RevDem Podcast

In this new conversation at the Review of Democracy, Adam Kirsch – author of the new book On Settler Colonialism. Ideology, Violence, and Justice – discusses the ideology of settler colonialism and how it leads idealists into morally disastrous territory; reflects on whether the application of this ideology to the State of Israel should be viewed as continuing the long, highly problematic tradition of antisemitism; considers whether there are valuable elements in this ideology that would be worth salvaging; and suggests preferable ways to think about the traditions of the oppressed. Adam Kirsch is a poet and literary critic.  He is an editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section and the author of a host of significant books that include The Blessing and the Curse. The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century as well as The Revolt Against Humanity. Imagining a Future Without Us. On Settler Colonialism. Ideology, Violence, and Justice has been published by W.W. Norton.  

In this conversation, Marietje Schaake – author of the new book The Tech Coup. How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley – discusses how tech companies have been eroding democracy and what makes their growing power into a systemic problem; compares the policies of democratic and authoritarian regimes; identifies issues where regulation would be urgently needed on the global level; and spells out crucial aspects of a specifically democracy-focused internet policy. Marietje Schaake is international policy director at Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Between 2009 and 2019, she served as a member of the European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party D66 and was among the leading personalities shaping the EU’s policies on technology, trade, and foreign affairs. Marietje Schaake currently serves on the United Nation’s AI Advisory Body and she also writes a monthly column for the Financial Times on technology and governance. The Tech Coup. How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley is published by Princeton University Press.

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Marius Turda – author of the new book În Căutarea Românului Perfect. Specific național, degenerare rasială și selecție socială în România modernă (In Search of the Perfect Romanian. National Specificity, Racial Degeneration, and Social Selection in Modern Romania) – discusses the intersection between eugenics and racism in Romanian nation-building; presents the main historical moments that influenced the evolution of eugenics and racism; and analyzes the influence of interwar debates around eugenics and racism on socialist and post-socialist Romania. Adrian Matus: Most of your scholarship is addressed at reading publics in English and you use academic concepts that are familiar in that language. Your new book adds such academic concepts to the Romanian intellectual discourse to shed light on the coexistence of racism, anti-Semitism, and eugenics. What motivated you to want to write such a book? Were there any special historiographical or conceptual challenges, or maybe even limitations, when writing the book in Romanian and for a Romanian audience? If so, how did you try to tackle them? Marius Turda: If you really want to understand the present, you need to go back to the past. But one should go back to the past in a way that allows the past to speak for itself rather than reinvent it. A lot of good books about Romania that are very interesting theoretically speaking and very provocative conceptually speaking are written from the point of view of adopting a terminology or a methodology which worked in Colonial Studies, Subaltern Studies, Decoloniality and so on, and then try to use this conceptual work to see how it applies to Romania. My strategy, on the contrary, was, first and foremost to tell the story. I want to revive the past through the work of a historian and through the tools historians have at their disposal. Then, the reader can actually encounter what happens and encounter an idea or a concept or an explanation for a social phenomenon through the actual reading rather than through my eyes. I very much hope that there will be a conversation and theoretical debate after this book is published and disseminated about racism and about eugenics. We still do not have a history of Romanian racism. We still do not have a history of the eugenic movements in Romania. Of course, there is the German eugenic movement, the Romanian eugenic movement, and then the Hungarian eugenic movement, but the research on the Romanian one has never been done. An intense theoretical debate about certain crucial moments from the past can only happen once the past is known rather than reinvented. You might remember the conversation the historian Lucian Boia and others had about mythologizing of the past. Now, I could have done something similar to what Lucian Boia did. I could have written a book about Romanian eugenics, biopolitics and racism, demythologizing it as something that is bad,  or something that was alien to Romanians. The outcome would have been completely different because then people would have said that you basically replace one historiographic construction with another. My strategy may be considered very unorthodox because obviously, people did expect me to use a lot of the terminology that I have acquired through my work, to use that kind of English-speaking terminology that is familiar to everyone who is educated in English-speaking universities and to apply that to the Romanian context.  