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Neoliberal Capitalism and Visegrád Countermovements

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DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1990862

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Neoliberal Capitalism and Visegrád

Countermovements

Chris Hann & Gábor Scheiring

To cite this article: Chris Hann & Gábor Scheiring (2021): Neoliberal Capitalism and Visegrád
Countermovements, Europe-Asia Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2021.1990862

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 EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2021.1990862

Neoliberal Capitalism and Visegrád

Countermovements

CHRIS HANN & GÁBOR SCHEIRING

THE FOUR VISEGRÁD COUNTRIES (V4) ARE WIDELY PERCEIVED to be undermining

liberal democracy and the stability of the European Union they joined in 2004. The
essays in this special issue approach this new populism as a countermovement in the
sense of Karl Polanyi: a societal reaction to neoliberal marketisation in a dependent
periphery. Its varying national forms are shaped both by socialist legacies and long-term
historical configurations. In this introduction, we argue that cultural-historical approaches
can be fruitfully combined with analyses of contemporary political economy and global
dependencies. After presenting the overall framework of the issue, we conclude by briefly
introducing the essays that follow.
The concept of ‘countermovement’ used throughout this issue is adapted from Polanyi’s
celebrated analysis of the ‘double movement’ that is set in motion when society takes
protective action against the disintegrating effects of free markets (Polanyi 1985). The
impact of neoliberalism in recent decades, nowhere sharper than in the post-socialist
states, invites comparisons with the consequences for Britain and the world of an older
liberal ideology in the nineteenth century (Hann 2019; Scheiring 2020a). Polanyi taught
that the very idea of the free market is an illusion, since markets always depend on a
range of institutions, notably the state. Nevertheless, the misguided attempt to implement
‘market society’ has far-reaching consequences. The victims of this perverse utopianism
react through various forms of countermovement. Some, such as the establishment of
trade unions, may promote reforms of working conditions and function to stabilise
capitalist domination. Others generate aggressive protectionism, nationalist intolerance
and ultimately fascism. Polanyi’s conceptual apparatus is further discussed and extended
by Chris Hann in his contribution to this issue.

The contributions of Buzalka, Hann, Malewska-Szałygin and Scheiring were first presented at a panel
convened by the editors at the BASEES annual conference in Cambridge in April 2019. Wyss also
participated in that session. Buzalka, Malewska-Szałygin, Szombati and Wyss have all been active in the
‘Visegrád Anthropologists’ Network’, organised by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in
Halle (Saale) since 2017. The complementary essays by Bartha and Tóth, Ringel, and Shields were
commissioned by the editors to complete the set. We are grateful to everyone, as well as to anonymous
reviewers and the editor and staff of this journal, for their efficiency and exceptional collegiality.
Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

© 2021 University of Glasgow

https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2021.1990862
2 CHRIS HANN & GÁBOR SCHEIRING

The conspicuous countermovements of the neoliberal era are commonly labelled populist.
Populism has become one of the most frequently used and misused signifiers in contemporary
scholarly and public debates. The term is applied as commonly to Brexiteers in the United
Kingdom and to the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland) as it is to
certain political parties in Eastern Europe. All of these populisms are associated with
conservative patriotism, but populisms of the left also flourish, notably in Southern Europe
and Latin America, where the Peronist tradition remains strong. To lump such diverse
phenomena together is justified for some purposes, but it is important to be able to
differentiate and to recognise specific historical antecedents. Contemporary scholarship
defines populism generically as ‘a form of political claims-making—that is, a way of
formulating appeals to a mass public using a Manichean logic that opposes the virtuous
people to corrupt elites and affiliated out-groups’ (Gidron & Bonikowski 2013, p. 24).
Much of the early scholarly literature focused on Latin America, where charismatic leaders
grounded their appeal in social inclusion and the redistribution of wealth. Neoliberal and
exclusionary varieties of populism arose later, in particular in the 1990s (Weyland 1999).
Some populist forces do not fundamentally challenge established democratic norms, while
others erode liberal democracy and generate illiberal outcomes (Kaltwasser 2012). We
conceptualise illiberalism as political practices and social relations in the economy and
culture that lead to a divergence from the norms and practices of pluralist, constitutional
liberal democratic governance—towards illiberal democracy (Zakaria 1997) or competitive
authoritarianism (Levitsky & Way 2002).
The earlier literature on populism in Latin America had a structuralist orientation
(Weyland 2001). Later approaches paid more attention to populist agency (Mudde &
Kaltwasser 2017) and changes in political culture (Norris & Inglehart 2019). A more
recent wave of populism scholarship has returned structuralist concerns to centre stage by
contending that capitalist dislocation, relative status loss and the experience of downward
mobility are no less crucial than agentic and cultural factors (Kriesi & Pappas 2015;
Rodrik 2018). The debate between ‘culturalist’ and ‘economic’ explanations of populism
has so far been dominated by political scientists and economists. The relational
perspectives of sociologists and anthropologists offer ways to transcend this binary
(Ausserladscheider 2019).
This special issue combines insights from anthropology, sociology and political economy
to analyse the lived experience of post-socialist economic change and its relation to populist
countermovements in the Visegrád region. Inspired by Karl Polanyi, we view the economy
as embedded in structures of symbols as well as power, in moralities and cultural practices as
well as institutional relations. Culture is not something that lives in people’s heads waiting to
be uncovered by attitudinal surveys. Culture lives in relations between people and groups of
people; relations that are wrought with tensions, inequalities and disruptions. It is not a
question of culture versus economy, but of understanding how entangled cultural, political
and economic processes co-create populist countermovements in specific historical and
geographic contexts.
The essays in this special issue illuminate the emergence in Central and Eastern Europe
since the revolutions of 1989 of what we term the populism–illiberalism nexus. The extent to
which these configurations can be analysed as countermovements to global capitalist
marketisation has already generated a substantial body of literature (Kalb 2009;
 INTRODUCTION 3

