The Tumultuous Politics of Scale by Donald M. Nonini Ida Susser

Author:Donald M. Nonini, Ida Susser [Donald M. Nonini, Ida Susser]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367186241
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 50738308
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Coda

“Double polarization” processes à la Jonathan Friedman – social polarization combined with cultural polarization – led first to the making of “the Eastern Scale” as a domestic political articulation within Hungary and Poland. “Eastern” is not a mere geographical referent here. It stands for a subaltern class-formation process, or rather a subaltern class alliance, as I have shown, that spans broadly conceived working classes, small property owners, and direct producers across those countries. The decisive mobilizing push as well as the critical electoral weight, however, was generated in significant ways by radical popular coalitions in the economically collapsed Eastern regions. In the context of national integration and upscaling into an increasingly financialized Western capitalism, these post-socialist class-formation processes emerged under the sign not of labor, but of a radical populist neo-nationalism celebrating the abandoned people of national stock. This populism grew within and against the social and territorial cracks of a liberal political system that had been slowly losing its legitimacy in the eyes of substantial parts of the electorate. Its rise derived its energy from the popular anger at social democratic parties that had done little to prevent the emergence of oligarchic inequalities and had failed to find ways to govern effectively in the “one nation” mode. Abandonment and theft were the emic key terms.

The illiberal movements so established are currently leading to significant state transformations – even constitutional makeovers – in Hungary and Poland, away from the Western liberal state form. They are now also for the first time since 1989 producing the Visegrad bloc of post-socialist countries as a self-conscious and coordinated scale within the EU, turning a technical device into the international vehicle for projecting the power of a right-wing illiberal alliance on the Eastern flank of a fragmenting EU. Western neo-nationalisms in Holland, France, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia are steadily magnifying this fracturing momentum, which was driven first by the indebted European South (starting in 2010), then by the angry right-wing East (accelerating after 2011), and subsequently by Britain’s exit (2016 referendum). Taken together, these deep and fundamental rifts, social-political-economic, are threatening to paralyze what Perry Anderson has celebrated as the internationalist elements of the EU architecture (Anderson 2009).

After coming to power, Orbán immediately attacked the autonomy of the Central Bank, re-nationalized/socialized the privatized pension system, installed workfare, and rewrote the constitution (about Orbán, see Financial Times 2018; Lendvai 2017; Magyar 2016). Later the Hungarian government bought up the Budapest stock exchange and forced out international corporations from the banking and utility sectors by imposing taxation and setting limits on prices. It also orchestrated and re-regulated in punitive ways the (internationally owned) media (that had called him and his government “fascist”). Orbán, in particular, created a clique of millionaire powerbrokers and entrepreneurs around him that was fed by state spending and that helped him reorganize civil society, the media, and the party system. This overt illiberal campaign had a continuous though submerged racist undertone in relation to Roma and non-Roma surplus populations, sometimes turning into blatant overtone.

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