I did not do that in order to see whether there is a fertile ground for a conversation whilst people know exactly how diverse this phenomenon was, how complex it was, and how much it really shaped the debate on national character and national specificity in interwar Romania. If that is the case, then we could have a meta-debate or a meta-theoretical conversation about what it all means. People could come and say this is very descriptive and positivistic. Apart from the introduction, the book does not have any secondary sources. It has 1000 footnotes – and all of them reference primary sources.  Every argument I put would have required 5 to 10 secondary sources – just imagine how the book would have looked like then. My strategy could backfire. People could ask why I did not offer more theoretical background to the book rather than just present this argument in its simplicity. Prior to this, apart from one or two people who knew something about eugenics, I could not have a conversation about what I cover in this book because no one has actually put this historical material together. What would be the point to discuss, for example about disability without having an example of how it was understood in interwar Romania? In the book, I provide the example of  someone who murdered her son and killed herself in a hotel in Bucharest because her son had disability and people were throwing stones at him on the street. In parallel, there were discussions in the Parliament whether to introduce eugenic laws and have premarital certificates, so people with certain diseases would not have children. Through such examples, we can have a talk about what it meant at the time. This is in many ways very pedagogical and didactic. We are in a culture in Romania where these topics have not been discussed properly but there is a big jump in terms of the theoretical argument. Particularly now, there are an amazing group of younger people across the board – from sociologists to political scientists and historians – who are very attuned to debates abroad and they are very keen to integrate into that conversation and integrate the Romanian case study in that global debate about various issues. Ultimately, this can only be done if this new generation actually knows what exactly happened. Otherwise, they end up constructing as much as they deconstruct – they construct via deconstructing because what they say is basically another construction. The general public finds it very hard to follow a debate which is highly theoretical, particularly when it comes to topics such as fighting racism in Romania, combatting xenophobia, or tolerance. The person on the street will not accept any of that unless you come and show what happens. Not just the Holocaust. Not just the deportation and the pogroms, but the very strong streak within Romanian culture that really reach very deeply in the Romanian population: the idea that we have to define ourselves not just in terms of language or religion, but also in terms of blood and race. Every single country has done it – Romanians are no different than Hungarians, Croats,  Bulgarians or the English. It is not about being in a very  unique position in Europe. We imitated and copied, we followed and emulated so many Western models. The entire Romanian historiography and literature is rich with examples of how the Romanian revolutionaries of 1848 imitated the French revolutionaries. And as much as they adopted the idea of patriotism from French political discourse, they also adopted the discourse about race from that political tradition. It does not take that much historical inquiry to put it all together, but it has not been done. Hopefully mine is one step forward, one attempt to really bring the conversation towards some very key moments in the history of Romania and in the intellectual history of Romania, which in a way allows us to re-read in a different key the period between the 1880s and the 1950s and at the same time to shed some light on longue durée phenomena in Romanian culture leading to the present day, particularly with respect to anti-Semitism, racism, eugenic feelings and eugenic behavior towards people with disability, and how the Romanian state behaves as it continues to adopt eugenic language. MA: A core argument of the book is that being a Romanian was constructed via culture but that the idea also acquired a marked biopolitical component in the 20th century. So what did it mean to be Romanian at various times? What main justifications were used to exclude those who were not considered part of the national project? MT: I tried to offer some answers to this question in the book by looking at how, for example anthropology, sociology or demography were used to define ‘Romanianness’.  Before the 19th century, an entire tradition already existed in the form of the Enlightenment Transylvanian school that defined the Romanian as someone who spoke Romanian, lived for generations on the territory that is today Romania, and was a descendant from either the autochthonous population or from the synthesis created between Romans and the Dacians. There were many ways in which historians of the Enlightenment were already formulating a definition of Romanian identity. In the 1880s however, with the creation of Romanian state, a number of very important novel elements came into the picture. The Romanian would need to be a citizen of the new Romanian state - so a definition of the idea of citizenship was required. The Jews were not Romanians by blood, but could they become, civically speaking, Romanian citizens? That was a big debate. At the time, citizenship came to acquire, as was the case in other countries too, a very powerful meaning, because it could give one the quality of being a Romanian. The First World War and the creation of Greater Romania then intensified the whole conversation about who is Romanian, how can one define Romanian (because of the number of ethnic minorities in the country - not only the Jews, but also the Hungarians and Germans). The Romanians were constantly confronted with a need to redefine their national identity; first in the 1880s, regarding the Jews, then again in the early 1900s, and then particularly in the 1920s regarding the other ethnic minorities. There was always the idea that if an individual is Romanian citizen, that is enough.  