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Identities
Global Studies in Culture and Power
ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20
Understanding the rise of the far right from a local
perspective: Structural and cultural conditions of
ethno-traditionalist inclusion and racial exclusion
in rural Hungary
Margit Feischmidt & Kristóf Szombati
To cite this article: Margit Feischmidt & Kristóf Szombati (2016): Understanding the
rise of the far right from a local perspective: Structural and cultural conditions of
ethno-traditionalist inclusion and racial exclusion in rural Hungary, Identities, DOI:
10.1080/1070289X.2016.1142445
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2016.1142445
Published online: 16 Feb 2016.
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Understanding the rise of the far right from a local
perspective: Structural and cultural conditions of
ethno-traditionalist inclusion and racial exclusion
in rural Hungary
Margit Feischmidt
a
and Kristóf Szombati
b
a
Centre for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary;
b
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest,
Hungary
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the reconfiguration of social relations in rural Hungary after
the collapse of socialism as well as the cultural idioms in which these changes
were interpreted in order to unearth the connection between structural trans-
formation, the re-articulation of ethnic and peasant traditions and the discourse
on Roma as a threat to communal harmony. The locality in the focus of our case
study is a village that played a major role in the rise of the far-right Jobbik party.
By applying an ethnographic approach, we seek to uncover structural forces,
discourses and agencies that help explain the success of the anti-Roma mobi-
lization campaign that ended with Jobbik’s electoral victory.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 12 December 2014; Accepted 10 January 2016
KEYWORDS Far right; xenophobia; racism; nationalism; Hungary; Roma minority
1. Introduction
This paper explores the rise of the far right on the local level in Hungary by
using interviews and ethnographic data collected in Gyöngyöspata, a village
where the Jobbik party mounted a major anti-Roma mobilization campaign
in the spring of 2011. We adopt an ethnographic approach by applying a
micro- and ‘externalist’perspective. That is, instead of attempting to deci-
pher individual motivations that prompt social actors to side with far-right
political movements –which Kathleen Blee calls the ‘internalist perspective’
(Blee 2007) –we want to understand how and why far-right support
emerges in particular socio-economic contexts and how it relates to
discourses of belonging and difference. In our analysis, we therefore
combine the investigation of structurally generated antagonisms
(Section 2) with the analysis of discourses that play a key role in the
CONTACT Margit Feischmidt feischmidt.margit@tk.mta.hu
IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2016.1142445
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
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ethnicization-cum-racialization of social relations in a multi-ethnic rural
locality (Section 3). Finally, in order to explain the spread of anti-Roma
popular sensibilities and the local electoral success of the far right we
highlight the role of political agency –in this case, an anti-Roma field
campaign that allowed far-right actors to mobilize racially non-marked
social groups against the racialized minority (Section 4). The combined
analysis of broad structural transformations, symbolic power and political
agency can only be accomplished through an ethnographic approach. The
ethnographic locale, as advocates of the extended case method convin-
cingly argued, can be studied as simultaneously shaped by and shaping of
an external field of forces, which operates on its own principles of coordina-
tion and its own dynamics (Burawoy 1998, 15).
Our analysis of this particular case of far-right mobilization relies on a
dozen field visits that took place between March and December 2011.
During these visits –whose length varied between 4 and 10 days –we
conducted several dozen ethnographic interviews with ‘commoners’(Roma
and non-Roma inhabitants), which we complemented with participant
observation, taking part in public events such as Sunday masses, cultural
commemorations and political meetings. It is important to note that we
gave an actionist twist to participant observation. In the summer of 2011,
we made an attempt to foster interethnic reconciliation by inviting repre-
sentatives of the two feuding ‘communities’to participate in a ‘communal
roundtable’. Although our initiative failed, it gave a new impetus and direc-
tion to the research process. Between July and December 2011, we focused
our efforts on eliciting the views of members of competing local elite groups
in order to better understand their effort to gain political capital by giving
voice and direction to lay experiences of loss, anxiety and threat. During this
period we conducted 38 semi-structured interviews with local councillors
and former mayors, members of the Gypsy Minority Self-government, the
heads of local public institutions (kindergarten, school, cultural centre, etc.),
and leaders of local associations.
Studying the advance of the far right on the local level is important not
only because it allows a combination of different analytic perspectives but
also because support for the far right tends to be heavily concentrated in
specific localities and supporters are generally reluctant to identify them-
selves prior to electoral breakthrough. This was, for instance, true for the
Front National (Veugelers 2012), the British National Party (Goodwin 2008),
and the Vlaams Belang (Mudde 2007), which had all developed urban
bastions: Toulon; Burnley, Barking and Dagenham; and Antwerp. At the
time of our research, Jobbik only controlled three smaller localities in the
whole of Hungary despite the fact that it had received more than 16 percent
of votes at the parliamentary elections of April 2010. Thus, in contrast to the
mentioned Western European sister parties, Jobbik did not possess an
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electoral heartland it could rely on (see Bíró and Róna 2011; cf. Rydgren
2006). This rendered research much more difficult as most informants were
wont to identify themselves as far-right supporters due to fears of a poten-
tial backlash on behalf of an increasingly authoritarian state.
Our findings offer support for the relative deprivation thesis advanced by
political sociologists, according to which support for the far right is likely to
be particularly strong among social groups threatened by status loss and/or
declining market situation (Bell 2002). The key claim is that feelings of
deprivation –seen as being caused by disappointing comparisons with
one’s own past or with social reference groups –tend to make people
more anxious, insecure and resentful, and that these feelings may be
channelled into support for anti-establishment politics of all colours, but
especially those that blame minorities for the problems of the ethnic major-
ity (Rydgren 2007). In Section 2, we use our ethnographic material to high-
light the deep structural transformation that engendered social dislocations
for rural segments of the Hungarian population after the collapse of social-
ism and argue that racism became a strategic instrument in a zero-sum
struggle for collective goods at a time when the social contract appeared to
break down and promises of solidarity became rare assets. The case we
analyse thus underpins Andreas Wimmer’s generalized claim that racist
discourse is a critical element of a political struggle about who has the
right to be cared for by the national community and the state (Wimmer
1997) and the concomitant claim that members of the ethnic majority turn
to the far right to legitimize the preferential treatment of ‘natives’(Lubbers,
Gijsberts, and Scheepers 2002).
1
Although our analysis underscores the need to study the rise of popular
racism and far-right political alternatives in the context of deep-seated
structural transformation, we also emphasize that political economic analysis
is in itself insufficient to explain these processes. We base this assertion on
our analysis of the symbolic struggle between two local elite groups
(Section 3), which leads us to claim that the blaming of the local Roma
community for the plight of the non-Roma majority did not arise sponta-
neously out of structurally generated grievances and antagonisms. For anti-
Gypsyism to emerge as a potent social force the grievances of the majority
had to go through a process of canonization and popular anti-Roma sensi-
bilities –generated under the pressure of hidden structural forces –had to
be re-articulated within an exclusionary political project. This symbolic work
was performed on the local level by ambitious members of an elite group
who held a stake in the promotion of ethnic peasant traditions. We claim
that the group’s success in valorizing ‘Hungarianness’largely depended on
its successful redefinition of Roma as a menace for the community. The
group achieved this by systematically connecting perceptions of communal
decline –arising out of structural dislocations (the continuous outmigration,
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the disappearance of jobs, etc.) –to the rise of ‘Gypsy criminality’. This
finding is in line with the analysis of Matthew Goodwin, who, in a paper
focusing on the rise of the BNP in two British localities, identified ‘perceived
ethnic competition’and ‘threat’as key explanatory factors of far-right sup-
port in working-class constituencies (Goodwin 2008, 348). More importantly,
it also underscores the generalized claim that discursive struggle largely
determines how the combined force of structural forces and social processes
crystallize into particular social arrangements, including intergroup (inter-
ethnic) relations. Utterances and symbolic representations, in other words,
often become the semantic battlefield where intergroup relations are inter-
preted and contested. These interpretations, in turn, render particular
courses of political action meaningful and others improbable. Our analysis
shows that the re-articulation of Roma as presenting a collective social
threat preceded the rise of the far right in rural Hungary, was achieved by
actors operating on the local and regional level, and created favourable
conditions for the successful intervention of far-right actors.
While taking care to emphasize the significance of symbolic work and the
relative autonomy of the cultural domain, we also stress the need to
contextualize processes unfolding in this realm. At the end of Section 2,
we suggest that the symbolic efforts of the local elite group were part of a
broader cultural movement rooted in a conservative critique of individual-
ism, consumerism, and multiculturalism that picked up pace and force after
the palpable delegitimization of the left-liberal modernization project. This
claim resonates with Douglas Holmes’sfieldwork in rural Italian commu-
nities affected by recent modernization waves. Holmes’s key argument is
that rural communities may increasingly reach back to traditions to mend
ruptures in their sense of belonging in a rapidly changing and increasingly
insecure world (Holmes 1989). We find his concept of ‘integralism’–
designed to highlight a consciousness of belonging linked to a specific
cultural and geographic milieu –useful in highlighting that in the current
epoch the mobilization of ethnic identity may provide the most effective
counterweight to unpopular or unsuccessful modernization projects driven
by national elites.
We use our analysis of the far right’s local anti-Roma mobilization cam-
paign to highlight the role of landmark events –which mark a rupture with
the past and thereby powerfully mark the collective psyche –in entrenching
perceptions of threat (Section 4). The case we chose to analyse underscores
Mabel Berezin’s general claim that threat ‘makes cultural communities
because it forces groups to define boundaries and argue about who is
different and who is the same’(Berezin 2009,pp. 53–54). Our analysis
reveals that for such imagined communities to materialize, menace must
often not only be invoked in discourse but also be enacted in ritualized
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performances that clearly separate the racially marked and unmarked social
categories.
