Cultural Policy in an Illiberal State

Abstract

In social sciences literature, numerous attempts have been made to capture the political essence and features of Hungary's 'illiberal' regime but few were aimed at analyzing specific public policy fields in the illiberal democracy. This paper analyses the cultural policy of the Orbán regime, focusing on the role of ideology. A qualitative case study based on document analysis looks at the legitimizing function of post-communist traditionalism in a managed illiberal democracy (Csillag and Szelényi, 2015). Governmental policy making in the field of culture is analyzed on two interrelated levels: (1) attempts to rewrite the cultural canon, and (2) institutional and financial changes. The results show that post-communist traditionalism serves as a discursive framework for the partial replacement of the cultural elite as well as the redistribution of cultural positions and resources, thus contributing to the creation of a new, loyal elite for the managed illiberal political system.

The Theory and Practice of Plebiscitary Leadership: Weber and the Orbán regime

“…111 The main objective behind these moves has been the vindication of a national-conservative set of values, and secondarily a politically driven, massive economic and cultural elite change. 112 We have seen earlier that in PLD, where charisma and legality are simultaneously present, there may be a tension between the revolutionary character of politics, the bureaucratic nature of the state, and the regime's legitimacy. In Hungary, this tension has emerged especially in authority conflicts, such as the conflict between the government majority and the Constitutional Court and other public institutions.…”

Shakespeare, national memory, and tourist place: Gyula's Várszínház Festival

“…These displays' portrayal of heroic resistance to foreign influence (i.e., invasion) imbue the Vár with the kind of nationalist sentiments that have long been ingrained in Hungarian thought due to their circulation through popular culture, education, museums, and other institutions. While such sentiments might be consistent with the 'traditionalism' that Luca Kristóf identifies as characteristic of the Fidesz government's policy initiatives throughout the 2010s, 26 the two are not identical. Rather, the government has harnessed these ideas for its own ends.…”

“…2 This 'traditionalism' valorises '"patria, church, and the (traditional) family"' and includes 'anti-immigration' sentiment. 3 If those sympathetic to these sentiments might regard Gyula as a place that uses its tourist attractions to celebrate traditional national culture, the Várszínház complicates any such sense of place by hosting challenging Shakespearean performances that often portray national crises and relationships between political rulers and the ruled with profound pessimism. In this essay, I will examine two productions that exemplify such performance, László Bocsárdi's Hamlet (2013) and Attila Vidnyánszky Jr's Richard III (2016), to consider how the relationships between tourism, national identity, and Shakespearean theatre affect the kind of tourist place Gyula is in the twenty-first century.…”

Remaking civil society under authoritarian capitalism: The case of the Orbán regime’s Hungarian Academy of Arts

“…Regarding cultural production, Orbán's lines quoted above accurately capture that culture is not an external but an integral part of the hegemonic struggle. First, the general cultural politics and policy of the Orbán-regime have been recently examined by several scholars (Kristóf, 2017;Barna et al, 2018;Bonet & Zamorano, 2020;Nagy & Szarvas, 2021). This article joins the thread in the literature that emphasizes how the regime's cultural politics should be studied as an integral part of its comprehensive restructuring of the internal and external dependencies from financial policy (Karas, 2022), to housing (Gagyi et al, 2021), from labor-relations (Meszmann & Fedyuk, 2020) to its integration into global value chains (Szabó & Jelinek, 2023).…”