Syllabus
1) Introduction
I. Western and Central Europe 2) Rogers Brubaker, Between nationalism and civilizationalism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol 40, 2017, 8, pp. 1191-1226 3) Jacque Rupnik, The Crisis of Liberalism, Journal of Democracy, Vol 29, 2018, 3, pp. 24-38 4) Nadia Marzouki, Duncan McDonnell, Populism and Religion, in N. Marzouki, D. McDonnel, O. Roy (eds.) Saving the People. How Populists Hijack Religion? Hurst and Company, London 2016, pp. 1-7; François Guesnet, Gwen Jones, Antisemitism in Poland and Hungary after 1989: Determinants of social impact, in F. Guesnet, G. Jones (eds.), Antisemitism in an Era of Transition. Continuities and Impact in Post-Communist Poland and Hungary, Peter Lang 2014, pp. 7-20.
II. Poland 5) Wojciech Przybylski, Can Poland Backsliding Be Stopped? Journal of Democracy, Vol 29, 2018, 3, pp. 52-64 6) Ben Stanley, Defenders of the Cross. Populist politics and Religion in Post-Communist Poland, in N. Marzouki, D. McDonnel, O. Roy (eds.) Saving the People. How Populists Hijack Religion? Hurst and Company, London 2016, pp. 109-128 7) Grzegorz Krzywiec, Between Realpolitik and Redemption: Roman Dmowski’s solution to the ‘Jewish question’, in F. Guesnet, G. Jones (eds.), Antisemitism in an Era of Transition. Continuities and Impact in Post-Communist Poland and Hungary, Peter Lang 2014, pp. 69-90 8) Adam Ostolski, Public Memory in Transition: Antisemitism and the memory of WWII in Poland, 1980-2010, ibid., pp. 149-166
III. Hungary 9) Péter Krekó, Zsolt Enyedi, Orbán’s Laboratory of Illiberalism, Journal of Democracy, Vol 29, 2018, 3, pp. 39-51 10) Zoltán Ádám, András Bozókií, ‘The God of Hungarians’. Religion and right-wing populism in Hungary, in N. Marzouki, D. McDonnel, O. Roy (eds.) Saving the
People. How Populists Hijack Religion? Hurst and Company, London 2016, pp. 129-148 11) László Karsai, Miklós Horthy (1868-1957) and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Hungary, 1920-1945, in F. Guesnet, G. Jones (eds.), Antisemitism in an Era of Transition. Continuities and Impact in Post-Communist Poland and Hungary, Peter Lang 2014, pp. 91-114 12) András Kovács, Antisemitic Elements in Communist Discourse: A continuity factor in post-war Hungarian antisemitism, ibid., pp. 135-148 13) Claude Cahn, Divide et Impera: (Re)Creating the Hungarian National Gypsy, ibid., pp. 255-270 14) Closing Discussion
Annotation
Course Description
Since the mid-2010s we have been experiencing the global populist moment: from the election of BJP’s Norendra Modi as the prime-minister of India in 2014 and the xenophobic wave in Europe sparked by the refugee crisis in 2015 through the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 to the political victories of Matteo Salvini in Italy and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018. Although this populist wave has been global in its scope, it has been highly variegated according to regional and national specificities. Rather than to try to reduce it to some common denominator we should try to understand each regional or national case within its own parameters - from its own historical and political background conditions and causes. We might even find out that, in some cases, the very label “populism” might be redundant as an analytical category since the more conventional categories can do the whole explanatory work. This holds true for the cases of Poland and Hungary which are the subject-matter of this course.
The first part of the course offers some general reflections upon the populist moment in Europe and Central Europe. The second and third part deal with Poland and Hungary respectively. In each case we begin with the description of the current situation, then treat the religious aspect and finally go back to the historical analyses of the most pronounced modern tradition of xenophobia of the two countries which is Anti-Semitism (in Hungary together with Anti-Tziganism). As a result, various current configurations of the Jew, Muslim or Gypsy hatred will be understood as an innovative re-articulation of the elements of the repertoire inherited from the past.