Johnson & Barnes 2015; Shields 2015; Gagyi 2016; Ost 2018; Szombati 2018; Fabry 2019).
While the anthropological contributors to this issue pay more attention to particular cultural
manifestations of this populism, others engage with general sociological processes and
pinpoint structural causes of the populism–illiberalism nexus in the acceleration of
capitalist globalisation. We see these approaches as complementary. Eschewing
reductionist explanations, the contributors shed new light on the ongoing social
transformation of the V4 region. Societies draw on the resources available to them,
including the imaginaries of a pre-socialist past, as they seek to protect themselves from
the incursions of what Polanyi termed ‘market society’.

The V4: emerging from socialism

The four countries of the Visegrád cooperation (hereafter V4) differ considerably. Poland is
by far the largest and its history in the last decades of socialism was by far the most
tumultuous. With additional inspiration from the newly elected Pope John Paul II, the
eruption of the Solidarity movement in summer 1980 represented an alliance between
three components of Polish society that had not harmonised so well previously: workers,
the secular intelligentsia and the dominant Roman Catholic Church (Ascherson 1982;
Garton Ash 1983). This was genuinely a mass movement—at its peak in 1981, Solidarity
claimed ten million members. In its discourses, the Polanyian language of self-protection
and dissident notions of local self-organisation were prominent. So too was national
rhetoric, above all the aspiration to revive traditions of sovereignty stretching back to the
early Middle Ages. Anxiety concerning the very survival of the nation-state was also a
factor in helping most of the population to come to terms with military intervention in
December 1981. Solidarity never recovered its popular base thereafter. The negotiations
which led to the first partially free elections in 1989 were necessarily the work of elites,
even if it was the charismatic workers’ leader Lech Wałęsa who took office as the first
post-socialist head of state a year later. The left-liberal elites’ neoliberal turn in the 1990s
created an opening for national-populist activists to consolidate their leadership among
workers (Ost 2006), leading to the election of the region’s first national-populist
government in 2005 (Shields 2007). As Stuart Shields highlights in his contribution to
this issue, though the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość—PiS) of the
Kaczyński brothers has indeed challenged elements of neoliberalism through its
redistributionist social policies, it has significantly reinforced conservative social and
family hierarchies.
Intellectual dissidents were exceptionally creative in socialist Czechoslovakia, notably in
the framework of Charter 77, but here they had little success in mobilising the masses. The
‘velvet revolution’ arrived unexpectedly, in the wake of developments elsewhere in the
region. As Johana Wyss shows in her contribution to this issue, this history casts a long
shadow when the liberals of a later generation attempt to present the transformation in
heroic terms. Václav Havel could not touch the masses in the way that Wałęsa could.
Rather, he was the most articulate essayist-spokesman for the ideals of civil society. His
image of the independent greengrocer obliged to display a communist slogan in his
window and thus unable to ‘live within the truth’ was a poignant indictment of the post-
totalitarian society that left no space for human freedom (Havel 1985).
4 CHRIS HANN & GÁBOR SCHEIRING

Compared to Bohemia (as well as to Poland and Hungary), civil society dissidence was
weaker in Slovakia. Bratislava did not become a capital city until the ‘velvet divorce’ that
came into operation in January 1993. Unlike the other V4 peoples, the Slovaks could lay
no claim to the status of ‘historic nation’—one with a long history of statehood. In terms
of industrial development and urbanisation, Slovakia was a late developer in comparison
with Bohemia and Moravia. This is highly relevant to the populism that emerged strongly
here in the 1990s and which has never gone away, though its forms have changed. As
Juraj Buzalka shows in his contribution to this issue, in Slovakia even self-defining
progressive liberals must ground their political campaigns (and the personal identities
they project) in the post-peasant values of the provinces.
Hungary developed a distinctive, consumer-oriented ‘market socialist’ system of
economic management following the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism in
1968. Reformers were less innovative in the domain of politics, but the space for
autonomous socio-cultural activities nonetheless increased steadily in the 1970s and
1980s. As in Poland, dissident intellectuals were not harshly repressed. The most critical
voices were confined to samizdat journals, but others were able to make themselves heard
via established state publishers. The latter included sociologist Elemér Hankiss, who
suggested that by the 1980s an emerging ‘second society’ was challenging the official
public sphere (Hankiss 1990). The political dénouement resembled that accomplished in
Poland: the roundtable talks that paved the way for free elections in 1990 were very
much a ‘negotiated revolution’ between different segments of the elite (Tőkés 1996;
Bozóki & Simon 2021).
All these national trajectories were significantly affected by the momentum of change
elsewhere as the Soviet bloc crumbled, and by the wider international context. The
dominant discourses were those of ‘rejoining Europe’, which meant shifting the Cold War
divide eastwards and continuing to exclude Russians. Diaspora writers had great influence
(Milan Kundera was a worthy successor to Czesław Miłosz). The publications of exiled
philosophers such as Leszek Kołakowski in the United Kingdom and members of the
Budapest School in far-flung Australia were closely followed by intellectuals in the homelands.
Some of those who influenced discussions of civil society in the 1980s never wanted to
become full-time politicians. Václav Havel was unable to avoid this fate, but Adam Michnik
preferred to quit parliamentary politics almost at once in order to edit Gazeta Wyborcza,
György Konrád remained first and foremost a writer, while Elemér Hankiss took charge
of Hungarian state television and radio. Some of the intellectuals who entered politics
soon regretted it. The philosopher János Kis thrived as chief editor of a samizdat journal
throughout the 1980s, but Lukácsian Marxists who morphed into Kantian Liberals were
not cut out to be effective parliamentarians, let alone party leaders (Kis presided over the
Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad demokraták Szövetsége) briefly in 1990–1991). By
the end of the first post-socialist decade the liberal intelligentsia had effectively
abandoned the terrain to pragmatic political animals concerned to manage the economy so
as to serve their electoral objectives. When neoliberal austerity began to bite, these
leaders substituted the ideals of a free civil society with those of national belonging, as
Hann outlines in his contribution. Especially in the countryside and in small towns,
liberal and leftist parties lost their core of activists and local political debate came to
mean rivalry between competing factions on the right (Szombati 2018, also this issue).
 INTRODUCTION 5

To understand the variety in contemporary constellations within the V4, wider societal
factors and diverse histories during the socialist decades and earlier must be brought into
the frame. One key factor was economic development and the rural–urban divide.
Individual states all strove to overcome historic backwardness during the socialist
decades, but they did so in different ways and with different degrees of success.
Following the political disasters of 1956, Poland was the only state that failed to follow
through with a mass collectivisation programme. As a result, the size of the rural
population remained exceptionally large. Since urbanisation was everywhere hindered by
the chronic failure of socialist states to invest in housing (Szelényi 1983), worker-peasant
households were ubiquitous. These families combined employment in industry with
agricultural labour, either as workers for socialist farm enterprises, or as small-scale
producers on the basis of a household plot, or both. Socio-cultural continuities with the
pre-socialist peasant economy were particularly strong in non-collectivised parts of
Poland, as Anna Malewska-Szałygin shows in this issue. The essays by Juraj Buzalka on
Slovakia and Kristóf Szombati on Hungary show that, even in the collectivised countries,
‘post-peasant’ imaginaries continued to shape consciousness.1
Table 1 outlines some of the differences that had emerged within the V4 region by the
mid-1990s, factors which contributed to the emergence of populist politics thereafter. In
Poland in the mid-1980s, barely one third of a vast rural population was employed outside
agriculture, compared with well over 50% in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In the 1990s
the proportion employed in agriculture fell in all four countries, but only in the Czech
Republic did those who lost their jobs in the course of decollectivisation manage to find
alternative employment outside agriculture. In Slovakia, by contrast, rural unemployment
soared. The gap between Bohemia in the west, where paths of industrialisation and
secularisation had been initiated in Habsburg days, and Slovakia, historically a peripheral
region of the empire’s junior partner, closed significantly in the socialist decades; but the
cleavage was never fully transcended. The contrast between the Czech Republic and
Hungary is also striking. Almost identical in profile in the 1980s, in Hungary employment
fell sharply in both agricultural and non-agricultural sectors as a consequence of the more
severe dislocation of the early 1990s.
A focus on dislocation in the rural sphere is clearly insufficient to explain the incidence of
populist politics. After all, populism has been prominent in Poland too, where the numbers
employed in agriculture remained much higher. In Poland one needs to look more carefully
at the long-term consequences of the failure to modernise agriculture under socialism, which
led to huge tensions when this rural economy was exposed to capitalist agribusiness, and also
consider the negative social and political consequences of the collapse of industry. In
socialist Hungary, by contrast, despite restrictions on private capitalisation, the symbiosis

1
Cf. Kideckel (1993) for the case of Romania. Rural–urban links must be approached in the wider context
of demographic change. The new century has brought significant population decline in Poland and Hungary,
while the Czech Republic and Slovakia have remained more stable. In Hungary, urbanisation has continued
steadily, approximating to the level of the Czech Republic. In the latter, as in Poland and Slovakia, the urban
population has been declining in recent years. These trends, of course, continue to be affected by the
availability and affordability of urban housing, the costs of which—following privatisation—have risen
significantly, especially in capital cities.
6 CHRIS HANN & GÁBOR SCHEIRING

TABLE 1
CHANGES IN V4 RURAL EMPLOYMENT, 1980 S – MID -1990 S
Hungary Poland Czech Republic Slovakia
Mid- Mid- Mid- Mid-
Employment 1980s 1990s 1980s 1990s 1980s 1990s 1980s 1990s
Agricultural 16.9% 3.9% 31.8% 24.1% 15.9% 10.8% 27.9% 18.2%
Non-agricultural 54.4% 35.7% 33.9% 33.1% 55.0% 62.1% 55.2% 42.5%
Unemployed 0.2% 8.5% 0.4% 8.7% 0.8% 2.0% 1.2% 17.0%
Pensioner or other 28.6% 51.9% 34.0% 34.1% 28.2% 25.1% 15.8% 32.3%
Source: Swain (2013, p. 89).

of socialist sector (state farms and collectives) and household sector set millions of citizens
on paths of consumerist accumulation that have been appropriately theorised as a socialist
form of embourgeoisement (Szelényi 1988; Hann, this issue). This Hungarian symbiosis
sustained an agricultural labour force that, though modest compared to Poland, was still
large in comparison with the rural economies of Western Europe. In the collectivised
agricultural system of Czechoslovakia, where the household sector had not been
mobilised to the same extent, the disruption of the 1990s had less impact. In the Czech
Republic the rural population had declined faster in the pre-socialist era, and post-
socialist policies enabled a more gradual transition. It is clear overall that relatively large
provincial populations were vulnerable in a post-socialist order they were powerless to
influence. This rendered them receptive to the antiliberal countermovement.
Historically, urban industrial workers have provided the backbone of the organised left.
The dislocations caused by deindustrialisation have rendered them receptive to populist
messages, in the V4 states as in many other parts of the world scarred by rustbelts in one
form or another (Scheiring 2020a, 2020b). As Eszter Bartha and András Tóth show in
their contribution to this issue, where the leaders of the left have abandoned progressive
narratives and a social democratic identity, a shift to the right is the predictable
consequence. This has been most clearly visible in Hungary and Poland. The gap between
trade union organisers and increasingly anti-labour liberal politicians has widened (Ost
2006; Gökarıksel 2017). Kalb’s research with Polish workers showed how working-class
populism emerged as a response to community decline, criminal privatisations and
betrayal by formerly trusted elites (Kalb 2009).
In addition to rural–urban disparities, regional inequalities increased considerably in the
new order. This has been most conspicuous in Poland, where the cleavage between a
rapidly changing Polska A in the west and a stagnant, conservative Polska B in the east
has been consistently reflected in voting patterns (and exploited by PiS in its electoral
strategies). A similar binary can be identified in Hungary, and to a certain extent even
within the former Czechoslovakia. But neither Poland nor Hungary had the option of an
internal divorce. In some regions of the V4 states, a new symbiosis has emerged to replace
that of collective farm, rural household and relatively stable industrial jobs. The new
configuration, which leaves little or no space for household commodity production, is
made up of domestic firms that offer more or less precarious minimal-wage employment
and transnational corporations (TNCs) that offer higher wages and more security, even
though labour turnover may remain high due to the dehumanising monotony of the labour
 INTRODUCTION 7

