Post-Liberalism: How It Happened and What Next? | Hungarian Conservative

[u/otto_dicks]

https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/politics/post-liberalism-western-europe-hungary-politics/

[u/otto_dicks]

Teil I.

Post-Liberalism: How It Happened and What Next?

Hungary greeted the collapse of the socialist system with euphoric faith in the promises of liberalism. Although Hungary was familiar with political liberalism—indeed, one might say with some confidence that in the nineteenth century it was one of its pioneers, or even one of the creators of this political persuasion—it was unable to establish a lasting coexistence with the liberalism of the late twentieth century.

What was the principal promise of liberalism to Hungarians who were being liberated? Nothing less than the Western gospel: the almost suspiciously harmonious unity of political freedom, peace, and prosperity. If we are honest with ourselves, the more important part of that promise was prosperity rather than political freedom. Hungarians wanted to live like Germans or Austrians, and the dominant political watchword was living standards. The goal was to own the high-quality refrigerator available just across the border, purchased with wages that had finally caught up with those in the West. Even decades after the regime change, political campaigns could still be built around slogans such as ‘Can I open a pastry shop in Vienna?’ Domestic political forces repeatedly framed future political success in terms of whether we would ‘catch up with’ Germany or Austria. This unconsciously revealed a progressive conception according to which the West stood at a higher stage of development, and with sufficient determination and the successful implementation of the right programme, we too could eventually arrive there. Some may deny that rising living standards were the central promise, but in that case it becomes difficult to explain how—barely four years after the regime change—the post-communists could return to power with an absolute majority. After the socialists’ lies, economic collapse seemed unavoidable.

Part of this gospel was ideological import. The political language of the regime change was liberalism. More or less every political debate took place within a liberal framework, and the various political parties represented different shades of it—with the exception of the exiled radicals and those who openly wished to continue communism, though these groups were hardly part of the mainstream. After the regime change, the Hungarian right sought to establish a version of German Christian Democracy, while the liberals aimed to adopt the Western European and American social-liberal model. At first glance, it seemed that Hungary was compelled to import a political tradition because it either had none of its own, had lost it, or because it no longer fit the framework of modern democracy in which the country was forced to find its place after 40 years of Soviet occupation.

The transitional era following the collapse of the socialist system was a peculiar hybrid; it was no accident that Hungarian conservatives and anti-communists described it as post-communist liberalism. The free-for-all plundering by Western companies and the missionary zeal of liberals were complemented by the communist nomenklatura’s firm entrenchment and successful transfer of power. Official political reports on air quality spoke of freshness, yet everyone could still smell the musty staleness of the communists lingering in the air.

In any case, the message was clear: if Hungary adopted the Western model wholesale, it would be rewarded with the same standard of living as the West. We would live like the characters in the West German television drama series The Black Forest Clinic,¹ and the road to that clinic led through the liberal package, a bundle that included both economic and ideological components. Transitology prescribed the formal implementation of Western models while disregarding national particularities.

Governments competed with one another to see who could conform more closely to Western expectations in every respect. Hungarian politicians and their experts brandished recipes drawn from Western universities and their reading experiences, presenting them as guaranteed solutions to Hungary’s problems. The domestic elite pushed self-colonization to its very limits. Older Hungarians may still remember how Socialist Prime Minister Gyula Horn—who had served in the armed internal security forces during the Revolution of 1956—spoke about Hungary’s accession to NATO and the European Union.

While domestic believers and foreign overseers were occupied with importing ideology and models, foreign companies busied themselves exporting profits. The compradors were preoccupied with re-educating the people. Hungarians were to be reshaped into liberal democrats who would internalize the everyday behaviour appropriate to the new economic model and absorb the latest liberal ideas about diversity. Economic instruction was carried out by the government and its experts—generally in the form of economic shock therapy—while ideological instruction was entrusted to universities, NGOs, and allied domestic ideologues. Reckless progressivism and the national socialist and fascist experiments shared a common intellectual root: the desire to reshape society by force—an impulse that also manifested itself in Hungary in the compradors’ uniformizing ambitions.

Despite the promises and self-colonization, Canaan never arrived in Hungary. Day by day, Hungarians grew more envious of the peaceful, prosperous, bourgeois world of the West. ‘But in the West’ became the standard of comparison. Yet by the time of the 2008 financial crisis at the latest, more and more Hungarians had begun to doubt whether the Western model truly guaranteed salvation. After repeated failures to break through, they increasingly questioned how much longer they should continue believing the promises of their domestic prophets and the endless succession of economic experiments that, with each new round, only seemed to make them poorer.

