Critical Remarks on the "Sovietization" of Hungarian Human Geography (original) (raw)

2018, Social Sciences in the Other Europe since 1945

This chapter critically engages with recent studies on the “Sovietization” of geography and regional planning in Hungary. It identifies some key theoretical and methodological issues, and proposes directions for new research. The first part argues that current narratives of “Sovietization” as colonization are prone to political revisionism and lack elaboration on the “socialist system,” which is treated as a homogeneous dictatorship with essential traits. These accounts are subjugated to Cold War dichotomies, rely on internalist and essentialist assumptions of “the socialist system,” and in turn disengage with foreign relations and the precedents or comparability of the “socialist state.” The second part considers issues of narrativity, disciplinary history, scientific and ideological discourse, and the geographies of knowledge, and argues for a transdisciplinary approach to “deprovincialize” the “tunnel vision” of the history of human geography. I argue that the relentless focus on ideology, biographies, and political regimes disregards the ambivalence of discourses, the complex interplay of actors, and expert rivalries. It also disregards the general shifts from human to social (economic) geography, from jurisprudence to economic management in state technopolitics, from historicist culturalism to rationalist economic developmentism, from morphology to functionalism, and also the emergence of the settlement network concept, and the development of urban and regional planning. I conclude that accentuating the historical rupture of “Sovietization” ignores important continuities and international trends, and holds the danger of contributing to a self-Orientalized case study of political dictatorships.