By Veronika Hermann
Veronika Hermann is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, ELTE Budapest. She teaches at the Institute for the Theory of Art and Media Studies and the Department of Media and Communication.
The political and cultural revival of Cold War narratives, the resurgence of authoritarian tendencies and, more recently, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Donald Trump’s liaison with Hungarian far-right policymakers is drawing renewed scholarly and public attention to the Central and Eastern European region. A common characteristic of post-1989 far-right movements in Central and Eastern Europe is the strong anti-communist ideology, which remains prominent in their rhetoric. These movements not only oppose contemporary leftist formations and anti-fascist movements but also reject the legacy of socialism – while recycling elements of the latter’s organizational strategies.
In the section that follows, I will introduce three examples of how utopian ideals have been co-opted in the context of Central and Eastern Europe, leading to a dynamic of authoritarian tendencies more interconnected with each other than they might seem at first sight. These seemingly unrelated but interconnected political and social utopias shape contemporary political discourses, media relations, the politics of representation, and cultural production. Although utopia is commonly defined as a hopeful, perfect future state, none of the ones discussed here have been realized: some have even devolved into outright dystopias within their problematic social contexts. As such, these “failed utopias” serve as a useful reminder of the changing trajectories of political aspirations in Eastern Europe.
The Peace Movement as Utopia
Socialist thought and the early idea of utopian socialism began in the nineteenth century. However, as my title suggests, my focus here will be not on the traditional utopia of socialism but on the utopian ideals that have emerged in the aftermath of socialism as a political system. One of the most prominent utopian visions during the socialist period was the ‘peace camp,’ a term used both officially and unofficially to describe socialist countries of Europe, often for propagandistic purposes. After 1945, one of socialism’s most prominent political slogans was that only the Soviet Union and its allies could preserve peace. This messaging framed the USSR as the protector of peace, which contrasted with the violent experiences of citizens living in socialist countries under the tutelage of the USSR.
The idea of the peace camp gave rise to two significant phenomena that remain relevant to this day. First, that the supposed equality and anti-racism promoted by the peace camp did not settle but rather aggravated the internal differences between the European socialist countries. There is a growing literature comparing the post-socialist and post-colonial conditions, in which discourses in East European former socialist countries are typically classified in the former category, and non-European former socialist countries in the latter. In recent years, there has been a growing body of research which compares the post-socialist condition to the post-colonial, but there is a relative scarcity of studies that examine the relationship between Eastern Europe and non-European socialist countries and the role of decolonization in a historical context.[i] If scholarship would map the relations of subordination and superordination among the former socialist countries, the dynamics of these inequalities would be clearer. In other words, using the logic of postcolonialism, we could show how the logic of racial discrimination and white supremacy fueled internal differences even within the context of the same ideology.
The other lesson is that under the guise of promoting world peace through socialism, the peace movement aggressively targeted the supposed enemies of the system. Rhetorical tools like ‘peace struggle,’ ‘peace camp,’ and ‘peace loan’ became empty buzzwords describing an oppressive, militant state machine disconnected from the true ideals of peace. In Hungary, between 1949 and 1955, citizens were required to take on a ‘peace loan,’ a hidden tax program that helped finance state debts and military equipment. The subscription to the peace loan was practically obligatory in the first years and helped cover the first five-year plan. The state expected all working citizens to pay an amount equivalent to one month’s salary per year.
This makes it even more concerning that thirty-five years after the supposed end of the Cold War, supporters of contemporary Russia, including the current Hungarian government, propagate anti-Western rhetoric and back the dictatorial Putin regime in the name of peace.
Just as socialist military aggressors operated under banners of peace in the past, we see a similar paradox today within the European Union. In the name of peace, the Hungarian government, which opposes aid to Ukraine, demands that it surrender territories to Russia to end the war.
The ‘peace struggle’ operates today in a different social and mediated context, but with familiar methods. ‘War is peace’ – says the best-known dystopia, George Orwell’s 1984. Although the peace struggle shifted into a more subtle mode with death of Stalin in 1953 and the onset of de-Stalinization, when a sense of détente started in the Eastern Bloc, the rhetoric was around until the fall of the system and affected the events of 1968.
1968 as Utopia
1968 brought to Western culture not only a new brand of liberalism and multiculturalism but also, ironically, the seeds of the current crises of both. The failed liberal utopias of that era contributed, in part, to an alt-right backlash. While there is much knowledge about the student movements – almost bordering on cliches –, there is very little knowledge about the emergence of a utopian vision within the Eastern bloc. The political project of ‘socialism with a human face’ met with failure, mirroring the disillusionment that was taking root in the West. In the Eastern bloc, it meant the death of revisionism, the crisis of existing socialism, a critique of Stalinism, and – as Vladimir Tismaneanu put it in his 2010 edited volume, Promises of 1968 – a farewell to Marx and Marxism. In the late 1960s, these events appeared to be the consolidation of the system, not its slow erosion.
What wasn’t known, however, was that the failure of socialism with a human face in 1968 amounted to the beginning of the end.
The 1970s and the 1980s remain in the cultural memory of socialism as a ‘frozen present’ – see, for example, Alexei Yurchak’s book on late socialism, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. The period has since become a historical allegory for the unfulfilled promises of the utopia of socialism, still echoing in both popular culture and public discourses.