But then, there was always lurking in the backs of some minds that this attitude might be ruinous, that it might actually delegitimize the Romanian national project and lead to a catastrophe. Some would tell you that Emil Cioran[i] is one of those who came up with one of the best questions summarizing the dilemma of Romanianness: “How could you be or how could one be a Romanian?”  I think there is another important question that was asked at the time that actually encapsulates this debate and gives a good answer. This is a question asked by Nae Ionescu[ii], who asked it in the context of the debate he had with the Romanian Catholics. For him, Romanian Catholics could follow the laws, pay their taxes, or in other words, be model citizens, as many Jews, Germans, and Roma were. But, he says, you could be good Romanians, but the essential question remains,  “are you Romanian?”  To me, this is extraordinary. You could see the same tendency in the debate he had with Mihail Sebastian, where the question was precisely not how much Sebastian would try to become Romanian. Nae Ionescu considered Sebastian only as a Jew from Brăila. This is the question that we need to go back to and try to understand when we are looking at the complexity of the Romanian national project. These were Romanian citizens, but were they Romanians because of their inherent ‘Romanianness’, not acquired via political decision.  I read this particular article by Nae Ionescu when I was in my 20s and it took me so long to understand what exactly he meant by the question: ”You are good Romanians, but are you truly Romanians?”. It was only after I studied the entire arsenal of arguments put forward by Romanian anthropologists, physicians and eugenicists for really trying to find that essence, that palpable thing, that I understood what he was referring to. In Europe, centuries worth of effort have been spent by anti-Semites and others obsessed with the idea that if we can find the perfect Aryan and really identify it, that will solve all of our problems. It was the same with Romanian figures I am discussing. They really tried to say that it was not enough to really go to the top of the mountains and claim, like Lucian Blaga[iii] that “eternity was born in the village”. They wanted to go into the villages and find a peasant that actually looked like a piece of unchanging history when you looked at him: the way he had his beard, the way he peered into the distance, the way he presented his persona – in other words, they wanted to know about everything that concerned him that could actually be touched and felt. The physicality of the nation had to be identified. In this context, they could define what Romanian was: ideally not only a Christian, but an Orthodox Christian, in other words part of the national church, but also someone who did not have any Roma or Jewish blood, ideally for three or four generations, if not more. If they had some German blood that was not considered too bad, because that was thought as belonging to a superior nation. Ironically, some of the most radical of these Romanians were not of Romanian origin. It is  the same as everywhere: most fanatics, are those who are never able to overcome what they call the ‘stigma’ or ‘shame’ of having impure blood. The quest for the perfect Romanian, as I call it, was something that really drove the conversation about national specificity. Very few people were able to actually really pinpoint how this idea of identity changes - because it does change. I am not saying, for example, that a debate about economic arguments, social conditions or the cultural debates about national imitation are not important, but they could also be understood much better if they are put in conversation, or if  they are put together in dialogue with this almost biological obsession people had about finding that real Romanian that poets write about and philosophers muse about. AM: Who were the scientists that formulated these racial and eugenic arguments about the Romanian nation in the interwar period? MT: There were many, some of them quite prominent: important psychiatrists like Gheorghe Marinescu[iv], important physicians like Gheorghe Banu[v], Iuliu Moldovan[vi], demographers like Sabin Manuilă[vii], as well as sociologists, poets, literary critics and genealogists. As I show in the book, it is very interesting that there was a so-called ‘scientific’ literature on race and racism,  both supporting it and arguing against it. The

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury – author of the recent book Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford UP, 2019) – discusses the various layers of democracy in Bangladesh. Analysing the differences between the English word “crowd” and the Bengali term “jonata,” Professor Chowdhury deliberates upon the recent events in Bangladesh through the lens of the country’s long history of popular dissent and street mobilization. She describes how the Western category of “the people” fails to capture the tenuous, fleeting, and ephemeral materiality of the crowd in the context of Bangladesh and beyond.

