In 1940, Nazi agronomist and SS-Oberführer Konrad Meyer set up an institution to devise the ‘rational’ plans of ‘colonizing the East’ in order to create an ideal landscape for settler colonists of an imperial German-Aryan […]
Szerző: Zoltán Ginelli
Zoltán Ginelli is a geographer and historian of science. His research is in the geographies of knowledge, the history of geography, and global and transnational history. His main focus is on the historical relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South/Third World in the 19th and 20th centuries, including topics such as development and regional planning, (post)colonialism and racism, Cold War foreign policy, and travel writing. He lectured at various universities and colleges, and worked as an assistant researcher in the 1989 After 1989 and Socialism Goes Global projects at the University of Exeter (2015–2019). His current project, Postcolonial Hungary explores Hungarian semiperipheral colonial history from a world-systemic perspective. He is curating the exhibition Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South, and finishing his book based on 7 years of research about the global history of the quantitative revolution in geography.
zginelli@gmail.com
Hungarian Westsplaining
A strange ambivalence lurks behind how Hungarian politics forcefully captured ‘coloniality’ vis-á-vis the ‘West’, while ‘West’-oriented anti-colonialism rejects any systemic criticism of Hungary-centered global colonialism(s). On the full political spectrum, Hungarian culture became a hotbed of self-colonizing mimicry, a staged ‘West simulacrum’ populated by turn-key imports of ‘the West’. However, nobody addressed the geographies behind ‘West imaginaries’, the divisions of labor in ‘colonizer/non-colonizer’ difference-making, the non-comparative ‘colonial identity politics’ of competitive nativist victimhood, and the controversial, multi-layered, imagined, yet unitary concept of ‘the West’.
The Hungarian ‘Colonial Turn’ of 2012: Commemorating 1848 as ‘Habsburg Colonialism’ in Anti-Western Public Discourse
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”. 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.
Akkumulátor-gyarmatosítás Magyarországon
A nyugatcentrikus ellenzék csupán tükrözte a kormány nyugatellenes gyarmati diskurzusát. Így született az “orosz gyarmatosítás” és a “kínai gyarmatosítás” elleni kritika is (pl. a Fudan Egyetemhez kapcsolódó tüntetésben, amelynek főszervezője a Szikra Mozgalom volt), amely erősen táplálkozott az orientalista rasszizmus régi gyarmati diskurzusaiból is. Ezekre az előzményekre épített újabban a kormány akkumulátor-ipari és elektromosautó-gyári beruházásaival szembeni “akkumulátor-gyarmatosítás” szlogenje is. A tanulmány az “akkumulátor-gyarmatosítás” politikai kommunikációját dolgozza fel a magyarországi gyarmati fordulat kontextusában és a gyarmatkritikus (dekoloniális) világrendszer-elemzés megközelítésében.
The Hungarian ‘Colonial Turn’ in 2012: Commemorating 1848 as ‘Habsburg Colonialism’ within Anti-Western Public Discourse
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”. My contribution focuses on contextualizing Orbán’s speech by looking at how ‘coloniality’ has captured the limelight in Hungarian public discourse.
Colonies Without Colonies? Race, Colonialism and Whiteness in the Hungarian Colonies of Southern Brazil
In Eastern Europe, the arguments of ‘white innocence’, historical exceptionalism, and ‘never having colonies’ had systematically denied the region’s participation in global colonialism, only to support the colonial victimhood of ‘peripheral whites’. This paper refutes these semiperipheral historical myths by exploring the story of Hungarian settlers in the Brazilian colonial frontier between the two world wars. While in Brazil the story of Hungarian settlers were de-emphasized as they were absorbed into the wider history of ‘European immigrants’, Hungarian memory politics never admitted these settlers into the history of global colonialism.
‘We Never Had Colonies’: Episodes in the Global Histories of Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in Hungary before the Second World War
I presented my paper ‘We Never Had Colonies’: Episodes in the Global Histories of Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in Hungary before the Second World War at the academic conference Colonial Entanglements in Central and Eastern Europe before 1939 organized by Agata Łuksza and Łukasz Zaremba on 4–5 September 2023 at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw (IKP UW) in cooperation with Leibniz ScienceCampus ‘Eastern Europe – Global Area’ (EEGA).
‘We Never Had Colonies’: Global Histories of Race and Colonialism in Hungary, 1850–1939
Global history has often ignored how race and coloniality articulated Eastern European economic, structural, and world-systemic positions. This talk will refute these approaches by exposing the role played by race and coloniality in Hungary’s semiperipheral integration to the capitalist-colonial world economy between the mid-19th century and the 1940s – the era of Hungary’s opening up to global colonialism during ‘high imperialism’.
Ferenc Kordás and Hungarian Colonies in South America
As part of my research on Hungarian colonies in South America, I’m digitizing parts of the archival collection of the Julian teacher, writer and poet Ferenc Kordás (1911–1993) held at the Déri Museum in Debrecen. In my work, I’m looking at his Brazilian sociographies, diaries, notes and poems about the tropical experience and Hungarian settler colonists during his stay there between 1936 and 1942.
Hungary and Ghana: What do Their 1960s Forgotten Relations Tell Us about the ‘Southern Opening’ After 2015?
My paper for the international conference “Visegrad countries and Africa: History and Contemporaneity” held online on 27 April 2022. I follow a world-systemic and decolonial approach to investigate Hungarian semiperipheral positioning strategies in global colonial history by looking at the interactions and converging interests of Hungary and Ghana in the early 1960s.
Zoltán Ginelli 