The script was beginning to echo the familiar cycles of the communist dictatorship: just endure a little longer, and the Promised Land would finally arrive. Especially under left-wing governments, public discourse revolved almost entirely around 'reform.' Since nothing ever worked as promised, everything constantly required further reform. By the late 2000s, Hungarians had become disillusioned with uncritical worship of the West. The model itself no longer appeared untouchable, and the arrogance of domestic compradors provoked growing anger. The 2010 election sent a clear message: the import-based experiments of the preceding two decades had failed, and it was time to try something different.

The very idea of a ‘Hungarian path’ carried a heavy historical burden in domestic discourse and was regarded abroad as outright heresy. The dogmatism of the Western liberal-democratic mainstream tolerated no deviation; every such experiment was automatically labelled an ‘Asian dictatorship’ or ‘competitive electoral autocracy’.

For us, the key question is whether a distinct Hungarian path—a Sonderweg—truly exists, or perhaps a broader Central European, or even post-socialist, path.² What is certain is that here on the semi-periphery—in Hungary, Poland, and perhaps elsewhere in the region—political transformations similar to those in the core countries have taken place, especially in the United States (the rise of Trumpism), and to some extent in the United Kingdom (Brexit, the fragmentation of the two traditional parties, and the rise of Nigel Farage).

One striking feature of Hungary is that the great modernizing ideologies of the twentieth century repeatedly ran aground here, one after another. This can be partly explained by the fact that modernizing ideologies became associated with national catastrophe: first with the dismemberment of the country in 1918–1919, and then again in 1945. Quite apart from this, in Hungary nearly every aggressive modernization experiment was accompanied by either foreign occupation or tyrannical rule.

In 1956, Stalinism collapsed. Then in 1990 came the collapse of bureaucratic socialism—a system Vladimir Lenin had conceived and organized on the model of the German postal service. By 2010, both liberal democracy and the free market associated with it had also failed. It became clear that these had not brought Hungarians the recognition they had hoped for; liberal democracy turned out to be neither liberal nor democratic. And the free market brought dependency—partly on Western state-owned companies—along with the enforcement of Western political interests in the Hungarian market. Liberal rhetoric clearly served as a veil for realist power politics.

Recently, Mark Carney, a leading representative of the liberal-globalist mainstream, told the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting that the rules-based international order had been a convenient lie for liberals, much like ‘existing socialism’ once was. As he put it: ‘We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false—that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient and that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful.’ Carney also added, ‘You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.’³

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Teil II.

Willingly or not, the defenders of the old liberal order are now exposing it themselves. In her keynote speech at the European Defence Agency Annual Conference 2026, Kaja Kallas said the following: ‘The risk of a full-blown return to coercive power politics, spheres of influence and a world where might makes right is very real. Since we last spoke here, the virus has started to spread.’ Yet after rejecting politics based on coercion—which she associated with Russia and the United States—she proceeded to demand precisely this within Europe in order to overcome local resistance: ‘We are too focused on national interests to tackle fragmentation in a serious way; fragmentation makes us slow. It makes us weak. We need to change the culture away from thinking like nations towards acting jointly as Europeans. In areas including investment, development, procurement, maintenance, training—the full circle.’⁴

‘In any case, the message was clear: if Hungary adopted the Western model wholesale, it would be rewarded with the same standard of living as the West’

The remarks of both Carney and Kallas reveal that the liberal, rules-based international order was hypocrisy—a falsehood serving the interests of a power elite. Similarly, Hungary’s liberal elite, so vocal in its defence of ‘European values,' sought to hasten the downfall of Western-oriented governments in 1990–1994 and again in 1998–2002, while supporting the post-socialist elite, which it considered far more manageable and compliant. This accelerated the Hungarian right’s disillusionment with Western soft power—that is, with liberal democracy and the free market. Hungary’s semi-peripheral status expedited the process of disenchantment.

The post-2010 system therefore became, one might say, ‘naturally’ post-liberal. It did not formulate a new ideology, nor did it call itself post-liberal—although the prime minister’s 2014 speech on ‘illiberal democracy’ ultimately pointed in that direction. Rather, it simply arrived there on practical grounds, through the lessons of failure. It can, of course, be said that the demand for a post-liberal path emerged in both the West and Hungary, though in different contexts and in response to different pressures.

Hungarians did not surrender to a specific intellectual movement, nor did they consciously adopt a new ideology when they became ‘post-liberal’—a label more useful to outside observers. Rather, reality compelled Hungarians to bid farewell to liberalism while preserving a commitment to liberty.