Finally, whilst existing approaches are one-dimensional (positing either
structuralist or culturalist interpretations), the current paper combines these
approaches into a more integrated approach to address and appreciate the
complex forces behind the rise of the far right.
2. Structural dislocation and strategies of exclusion
Gyöngyöspata is a locality situated in the foothills of the Mátra Mountains, 12
kilometres northwest of the city of Gyöngyös and less than 100 kilometres
from Budapest. The total population was 2,586 at the time of the last census
(2011) and the number of inhabitants who identified themselves as Roma was
318. Grape growing and wine making have played a major role in the local
economy since the late middle ages, with output reaching its peak in the
period of export-oriented socialist viticulture. However, after the economic and
political transition of 1989, which brought about the collapse of export mar-
kets, the sector underwent a severe crisis. The state-owned cooperative was
privatized and properties were handed back to the families who had owned
them before collectivization. Today, there are about 10 active medium-sized
family businesses in the sector and a much higher number of self-sustaining
agricultural producers. There is only one significant company active in the
agricultural sector, which employs about 20 people.
Industrial production played an important role during the socialist period
but most of the large state-owned companies in the nearby city went
bankrupt after the change of regime, forcing former workers to come up
with alternative livelihood strategies. As Christopher Hann described in his
latest work on the post-socialist transformation –tellingly entitled ‘back-
wardness revisited’–in order to get by rural people not only needed to
work hard but also had to rely on a combination of different economic
strategies (Hann 2015; see also1980). In Gyöngyöspata –as in Tázlár, the
village where Hann worked –the dominant strategy involved the combina-
tion of small-scale farming with low-paid industrial employment within
families. Post-peasants have forged narratives that make sense of the failure
to realize dreams of autonomy and upward mobility through narratives that
lay part of the blame on Roma, whose ‘thievishness’and ‘scrounging’stand
opposed to the ‘hard work’of the ‘peasants’. In the remainder of this
section, we will seek to highlight some of the deep-seated causes that we
see as responsible for this state of affairs.
Members of the local Roma community in Gyöngyöspata were also
employed in the big state-owned factories, but they –unlike non-Roma –
commuted to Budapest. Crucially, these workplaces, which relied predomi-
nantly on unskilled labour, were the first to undergo restructuring from the
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mid-1980s. Since employers tended to be biased in favour of non-Roma
(Kertesi and Kézdi 2011), Roma were often the first to be fired from their
workplaces. Moreover, since they were overrepresented among unskilled
workers, the collapse of heavy industry disproportionately affected the
Roma population. Whereas some non-Roma members of the workforce
successfully managed the reconversion to self-employment and others
retained jobs in the industrial plants that survived economic restructuring,
Roma were by and large unsuccessful in this regard. This major discrepancy
is reflected in the unemployment rates of Roma and non-Roma men. We
know from local informants that only three Roma men had stable jobs
2
and
a further four to five were employed by local farmers on a regular basis at
the time of our research. The stark contrast between the unemployment
rates of the local Roma and non-Roma population (an average of 90 percent
versus 10 percent in the post-1989 period) reveals the huge gap between
their economic opportunities.
3
Although relatively generous unemployment
benefits initially cushioned the victims of economic restructuring from the
worst calamities, the gradual dwindling of welfare benefits trapped unskilled
Roma workers in a vicious cycle of poverty (Szalai 2007). By the early 2000s,
exclusion from the labour market had become a permanent feature of Roma
lives, not only in Gyöngyöspata but also in many other villages of the
country’s north-eastern periphery (Ladányi and Szelényi 2006; Virág 2010).
Roma and non-Roma have forged competing explanations for the
chronic unemployment and poverty that characterizes the Roma commu-
nity. While our Roma informants voiced suspicions that ‘peasants’had
deliberately excluded them from the labour market, most of our non-
Roma informants voiced their conviction that Roma were too lazy to work.
What individuals on both sides of the ethnic divide agreed on was that
Roma unemployment had become deeply problematic in the course of the
past decade: ‘What fuels tensions is the fact the Roma do not work. This is
what irritates people’–declared a man before going on to highlight the link
between unemployment and theft, which non-Roma see as the main source
of tensions between ‘Gypsies’and ‘Hungarians’.
4
Like many other land-
owners, this informant cited the example of the Goat’s Stone, stating that
it is on this hill that the finest grapes could be harvested.
The sight of decaying holiday houses ‘raided’by the Roma and the
memory of once resplendent vineyards does not only haunt their owners.
They remind of the difficulties brought by regime change and the shattering
of peasant traditions: the unproductive toil on the land and the vain hope
that it would earn hard-working families a decent living. One of our infor-
mants told us that his feeling of loss (he used to own an orchard on the
Goat’s Stone) was rendered unbearable by the sight of roof tiles of former
wine cellars reappearing on Roma houses –houses that had been built with
the help of state subsidies in the 1980s. Whether true or not, such
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accusations show that the blame for personal loss is often placed squarely
on the inhabitants of the ‘Gypsy settlement’, and ‘scrounging’is contrasted
to the ‘hard work’of peasants. Some of our respondents went further by
comparing the old and new regime through the lenses of interethnic rela-
tions: ‘The regime change gave them [i.e. the Roma] welfare benefits along
with an ombudsman to defend them, whereas all we [i.e. non-Roma] got
was the opportunity to work even harder’.
