by Zoltán Dujisin
Operating at the intersection between politics and academia, National Memory Institutes across Central and Eastern Europe have developed appealing and resonant narratives and produced a “thick” ideology. Their rise has helped normalize the erosion of autonomous, scholarly expertise in the name of an idealized national community.
Zoltán Dujisin is a National Fund for Scientific Research postdoc at UC Louvain and was recently appointed Assistant Professor at Corvinus University’s Department of Sociology. He has a PhD in sociology from Columbia University. He has conducted over fifty interviews with historians at national memory institutes. He has been published in journals such as Theory & Society, Memory Studies, and History & Memory.
The establishment and rapid growth of state-sponsored National Memory Institutes (NMIs), particularly beginning in the 2000s, has been part and parcel of an institutionalization of illiberal memory regimes in much of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Right-wing governments have invariably been behind their set-up, entrusting their historians with the mission to reveal the “truth” about the communist past, and in the process conflating partisan with national interests.
While some prefer to argue that they are a predictable product of societies grappling with their authoritarian pasts, the rise of National Memory Institutes has actually helped normalize the erosion of autonomous, scholarly expertise in the name of an idealized national community.
This article takes an insider look at NMIs and their historians, and places their emergence in some of the key forces that drove the transition from socialism, forces that helped legitimize a hybrid space between politics and academia. I argue that it is in this space that we find the early symptoms of a larger illiberal political shift, redefining the relationship between politics, citizens and autonomous expertise.
Illiberal memory regimes have been generally studied in terms of their anti-communist (anti-totalitarian) and/or anti-liberal narratives, less so in terms of the relations between citizens and democracy they encourage. Grasping the latter dimension more fully requires moving beyond an exclusive focus on discourses, personalized accounts and political strategizing, to instead reveal the drivers of an increasingly significant space at the intersection of politics and academia. It is in such a space that NMIs developed as institutes that, despite their various sizes and budgets, are fundamentally dedicated to disseminating an anti-totalitarian view of the communist past. They do this through multiple means, including by publishing popular history magazines, academic articles and comic books, by organizing exhibits and conferences, and by encouraging their historians to participate in TV programs or commemorative events. Crucially, it is this hybrid space that contains a recurrent potential to erode academic autonomy in the name of the nation, and to thereby redefine the relationship between politics, citizens and expertise.
Nowhere in the West has this potential been more fulfilled than in Hungary, where Fidesz has fought against a perceived dominance of an elitist left by placing expertise at the service of the “nation.” Ever since its prime minister Viktor Orbán put forth the concept of illiberal democracy in a 2014 speech, interest in illiberalism and its relation to populism has risen dramatically among pundits and academics alike. For Orbán, illiberalism is compatible with democracy and conveys the idea that polities should be organized around a national community rather than atomized individuals. For his critics, illiberal democracy indicates a pretense at democracy; to them, it implies the presence of fundamentally authoritarian practices coated in formal democratic institutions and procedures. They moreover see it as inspired by a thirst for revenge over political, cultural and economic dominance by left-wing (and former communist) elites.
The issue of academic autonomy in Hungary, which is inextricably linked to that of NMIs, shows that there might well be some truth to both of these clearly opposed positions.
Before giving critics of illiberalism their due, we must begin by admitting that challenges to academic freedom in the West also affect democracies such as the United States, and more recently Germany over the war in Gaza. But since Fidesz’s 2010 electoral victory, Hungary has been uniquely accused of endangering the autonomy of not only academic, but also political, economic, judiciary and media institutions. When it comes to issues of academic freedom, its record is unflattering indeed. The quasi-forced departure of Central European University, the use of government regulatory power to revoke the accreditation of gender studies programs, the radical reorganization (and renaming) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and its network of research institutes, or the 2019 government decision to transfer ownership of public higher education institutions to private foundations ruled by political appointees, all illustrate the point made by critics of illiberalism: Hungary shows a penchant for mobilizing putatively democratic mechanisms for purposes of limiting academic autonomy.
It is equally true that,
in line with Orban’s definition of illiberalism, attempts to justify these reforms often refer to principles external to the academic field, indicating a worldview in which scholarship is at the service of the polity or the nation.