process. German automotive giants need domestic partners for a range of supplies and
ancillary services to prop-up their dwindling global competitiveness. In doing so, they
have found ready allies in domestic elites. Some segments of the new national bourgeoisie
benefit from this new arrangement, and liberals argue that it is in principle a good thing to
forge strong links with Western partners expected to transmit by osmosis more transparent
institutional cultures; but the major winners are the TNCs.2

The populism–illiberalism nexus

Elements of populism (or at least ‘populism lite’) have been a significant factor in V4 politics
from 1989 onwards. Stronger or ‘thicker’ variants were also visible here and there (notably
that of Vladimír Mečiar, who served three terms as Slovak Prime Minister in the 1990s).3
Populists were typically strongest in the countryside and among disgruntled industrial
workers, but there was always much variation. In Hungary the revived Independent
Smallholders’ Party (Független Kisgazda-, Földmunkás- és Polgári Párt) was conservative
to the point of reaction. The Polish Peasants’ Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, literally
Polish People’s Party), founded in 1895, was able to maintain an autonomous
organisational profile in the socialist decades and remained left of centre throughout the
1990s. Industrial workers did not abandon the left in droves until the 2000s (Berman &
Snegovaya 2019). When a more full-blooded populist party appeared on the Polish
political stage in 2001, Andrzej Lepper’s Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland
(Samoobrona Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej), it too promoted a left-wing economic agenda.
The V4 countries are undeniably rich in populist traditions. In the latter decades of the
Habsburg and Romanov empires, which extended across vast territories not yet
significantly touched by industrialisation and an urban working class, the populist parties
were the principal representatives of the masses against oppressive rulers. Their
emancipatory programmes turned above all on the cause of land reform. While most
peasant parties supported private property and were culturally conservative, some found
common cause with agrarian socialists and even with Leninists. The populism of
pre-socialist generations in Eastern Europe can be classified as a distant reaction to the
marketisation processes that Polanyi analysed in Britain, later emulated elsewhere. The
essays gathered in this issue suggest that post-socialist populism is something very
different, but it too is a reaction to marketisation.
Post-socialist populism is best grasped as a response—a countermovement—to market-led
transformations that have left large swathes of society feeling highly insecure and worse off
materially than they were under the former socialist regime—sometimes only in relative
terms, but often enough in terms of absolute living standards. The emotions tend to be

2
It has been calculated that the profits repatriated from the V4 states by TNCs considerably exceed the
value of the transfers they receive via the EU cohesion funds (Piketty 2018). Though this comparison
neglects the value generated by transnational capital through spillover and economic linkages, it does
suggest that the region’s dependent integration into the European and global economy comes with high
economic costs.
3
For comparative discussion of populism, see Ionescu and Gellner (1969), Laclau (2005), Müller (2016),
Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017), Mazzarella (2019).
8 CHRIS HANN & GÁBOR SCHEIRING

