Abstract of contribution proposal for the ‘Turning Points of Public History in Europe since 1945’ edited volume.
On 15 March 2012, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a commemorative speech during the national anniversary of the declaration of Hungarian independence from ‘Habsburg colonialism’ in 1848. The speech was pivotal in setting the course for Hungary’s new official political agenda: “we will not become a colony of the West”, thereby the country must wage an anti-colonial ‘culture war’ against Western liberals in order to protect the independence and sovereignty of the Hungarian nation. This conservative message was extended by government officials, state institutions, and government-supporting/ed civil organizations and propagandists, quickly rising to the level of official ‘illiberal’ government communication both in domestic and foreign policy – within the EU and beyond. The political opposition only mirrored this discourse to either follow a similarly anti-Western or a pro-Western rhetoric focusing on Russian and Chinese colonialism.
My contribution focuses on contextualizing Orbán’s speech by looking at how ‘coloniality’ has captured the limelight in Hungarian public discourse. Political commentators and analysts have failed to identify the historical and political significance of this ‘colonial turn’ in Hungary, including both its potential and threat to public history. Hungarian conservative political elites’ capture of decolonial frameworks within their nationalist-populist political communication go hand-in-hand with a complete local neglect of recent historical research on the global colonial histories of Hungary, but instead a West-oriented approach dominates where coloniality is locked within Eurocentric frameworks in which public memory politics reproduces narratives of ‘colonial victimization’ and ‘national exceptionalism’.
Not coincidentally, since 1848, anti-colonialism in semiperipheral Hungary has dominantly remained about embracing a white Eurocentric approach to articulate the fears of losing white privilege and becoming treated as colonial non-whites, while it has also been used to develop strategic alliances outside the West, or to even plead for ‘fate analogies’ with Native Americans, through clinging onto nationalist ideas, moments, narratives, and myths that have remained strongly embedded in popular culture and public memory until today. The primordial historical date of 1848 served to articulate the concept of ‘Habsburg colonialism’ not only for 19th century Hungarians, but also to support the anti-Western and anti-colonialist positioning of the later communist regime (1947–1989) during its opening to decolonizing Afro-Asian countries, just as it serves today the ‘opening to the East and South’ of the Fidesz government after 2012.
Yet commemorating 1848 is only one element in a string of traumatic historical events controversially and selectively interconnected by nationalist memory politics of ‘colonial victimization’: the Treaty of Trianon (1920), the revolution against the ‘Soviet Empire’ (1956), or the anti-communist system change (1989). Whereas some of these interconnected historical events are not date-focused or lack national commemoration (such as the EU accession in 2004), Hungary’s ‘colonial turn’, which kicked off with the 2012 commemoration of the 1848 independence war, allowed to conjure up a pool of existing historical articulations of ‘Hungarian coloniality’ where public historical knowledge could be selectively abused to argue that e.g. “Brussels is the new Moscow” or “we never had colonies like the West”. While leading Hungarian historians have contested the particular historical authenticity of the ‘Habsburg colonialism’ narrative, there is a systemic neglect in Hungarian public knowledge, education, and cultural life of addressing Hungary’s complicated historical relations to global colonialism.
Zoltán Ginelli 