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, George Paul Meiu clarifies his concept of ethno-erotic economy and the commodification of ethnic sexuality; reflects on the role of objects in shaping political representations; discusses belonging and citizenship as well as mobility, memory, and materiality – and shares his insights concerning possible interpretations of the Greek God Dionysus episode at the Opening Ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games. Adrian Matus: You have done extensive research on East Africa, particularly Kenya. As a result, you published “Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya”[i], where you propose the concept of ethno-erotic economies to grasp what is going on in the tourist resorts of the country. Could you tell me a bit about your main findings concerning the Samburu ethnic sexuality and what they may tell us about belonging in today’s postcolonial world more generally? George Paul Meiu: My project in ethno-erotic economy started in a very specific place in Kenya. Since the 1980s, young Samburu men from Northern Kenya have begun migrating seasonally to the coast of the Indian Ocean, where they sold souvenirs and danced for tourists, but also increasingly started developing relationships with women from Western Europe. By the time I started doing research in 2005, in Northern Kenya–where these men come from–some of the richest men in the area were in relationships with white women. For me, this raised all kinds of questions. How do you commodify ethnicity and sexuality in order to produce a certain kind of future at home? What does it mean for an indigenous population like the Samburu, who have been marginalized and peripheralized by both the colonial and independent states, to now seek a certain kind of economic emancipation by commodifying colonial stereotypes of themselves and of their sexuality? Increasingly, what I started seeing is that this is actually very little about sexuality, as such. This is not about what people do sexually. This is about all kinds of imaginaries that one brings in terms of tourist commodification, consumption and so on. What was really interesting for me was how these things reverberate beyond tourism. I ended up going back to some of these men's villages where I did the heavy part of my research and saw how the money that they brought home gave rise to all kinds of gossip and debates over what it means to make money through sex and feed your children and parents with it. All of these moral dilemmas raise questions about what it means to belong, to belong to that area and to an ethnic group. A lot of what these young men were also doing was trying to use the capital they acquired through sexuality to gain respectability. In many parts of the world today, people use sex economies to try to move to the West or other more affluent parts of the world. What was interesting for me here is that these young men did not. Most of them wanted to go back to their home village, where the value of the money was higher, where they had the comfort of being at home and where the ability to negotiate respectability was very different. This created all kinds of puzzles. What does it mean to be a young man in your early 20s, to already have so much money and to gain access to becoming an elder, a respected elder, through your sexuality? All these conundrums raise the issues over what it means to belong. This is a story about East Africa, about Samburu indigenous people and the colonial discourses of their sexuality. In many ways, it is closely related to the global phenomenon of intensified migration. We see the commodification of ethnic sexuality everywhere. What I mean by ethnic sexuality is the very modernist idea that we carry within our bodies something that we can call sexuality. On the one hand, we see across the world now a growing commodification of migrants. I am currently doing research in Romania. A lot of Romanian migrants in Western Europe– men and women–commodify their sexualities and sexual economies, as Eastern Europeans and Romanians. This fantasy has very strong repercussions. On the other hand, we see growing ethno-nationalism everywhere that plays out in the name of sexuality and ethno-sexuality. Sexuality becomes quite key in both consumption and governance in the contemporary world. AM: In your book Queer Objects to the Rescue[ii], you shifted and narrowed the focus of your investigation by pointing to objects that play a surprising role in shaping political imageries that represent queerness as a societal threat and the resulting practices to exclude queer people. Your claim is that, if we want to understand and critique homophobia, we need to understand the role of such objects. One of your central points is that plastic plays an important role in this type of representation, as Chapter 4 of this book argues. What are the main reasons behind associating plastic with queerness? GPM: The deployment of political homophobia has played a central role in morally legitimizing the sovereignty of the state. In many contexts, the state actually works to monopolize capital and claim monopoly on various forms of extraction and exploitation. In this very moment, it seems to me that when we talk about these things, such as moral policing and moral panics, our ability to imagine has become quite bankrupt. When we talk about homophobia, for example, we end up demonizing homophobes versus positioning ourselves as scholarly critics; activists on a position of superiority to those irrational Others who hate. While not condoning any form of hate or relativizing it, I do think that as social scientists we have a responsibility–ethical and political–to try to understand the conditions in which hate is reproduced, also. Thus, working on objects was not necessarily an attempt to narrow the focus, but to escape this discursive realm that keeps us trapped in a kind of liberal, emancipatory discourse versus irrational, backward, demonic hate dichotomy. We need to understand things differently. We need to step a bit outside. Objects, in a way, did that for me. The paradox of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, misogyny and hate towards migrants creates a globalized grammar of hate. If these things indeed are global, then that still does not explain how people and populations–vast populations across the world with very different contexts of life, work and governance– pick them up. These discourses have to be made to resonate. I was trying to look at those poetics. How does a leader come in front of the masses and say: “your children are in danger immigrants, are in danger of the homosexuals?” For people to pick up, I do not believe these discourses that just assume masses are these irrational, malleable things. In reality, we have to pay close attention to the sentiments and desires that they are expressing. Therefore, for me, objects became an interesting coincidental way to tap into the production of collective sentiments. While doing previous research on my first book in Kenya, I started seeing a lot of concern and panics over various kinds of objects, and then I thought, how might panic over various kinds of objects tell us something about the panics over homosexuals or immigrants? Just to give a quick example, early on in my research I came across a Facebook post by somebody in Northern Kenya who made a homophobic statement. The way it was formulated was quite intriguing for me as an anthropologist. It said that “homosexuality is a foreign plastic import that doesn't fit African chemistry”. There's a lot of cultural and historical baggage that goes into formulating and understanding what is being said here. For me, this resonated because I had already started working in northern Kenya on questions of plastic and panics over them.  The fact that there is a whole category of young men in the area called plastic boys, children of refugees who do not claim any belonging to clans or lineages in the area, and therefore–like plastic–seem to come from elsewhere and never attach themselves to any particular place, is significant. Plastic became a very evocative medium, object, or set of objects, that gave a certain kind of material expression to anxieties over belonging, autochthony, bodily well-being, and integrity, as well as to concerns over reproduction, whether biological or social. In that regard, objects give us the certainty of a definitive cause for all our troubles it's because of plastic, it's because of the plastic boys, it's because of this that we cannot live our lives fully as an ethnic group, as a nation, and so on. Something very similar, in fact, happens with the homosexual body. These objects, I argue in this book, enable a certain kind of displacement of meanings, but also of sentiments, anxieties, and desires, from a very diverse set of contexts, where they often have very legitimate reason to exist, particularly where opportunities of work and social reproduction have shrunk. Yet while these anxieties are very legitimate, their projection upon objects, whether it's plastic or the homosexual or the immigrant, can be very problematic. This is, in a way, how I think contemporary politics works, and therefore we do need to pay attention to these forms of displacement. When you have a sexuality politics that only looks at what it names; when we say we're studying sexuality or we're activists of sexuality and all we care about is sexual identification and sexual expression; we miss out on how sexuality ends up taking on anxieties, concerns and desires that have nothing to do with sex or sexual identity at all. Rather, they belong to other domains like work, reproduction and consumption sovereignty. AM: Could you tell us about your fieldwork and how you try to make sense of the objects you encounter? What methodologies do you prefer when trying to account for the role of commodification in the routes of violence and displacement? GPM: I think that my methodologies over the years have become messier and messier. I am doing things that I would never advise my graduate students to do because it is, in a way, messy. I do find myself more and more in need to embrace messiness in order to