March 12, 2025
Abstract:
This dissertation asks how new right-wing cultural politics form and contribute to regime reproduction. My aim is to understand how artists participate in nationalist cultural politics and how they inhabit it. The study focuses on contemporary Hungary, a country governed by Fidesz and ruled by Viktor Orbán since 2010, and the EU country with the highest cultural spending as a share of GDP. I examine the case of its flagship institution, the Hungarian Academy of Arts (HAA), which has been enshrined in the constitution since 2011. The dissertation mobilizes a combination of ethnographic and historical-sociological methods. These consisted of participant observation while spending a year working at the Academy, research at the Academy's previously unexplored archives, and interviews.
I show that Hungary's national protectionist right-wing regime managed to attract the support of artists who turned to national sentiments and sought social protection after being threatened by the globalization of the market of cultural goods and the retreat of state patronage. I argue that the seeds for cultural producers' rallying to the regime were laid as early as the 1970s, during the global economic downturn, and gained new momentum after Hungary's post-1989 integration into global neoliberal capitalism. The crisis and ultimate downfall of the state-socialist system and economy left artists bitterly disillusioned with "socialist" modernization. It also made many of them, mostly first-generation intellectuals and heirs of the upper class, receptive to rural peripheries and the kind of nationalist ideas that had grown since the 1970s and had flourished from the 1990s.
The Orbán regime's cultural policy could grow on this ground of national beliefs and vulnerable material conditions experienced by artists. Marginalized on international cultural markets but deeply embedded in local communities, these artists were able, through the Academy, to access some degree of bourgeois status and national recognition. Against these artists' self-presentation and the common cliché of "official culture," I show that organizations such as the HAA do not so much provide ideological leadership. They, in fact, embrace and promote diverse and often contradictory world views reflecting artists' diverse trajectories and social positions.
Instead of ideological leadership, the HAA stabilizes the regime institutionally and organizationally. It consolidates some select artists' newfound authority and material support, placing them in extended and consolidated networks of dependents that also escalate class conflict among artists. They, in return, are expected to provide support and cultural legitimacy to the regime. I suggest redefining their role from ideological leadership to consolidating the political regime within civil society, as most of these artists are more engaged with local communities than international markets.
Thus, aligning with Gramscian theories about the connection between state and culture, I propose reconceptualizing cultural politics under Orbán as an example of the "culture wars." Culture wars, I argue, are conflicts that occur at a historical point when there is a shift in the local accumulation regime that reorganizes the coalition between the ruling classes and intellectuals by promoting new elites and new allied intellectuals. In such a context, making a new national cultural infrastructure is part of the process through which a regime such as Orbán's consolidates means of accumulation in Europe's semi-periphery in times of global transformation and crisis. My work shows that the rise of right-wing cultural politics is not merely an instrumental effort at ideological control by political elites. Instead, it is also an outcome of global economic changes that create new alliances between new political-economic elites seeking to advance their position in accumulation and a segment of artists aiming to avoid deprivation.