A report published in 2006 by a local NGO called the Friends of
Gyöngyöspata Circle reveals that the breakdown of the moral economy
and the social order was in fact the master frame through which the non-
Roma population interpreted the change of regime and the social disloca-
tions that accompanied it. The 65 page report, which provided detailed
descriptions of the ‘misdemeanours and other crimes’allegedly perpetrated
by local Roma revealed the main sources of non-Roma grievances: theft,
welfare scrounging
5
and bullying. Our own ethnographic research showed,
moreover, that these grievances were not equally distributed amongst the
local non-Roma population. While theft poked the eye of landowners, wel-
fare scrounging was most often cited by employees living on low salaries
and bullying by elderly women living on their own. What united these
diverse groups was that they all felt abandoned by authorities.
6
The non-Roma population rewarded the Friends Circle for speaking out in
its name by rallying behind its candidate at the local elections of 2006. The
association, in turn, capitalized on its newfound political clout to reinforce
its position. Members of the local council associated with the Friends Circle
first persuaded the new mayor to radically raise the honorarium of council-
lors and then coerced their peers into transferring their honorarium to the
association’s private bank account, which they used later to purchase prop-
erties offered for sale in order to prevent Roma families from moving from
the ‘Gypsy settlement’into the village. Another portion of the fund was used
to finance the installation of CCTV cameras in the streets surrounding the
‘Gypsy settlement’with the aim of disciplining the Roma population. In
2007, for instance, local representatives enacted a new building regulation,
which prohibited the building of new houses –a measure that was actively
supported by governmental programmes –as well as renovations and
improvements to build property on the ‘Gypsy settlement’. The obvious
goal was to prevent Roma from Gyöngyös and nearby villages from settling
in Gyöngyöspata. At the same time, the local council tacitly supported the
segregation of Roma children in the local elementary school. Children
whose parents lived on the ‘Gypsy settlement’were taught in separate
classes on the bottom floor of the school building. Besides being segre-
gated, they were also de facto barred from attending swimming classes that
took place at the local pool.
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The initiatives carried by the association and the local council sought to
safeguard the privileges of the non-Roma majority, to ensure its control over
public space and to discipline the Roma in a very direct and mostly illegi-
timate way. It is worth mentioning that local mechanisms of segregation
and control were implemented in a period when the ruling left-liberal elite
found itself forced to adopt a wide range of austerity measures that dras-
tically reduced funding for rural development and placed an increasing
strain on such crucial services as public education and housing subsidies.
These findings support the claim that racism –in this case, anti-Gypsyism –
can be conceptualized as a strategic instrument in a zero-sum struggle for
collective goods. Put differently, in a situation where the differential access
to resources, power and prestige becomes the dominant theme of social
relations in a multi-ethnic locality, representatives of the ‘ethnic majority’
may resort to discursive practices of racialization in order to buttress threa-
tened ethno-racial hierarchies (Back and Solomos 2000, 5; Fox, Moroşanu,
and Szilassy 2014).
3. Recasting local traditions in an exclusionary framework
Up until now, we have focused on the structural forces and social experi-
ences that created space for the emergence of anti-Gypsyism as a general-
izing public discourse that could be deployed to signify divergent
grievances suffered from Roma families in a period when the village econ-
omy entered a phase of decline. These structural forces did not, however, in
and by themselves lead to the representation of the local Roma community
as a source of menace for the entire non-Roma population. However, for this
potentiality to become reality, a great amount of symbolic work is required.
In what follows, we highlight a political struggle between two elite
factions over the desirable future development path of Gyöngyöspata and
how it provided space for the re-articulation of both the categories of
Hungarian and Gypsy. Our focus on local actors (who tend to fall below
the radar of political scientists) is in line with the analysis of János Zolnay
(2012), who claimed that it is local mayors –more than national politicians –
who have been responsible for introducing aggressive, racist and exclusion-
ary language into the Hungarian public sphere. Still, this should not blind us
to the fact that the kind of public abuse, slander and mockery of Roma that
Zolnay had in mind does not possess the kind of symbolic power that the
contemporary discourse of the ‘Gypsy menace’(Stewart 2012) does. These
speech acts –especially when legitimized by holders of public offices –are
certainly powerful tools for preserving spaces of privilege and upholding
ethno-racial hierarchies –both in fact and in representation. But they are not
useful for buttressing a politics that seeks to reinstate mechanisms of
discipline and control over minorities. To create space for an extremist
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political anti-Gypsyism –a novelty in Hungarian political life –a new
discourse was also required, one that would redefine Hungarians as a
homogeneous collectivity threatened by an equally homogeneous Roma
collectivity. In what follows, we look at how this dual re-articulation was
achieved in Gyöngyöspata in the 2006–2010 period through appeals to local
peasant traditions. While in the previous section we claimed that the Friends
Circle had tapped into already existing frustrations and grievances, it is
equally important to point out that it played a major role in reconstructing
popular notions of culture and community. A brief summary of the struggle
of two local elite groups that successively dominated local public life reveals
the nexus between symbolic and political power.
