Table Of ContentCHALLENGES TO DEMOCRACY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
SERIES EDITOR: HANSPETER KRIESI
The Retreat of
Liberal Democracy
Authoritarian Capitalism
and the Accumulative
State in Hungary
Gábor Scheiring
Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century
Series Editor
Hanspeter Kriesi
Department of Political and Social Science
European University Institute
San Domenico Di Fiesole, Firenze, Italy
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Gábor Scheiring
The Retreat of
Liberal Democracy
Authoritarian Capitalism
and the Accumulative State
in Hungary
Gábor Scheiring
Bocconi University
Milan, Milano, Italy
Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-030-48751-5 ISBN 978-3-030-48752-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48752-2
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To the Memory of My Parents
Preface
This book is the product of three years of empirical research, four years in
politics and a lifetime in a country experiencing three different political-
economic regimes. It brings together empirical political economy, social
theory, qualitative sociology and comparative politics with a desire to
provide a fresh understanding of Hungary’s past three decades, to answer
a simple yet profound question: why has liberal democracy retreated? The
reader will encounter the lead actors of the story, as well as the voices of
everyday people whose fate the elites decided. The lives of everyday peo-
ple and the life of democracy are tightly interwoven, but it is the powerful
who can act upon structural opportunities to steer history. The chance to
stop hybrid authoritarianism and create an inclusive and participatory
democracy depends on our understanding of the underlying structures
that both prohibit and enable action. As Fernando Cardoso and Enzo
Faletto (1979, p. 179) said: ‘The course of history depends largely on the
daring of those who propose to act in terms of historically viable goals.’
A person acting in terms of historically viable goals believes in action
but at the same time dares to ask uncomfortable questions about struc-
tural opportunities and predetermining factors. When I began working
on this book, action dominated my life. The first written evidence of my
engagement with the topic was a political strategy discussion paper dat-
ing back to the end of 2014, a few months before I quit politics. Since
vii
viii Preface
then, analysis has taken over the place of action. After a decade of activ-
ism and four years of being an MP, I became a researcher at the University
of Cambridge. I finished my PhD on the human price of the postsocialist
transformation, launched a postdoctoral project on the political economy
of democratic backsliding and moved to Milan to take up a job as a
research fellow at Bocconi University.
These roles all informed this book, which also marks the end of a tran-
sition: the transition from politics to academia. Cardoso and Faletto’s
book is a crucial source of inspiration for me. Not only because of its
pioneering thesis on dependent development but also because it com-
bines the politician’s passion for agency with the social scientist’s dispas-
sionate act of analysis. Fetishising political action and neglecting the
binding power of structures are just as erroneous as overemphasising
structural determinism. The main purpose of social sciences is to help us
understand the structurally limited, yet historically viable goals that are
worth pursuing, such as the right strategy to prevent the retreat of liberal
democracy and fight hybrid authoritarianism. This is the primary aim of
this book.
However, the most important motivation for writing this book was
personal. I will never forget when my father—may he rest in peace—told
me, smiling, that despite being happy and proud to see me on television
as an MP, he turned the volume down when I spoke because what I said
irritated him. When it came to politics, we had only one thing in com-
mon: he often declared that he would vote for a decent social democratic
party if there were any. As there wasn’t, he was left with the centre-right
MDF (Hungarian Democratic Forum) and then Fidesz (Fidesz—
Hungarian Civic Alliance).
As a blue-collar worker, my father had an ambivalent relationship to
the ‘actually existing socialism’ and to the new capitalist world. When he
was young, his aunt, who had emigrated to Australia, invited him to
spend a month in her house in Brisbane, Queensland, hoping he would
stay there. He enjoyed the sunshine, of course, but decided to return to
his home country. He did not understand why his relatives down under
were slaving away for the fourth apartment when they already had three.