Several examples confirm this. The reforms of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were accompanied by official declarations that state funding should directly translate into returns for the Hungarian economy and society. This process occurred in parallel to pro-government media reports attacking academics through the deployment of well-known tropes. These reports depicted academics as unproductive members of society and complained about excessive funding going to “niche” or “ideological” research topics such as immigration, homosexuality, and gender. A similar reference to external legitimation is found in the latest Higher Education Act, that of 2011, which omits terms such as “autonomy” and “freedom” and instead focuses on questions of how to renew the nation spiritually and intellectually. The 2019 bill establishing the university foundations also mentions the need to strengthen national identity. Tellingly, Attila Vidnyánszky, the chairman of the board of trustees that took control of the University of Theatre and Film in 2020 partly justified the takeover with the claim that the university “was a very important institution for the communist regime, and unfortunately it still is,” thus hinting at a higher societal interest in anticommunist struggle.
But, as argued earlier in this article, it was the gradual buildup of illiberal memory regimes that sowed the seeds for the erosion of academic autonomy in the name of the national community. The most manifest precedent is to be found in the establishment of institutes such as the House of Terror in 2002, the Veritas Institute, RETÖRKI, or the Committee of National Remembrance (NEB) in 2013.
Such NMIs exhibit important differences in terms of their attachment to scholarly procedures, period focuses and target audiences, but they all belonged among the early manifestations of the gradual thickening of a social space at the intersection of politics and academia.
The emergence of this space has deeper structural roots that gradually encouraged an alignment of interests between conservative political actors and historians. These structural roots include
1) Euro-Atlantic integration, which in pre-accession times imposed a certain programmatic political-economic uniformity. Parties thus had an incentive to assert their identities in the symbolic arena (i.e. memory politics) to define themselves politically;
2) The symbolic disadvantage of the left: regardless of the more or less tangible links to former communist ruling parties, the connotations of the left in CEE were predominantly negative due to a discredited communist past, giving the right an incentive to assert its identity by embracing staunch forms of anti-communism. This was, ironically enough, the case even in the Czech Republic, where one could find more former communists in the neoliberal right than in the social democratic left;
3) The presence of former communists across the political spectrum, which meant transitional justice measures such as lustration could backfire. This offered an added incentive for the right to increasingly focus on “safe” symbolic arenas such as public education about communist crimes and perpetrators. This is, for instance, the case with the earliest and largest NMI of all, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. The institute was initially fashioned with a more prosecutorial and investigative intent but gradually shifted towards a profile based more on public education;
4) Post-communist institutes of history were generally underfunded and often disconnected from transnational academic debates (albeit to a lesser degree in Hungary or Poland), making historians vulnerable to political co-optation by well-funded, state-sponsored NMIs.
5) EU accession, which allowed the creation of transnational networks of committed anti-communist politicians and historians interested in emulating the NMI model across the post-communist parts of Europe. In sum, a combination of interrelated structural forces created strong incentives for conservative political actors to invest in anti-communist identity politics across CEE.
What NMIs gave the political right was the ability to “market” conservative identities as representing the national interest. In large part, this was done by coating anti-communist discourses with a layer of scholarly legitimacy. In these discourses totalitarian communism remains a threat, both in the shape of former communists and that of persisting communist mentalities. Former communist elites are depicted as ubiquitous and recalcitrant, as having surreptitiously maintained political, economic and cultural power. Thus their presence – sometimes directly and at other times indirectly, through their “left-liberal heirs” – is seen as telling a larger story, one of a fundamentally flawed post-communist system. But this sense of a threat to the nation could not be conveyed to large enough segments of the public from the strict bounds of either politics (which are always widely suspected) or academia (which largely disagrees with this diagnosis).
In such a situation, NMIs offer an optimal solution, in that they institutionalize the intersection between politics and academia, putatively operating according to scientific principles while actually being highly vulnerable to political control.
Given the public’s inability to discern the varying degrees of scholars’ historiographic expertise and academic reputation, this is hardly an impossible task.
NMIs research output underscores the extent to which these institutions remain relatively peripheral to mainstream historiography. According to the Hungarian Science Bibliography, a traditional research institute such as the Institute of History of the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities has 73,837 citations for the 18,647 publications since 2007, a citation/publication index of 4.28. In the same period, another such institution, the one colloquially known as the 1956 Institute, has an index of 9.6. The Institute of Political History, perceived as scholarly-oriented albeit closely aligned with the political left, has an index of 2.4. In contrast, the scores for NMIs such as Veritas (0.82), NEB (0.74), or RETÖRKI (0.48) indicate a reduced institutional interest in being part of the scholarly community. This is no secret either, as many NMI historians openly view their focus on lay audiences as a legitimate and necessary reorientation of scholarship away from elites.