decentre certain discourses. A proper methodology about sexuality would be to do some participant observation such as interviews – to talk to people about sexuality. What I'm doing is a bit different in the sense that, in order to understand what sexuality politics is about or what the commodification of sexuality is all about, you need to look elsewhere. You need to leave sexuality aside and look at the places in which its effects or, or conditions of possibility emerge. I am studying homophobia, but I am putting homophobia on hold, and I'm going and looking at what plastic signifies before I can connect it back. I call these ethnographic detours with other anthropologists who have written them in a similar vein. These kinds of methodologies pursue ethnographic detours. In other words, rather than look straight on at the subject that we claim to observe, and only engage with the literatures pertaining to that subject or take that subject very literally, I am trying to walk in circles around that subject in order to see how its effects or conditions of possibility emerge or register beyond it. To be a scholar or an anthropologist of sexuality, I have to actually pay attention to labor and economic value. I have to pay attention to questions of ethnicity and autochthony. I have to pay attention to questions of commodity production and consumption. In other words, you have to be everywhere and nowhere. AM: Your most recent publication On Hate, its Objects, and the Poetics of Sexuality juxtaposes the Romanian and the Kenyan cases of highly mediatization panics over sexuality. You argue that one of the reasons of defending the “family values from the foreign plight” is determined by “a late capitalist political economy when sexuality—its politics and poetics—plays out in uncannily similar ways across the world” and creates “an interplay between globally circulating grammars of identity” that are able to resonate with inherited historical anxieties. What creates the objects of hate in these cases? Could you expand on such patterns of panic? GMP: I think I can try to distil two patterns, maybe through an example or two, to help. Because one of the key issues of this modularity of objects of hate, whether we talk about the immigrant, whether we talk about the sexual other, whether we talk about various forms of sexualized indigenous people or racialized others and so on, there is something quite similar happening across the globe. For instance, the fact that Russia has anti-LGBTQ politics and the fact that previously Bolsonaro's Brazil had similar politics, those things resonate with one another. You cannot say that these are separate places, separate cultures –we live in a global world. We recognize the enemy, as it were, by virtue of its appearance everywhere. But what I am arguing as an anthropologist is that we cannot stop there. The work that this does in every place is really important to pay attention to. One interesting example was a few years ago when radical right protesters in Brazil, for example, protesting for family values, anti-LGBTQ policies, or against what they call “gender ideology”. Any discourse or film or culture production associated with gender and sexual diversity was depicted as somehow threatening to the fabric of a nation or a culture. When these protesters gathered in Rio in front of a venue where queer and feminist theorist Judith Butler was to give a talk, they produced an effigy of Judith Butler dressed as a witch and set it on fire as though to cleanse, as it were, the nation state of the plight of “gender ideology”. To me, what happened there of course is scary, but if you take a deep breath and try to analyse ethnographically what is going on there, it gives you a sense of the quite complex grammars through which this sort of sexuality politics and ethno-nationalism plays out. There is a growing sense of ambiguity and uncertainty around the center. I argue in my book Queer Objects to the Rescue: Intimacy and Citizenship in Kenya that you do not need to be queer for elements of your life to already have been deeply non-normativ

In this conversation, Anikó Imre and James Mark – co-editors, with Catherine Baker and Bogdan Iacob, of the new volume Off White. Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race – present the ambiguities of East Europeans’ whiteness and the major implications such ambiguities have had; analyze how the “two halves of Europe” compare when it comes to questions of white supremacy; explicate what their historical approach to nation building in Eastern Europe has yielded; discuss the place and role of East Europeans in global rightist networks today; and reflect on how they see their own role as mediators between political cultures and different scholarly traditions. Anikó Imre is a Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. James Mark is a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Off White. Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race has been edited by Catherine Baker, Bogdan Iacob, Anikó Imre, and James Mark. It is published by Manchester University Press.

