Reactionary Vanguardism.

• Author: Maitra, Sumantra
• Position: Viktor Orban

The British historian AJP Taylor believed that there was a unique historical contradiction in Hungary, claiming that the "strongest resistance, culminating in revolt, came in Hungary, where the claim to traditional rights gave a spurious air of liberalism to the defence of social privileges." As a result, the Hungarian system was a compromise, where a blend of agrarian conservatism thrived with the traditional nationalist instinct of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, positioned amidst surrounding imperial actors. "The central event in the history of Hungary in the nineteenth century was the compromise between the magnates and the lesser nobility; this was the essential prelude to the compromise between Hungary and the Habsburgs, which preserved the antiquated social order in Hungary until the twentieth century," Taylor wrote, adding that "middle class, the lesser nobility, existed only in Hungary; and in Hungary the intellectuals, even if Slovak or Rumanian by origin, could become 'Magyar' like the gentry."

This realism in Hungary is historical, and the country's history helps shed some light on this unique blend of political reaction and narrow national interest. Hungary has long been an outlier surrounded by changing and fluid political actors--a rebellious but simultaneously reactionary holdover amidst a sea of imperial progress, where imperialism was often paradoxically the liberalizing progressive force, favoring industry as opposed to an agrarian localized lesser nobility.

One of the most visible features of Hungary's reactionary governance is that it positions itself against a predominantly liberal-imperial officer class (in this case, from the European Union), which is more cosmopolitan, and overtly opposed to any nationalist or homogenous centrifugal force--thereby making the imperial edifice increasingly more authoritarian. The EU has often been likened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the same internal dynamics of political reaction from the days of the Habsburgs are still visible in central Europe--just in newer forms.

This particular form of political governance constitutes a form of "reactionary vanguardism." Similar to every interesting (and influential) new social movement that is often a study in contradictions, conservatism in Hungary is at once historical with philosophical continuity, while novel in form. It is debated and implemented by a vanguard party with a determined cadre, but towards reactionary ends. This vanguardism is liberalizing (so to speak) and defies supranational--and often imperial--politics originating from both Brussels and Washington; but it is also against a certain version of social progress which is brought on by the same supranational and imperial top-down measures. It is, just as AJP Taylor once noted, a study in contradictions.

Enter Viktor Orban, whose very specific model of reactionary governance provides an example of what such a reactionary system might look like in operation and administration. For the ascending global post-liberal "New Right," Hungary is what Sweden has been to neoliberalism, feminism, and democratic socialism: a functioning model. As recently as in May 2022, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) hosted its first international conference in Budapest. Theoretical analyses of this new emergent form of political reaction, however, are sparse. Political scientist Dorit Geva categorized it as Ordonationalism, or a form of authoritarian and hyper-nationalist neoliberalism. But that is merely a descriptive term, and does not lend much analytical or historical validity, nor does it explain Orban's much-vaunted family bursary programs--which are most definitely opposed to all tenets of neoliberalism. In a speech given to students in 2014, Orban declared:

What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that peoples personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged...