THE BRITISH historian AJP Taylor believed that there was a unique historical contradiction in Hungary, claiming that the “strongest resistance, culminating in revolt, came in Hungary, where the claim to traditional rights gave a spurious air of liberalism to the defence of social privileges.” As a result, the Hungarian system was a compromise, where a blend of agrarian conservatism thrived with the traditional nationalist instinct of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism, positioned amidst surrounding imperial actors. “The central event in the history of Hungary in the nineteenth century was the compromise between the magnates and the lesser nobility; this was the essential prelude to the compromise between Hungary and the Habsburgs, which preserved the antiquated social order in Hungary until the twentieth century,” Taylor wrote, adding that “middle class, the lesser nobility, existed only in Hungary; and in Hungary the intellectuals, even if Slovak or Rumanian by origin, could become ‘Magyar’ like the gentry.”

This realism in Hungary is historical, and the country’s history helps shed some light on this unique blend of political reaction and narrow national interest. Hungary has long been an outlier surrounded by changing and fluid political actors—a rebellious but simultaneously reactionary holdover amidst a sea of imperial progress, where imperialism was often paradoxically the liberalizing progressive force, favoring industry as opposed to an agrarian localized lesser nobility.

One of the most visible features of Hungary’s reactionary governance is that it positions itself against a predominantly liberal-imperial officer class (in this case, from the European Union), which is more cosmopolitan, and overtly opposed to any nationalist or homogenous centrifugal force—thereby making the imperial edifice increasingly more authoritarian. The European Union (EU) has often been likened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the same internal dynamics of political reaction from the days of the Habsburgs are still visible in central Europe—just in newer forms.

This particular form of political governance constitutes a form of “reactionary vanguardism.” Similar to every interesting (and influential) new social movement that is often a study in contradictions, conservatism in Hungary is at once historical with philosophical continuity, while novel in form. It is debated and implemented by a vanguard party with a determined cadre, but towards reactionary ends. This vanguardism is liberalizing (so to speak) and defies supranational—and often imperial—politics originating from both Brussels and Washington, but it is also against a certain version of social progress which is brought on by the same supranational and imperial top-down measures. It is, just as AJP Taylor once noted, a study in contradictions.

ENTER VIKTOR Orbán, whose very specific model of reactionary governance provides an example of what such a reactionary system might look like in operation and administration. For the ascending global post-liberal “New Right,” Hungary is what Sweden has been to neoliberalism, feminism, and democratic socialism: a functioning model. As recently as in May 2022, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) hosted its first international conference in Budapest. Theoretical analyses of this new emergent form of political reaction, however, are sparse. Political scientist Dorit Geva categorized it as Ordonationalism, or a form of authoritarian and hyper-nationalist neoliberalism. But that is merely a descriptive term, and does not lend much analytical or historical validity, nor does it explain Orbán’s much-vaunted family bursary programs—which are most definitely opposed to all tenets of neoliberalism. In a speech given to students in 2014, Orbán declared:

What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that people’s personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged, are closely linked to the life of the community and the nation, and that this relationship is preserved and reinforced. In other words, the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed. And so in this sense the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state. It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.

That was arguably the first, but not the only or last time, that Viktor Orbán elucidated on a new form of government. On one hand, it is a system that is somewhat statist in shaping the levers of politics, the judiciary, and resources. On the other hand, the party in question is distinctly socially conservative in outlook and reactionary in tactics and approach. Non-academic literature and pop journalism also neglect the internal contradictions of a reactionary-but-vanguardist system and fail to explain Orbán’s popularity—as well as the rise of post-liberalism elsewhere in the West. In that regard, Hungary is somewhat considered a model, where a version of “National Conservatism” is currently being implemented and institutionalized (at least, according to Balázs Orbán at the November 2021 National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida). 

There is, of course, no one comprehensive theory of reactionary politics—much less a reactionary organizing principle or theory of governance. Within the Anglosphere, the National Conservative movement that has emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom post-2016—which is especially focused on harnessing state power—has gradually devolved into two camps. The first is post-liberals disaffected with the current form of liberalism, mostly focused on free speech and the cultural revolution, who argue that real liberalism has never been tried and progressivism is a deviation from liberalism. The second consists of the true reactionaries, primarily focused on power transition and governance, who claim that progressivism is a natural and logical endpoint of liberalism. In continental Europe, while there has been a steady increase in right-wing politics, those on the Right are far from united, nor do they possess a coherent set of principles or even a unifying worldview.