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, András Bozóki – author of the new collection Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) – reflects on what has made the anti-democratic turn in Hungary so effective and discusses what has surprised him the most about the evolution of the Orbán regime; comments on the regime’s attempted remaking of Hungarian elite groups and its uses of ideology to legitimate its rule; evaluates his thesis on the Orbán regime being an “externally constrained hybrid regime” in light of more recent developments; and assesses the role of his own generation, the 1989ers, in the longer arc of history.   András Bozóki is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Central European University and a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute. His main fields of research include democratization, de-democratization, political regimes, ideologies, Central European politics, and the role of intellectuals.   Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) has been published by Gondolat Kiadó.   Ferenc Laczó: You have just released a large and exciting collection in Hungarian under the title Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról, which might be translated as Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy. This new volume of some 500 pages collects sixteen important articles that you have authored or co-authored since 2013 and presents them in a largely chronological fashion. The Orbán regime has clearly been a central concern of yours. How this regime has emerged, how it operates, how it may be classified, and what can be said about its international embeddedness—these are all questions that are repeatedly raised and considered on these pages. You have evidently been studying a moving target since the early 2010s. I wanted to start our conversation there: How has your understanding of the Orbán regime evolved over the years? What was foreseeable to you already back in the early 2010s about where this regime would be heading, and what came rather as a surprise to you in more recent years? András Bozóki: There was already a de-consolidation of democracy, in the form of increasing political polarization, between 2006 and 2010. However, according to all international democracy-measuring institutes, Hungary was still a liberal democracy up until 2010, despite all the troubles. People were disappointed with the government of the time; they found it ineffective, and they wanted a more decisive turn towards what was supposed to be a more democratic system. It was interesting to see that, while Viktor Orbán started his de-democratization project quite early on, it was propagated as making the system more democratic. Forget about the rule of law and all these legal nuances, or what the Constitutional Court defends, or the ombudsman, all these legal brakes on the regime. Let the people govern, let the will of the people rule without any brakes. Autocratization was sold as democratization. As a political scientist I was surprised by three phenomena in the process of de-democratization: weak popular identification with democracy, the effectiveness of political propaganda, and, third, the radical change in Hungarian foreign policy.  As someone who used to be a member of Fidesz at the change of the regime, but left it early, I had no illusions about Orbán. My surprise is not so much about his behavior as a leader, but about the passive behavior of Hungarian society. I did not expect that the democratic backsliding process would go so swiftly, and without much social resistance, I would say. That was a major disappointment: that people didn’t see the existent democracy as something worth fighting for, worth defending. They said that democracy is just about a multiparty system and nothing more. It is not about the spirit of the people, it is only about weak institutions and corrupt party machineries. They didn’t want to defend that system. It was easy, retrospectively speaking, for Orbán to change the regime because the social resistance was surprisingly weak. My second surprise concerns the effectiveness of propaganda. I did not believe that propaganda after the 1950s can again be used for direct political purposes in Hungary, that a country which survived Communism can go back to daily propaganda. But that happened in 2015 with the migration crisis and the 2016 referendum afterwards. It was just intolerable. In the late Communist period, the regime was not propagandistic at all. They had neither ideology, nor propaganda; it was just based on traditional mentalities. It was striking to see that propaganda can again be effective, together with the manipulation of social media, and make citizens change their opinion concerning foreign migrants. Before 2015, there was no Islamophobia in Hungary at all, unlike some traditional anti-Semitism. However, the Orbán regime propagated Islamophobia and mixed it