HBO’s Central and Eastern European Utopia
One of the noteworthy echoes of socialism’s unfulfilled promises is the proliferation of Cold War frameworks in contemporary Central and Eastern European popular media, influenced by the global rise of populism.
These television products display a hybrid generic repertoire and explore the region’s troubled past. They use state socialist regimes as allegories for issues like white nationalism, right-wing populism, surveillance, and social control. State socialist and Cold War themes, surveillance, spy culture, and nationalism are intertwined. They form a cultural map that defines the region through a specific set of representations that includes often sterile, Westernized portrayals of Eastern Europe, saturated with shaded interiors, constant melancholy, and sexual- and substance abuse issues.[ii] Socialist-themed thriller series like Burning Bush, The Sleepers (HBO Czech Republic, 2012, 2019), The Mire (Netflix, 2018), The Informant (HBO Hungary, 2022) or Spy/Master (HBO Romania, 2023) introduce the political resistance movements of the era, creating a malleable bond and causally sketched narrative correspondence between state socialism, failures in the democratic process during the transition period, and current authoritarian systems.
Central and Eastern European quality television series[iii] of the last decade responded quickly to how right-wing populist regimes exploit the pluralistic media-technological milieu to occupy cultural and political meanings at all discursive levels.
The dystopian portrayal of past authoritarian regimes is formulating social criticism of the authoritarian present.
HBO’s withdrawal from Europe in 2022 has killed off this utopia when left the region with service productions and, in the case of Hungary, given rise to the illiberal film industry. Transnational, global productions take over the relatively cheap workforce of these countries, which is a form of labor and industrial colonization. At the same time, the illiberal media industry tries in vain to imitate the aesthetic characteristics of transnational productions. Local creatives and actors oftentimes cooperate with producers and filmmakers loyal to the government’s ideological position. While it may be speculative to claim that financial and professional necessity are the primary factors, it is clear that many creatives, previously involved in locally produced transnational projects, are now turning toward illiberal moving image productions. However, the inherently politicized nature of such production makes it neither popular locally, nor attractive to global audiences. HBO’s utopia in Eastern Europe introduced novelty, independence, and, in some cases, critical lessons on memory politics at both narrative and institutional levels. However, this period proved to be a brief detour in a longer tradition of Eastern European utopias, all of which suggest that utopias are incompatible with democratic institutions.
Nationalism Revisited the Illiberal Utopia of the Glorious Past
With the departure of HBO, which previously provided independent creators a valuable platform, opportunities for diverse content production have diminished. Increasingly, local producers now receive funding in exchange for political loyalty, limiting creative expression. While the “HBO utopia” in Central and Eastern Europe may have been a Westernized one and often rather superficial, what remains in its absence neither serves audiences nor fosters genuine creativity.
Recent Hungarian examples of this process include the historical series, Fairyland: Age of Temptations (Tündérkert, created by István Tasnádi, 2023), and the feature film Now or Never! (Most Vagy Soha!, dir. Kálmán Rákay, 2024). The latter is infamous for being the most expensive Hungarian film production to date, while receiving some of the lowest ratings amongst critics and audiences. These productions entered the media space at the crossroads of global and local trends, a curious moment when two factors intersected: the de-historicization of content produced by global entertainment companies, who exploit the ecosystem as an attractive neutral setting and eliminate local endowments and creative industries that may be described as a form of cultural colonization, and the increasing politicization of the entire Hungarian media landscape under the illiberal Orbán regime. Self-colonization, nationalist media production, and external, post-colonial representations put the region’s popular media production at a double disadvantage. Similar to the theory of dual colonization, Central and Eastern European media production and distribution are caught between the demands of global cultural and economic standards and local nationalist ideologies. The illiberal utopia has two claims. One is economic; the other is cultural and social.
The economic utopia promises that politically loyal local film production can generate profits like global corporations. The cultural promise is that the fictional glories of the past can cover up the crises of the present. It is becoming clear that neither of them can fulfil its promises.
When discussing contemporary issues of identity politics, we must recognize how similar the dynamics of ideological control over public discourse and creative freedom are.
This op-ed is part of the Utopia and Democracy series. Op-eds in this series draw on presentations delivered at the conference held under the same title on July 3 to 5, 2024, which was organized by the Utopian Studies Society/Europe and hosted by Zsolt Czigányik, Iva Dimovska, and Daryna Koryagina – members of the Democracy in East Central European Utopianism research group, CEU Democracy Institute – at Central European University’s Budapest campus.
[i] Among the few very inspiring works on how ‘the peace camp’ maintained inequality e.g. Ghodsee, Kristen (2019), Second World, Second Sex. Durham: Duke University Press. Mark, James et al, eds. (2022), Socialism Goes Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[ii] On HBO’s Central and Eastern European utopia from another point of view: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0005.204/–hbo-s-e-eutopia?rgn=main;view=fulltext
[iii] Since the introduction of quality formats in television in the mid-to-late 1990s, there have been seminal discourses on the normative dimensions of the definition, and on the social and technological changes it indicates. The proliferation of original content production by streaming services established a widespread agreement on the characteristics of quality television, meaning niche visual texts with arthouse movie quality and the illusion of exclusivity. Quality television has become the stereotypical midcult form of entertainment often combined with high cultural ambition.