strongest and the nationalist language most vitriolic where the decline has been greatest and
the casualties most severe. Working-class communities that experience deindustrialisation are
a case in point, as demonstrated in this issue by Bartha and Tóth, and also by Felix Ringel for
the structurally similar case of the neue Bundesländer in Germany (see also Kalb & Halmai
2011; Scheiring 2020a). Working-class populism is less strident in the Czech Republic where
industrialisation and urbanisation began earlier, and where post-socialist power holders
showed more sensitivity to cultural norms emphasising cohesion and equality.4
Neoliberal conceptions of the market and of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ resonated with
many post-socialist citizens, especially the young and mobile (Makovicky 2014). But
most anthropological studies have highlighted the tensions and struggles to which the
dominance of market logics has given rise, in Central and Eastern Europe as throughout
the post-socialist world (Bridger & Pine 1998; Burawoy & Verdery 1999). One catchword
was ‘shock therapy’, associated particularly with the advice of economist Jeffrey Sachs to
Poland, of which the Balcerowicz plan was the prototypical implementation. As Gábor
Scheiring shows in this issue, the tempo and impacts of marketisation varied
considerably, even within the V4. Slovakia, perhaps because of its distinctiveness as a
new state, took longer to fall into line. When it finally did so in the new century, as if to
make up for lost time it became the only V4 state to join the Eurozone. In other ways
too, notably in fiscal policy, Slovakia moved further than its neighbours in deferring to
the tenets of neoliberal ideology. In Hungary and Poland, ex-socialist elites looking to
‘convert’ their power found it convenient to embrace the neoliberal Zeitgeist of
privatisation. But the requirement to harmonise institutions in advance of European Union
accession ensured that these new members would have to conform to Maastricht rules
and cut social support entitlements to meet austerity objectives. This dynamic was fatal
for left of centre parties (see Bartha and Tóth, this issue).
The consequences of rejoining Western Europe in this way were clear long before the
global financial crisis that began in 2007. As Malewska-Szałygin demonstrates in this
issue, PiS, the party of Law and Justice led by Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński, had strong
support from provincial voters even before accession to the European Union accelerated
the pace of change and increased the appeal of Euroscepticism (cf. Buzalka 2007).
Populists exploited the disintegration of rural and working-class communities caused by
labour emigration to suggest that Brussels was taking over from Moscow as a dominant
external power. For politicians such as the Kaczyński brothers and Viktor Orbán, it is the
responsibility of sovereign governments to intervene in market processes to secure the
national interest. This involves striking a fine balance between welcoming international
(especially German) capital and building up a national bourgeoisie (see Scheiring, this issue).
This, then, is the economic background for the ressentiments experienced by large
sections of the V4 populations and astutely exploited by political leaders. But the
approaches from political economy are insufficient for grasping actors’ subjectivities, the
forms that protest takes, or the metaphors that evoke the strongest emotions. Populism

4
Holý (1996) provides a long-run cultural analysis of the Czech case. While Miloš Zeman has drawn
considerable support from workers, his populist appeal remains moderate in comparison with counterparts
in neighbouring states.
 INTRODUCTION 9

emerges from particular forms of political economy but it is also about imaginaries,
perceptions and strongly felt identities. The essays in this issue by Buzalka, Malewska-
Szałygin, and Szombati address these specificities. They show that power holders are
assessed according to models (or mental maps) deeply rooted in the agrarian past in
Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. Notions of responsibility and competence are also
important in the more urbanised Czech Republic, with its long history of industrialisation,
where Andrej Babiš grounds his electoral success on his proven entrepreneurial skills and
sense of managerial responsibility (see Johana Wyss, this issue). Appeals to a strong work
ethic resonate both with post-peasant populists in the countryside and urban workers
brought up with the ideologies of social democracy or communism. This is why
populists’ substitution of workfare for earlier systems of social support, though criticised
as authoritarian by external analysts, may well be welcomed on the ground by the
schemes’ participants (Szombati, this issue; cf. Hann 2018).
Table 2 lists some of the variables that a more comprehensive cultural-political-economic
analysis of populism would need to consider. Causalities are complex. Suppose, for example,
that one were to agree on how to measure populism, and that the result of applying this
measure indicated that the Czech Republic was less affected than the other three states.
How could this milder form of populism be explained? The variables in the Table that
distinguish this country from its V4 neighbours include the early onset of industrialisation
in the Bohemian lands, industrial policies, and a cautious approach to privatisation and
marketisation in the 1990s that promoted domestic value chains. At the same time, active
labour market policies kept the Czech welfare state and levels of inequality closer to the
configurations of Scandinavian countries, and a more traditional political division was
sustained in which leftist commitments to social democracy had some substance. An
additional factor in the Czech case is the relative weakness of the church as a political
actor. An expanded historical account would have to take account of the fact that the
structure of Bohemian society differed over centuries from the aristocratic hierarchies of
the Hungarian and Polish kingdoms.

TABLE 2
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE V4 STATES
Czech Republic Hungary Poland Slovakia
Historic Nation X X X 0
Early industrialisation X 0 0 0
Agricultural collectivisation X X X X
Strong intellectual dissidence (1980s) X X X 0
Political religion (1980s) 0 0 X 0
Strong workers’ movement (1980s) 0 0 X 0
Fast propertisation and marketisation 0 X X 0
Industrial policy promoting domestic value chains X 0 X 0
Active labour market policy X 0 0 0
Neoliberal turn of the dominant left-wing party 0 X X 0
Eurozone member 0 0 0 X
Extensive workfare schemes (2010s) 0 X 0 X
Church influence strong (2010s) 0 X X 0
International migration (2010s) X X X X
Strong diaspora influences 0 X X 0
Consciousness of historical injustice 0 X 0 0
10 CHRIS HANN & GÁBOR SCHEIRING