Such numbers also underscore the delicate balancing act NMIs need to play, attempting to retain a scientific veneer while claiming to serve the nation, all the while ensuring their historians’ output is congruous with the identity politics of their political patrons.
It is therefore essential to understand the internal governance mechanisms that keep these institutes coherent, and whether they also herald illiberal challenges to academic autonomy. Research on the state of Hungarian academia offers a useful starting point: academic freedom is formally enshrined in law, but due to a lack of specific provisions, its protection is left in the hands of policy and institutional decision-makers who may socialize scholars into caution and conformity.
Research on NMIs shows that some of these socialization mechanisms have been in operation long before the current Hungarian regime was first accused of targeting academic freedom. NMIs ensure ideological congruence and conformity through informal, subtle mechanisms such as hiring practices, office socialization, and the sort of winks and nudges that are implicitly understood by all those working at these institutes. Socialization is less necessary with what Michal Kopeček calls “therapeutic” historians. This ideal type refers to scholars who perceive themselves as providers of therapeutic services to a wider, “national” community – a community they envision as traumatized by a painful past, which therefore needs guidance to connect disparate events into a coherent narrative. The theme of a persistent struggle against “communist” influence also inspires a certain sense of societal mission among them.
Unsurprisingly, such scholars are more oriented towards public education activities and less likely to complain about limitations to their autonomy. However, several NMI historians who advocate a more marked public role for history do not necessarily align themselves with their institutions’ overarching ideology.
Unlike their “therapeutic” colleagues who frequently dismiss scholarly historians as obsessed with “narrow” scientific debates about which “nobody cares,” these public-oriented historians perceive their profession as an alternative vocation that should not be pitted against academia.
Yet both groups include many who were shaped in the earlier stages of their career by experiences of rejection by their profession’s mainstream.
However, as mentioned above, NMIs also thrive on the scientific authority of their historians to claim scholarly credibility. Therefore, these institutes have an interest in qualified academics who can maintain bridges with the historiographic field via joint research projects, scholarly publications and participation in, or even co-organization of, scientific conferences. Younger historians are more likely to be attracted to such career opportunities in an otherwise underfunded field. An attraction that has to be balanced against worries of becoming stigmatized in the eyes of the mainstream to which they wish to belong. Together with the those public-oriented historians who eschew militant anticommunism, such younger historians usually become the main targets of informal socialization mechanisms at NMIs that are meant to ensure conformity.
Such socialization can occur in multiple ways, depending not only on the historian but on the NMI in question: Scholars are often incorporated into research projects that have pre-determined conceptual frameworks, media trainings might be used to teach scholars how to react to “political” questions in TV or radio interviews, institutional leaders might contact historians to scold them for using the “wrong” terminology in an interview. More generally, NMI historians learn to “read the room” and play along with expectations in order not to endanger their career prospects. Nevertheless, they also enjoy the freedom to pursue their research projects on the side, as their leadership welcomes scientific or lay publications, and generally wishes to project an image of relative pluralism.
These informal socialization mechanisms ensure that, regardless of the individual attitudes of the historians, NMIs are capable of producing a coherent, “thick” ideology that draws from the rich repertoire of history to string together an appealing and resonant narrative.
Its appeal lies in the populist promise to resolve the crisis of representation, offering “the people” a history they can connect to not as passive subjects, but as active participants.
This was palpable during the 60th anniversary of the 1956 revolution, which was organized by a public foundation affiliated with the House of Terror. Reacting to the alleged elitism of mainstream historiography, which tends to emphasize the roles played by disillusioned reformists and left-wing intellectuals in the revolution, House of Terror historians chose to hang posters of “freedom fighters” on the streets of Budapest. This was to serve as a public reminder that this was a revolution by the people and for the people. A media controversy ensued after one of the “freedom fighters” was mistakenly identified as well-known actor László Dózsa, whose tales of personal bravery in 1956 have been questioned by many historians. But that did not get in the way of Mária Schmidt, director of the House of Terror, calling the initiative a success: “Even in Game of Thrones, they say you can defeat anything but a good story. Narrative defines thinking.”
She might have a point.