In the aftermath of the change of regime, local political life in
Gyöngyöspata came to be dominated by local businessmen who relied on
the economic and social capital they had accumulated in 1980s to establish
connections to newly elected politicians and technocrats who formed the
backbone of the transitional elite that led the effort to modernize and
democratize rural Hungary. These ‘pragmatists’were led by the conviction
that Gyöngyöspata’s future depended on its ability to fully integrate itself
into the new capitalistic economy and to maintain close relationships with
the actors who were responsible for the management of state-managed
development funds. The group received the backing of two institutions –
the Catholic Church and the Association of Local Entrepreneurs –that
played a key role in local public life. Both threw their weight behind a
local entrepreneur who was elected mayor in 1990 and retained this posi-
tion until 2006. This political continuity –which was not uncommon in that
period –reflected the local population’s support for the project of liberal
modernization despite the tensions spawned by the process of ‘depeasanti-
zation’(Kovách 2012). The mayor’s success in enlisting popular support was
ensured by such successful initiatives as the development of the gas and
telecommunications networks and the building of the swimming pool.
Thanks to the mayor’sefforts, Gyöngyöspata managed to evade the eco-
nomic collapse that pulled so many other localities in Hungary’s north-
eastern region under in the 1990s. However, efforts to attract novel
resources floundered in the past decade.
The second elite group –whom we call ‘ethno-traditionalists’–was
formed by a new generation of entrepreneurs who were involved in wine
making and agro-tourism, with one exception: an entrepreneur making a
living through the commercial sale of security systems (including CCTV
cameras). The group created the Friends of Gyöngyöspata Circle with the
aim of proposing an alternative to the modernization project that had been
carried by the pragmatists. Their vision was founded on the rediscovery of
local cultural heritage and its instrumentalization for the reconstruction of
the village economy. While the pragmatists drew on the well-established
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canon of national symbols and patriotic ideals to emphasize Gyöngyöspata’s
embeddedness in the history and life of the national community, their
would-be successors stressed continuity with nineteenth-century village
traditions and proposed to revive traditional economic activities in order
to revitalize the local economy in a period when the liberal modernization
project –which depended on centralized development funds –was showing
clear signs of running out of steam. Their most important intervention was
the organization of the Palóc days, a cultural festival that sought to integrate
the village into a regional touristic network with a view to attracting a
steady flow of visitors to the village.
The ‘ethno-traditionalists’effort to foreground local peasant traditions
was not only motivated by the desire to propose an economically viable
alternative to liberal modernization. It was also based on their conviction
that the ‘unruly’local Roma community constituted a menace for the plan to
reinvent Gyöngyöspata as a touristic destination. This view was reinforced
by the eruption of sporadic acts of violence pitting Roma families against
non-Roma neighbours in the period when the association and the local
council implemented the mechanisms of segregation and control alluded
to earlier. The first fight broke out in 2006 after Roma children deflated tyres
of the car belonging to the head of the local winemakers’association in one
of the streets bordering the settlement. The owner startled the child, who
fell and hit himself. As soon as the child’s family and their friends arrived, a
fight broke out. A village meeting was held, in which anti-Roma emotions
flared for the first time, giving space to racist hate speech that had hitherto
been absent from public life. One year later, another violent incident
occurred, sparked by an event remembered by our informants as a
‘Hungarian boy being narrowly hit by a Gypsy car’. A third incident, which
occurred in 2009, took place in the school. A teacher was physically
assaulted by an angry Roma grandmother after her grandson was allegedly
beaten in class.
While the pragmatists sought to downplay ethnic tensions and manifes-
tations of anti-Gypsyism, ethno-traditionalists were looking to exploit strains
in interethnic coexistence. By openly blaming Gypsies for their inability to
adapt to basic social norms the group sought to satisfy mainstream groups’
growing hunger for social justice and score points against pragmatic oppo-
nents. Both their cultural initiatives and their radical anti-Roma stance found
resonance among the local population. Families who suffered badly from
the decline of the rural economy supported the group’s plan to revive
winemaking and other traditional economic activities. On the other hand,
landowners, downwardly mobile families, pensioners and inhabitants of the
border zone that separated the ‘Gypsy settlement’from the village reacted
positively to the group’s intransigent stance towards Roma. This combina-
tion of racism with the reinvention of ethnic traditions proved to be an
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effective tool for entrenching the group as a key player in local political life –
as shown by the victory of the ethno-traditionalist over the pragmatist
candidate at the local election of 2006.