The decline experienced by provincial Hungary (including medium-sized industrial

towns) in the neoliberal era was relative rather than absolute, both in comparison with
large urban centres and with the trajectories of accumulation attained under socialism.
Polish farmers, in contrast, since EU accession have been among the winners of the new
conjuncture, in relative and absolute terms. Farmers throughout the V4 have profited from
the subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy, which undoubtedly constitute a major
intervention in market mechanisms. From this angle, populist protest in the countryside is
hardly a classical Polanyian countermovement to marketisation. But a closer look reveals
that smallholders are not especially grateful to receive these subsidies: they would much
prefer to have less paperwork and the price stability that they knew in socialist days
(Kovács 2021). With the domination of large-scale agribusiness, the subsidy system has
functioned to increase income disparities. In many cases (such as that of Andrej Babiš
himself) the new revenue flows accrue to persons who are not farmers at all.
How does one explain the apparent paradox that the populism–illiberalism nexus
flourishes also among groups that are statistically better off now than they were in pre-EU
days (let alone socialist days)? In brief, our answer is that neoliberal mobilities—of
goods, finance and not least of people—transform subjectivities, destroy the integument
of communities and leave very large sections of society with a sense of relative loss. The
approaches from historical anthropology and contemporary political economy
complement each other; past and present combine to incubate the emotions that feed
populism–illiberalism.

The essays in this special issue

Gábor Scheiring develops the comparative analysis of populism in the V4 region further by
proposing a typology of illiberalisms: strong in Hungary, weaker in Poland and ‘contained’
in Slovakia. The Czech Republic is characterised by ‘managerial populism’ rather than
illiberalism. Combining the theory of dependent development with Polanyi’s notion of the
double movement, Scheiring analyses how uneven development and various structures of
dependency governance impacted on socio-economic disintegration to engender a variety
of countermovements. Scheiring distinguishes between convergent and divergent elements
of the populist conjuncture. He shows how these processes fostered neoliberal national-
populism with strong illiberalism in Hungary, welfare chauvinist populism with weak
illiberalism in Poland, technocratic populism without illiberalism in the Czech Republic,
and entrenched neoliberal populism with ‘contained’ illiberalism in Slovakia.
Chris Hann combines the notion of countermovement with the core Polanyian metaphor
of embeddedness in order to develop a frame to analyse Hungarian history since the violent
‘disembedding’ that took place in the first decade of socialism. Reforms from the 1960s
onwards shaped what Hann terms socialist embedding, a balance between centralised
redistribution and the market principle. This balance was shattered by neoliberalism after
1990. The consequences of the new market society for local economies and civil society
were overwhelmingly negative. After two decades of uncertainty and disintegration, Hann
argues that since 2010 a new populist embedding has been institutionalised by the
governments led by Viktor Orbán. He supports his arguments with close-up analysis of
economic and associational life in the market town of Kiskunhalas.
 INTRODUCTION 11

In the issue’s second political-economic contribution, Stuart Shields analyses the appeal
of the social policy programmes introduced by the PiS government in Poland. These populist
social policies, most clearly exemplified by the family 500+ programme, are designed to
alleviate some of the social tensions aggravated by neoliberal reforms. In this sense, PiS
indeed represents a break with neoliberalism. However, with the help of an expanded
notion of social reproduction Shields demonstrates that these limited redistribution
measures are designed to stabilise conservative social and family hierarchies (the male
breadwinner and the female housemaker model) and involve elements of regressive
redistribution that fail to target those most in need.
In the essay that follows, Anna Malewska-Szałygin draws on her long-term field research
in Podhale, southern Poland, to explain the appeal of the PiS party to rural voters. This
countermovement mobilises resentment toward the elites in distant Warsaw that
supervised the dismantling of state property after 1990 and profited from opening up the
country to foreign capital. Successive governments have failed to take care of the country
as a good gospodarz should. The parallel between good government at the national level
and good management of the household farm is grounded in a cultural model that leaves
no room for democracy in the sense of party-political pluralism.
The essay by Juraj Buzalka offers an original anthropological perspective on Slovakia,
where prior to socialist industrialisation the gulf between town and countryside was
particularly wide. Agricultural collectivisation transformed the traditional peasantry into
proletarian ‘post-peasants’. However, as in Podhale, the country remained in thrall to a rural
imaginary of the self-sufficient house and nostalgia has persisted after socialist farm
managers were replaced by capitalist agro-entrepreneurs. Buzalka finds Polanyi’s concept of
a countermovement useful, but insists that it can only be applied when due account is taken
of both pre-socialist and socialist history. Cultural forms of the countermovement in Slovakia
have been reactionary in the sense that (irrespective of their nominal party affiliations) the
dominant statesmen of the post-socialist years, including Igor Matovič, elected in 2020, have
all come to power by mobilising populist, anti-establishment sentiment. The election of
Zuzana Čaputová as president in 2019 shows that a progressive liberal may also tap into the
cultural model of the ‘house economy’ and thereby appear ‘authentic’ to ordinary voters,
thus broadening her appeal beyond the circles of ‘café people’ in the cities.
The essay by Johana Wyss is based on her field research in Opava, a small provincial city
in Czech Silesia. The author narrates how the thirtieth anniversary of the velvet revolution
was commemorated by Opavians in November 2019. Some citizens admire the ideals of
Václav Havel and other dissidents of that generation. However, municipal leaders and the
majority of the urban population do not share this enthusiasm; local ceremonies are
perfunctory and poorly attended. In her interviews, Wyss uncovers widespread cynicism
and resentment toward new power holders in the distant capital. Elites are alleged to have
squandered the wealth accumulated by hard work in the past. As in Poland and Slovakia,
where the focus was on the countryside, the scornful and sometimes cynical attitudes of
these urban Czechs feed on evolved cultural values: in this case egalitarian ideals that
owe more to the trickster, anti-establishment morality of Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier
Švejk than to socialist ideology.
The appeal to deep-seated values is also central to the processes through which Viktor
Orbán’s Fidesz party mobilises electoral support in contemporary Hungary, as Kristóf
12 CHRIS HANN & GÁBOR SCHEIRING

