Hungarianisation, Horrorism and a ‘Funeral for Higher Education’ – Populist Imaginaries and Knowledge-Making in 21st Century Hungary

‘Liberal is a dirtier word here than Nazi or communist… “Orbán says he defends all minorities, including the Jews. So, for the Jews this literally means we are not Hungarian’. ‘‘Hungarianism’. People have become accustomed to “sitting in Hungarian rooms and drinking Hungarian water, while reading Hungarian books and talking to Hungarian people; they even wear Hungarian glasses.’ Agnes Heller, interview extracts, Agnes Heller and Everyday Revolutions, Portrait of a Philosopher, 2015. The words of the late Agnes Heller, a Hungarian activist and philosopher, highlight the paradoxes that emerge within populist political thinking and its historical relationship to state-making as a ‘blueprint’ of imperialist thought and an energising concept of modernity (Arendt, 1951). Heller’s words also highlight how thinkers on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ in Hungary have developed arguments about morality and citizenship as they live through the nation-building project. In light of ascending 21st century authoritarianism and transformations in both HE governance reform and the forced move of the CEU to Vienna, the significance of Heller’s reflections could not be more pressing as a study of modern institutional and symbolic violence and accelerating transformations in populist HE political imaginaries. In this paper, we explore Heller’s concerns about ‘Hungarianisation’ within HE, with a particular focus on its ‘inner circle’ of elite knowledge makers and HE student resistance to authoritarianism. Drawing from the work of Arendt, Caverero, Dragos, and Mbembe, we examine the rise of populism in HE as a moralistic governing strategy through three distinct avenues. First, drawing upon archival and journalistic sources we examine the history of conservative elite knowledge-makers accounts (e.g., lawyers, theologians) of ethnonationalist citizenship as a claim to historical ‘victimhood’ to justify the introduction of novel forms of neo-nationalism into HE (Brogger, 2021; Dragos, 2020). We focus particularly on Hungarian scholarly accounts of the relationship between science, critical theory, conservative ideology, race and religion, secularism and the emergence of modern Hungarian politics. Second, placing oral history interviews and theoretical activist writings about state-making dating from the 1950s until the present into context, we explore how modalities of HE student resistance sought to challenge authoritarian strains within Hungarian HE. Finally, drawing on interview data and visual representations of student political action, we examine activist accounts of the forced move of the CEU across the European frontier space to Vienna. In so doing, we argue that Hungary’s claim to legal forms of authoritarianism in HE have fulfilled, at least in part, the mission of Hungarian statecraft to energise a ‘folktale of historical injustice’ (Felman, 2001) about the place of Hungary in global geopolitics and the history of empire. These practices represent the narration of a ‘sacred narrative’ and identity about Hungary’s past into contemporary legal and educational arenas as a nation-building strategy. In considering current student activist attempts at highlighting the ‘funeral of education’ in Hungarian HE, we aim to ‘decanonise and desacralize’ (Felman, 2001) such accounts as a way towards invoking a ‘critical consciousness’ of populism as it lives in HE today (Nora, 1989).