Furthermore, the war in Ukraine jeopardized all political alignments, with Hungary finding itself on the side of a pragmatic and status-quo favoring Germany and France, while Poland finds itself alongside the hyper-liberal Baltic states and a post-Brexit Britain pushing further brinkmanship in Europe (at no cost to itself). Immediately prior to the 2022 Hungarian election, Orbán channeling an arch-realist sentiment proclaimed:

We’re caught in the crossfire between major geopolitical players: NATO has been expanding eastwards, and Russia has become less and less comfortable with that. The Russians made two demands: that Ukraine declare its neutrality, and that NATO would not admit Ukraine. These security guarantees weren’t given to the Russians, so they decided to take them by force of arms. This is the geopolitical significance of this war. The Russians are redrawing the security map of the continent. Russia’s security policy vision is that, in order to feel safe, they must be surrounded by a neutral zone. Hitherto they’ve seen Ukraine as an intermediate zone and, having failed to make it neutral by diplomatic means, they now want to make it neutral by military force.

IS ORBÁNISM a theoretically sound and coherent enough ideology that can survive and spread, either by adaptation or imitation, in the Anglosphere? At the time of writing, Orbán was facing enormous and ever-increasing pressure from centralized European institutions as well as individual progressive parties based in the western EU core—even after winning at home for the fourth time. While the Ukraine war resulted in absurd coalitions, the greater structural challenge of the EU remains the same. Outside of the war, a progressive bloc is forming within Europe: a centralizing ideological movement that prefers continent-wide campaigns against “far-right” groups, as well as actively funding and promoting abortion and LGBTQ rights in Poland and Hungary. The Hungarian government courted conservatives in the United States, but on the other hand, partly as a reaction, also was the only EU country not invited to the touted Democracy Summit in the United States. Recently, Hungarian foreign minister Péter Szijjártó complained that Hillary Clinton’s remarks regarding the Democracy Summit proved that “the event has a domestic political character, with invitations withheld from countries whose leaders had good ties with former President Donald Trump…We need nobody to judge the state of Hungarian democracy as if in a school exam.”

Of all the core tenets of Orbánism, the ideas of foreign policy and control of the domestic narrative are the two most important. In his speech at CPAC in Budapest, Orbán mentioned this winning combination. “Progressives always think that foreign policy is a battle of ideologies: a battle between good and bad, in which the course of history will be decided once and for all,” Orbán said. “We need foreign policy based on our interests. Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine the victim. But at the same time we know that Ukraine is not defending Hungary.” But how to promote this narrow national interest and realism, amidst a sea of progressive internationalism? 

Dear friends, we must have our own media. We can only show up the insane ideas of the progressive Left if we have media that helps us to do this. Left-wing opinions only appear to be in the majority when the media helps to amplify them.

Orbán’s suggestion to tackle progressivism should be familiar to the New Right: build new institutions, safeguard them from eventual capture by closet liberals and radicals, legislate laws when in power, and expose visible patterns and propaganda. 

For instance, there is the issue of LGBTQ propaganda targeting children. This is still a new thing over here, but we have already destroyed it. We brought the issue out into the open and held a referendum on it. The overwhelming majority of Hungarians have rejected this form of sensitization of children.

The legal implications of these battles are complicated. Consider, that a transgender individual, by virtue of borderless travel and the EU’s Human Rights supranational umbrella, can travel to places in Hungary and Poland where local laws might bar them from using facilities of their choice. These complications are ripe ground for a clash. Such a clash brings into question individual national policies about transgenderism, as well as questions about the laws and religious traditions of Hungary and Poland, which are stricter over such rules. Transnational ideological activism, (often aided by NGOs and EU-backed civil societies) is thoroughly behind supporting human rights supranationally, to the point that it overrides national laws and, by extension, democracy and sovereignty itself. This continuous supranational challenge to national sovereignty is often by design.

Furthermore, countries like Hungary, opposed to any such supranational orthodoxy, are almost inevitably deemed illiberal and opposed to “European values.” The European Union, especially after Brexit, is prone to remind member nation-states that EU law is supreme over national laws. The catch is that challenges to such EU laws are also adjudicated by EU courts, thereby negating a fundamental principle of jurisprudence: that no power can judge itself in its own court. Any challenge to such EU legal supremacy surreally opens the challenger nation to further charges of authoritarianism and further clashes in EU courts. This challenges the very idea of national democracies and elections.

PUT SIMPLY, survival for Orbán and his reactionary vanguard as a coherent set of ideas will be structurally difficult without forming a counter-internationalist coalition to balance liberal internationalism. 

We will not give up the right to defend our borders, to stop migrants…we insist that marriage in Hungary is between a man and a woman, a father is a man and a mother is a woman…and they should leave our children alone. 

Viktor Orbán told his cheering party during the election campaign, adding that “after communist bureaucracy, we don’t want new dictates this time from Brussels, and we don’t want to leave the EU at all, they can’t get rid of us so easily.” He added, “We want to keep our sovereignty and we don’t want to find ourselves in a United States of Europe, instead of integration.”

