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This article addresses the relationship between popular music and populism through three government-commissioned songs, produced for occasions of national remembering during the post-2010 Orbán regime in Hungary, namely ‘Barackfa’ (2013), ‘Egy szabad országért’ (2016) and ‘Hazám, hazám’ (2020). All three songs are one-off collaborations of artists representing various music genres. We ask, firstly, what aesthetic forms make these songs potentially suitable for the performance of national unity, solidarity and the ‘people’, and secondly, how the songs’ structure, production and dissemination can be interpreted as attempts by government commissioners and creators to gain popularity. Drawing on Ostiguy's performative approach to populism, combined with the notion of collective speculation and musical affordances, we identify three main strategies of constructing the ‘people’ in the songs: singing together as sound, legacy and practice; the pop ‘mega-event’; and the use of the folk music aesthetic as ‘mother tongue’.

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The contents of articles published are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Institute for European, Russian and Euasian Studies, including its staff and faculty, is not responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement expressed in the published papers. Articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies or any members of its projects.languages other than English), but most of them are new contributions; some of them follow a more academic writing style, others are rather essays. What they all have in common is their discussion of current developments that can be subsumed under the label of "culture wars," and where the roles of the culturally more liberal or progressive side, and of academia, are scrutinized too.The series had the goal of initiating a dialog between the U.S. and Europe. The cultural and social science hegemony of the U.S. is still in place, guiding or rather misguiding intellectuals from the U.S. (and in Europe, intellectuals oriented towards the US) to what Václav Bělohradský (as quoted in the chapter by Slačálek) aptly calls "metropolitan provincialism." In this context the papers explore the question of to what extent concepts and theories developed in and for the U.S. are applicable in Europe: the culture war in the first place, but also certain specific approaches-such as to what extent "critical whiteness" is helpful in understanding racism in Europe or inhibiting blind spots; current strands of queer theory to understanding gender relations in Europe; and so on. To put it differently, in the context of global inequalities-in economic terms, and not unrelated to them, in terms of knowledge production and determining what counts as cultural progress:how do concepts and causes that are intended to be emancipatory, fall into the trap of ignoring local contexts and follow a colonial or imperial logic, communicated through channels of power (political elites, institutions, funding, media, academia)? And on a related note, current political practices of the U.S. arrive in Europe, and are then pursued by activists, policymakers and donors: are these surely the way forward in all contexts? These questions must also be asked-and are asked in these papers (for instance, by Breiding, Suissa and Sullivan, and Nógrádi). East and WestBesides this, one explicit goal of the series was to create a dialog between Eastern Europe and the West (that is, Western Europe and US). In the current notion of the 'global' (in terms of Global North vs. Global South), the former Second World, the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, are rarely given a place. Expertise in dealing with political, social, economic, and cultural developments in this region is often relegated to various area studies, and hence ghettoized. Also, concepts and theories of the West are sometimes applied, without contextualization and local relevance, to developments in the East. This series has attempted to be a contribution against such academic practices, a...