THE POST-WEST OF POST-NATIONS AND THE EAST AS NEW WEST VIKTOR ORBÁN’S VISION FOR EUROPE AND THE CULTURAL GAP IT TRIES TO EXPLOIT
THE POST-WEST OF POST-NATIONS AND THE EAST AS NEW WEST VIKTOR ORBÁN’S VISION FOR EUROPE AND THE CULTURAL GAP IT TRIES TO EXPLOIT

Summary/Abstract: Based on political speeches, the paper summarizes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s idea of the ‘Europe of nations’, the main pillars of the general framework, as well as the modernization context, in which it is recently interpreted. The paper argues thatt Orbán initially pushed for comprehensive reforms of the European Union (EU) structure, but this political endeavor remained largely unsuccessful, so he has changed strategy and instead of focusing on institutional revisions, he brought back the sensitive and divisive issue of defining Europeanness. He suggests that the Western framing of Europe’s future is a total failure, leading to the collapse of the EU and, more generally, of European civilization as a whole. To avoid this cultural catastrophe, the Hungarian PM argue, Central and East European nations must preserve their authentic Europeanness, based on Christianity, traditional values, social homogeneity (i.e., no immigrants), and gender normality (i.e., no LGBTQ ideology). The paper emphasizes that this shift in Orbán’s EU and European discourse was not merely rhetorical, but strategic, as he realized that there are disagreements between the West and the East as regards to the above-mentioned identity issues, and he tries to reinterpret this gap as a choice between authentic and destructive Europeanness. The last section of the paper presents a comparative statistical analysis in order to explore whether the described gap really exists or not.

• Details
• Contents