Between Brussels and Moscow: Counterexpertise and geopolitical imagination in illiberal Hungary

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Anna Balazs, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Speaker: Anna Balazs, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Discussant: Olga Sasunkevich, Senior Lecturer, University of Gothenburg.


Abstract: Official Hungarian government communication about the Russia-Ukraine war has been an outlier within the European Union. While other European governments – especially in Eastern Europe with a shared experience of Soviet repression – expressed unconditional solidarity with Ukrainians, the Hungarian response has shown a limited scope of solidarity and sympathy (Szabó and Lipiński 2024). A pressing question about the Hungarian approach concerns how historical experiences of occupation and loss of political sovereignty, as well as the strong anti-Soviet tradition of the post-1990s elite influence current discussions about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My article addresses this question by presenting the views of scholars and public intellectuals currently or previously employed in government institutions on geopolitical issues related to the war. Analysing expert interpretations in the context of illiberal regime-building by the Orban-government, I argue that the geopolitical and historical narratives of right wing intellectuals are framed as a form of counter-expertise aimed at deconstructing a perceived liberal hegemony and animated by subjective experiences of political subjugation under the previous periods of leadership.