Historically, when a country pursues a governing principle based purely on democracy—where only the mandate of the majority will be worshiped and a distinct ethno-socio culture will be preserved—the country in question usually needs to be geographically small, and possess a low, fundamentally homogeneous population. Such a nation finds itself in a hard position to navigate imperial politics, nor can it afford to be a part of an empire. The moment it is a part of a bigger and multicultural imperial entity, there inevitably is a pull towards an ethnic balance of power guarded by an imperial elite. Hungary’s own historical experience in the Habsburg Empire is exemplary of this political maneuver. Issues such as minority rights are usually never guaranteed without a thoroughly interfering imperial elite, and any imperial (or supranational) elite is disdainful of both localized mass democracy and nationalism. Overall, any enlargement, whether economic or territorial, will lead to an elite hierarchy—and conversely, democracy and sovereignty will limit economic growth. 

Any project such as Orbánism will thus inevitably face a growing challenge from an imperial core. Majoritarian democracies usually elicit a consistent decline of size, power, and influence—and, therefore, a weakening of their political position and increased dependence on larger, external powers. This is as close to a natural law of international politics as one might get, and it is the heart of the Orbánist project’s balancing. That balancing is going to be increasingly difficult as long as Hungary remains a part of an empire—in this case, a thoroughly new beast, the European Union. Orbán’s Hungary will constantly face every external pressure of the empire and the imperial elite situated in Berlin and Brussels, who are structurally opposed to any nationalist and reactionary forces within the EU. But this aspiration to balance forces is seemingly beyond a single country’s power to control, and whatever one’s desire might be, sooner or later an inflection point awaits. Just as “socialism in one country” was difficult a hundred years ago, so is, presumably, “reaction in one country.” Orbánism might simply not be able to survive without either adapting and morphing at home or compromising with similar ideological forces to form a coalition abroad.

IT IS an open question therefore whether Orbánism can be replicated, adapted, or imitated directly in a country that is much larger than Hungary. To have any form of majoritarian democracy, whether it be the Swiss, the Danish, or the Hungarians, one needs some form of cultural homogeneity. That is unlikely, to say the least, in big and historically divided nation-states like the United States, where the most prudent and peaceable form of governance is often one of minimum centralized interference and maximum compromise. There is no difference regarding attitudes towards immigration, for example, in Switzerland, Hungary, or Denmark, regardless of their ruling political party’s ideology. This is not a coincidence. Homogeneity requires an element of state-applied force as well as enforced and mandated cultural cohesion and a focused educational system—a prospect that is fraying in the current balance of power within the Anglosphere. The rise of heavy-handed Anglo-nationalism post-Brexit, for example, has already resulted in fissures within the union. Wind of any ethnocultural nationalism post-Donald Trump has also resulted in massive institutional backlash. Western Europe, and parts of the Anglosphere, on the other hand, are also post-religious. Size matters too. The United States, a federalized country, is thirty-two times the size of Hungary. An exact imitation of reactionary politics of the Hungarian model might therefore be unlikely. 

But localized replication of reactionary vanguardism is possible, and Anglosphere conservatives are indeed paying attention. In Indiana, Republican lawmakers banned transgender women from competing in women’s sports. In Texas, legislators are proposing a criminalization of drag shows where minors are present. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has single-handedly taken the fight to the “woke capital,” and revoked Disney’s privileged tax status. Florida is also, along with Virginia, leading in legislation against Critical Race Theory-laced pedagogy in schools. Over thirty states in the United States have some form of legislation ongoing in various stages to tackle increasingly left-wing activism in higher education. Across the ocean, London has finalized plans to forcibly send refugees back to Rwanda, and drafted bills to outlaw public protests that hamper daily commuters, as well as legislation to secure free speech on university campuses. Orbánism might not be imposed in its Hungarian form in the Anglosphere, but one of its key tactical approaches—winning votes on culture war issues and legislating—is increasingly popular among Anglo-American conservatives, who are moving away from their free market and non-interference dogma, returning to their pre-World War I roots. And among American Republicans, a strong nationalist and realist faction is slowly ascending. The lessons from the capitulation of Netflix, State Farm, and Disney, faced with relentless pressure from the Right on cultural issues demonstrate two things. The reason the Left has been so successful in intimidating these companies towards its favored policies is that it can harness power. The same principle, however, applies on the other side of the spectrum—if the Right can use power as effectively. And second, grassroots activism is advantageous, but almost never organic, and a counter-elite to channel such activism is critical; one can almost call them reactionary vanguards.

Will there be a rapid attempt of consolidation of a reactionary-internationale (a Holy Alliance sequel?) after Orbán’s latest win? For now, the Ukraine war has thrown a spanner in all that. Passionate Poles and pragmatic Magyars are now opposed on the question of Russia, as Poland finds itself closer to its historic alignment with the Baltics, and Hungary finds itself alongside the more pragmatic Germans and Austrians, thereby dividing the core reactionary bloc within the EU. But the bigger question remains: how long can a country remain a part of the EU, without being ruled by the EU, and with a constant fear of an impending color revolution in Budapest? It remains to be seen. Viktor Orbán is, after all, a realist.

Sumantra Maitra is a national security fellow at the Center for the National Interest and an elected associate fellow at the Royal Historical Society.

Image: Reuters.