He felt more at home in the test room of the United Electrical Machinery
Factory (EVIG), on the industrial outskirt of Budapest. He missed the
Preface ix
camaraderie and solidarity of everyday life. I bet he was also missing my
mother—may she rest in peace too—who was working as an industrial
crane operator at the same factory when they met.
As a descendant of Austrian farmers, my father nurtured an inherent
dose of anti-communism. He was very much looking forward to the
regime change, but in a span of only a few years, he got disillusioned. He
had to work more and more to maintain the quality of life he had previ-
ously been accustomed to. After a few years, he had to pay the conse-
quences of the many hours of overtime: in the spring of 1995, he got a
stroke and became semi-paralysed. As a bittersweet turn of events, this
saved my mother’s life. She went on sick leave to be able to look after my
father, which is how she found out she had cancer. Both of my parents
experienced the transition from socialism to capitalism as a perpetual
downfall, eventually contributing to their premature deaths.
For a long time, I thought their story, our story, was unique. Now I
know that, unfortunately, it is very typical. Although I have met many
great people over the last decades for whom the regime change brought
not trauma but opportunities, I stand in solidarity with those who got on
the wrong train of history in the new capitalist world. Understanding
their fate and their political opportunities is the primary source of moti-
vation for my scientific and public activities.
From the first draft to printing the English edition, the book took six
years to complete. During such an extended period, the position of the
author is bound to evolve, so is the subject of the book. The theoretical
framework took shape over the years, as the work progressed. At the same
time, others were also working on interpreting the fate of democracy in
Hungary; unfortunately, I could only partially follow their work. Finally,
the evolution of ‘empirical reality’ presents the most significant challenge.
One could always extend a text, at the same time, I had to draw a line and
finish the work. All in all, I hope that these changing elements did not
undermine the value of the book. My aim was not to get into the daily
battles but to enrich the analytical debate in the long run.
The first edition of the book was published in Hungarian in 2019. The
English edition is not a direct translation, the two versions differ in sev-
eral aspects. The Hungarian edition had a separate chapter reviewing the
international political economy debate on the postsocialist transition,
x Preface
which was not necessary to include in the English version. The English
edition also benefited from the reviews and feedback on the Hungarian
edition as well as on the journal articles that are incorporated in revised
form into the English version. The wording and argumentation became
tighter, especially in the introduction, the theory chapter, the description
of the methodology and the concluding chapter, but every chapter
changed to a degree. I also dropped some details that were only relevant
for the Hungarian audience and updated the data wherever it was possi-
ble, so the chapter on the accumulative state covers a longer period in the
English edition.
The world is facing a new wave of democratic backsliding. The theories
of democratic consolidation and regime change need improvement if we
want to understand this illiberal wave. Hungary was long heralded as a
champion of political and economic liberalisation in postsocialist Eastern
Europe. However, the country recently emerged as a striking example of
the current illiberal turn. Why is liberal democracy retreating?
Understanding structural opportunities and ‘historically viable goals’ is a
prerequisite for competent political agency. This motived me to construct
a new causal narrative on the retreat of liberal democracy in Hungary and
to propose a new concept to interpret the political-economic nature of
the post-2010 state. Challenging and extending existing interpretations,
this book argues that Hungary’s new authoritarian regime emerged as a
political response to the tensions of globalisation following the example
of other hybrid authoritarian state capitalisms. In addition to theoreti-
cally reorienting the scholarship on democratic backsliding in Hungary,
the book also represents a methodological innovation, combining quan-
titative and qualitative approaches in a theory-building process tracing
framework, relying on a rich and diverse dataset, which is the result of
three years of empirical research.
The primary audience of the book is social scientists and policy experts.
However, journalists seeking background on Hungarian politics and
autocratisation, as well as politicians, activists and advocates in think
tanks, foundations and NGOs working on democracy might also find it
relevant. Given the book’s multidisciplinary approach and the author’s
experience in politics, the book might hold insights for political scientists
working on democratisation and autocratisation, sociologists working on
