{"id":707,"date":"2018-02-19T10:44:19","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T14:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/?p=707"},"modified":"2018-02-19T10:44:19","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T14:44:19","slug":"populism-east-european-developments-from-a-global-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/2018\/02\/19\/populism-east-european-developments-from-a-global-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Populism: East European Developments from a Global Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin, 2014.\u00a0 Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

By Silas Birdsell<\/p>\n

Populism is an increasingly important aspect of domestic and international politics across the world. One region where populism is most deeply entrenched is Eastern Europe. Populist parties are the ruling party in seven nations–Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic–and in some nations, such as Hungary, both the ruling party and the main opposition party are populist parties. Dr. Bal\u00e1zs Trencs\u00e9nyi, Head of the Department of History at Central European University in Budapest, helped to provide historical and cultural context to the significance of populism in Eastern European politics.<\/p>\n

In his talk, Dr. Trencs\u00e9nyi hypothesized that certain contexts are more likely to breed populist ideologies than others and that the tradition of \u201canti-political\u201d history in Eastern Europe made the region especially prone to populism. Trencs\u00e9nyi has found that patterns of westernization, democratization and populist ideological development emerge throughout Eastern Europe\u2019s history. Broadly, when states westernize they tend to democratize, leaving room open for opposing political views, and in this environment populist parties, which generally oppose the westernization and democratization processes, can come to power. Trencs\u00e9nyi noted that populist parties come to power through democratic means and behave the way you would expect political parties in a democracy to behave, but they do so while advocating a \u201cthird way\u201d that is not only a rejection of traditional left and right political ideologies, but very often also a rejection of liberal democracy itself. Additionally, when populist parties do come to power they often steer their countries in more authoritarian directions (e.g. Poland\u2019s dismantling of the independent judiciary). Trencs\u00e9nyi referred to these populist actions as the \u201chacking\u201d of the public sphere.<\/p>\n

Trencs\u00e9nyi also related Eastern European populism\u2019s relationship to agrarian society. Populist parties in Eastern Europe are often best supported by rural communities and agrarian life is often evoked and celebrated by populist politicians. The centrality of agrarian society in the populist national image can be seen as a reflection of the postwar period in the Soviet Bloc, during which local communist governments manufactured coherent national identities where previously national ties had been multifaceted. East European leaders used peasant life and agrarian society as the foundations for forming nationalizing states during this period. \u00a0Trencs\u00e9nyi stressed that Eastern European communist systems were more nationalist than often understood, helping to ensure that populism would survive in the region.<\/p>\n

Trencs\u00e9nyi also discussed the ways in which populist parties and governments justify their right to rule. He highlighted five, not mutually exclusive styles of justification in which the populist party: claims to represent the \u201cessence\u201d of a nation (essence generally referred to the peasants or agrarian communities); seeks to bring about a \u201crebirth\u201d of the nation, often recalling an idealized past; hierarchizes the people and claims to represent the masses; promotes nativism and claims to represent a particular ethnic group; or sacralizes the party through religious rhetoric and close ties with the church. He gave the example of Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s regime in Hungary, which appeals to its supporters, in part, by constructing a narrative of a glorious past, a horrible present, and a messianic future. An important element of this narrative of rebirth is that Orb\u00e1n\u2019s regime sees continuity with the Kingdom of Hungary before the Second World War and sees its participation in the war as a member of the Axis powers and the subsequent People\u2019s Republic of Hungary as periods of foreign control.\u00a0 Therefore, in Orb\u00e1n\u2019s rendering of the past, modern Hungarians are not responsible for the activities of the Hungarian government during the wartime and communist periods. Building on this example, Trencs\u00e9nyi concluded by examining the modern characteristics of Eastern European Populism. Eastern European populists in the 21st<\/sup> century are very often pro-Russian, ethno-nationalist, right-wing, anti-liberal, and anti-immigrant.<\/p>\n

While Trencs\u00e9nyi contended that Eastern Europe\u2019s context made its political system prone to populism, he cautioned against assuming that countries with different political and cultural contexts would not also be susceptible to populism. His presentation shed light on the history and nature of Eastern European populism and all those who attended left with a greater appreciation for the complexities of the region and its politics.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Silas Birdsell is a junior majoring in International Studies and Economics with a minor in Latin American Studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Victor Orban and Vladimir Putin, 2014.\u00a0 Wikimedia Commons By Silas Birdsell Populism is an increasingly important aspect of domestic and international politics across the world. One region where populism is most deeply entrenched is Eastern Europe. Populist parties are the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":781,"featured_media":708,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lecture_reviews","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}