Szombati shows in his contribution to this issue. Particularly in regions negatively affected by
globalisation and EU accession, members of the Roma minority who were first to be made
redundant were stigmatised by an illiberal (in this case also racist) countermovement.
Ethnic Hungarians felt threatened by their ‘unruly’ Roma neighbours and abandoned by the
left-liberal elite. Szombati shows that an expanded national workfare programme enabled
the dominant political party to shift the emphasis away from punitive stigmatisation and
instead mobilise support behind hegemonic notions of ‘deservingness’. At the same time,
Fidesz institutionalised new configurations of social relations at the level of the local
community. By tying the ‘deserving poor’ into clientelistic relations with mayors, the party
was able to tame the angry politics born out of the dislocations caused by neoliberal
restructuring in the countryside. Szombati argues that this ‘illiberal paternalism’ constitutes
an alternative to neoliberal regimes of poverty governance.
The following essay, a jointly written contribution by labour historian cum anthropologist
Eszter Bartha and industrial sociologist András Tóth, investigates why trade unions, in
Polanyian debates usually assumed to function as vehicles for a benign, progressive
countermovement, were organisationally unable to play such a role in post-socialist Hungary.
To explain this failure, it is insufficient to recognise dislocation and the problematic
inheritance from the socialist era, in which unions were effectively an arm of management.
The authors show how fragmentation, material expropriation and legal erosion of union
rights, when combined with a political vacuum on the left, played into the hands of capitalist
employers and rendered workers receptive to the patriotic rhetoric of the right. This pattern is
not confined to the most obvious victims of post-socialist marketisation in rustbelt localities.
The second part of the essay, based on life-history interviews with skilled TNC employees,
demonstrates that skilled workers in secure jobs, enjoying relatively good wages, find a sense
of solidarity and community in their ethnicity (vis-à-vis Roma) rather than in their class position.
The similarities and differences between post-socialist transformations of the V4 and
those that have taken place in the former German Democratic Republic open up many
possibilities for comparison. Felix Ringel analyses expressions of ‘discomfort’ amidst
current political and economic crises as complex negotiations of the present post-
industrial condition in Hoyerswerda, the GDR’s second socialist model city. He argues
that the agency citizens exercise in post-socialist conditions is not predetermined by their
socialist experiences, but is better understood through analysis of contemporary economic
change and deep subjective uncertainties concerning their post-industrial future.
Discomfort results not so much from lingering socialist sensibilities, cultivated as a
critical perspective on capitalism, but from the more general structural impasse of
deindustrialisation. Ringel therefore argues that the post-socialist conjuncture, including
high levels of support for populist political protest, must be analysed as a distinctive case
within the more general history of post-industrial capitalism.

CHRIS HANN , Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany;
Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, CB2 1RH, UK. Email: hann@eth.mpg.de

GÁBOR SCHEIRING , Bocconi University, via Guglielmo Rontgen 1, 20136 Milan, Italy.
Email: gabor@gaborscheiring.com http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0775-8610
 INTRODUCTION 13

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