adopted by Wilhelmine Germany. The project envisaged the German ‘organization’ of the territories lying to Germany’s east and southeast. Roughly the same geographical space would, some twenty years later, become associated with the idea of Lebensraum. The Visegrad Group, by contrast, was organized in opposition to this logic and functioned as such for several years.
3 For the specifically post-socialist character of this phenomenon—political naiveté, credulity, or postmodern millenarianism, which the scholarly literature describes as ‘pop-up parties’—see Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause, The New Party Challenge. Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2020).
4 See Frank Füredi, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History (Polity Press, 2024).
5 Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (Indiana University Press, 1988), 126.
6 See Edmund Burke’s statement in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: ‘People will not look forward to posterity, who never look back to their ancestors’ (Penguin Books, 1978), 119; or Alexis de Tocqueville’s in his Democracy in America, Vol II (Longmans, 1875), 92: ‘Not only does democracy cause each man to forget his ancestors, but it also hides his descendants from him.’
7 Baruch Spinoza, ‘A Political Treatise’, in Complete Works (Hackett Publishing, 2002), 702.
8 In 356 bc, Herostratus set fire to the temple of Artemis—protectress of women and children—simply in order to make his name famous. His name has since become a byword for someone who seeks notoriety at any price, even through the violation of all norms.
9 A form of dementia that may appear from about the age of 45. It typically begins with disinhibited behaviour and is characterized by reckless actions, aggression, or heightened sexual impulses. The disease involves degeneration of the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, which results in an inability to observe social norms.
10 See Plato’s Republic (Oxford University Press, 1998), 429–432.
11 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 2006).
12 In The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote admiringly of the efficiency of the German postal service and regarded it as a model for the socialist state. For the concept of the ‘New Class’ see The Revolution Betrayed (Dover Publication, 2004) by Leon Trotsky and The New Class (Harcourt Brace, 1983) by Milovan Đilas.
13 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, in A Gentle Creature and Other Stories (John Lehmann, 1950), 269.
14 Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, ‘The Conservative Vision’, Commonweal 62 (June 1955), 298.
15 The term was most likely inspired by Jefferson Morley’s article ‘The Cultural Civil War in America’, Spin (November 1990) and by James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic Books, 1991).
16 ‘Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club’, President of Russia (19 September 2013), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19243.
17 ‘Republicans in Name Only’.
18 Étienne de la Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (Adagio Press, 2016), 22.
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