We are not the first to highlight the role of ethno-political entrepreneurs
operating on the sub-national level in the politicization of ethnic tensions. In
his study on peasant workers in Italy’s Friuli region, Douglas Holmes had
emphasized the role of regional politicians, highlighting in particular their
ability to mobilize “adherents’fidelity to specific cultural traditions and […]
to recast these traditions within a distinctive historical critique and an
exclusionary political economy”(Holmes 2000, 4). He also called attention
to the difference between old forms of nationalism and the new rhetoric of
the nation deployed by regional political entrepreneurs (Holmes 1989). Our
case highlights the difference between the strategy of the pragmatists who
supported capitalist modernization and attempted to inscribe local tradi-
tions into this broader national project and that of ethno-traditionalists who
mobilized local and exclusionary solidarities against modernization.
Ethno-traditionalists made use of cultural, moral and biological argu-
ments to substantiate the need to discipline Roma and reinstate
Hungarian supremacy. We encountered widespread use of the argument
that the Roma have a very different history and special traditions that
are incompatible with the norms of the majority. We found an even more
widespread claim that Roma are immoral because they prefer idleness
over hard work and have little respect for private property. We sporadi-
cally also encountered a biological analogy between Roma and animals
exhibiting subhuman character traits (as exemplified by comparisons
with rats).
The cultural, moral and biological arguments buttressing popular anti-
Gypsyism –though unique in maintaining the biological distinction –show
some important similarities with the ways minorities have been re-imagined
in Western Europe. Verena Stolcke pointed out already two decades ago
that the new rhetoric and politics of exclusion increasingly rely on the
representation of immigrants as being culturally incompatible with the
native population and the concomitant argument that they pose a threat
to national unity (Stolcke 1995). More recent analyses of political and media
discourses have confirmed that both Islamophobia and anti-Gypsyism tend
to be articulated along both ‘cultural’and ‘racial’lines (Hervik 2011; Vidra
and Fox 2012), revealing a close affinity between new forms of nationalism
and racism (Wodak and KhosraviNik 2013). Our case study also shows that
the return to ethnic peasant traditions was not only accompanied but also
legitimized by an exclusionary redefinition of ‘Hungarianness’and the rein-
statement of historic ethno-racial hierarchy.
Our research shows that the castigation of Roma as a threatening col-
lectivity and the implementation of openly discriminatory measures took
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place in Hungary before the rise of Jobbik. In what follows, we show how
the far-right party was able to capitalize on the symbolic work performed by
local elites and wrest the initiative from place-based actors.
4. The transformative event: the far right’s anti-Roma
mobilization campaign
In the autumn of 2010 a few houses of the ‘Gypsy settlement’were
damaged by a flood. The Red Cross offered to help affected families by
purchasing new houses in the streets bordering the settlement. News of
unruly Roma families moving into the village spread quickly, sparking anger
among non-Roma residents. Their anger turned to rage after an older
resident committed suicide. Although the man’s motivations were unclear,
Barikád TV, an online news portal maintaining close ties with Jobbik, pub-
lished a video report titled ‘Gypsy terror’in which Jobbik’s local leader
declared that the man had committed suicide because he could not sto-
mach the ‘relocation of Gypsies into the village’. Several days later, uni-
formed members of a paramilitary organization appeared in Gyöngyöspata
and began patrolling the streets of the village.
7
On 6 March 2011, Jobbik
organized a mass rally on the village’s main square, calling on residents to
‘demonstrate against Gypsy terror’. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people
attended the highly publicized event, many of them local residents.
At this point a brief note on paramilitary organizations is necessary.
Although paramilitarism is not a phenomenon unique to Hungary, of the
Eastern European far-right parties it is Jobbik that has reaped the most
rewards from the mobilization of paramilitary allies –foremost the
Hungarian Guard, which was founded in June 2007 by Jobbik party leaders
as a cultural association aiming to ‘strengthen the nation’s ability to defend
itself on both the physical and spiritual level’. It is under this pretext that
uniformed members of the organization carried out several dozen provoca-
tive field campaigns, marching through multi-ethnic villages and demand-
ing the restoration of public order. On 2 July 2009, the Budapest Tribunal
ruled on the dissolution of the organization based on the claim that its
demonstrative marches violated Rom citizens’right to personal freedom and
security. However, neither the left-wing government in power until 2010 nor
its right-wing successor was capable of enforcing the court’s decision until
the events that took place in Gyöngyöspata in the spring of 2011. This was
because the Guard’s members regrouped in a new organization called the
For a Better Future Civil Guard and continued to carry out patrols.
In March 2011, Jobbik’s leaders decided to send the Civic Guard to
Gyöngyöspata after they learned of the old resident’s suicide.
