Kristof Szombati

Institut für Europäische Ethnologie Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Nationalist forces in both western and eastern Europe are asserting their Europeanness with ever clearer ethnic-racial undertones. This project focuses on the racialization of the Roma minority in Central and Eastern Europe and the politicization of the 'Gypsy question'. I seek to uncover the historical roots and socio-economic drivers of 'popular anti-Gypsyism', analyze the strategies whereby right-wing movements and parties have attempted to construe the Roma as a threat to the national community, and theorize the linkages between anti-Gypsyism and other exclusionary ideologies and discourses such as anti-Muslimism and anti-Semitism.

This was my PhD project in which I explored the making of right-wing hegemony by tracing the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, and showing how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empower right-wing agendas.

This is a new research project I started at the MPI. It builds on, but also departs from the topic of my PhD, which was the rise of anti-Gypsyism and its role in the making of a new radical rightist hegemony in Hungary. This project seeks to contribute to and extend our understanding of the key features, hegemonic strategy and stability of the new political regime that Fidesz built after 2010. I take inspiration from Stuart Hall's conceptualization of Thatcherism and, more particularly, his focus on 'authoritarian populism': the reconstruction of the (neo)liberal state in a way as to disaggregate the (civic and political) opposition, prevent the politicization of social grievances, and win a strategic measure of popular consent to underpin rulers' authority. The project will seek to map this novel hegemonic strategy and contrast it with strategies deployed by illiberal rulers in semi-peripheral countries such as Turkey as well as right-wing ruling parties in core European countries. It complements and relies on my friend and former colleague Gabor Scheiring's analysis of the emergent 'accumulative state', which offers a political solution to manage the internal contradictions of dependent development on the EU's periphery by fostering short-term capital accumulation in both multinational and domestic sectors of the economy. My departing axiom is that strategies which rely on an authoritarian populist logic (i.e. they address people's lived experience in a way that is in line with rightist discourse and policies) are instrumental in generating consent among the losers of the new accumulation regime. The project will to seek shed light on these strategies by showing how they function in practice. It will result in several journal articles, as well as shorter commentary pieces.