This chapter argues that the Hungarian illiberal-entrepreneurial administration’s cultural politics is key to the Orbán regime’s long-term success. This cultural politics also crystallizes a formula that has been institutionalized in other small Eastern European states and has served as a model to adopt for the Global Right beyond the region. In place of a cohesive cultural policy, such a formula derives from a narrative and media-based agenda, which populates a set of globally-traveling, locally adaptable worlds of political storytelling, or politicized worldbuilding. This politicized story world draws on the traditionalist tropes of the Global Right, which revolves around a heteronormative, racially pure family as the fortress of the nation in a sacred battle against destabilizing forces such as the LGBTQ “mafia,” immigrants, non-Christians, the European Union, neoliberalism, and intellectual elites. This vision of the nation-family is based on alternative histories that are infused with fantasy and mythology, propped up by pseudo-historical and philosophical paradigms such as Neo-Eurasianism, and disseminated across digital platforms. I analyze the recent turn to government-funded film and television production that aims to confirm the Orbán government’s mythical-civilizational vision and that demonstrates the crucial role of storytelling in cultural politics as an ideological, political, and economic investment.

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Historical Storytelling in the Hungarian Culture Wars

  • Anikó Imre

摘要

This chapter argues that the Hungarian illiberal-entrepreneurial administration’s cultural politics is key to the Orbán regime’s long-term success. This cultural politics also crystallizes a formula that has been institutionalized in other small Eastern European states and has served as a model to adopt for the Global Right beyond the region. In place of a cohesive cultural policy, such a formula derives from a narrative and media-based agenda, which populates a set of globally-traveling, locally adaptable worlds of political storytelling, or politicized worldbuilding. This politicized story world draws on the traditionalist tropes of the Global Right, which revolves around a heteronormative, racially pure family as the fortress of the nation in a sacred battle against destabilizing forces such as the LGBTQ “mafia,” immigrants, non-Christians, the European Union, neoliberalism, and intellectual elites. This vision of the nation-family is based on alternative histories that are infused with fantasy and mythology, propped up by pseudo-historical and philosophical paradigms such as Neo-Eurasianism, and disseminated across digital platforms. I analyze the recent turn to government-funded film and television production that aims to confirm the Orbán government’s mythical-civilizational vision and that demonstrates the crucial role of storytelling in cultural politics as an ideological, political, and economic investment.