Book Review : Gábor Scheiring (2020). The Retreat of Liberal Democracy: Authoritarian Capitalism and the Accumulative State in Hungary. New York, Palgrave Macmillan. XXVII, 367 pages (original) (raw)
Gábor Scheiring has written an extremely thoughtful and provocative book on the death of Hungarian democracy, introducing many new aspects. Rarely do we find such a wellthought-out, scrupulous, and well-structured work about Hungarian politics, in which the theoretical and empirical parts build on each other in supporting the key statements of the book. In line with the dominant position of political science in Hungary and internationally, the author considers the Orbán regime to be a competitive or elective dictatorship, and consequently places it among hybrid regimes (cf. Levitsky & Way, 2010; Schedler, 2005; 2015). This book, however, is not so much about the nature of the already fully fledged Orbán regime (see, for example, Scheiring & Szombati, 2020) than about the reasons behind its emergence. The author claims that the primary reason for the historic failure of the fragile Hungarian democracy, emerging in the wake of the change of the regime, is market fundamentalism, which came to dominate Eastern Europe after 1989 (cf. Soros, 1998). Its principles and key concepts, including privatization, deregulation, shock therapy, financial and trade liberalization, macroeconomic stabilization and market society were accepted by the Hungarian parties. Thus, the electorate belonging to social groups below the middle-class were unable to find a political alternative in the 1990s, which would have credibly represented the principle of equality in addition to freedom. Eventually, these voters, having lost their patience, lined up alongside the right-wing and far-right forces operating on the exclusionary notion of 'nation'. Scheiring points out that for significant groups of voters, the shift essentially implied the replacement of the concept of 'class' with the concept of 'nation', without a change in the substance of their basic attitudes initially. Workers, who in the early 2000s were not yet receptive to ethnicist ideology (cf. Szalai, 2004), had mostly espoused it by the end of the decade. The 2010 political turn put an end to the era of liberal democracy and voters gave a green light to the rise of an illiberal, competitive dictatorship (initially labelled as a majoritarian democracy). Because Scheiring sometimes calls the period of 1990-2010 a democracy and other times he dubs it as a 'simulated democracy', it is not always clear exactly what he means. In my opinion, the author describes an elite-driven, institution-centred democracy, which re-and boki mained one-sided over the years because active social participation could not gain strength. Consequently, many identified the concept of democracy with the multi-party system only. In contrast with such democratic deficit, however, the concept of simulation presupposes intentionality on the part of political actors, and it would be an exaggeration to extend it to the entirety of the above-mentioned twenty years. My impression is that it is more likely that that the co-emergence of capitalism and democracy was a process laden with serious contradictions. The fact that democracies survived in capitalist systems only does not imply that a newly established capitalism automatically leads to democracy. Nor is it certain that the nascent market economy will automatically consolidate a semi-peripheral democracy which had no historical antecedents, and which emerged as result of an international domino effect. The term 'simulated democracy' is more fitting for the period starting from 2010, when the regime-in a manner that Prime Minister Orbán himself called a 'peacock dance'elevated the double speech to the rank of official politics (on the Orbán regime see Magyar & Vásárhelyi, 2017; Kovács & Trencsényi, 2020). The defining moments of the period included the unilateral constitutional process (2011), the fourth amendment of the Fundamental Law, which shattered the rule of law (2013), free but unclean elections, and the proclamation of 'illiberal democracy' (2014). The exaggeration and propagandistic reinterpretation of the dangers posed by the wave of refugees (2015) and a referendum serving the interests of the ruling party (2016) fit into this list as well. As illiberal democracy, despite its misleading name, is not a democracy but a hybrid regime (cf. Bozóki & Hegedűs, 2018a), by adopting it the Hungarian Prime Minister declared his break with the Westernstyle democratic system that has existed in Hungary since the change of regime. A typical communication strategy of a hybrid regime is double talk, which has appeared in both the domestic and international politics of political leaders in power. After Fidesz's victory in the 2018 'semi-free' elections, peacock dancing was less and less needed, although electoral autocracy persisted until the adoption of the 2020 emergency law (Scheppele, 2020). According to Scheiring, the key social factor behind the emergence of the Orbán regime was the parallel revolt of the working class and the national bourgeoisie against growing inequality and insecurity engendered by the neoliberal competition state. I believe the author is right in that for a considerable part of the working class it was indeed a revolt: the fact that beside Fidesz, the far-right Jobbik also became visibly stronger, attests to that. What began was not some 'rubbing shoulders with' the future authority, but a search for new, radical political agents who defined themselves in opposition to the policies of the left-liberal coalition government. In the case of national capitalists, however, this opposition was by no means so sharp, nor was changing sides. In their case, it was not so much a rebellion or ideological identification, but rather a flexible adaptation to the new political environment created by Fidesz, which by 2010 had risen to power. Those Hungarian capitalists who were unable to compete with multinational companies that paid higher wages, created better working conditions, and even tolerated the operation of trade unions sought and found favour in the protectionist nation-state in exchange for their political loyalty. This is evidenced by the fact that 'right-wing capitalists', as Scheiring calls them, almost unanimously opted for Fidesz, rather than Jobbik, from the two right-wing parties available to them. Of the rising ineecion. ea eopean jonal of ocie and poliic, 7(1): 161-176.