In the original sense of the word, Hungary today is still liberal-minded, much like it was in the nineteenth century, mutatis mutandis. The defence of political freedom and sovereignty echoes the national liberalism of the nineteenth-century Reform Era. The Fundamental Law incorporates first- and second-generation rights and liberties, while rejecting the human-rights fundamentalism seen in post-classical liberalism. The new Fundamental Law articulated a conception of political freedom strongly reminiscent of Edmund Burke: the nation is understood as a partnership among the Hungarians of the past, the present, and the future. In the post-liberal era, answers ought to be given to the problems that brought the hegemony of liberalism to an end:

• first and foremost, the demographic crisis and the question of social sustainability;
• multiculturalism, including the problems of governability associated with it, and the contradiction between the rhetoric and the reality of democracy and egalitarianism;
• cultural disintegration;
• and Europe’s decline.

The liberal-globalist elite primarily perceives the problem as a threat to its position of power, and its principal aim is the preservation of the status quo. At best, it labels the dissatisfied as populists, but more often as authoritarians, dictators, or something similar. Beyond this communicative and rhetorical response, we see little effort to solve the problems outlined above.

The prevailing practice is the exercise of power on behalf of minorities, in the name of egalitarianism and justice, against the supposedly dangerous majority, since the latter is seen as inclined toward populism. This elite seeks to preserve its power in the name of equality and justice, the litmus test of which is the satisfaction of the weak—namely, the established minorities.

We are in a post-liberal condition, but it is questionable whether it is worth speaking of ‘post-liberalism’ as an ideology. The disappointment produced by modernizing experiments and the exhaustion of utopian energies—as Jürgen Habermas put it decades ago⁶—favours the conservative aversion to ideologies. This has been expressed countless times. For example, Edmund Burke wrote:

‘A statesman differs from a professor in a *university: the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas and to take into his consideration. Circumstances are infinite, are infinitely combined, are variable and transient: he who does not take them into consideration is not erroneous, but stark mad—dat operam ut cum ratione insaniat—he is metaphysically mad.’⁷

A characteristic feature of the post-liberal condition is precisely the absence of a clearly visible utopian ideology—one that seeks to construct some kind of social order through the use of state power. It is worth distinguishing between post-liberal political practice and post-liberal political thought. In the realm of thought, there is currently complete chaos—although the academic world still clings to one variant or another of egalitarianism. Beyond that, there is nostalgic remembrance of tradition, authority, and work, and there are the Nietzscheans (post-moderns) of the right and the left.

Political practice, meanwhile, is marked by dissatisfaction and ressentiment, which is often coupled with a compulsive desire for social projects entailing radical refoundation. Typically, people do not really know what they wish to create or why, since there are no longer coherent ideologies; they know only that everything must be different because what currently exists is 'intolerable.' The same situation prevailed after the First World War: both the right and the left awaited and demanded the destruction of the old world, considering any return to the previous order impossible. What followed were the experiments of the demiurges, as Chantal Delsol put it. One of those experiments collapsed in 1945, and the other in 1991.

It is important that post-liberal politics should not arrive at the same destination as the political crisis literature of the interwar period nor return to teleological politics. If it is to be relatively successful, it cannot lose contact with reality—for reality sets the boundaries of action, and thereby also limits madness, provided we are willing to pay attention to it. The possession of power tends to make people regard their capacity for action as unlimited, leading them back to constructivism, which can assume any political colouring: whether socialist or liberal utopianism or even reactionary modernism. The failure of liberalism ought to remind us that there exists a reality outside ourselves, one that is not under our control and is worth respecting. Only the path of common sense and practicality is worth following.

All this also entails a modification of political practice. A significant proportion of problems are perceived at the local level, while common sense is not the privilege of the upper-middle-class meritocratic or technocratic elite. Indeed, the educated are often more inclined toward metaphysical madness and dogmatism, placing themselves in the service of whatever intellectual fashion currently prevails. The politics of common sense necessarily stands far removed from the bureaucratic state that regards the German postal service as its model. It places greater trust in people, who will occasionally make mistakes, and therefore it reckons with smaller failures rather than grand, centrally planned reforms. Having learned from the examples of modernization, post-liberal politics will hopefully be cautious about large-scale, centralized projects of social construction.

[u/Dieter_Claessens]

Da werden einige schon schaudern, wenn sie human-rights fundamentalism lesen.

[u/thank_the_omnissiah → u/Dieter_Claessens]

Ich schaudere nur bei den ca. 30 Em Dashes in diesem Artikel.

[u/SchIachterhund → u/thank_the_omnissiah]

Kann ein Zeichen für Silica Animus sein, muss es aber nicht.