8
Members of
the Civic Guard patrolled the village’s streets day and night, observing the
movements of Roma residents. Roma children in particular were intimidated
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by men clad in black boots and uniforms, but adults also felt unsafe and
anxious. The non-Roma population, on the other hand, welcomed the
vigilantes: more than 1,000 local inhabitants signed a petition that
expressed support for their activities. This, together with the interior minis-
ter’s unwillingness to step up against paramilitary activity, compelled the
Civic Guard to continue its patrols. Although the vigilantes left after 11 days,
the state’s hesitance to intervene emboldened rival paramilitary organiza-
tions that were keen on attracting public attention. In early April, another
paramilitary organization (the Defense Force) announced its plan to orga-
nize a military training camp on a property located next to the ‘Gypsy
settlement’. This announcement caused panic in the local Roma community,
prompting human rights organizations to mobilize international public
opinion.
Jobbik took advantage of the chaotic situation by presenting a strong-
handed candidate who promised to restore peace and security by clamping
down on renitent Roma families. His position was strengthened by the
government’s largely passive role in the crisis as well as the fragmented
state of the local elite. These factors contributed to Jobbik’s surprise victory
in the by-election held on 17 July 2011. The far-right candidate took the
mayor’s seat with 33.8 percent of votes. Since and even more extremist rival
received 10.5 percent of votes, this means that close to half of
Gyöngyöspata’s politically active citizens supported the far right in 2011.
How can we account for this outcome?
Rogers Brubaker promoted years ago the ‘eventful analysis of national-
ism’, by which he meant the analytical discussions of the nationness as
event, as something that suddenly crystallizes instead of gradually devel-
oping (Brubaker 1996, 12). The anti-Roma demonstration organized by far-
right party and accomplished by the participation of the local majority,
followed by the paramilitary occupation of the village and the democratic
takeover of the mayor’s seat, worked as such a special kind of collective
effervescence of both belonging and exclusion. The event did not, how-
ever, only have a representative function but also a transformative effect.
In Gyöngyöspata, the political shift to the right was completed by a social
performance (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast 2006) that did not so much
legitimize a political agent (as political scientists would claim) as bring it
into existence. The local non-Roma population experienced the ritualized
re-establishment of security and order as an act of empowerment that re-
established natives’ability to control their locality and uphold threatened
hierarchies and privileges. By skilfully involving locals in this collective
demonstration of Hungarian supremacy, Jobbik presented itself as an
agent capable of defending rural citizens who felt abandoned by the
government and threatened by ‘Gypsy criminals’. Although the ethno-
traditionalists had played a decisive role in presenting intergroup relations
IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 13
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as a zero-sum game, the far-right party stole the initiative by demonstrat-
ing in a very straightforward and persuasive manner that it disposed of the
means to ‘solve the Gypsy-problem’. This explains why the ethno-
traditionalist candidate only came in third (behind the pragmatist candi-
date) at the mayoral contest despite the fact that she also promised to
discipline the local Roma.
5. Conclusion
This paper has sought to analyse the reconfiguration of local social relations
after the collapse of socialism as well as the cultural idioms in which these
changes were interpreted, and thereby to unearth the connection between
structural transformation and the emergence of ethno-racial discourses
9
which prepared the terrain for the successful intervention of far-right actors
at a later point in time. Concerning structural forces, we emphasized the
failures and contradictions of capitalist modernization and the thin presence
of the state, the experiences of deprivation and the concomitant desire of
self-identified ‘transition losers’for dignity and recognition, as well as their
eagerness to reassert control over key public resources in the face of
economic decline and unresponsive authorities. In a multi-ethnic setting,
these questions are likely to be formulated in ethnic terms, thus grievances
also gave rise to popular anti-Roma sensibilities and created space for the
politicization of ethnicity.
While our analysis offers some support for structuralist interpretations of
the nexus between socio-economic deprivation, ethno-racial exclusion and
the increasing demand for political alternatives that robustly defend the
preferential treatment of ethno-racially unmarked groups (‘the natives’,‘the
majority’), it also questions the deterministic linear logic that informs most
research in political sociology. Our reconstruction of local political history
shows that the symbolic representation of social experiences and relation-
ships is inherently precarious and open to contestation. The outcome of the
struggle between two local elite groups –the ‘pragmatists’and the ‘ethno-
traditionalists’–was not determined in advance. The ethno-traditionalists’
victory was founded on their ability to offer a compelling vision for both the
revitalization of the locality and the re-establishment of traditional
hierarchies.
The analysis of the paramilitaries’anti-Roma field campaign shows that
decisive shifts in popular perceptions and public opinion are not only the
outcomes of discursive struggles. Landmark events, as Mabel Berezin recently
argued, can also bring about a ‘durable transformation of structures’(Berezin
2009;Sewell1996, 844). This is exactly what happened in Gyöngyöspata
where the far-right party stole the initiative from ethno-traditionalists by
14 M. FEISCHMIDT AND K. SZOMBATI
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demonstrating agency and power through the ritualized re-establishment of
public order.
This extended case study highlights the need to conduct more in-depth
analyses of symbolic struggles on the local level, moreover, to unearth the
links between processes unfolding in the national political arena and on the
local level. Our ethnographic engagement with Gyöngyöspata’s recent his-
tory shows that competing elite factions played a decisive role in the
building of ethnic solidarity among Hungarian peasants (ethno-
traditionalist inclusion) as well as in formulating a novel image of Roma
(ethno-racial exclusion). Perceptions of menace cannot, in other words, be
conceptualized as the direct products of socio-economic upheaval. Menace,
together with novel forms of identification, arises out of localized political
struggles in which elite groups instrumentalize the symbolic resources that
are at their disposal. The case we study also highlights the importance of
landmark events in the dissemination and amplification of threat.
Our emphasis on discourse, identity politics and agency goes hand in
hand with a defence of the ethnographic method. Ethnography, we con-
tend, offers a unique vista onto the struggles in which new identities and
allegiances crystallize. When combined with a robust analytic effort of
historical, socio-economic and political contextualization, ethnography
offers the best chance to decipher multi-scalar processes such as the rise
of a political movement by linking the analysis of events and processes
unfolding on the micro and macro level.
Notes
1. Empirical research results offer only weak support to the ‘ethnic competition’
thesis. Using individual-level data, Rydgren (2006) found that voters living in
areas with many immigrants were more likely to vote for the far right in
Denmark, and the Netherlands, but not in Austria, Belgium, France or
Norway (Minkenberg 2003). A more recent study of Sweden has, however,
confirmed the plausibility of ethnic competition as an important source of far-
right support (Rydgren and Ruth 2011).
2. According to a representative countrywide survey conducted in 2003, 38% of
Roma men aged between 15 and 49, and 20% of Roma women of the same
age, were employed in Hungary. In the case of Gyöngyöspata, the correspond-
ing numbers were approximately 5% and 0%.
3. It is important to mention that Hungarian citizens of Roma origin, who were
historically excluded from land ownership, did not benefit from the
Compensation Act of 1991.
4. Official statistics released by the police do not show an increase in crime rates.
In 2010, 55 criminal acts were committed in Gyöngyöspata (of which 31 were
related to violation of property rights). In 2011, until the conflict’s eruption
in March, nine criminal acts were registered. This, according to Gyöngyös’police
chief, means that the village’s crime rate is not worse than average. To what
IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 15
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extent these numbers reflect reality is a hotly debated and highly politicized
issue. Many non-Roma believe that the situation is in fact much worse because a
significant number of criminal acts were not reported by victims.
5. The reality is that income generated through welfare benefits never reached
the minimal wage, although in the 2007–2009 period the sum of welfare
benefits that could be claimed by families affected by unemployment did
come close to that level. The issue was widely discussed in the press and
spawned anger and resentment nationwide. As a consequence, the left-liberal
government cut welfare payments and introduced an obligation to perform
community work for claimants (Virág 2010).
6. The report was circulated to the local notary, the parliamentary representative
of the Gyöngyös electoral district as well as the police chiefs of Gyöngyös and
Heves County.
7. For a more detailed description and analysis of events, see Szombati and
Feischmidt (2012).
8. It is worth noting that the Gyöngyöspata campaign marked a strategic U-turn.
After its entry into parliament (in April 2010), Jobbik sought to distance itself
from the Guard and its successor organizations in the hope of broadening its
support base. However, instead of attracting new supporters, the party’s
popularity began to decline, due to the surfacing of internal tensions and
the party leadership’s inability to place new issues on the political agenda. It is
in this light that the leadership’s decision to return to the kind of ‘street
politics’that had catapulted Jobbik into the spotlight should be understood
(see Krekó, Juhász, and Molnár 2011).
9. Similar structural forces and social processes are at work in other depressed
regions of Hungary and in other corners of the post-socialist region
(Efremova 2012; Feischmidt, Szombati, and Szuhay 2014;Kovách2012;
Hann 2015; Kovács, Vidra, and Virág 2013;Vidra2014).
Acknowledgements
Wewouldliketothanktheorganizersandparticipantsofthefollowingconfer-
ences where previous versions of this paper have been presented: ASN World
Convention, Columbia, 24–26 April 2014, panel CE2; 13th EASA Biennial
Conference, Tallinn, 31 July–3 August 2014, panel co-chaired with Peter Hervik; Far-
right right extremism in crisis driven Greece and beyond, St. Anthony’sCollege
Oxford, 3 June 2014; Race in/outside post–WWII Europe: On the Politics of
Governing and Knowledge Production, CEU IAS, 10 June 2014. We would also
like to thank Ecopolis Foundation for its support of the fieldwork and the Centre
for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for supporting the
subsequent analytical effort. Special thanks go to Éva Deák from Partners
Hungary Foundation with whom we shared many thoughts about the conflict
that erupted in Gyöngyöspata and to Susan Gal, Jon Fox, Chris Hann, Attila
Melegh, Mihály Sárkány, Mónika Váradi, Tünde Virág, EnikőVincze and Violetta
Zentai for their comments on previous versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
16 M. FEISCHMIDT AND K. SZOMBATI
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