up with anti-Roma sentiments. And, finally, I did not expect Orbán to become a pro-Putin politician. I mean, I do not have to tell you that back in the 19th century, the Russian army destroyed the Hungarian Revolution and struggle for freedom; then, during the Second World War, they came to Hungary, and there are now accounts about their activity beyond the fronts, like not only killing people, but raping hundreds of thousands of women; then crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956; and stationing troops in Hungary for decades. Hungary was not as anti-communist a country as Poland, but there were strong anti-Soviet sentiments. “Russians, go home” was a leading slogan of the 1956 Revolution. That Orbán could change this and make Fidesz supporters pro-Russian, anti-EU, pro-war—that was something truly unexpected. They may now present themselves as the “party of peace,” but they actually support Russia’s war against Ukraine and have some invisible but easily detectable relationship with Putin such as economic and political collaboration. That has been genuinely surprising. Orbán currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU and is working on the deconstruction of the Union. The Trojan horse has arrived. FL: Several pieces included in this new collection address the regime debate that has been raging concerning Orbán’s rule. As part of that, you discuss its illiberal and antidemocratic features, and critique the widely used concept of ‘illiberal democracy’ in particular. You write about ‘electoral autocracy’ instead, and some years ago even formulated the thesis of a ‘liberal autocracy.’ Which key conclusions would you draw today from those regime debates? What might be key points of consensus among scholars despite their different emphases and terminological choices? AB: The first few years after 2010 were a shock. What should we call this regime? It was the constitutional lawyers, plus economist János Kornai, who claimed that the regime is moving fast towards autocracy. It was the constitutional lawyers—Gábor Halmai, Kim Lane Scheppele, Imre Vörös, and others—who claimed that there was an unconstitutional putsch when the new constitution started to be used for anti-constitutional purposes, when it was used to change the legal system and undermine the rule of law by 2013. In contrast, political scientists were rather quiet in those early years. They said: Let’s wait for the elections in 2014 to see whether these early warnings have been well-substantiated or not. Political scientists started to speak about electoral autocracy, or hybrid regimes, only after 2014, when the constitutional lawyers were already sounding the alarm that this was the end of the rule of law. Political scientists responded basically by saying, “Fine, but the rule of law is just one side of the story. What about free elections and the will of the people?” But, as it turned out, we could not consider the 2014 elections honest elections. It was free, but unfair. And that opened the way to the regime debates, which dominated the mid-2010s in Hungarian political science. There were several interesting approaches, such as the concepts of ‘mafia state’, neo-Bolshevism, re-feudalization, prebendalism, illiberal democratic capitalism, plebiscitary leader democracy, transmuted fascism, party-state, post-fascism, populist electoral autocracy and the likes. Also a distinction has been made between regime and rendszer – ‘regime’ and ‘system’, though the meaning of the Hungarian distinction does not translate well into English – or concerning the practices of the political formula vis-à-vis the formalities of institutional order. There were a lot of different approaches. At this point Orbán proudly came up with the notion of ‘illiberal democracy.’ In English, ‘illiberal’ sounds pretty derogatory. I do not think Orbán felt that it was that way. He wanted to state that “We want to keep democracy but make a break with liberalism.” But illiberal democracy means something else: it is not a democracy but a sort of hybrid regime. Still, not only Orbán but some political scientists in Hungary also wanted to argue that ‘illiberal democracy’ is just a form of democracy: there is a Western liberal democracy and there is a non-Western democracy which might be illiberal but is equally legitimate. I did not like those attempts. I did not think they were scholarly. I realized that being in the EU, there is a stronger defense of the rule of law from European Union institutions than from domestic elements. When people were prevented from initiating a referendum in Hungary in early 2016, I clearly felt that this meant the end of any sort of democracy. But maybe there is a new form of autocracy which keeps some sort of remnants of liberalism due to the constraints of the European Union. So, I was venturing with the concept of ‘liberal autocracy’ around the time. It is not my invention, Fareed Zakaria and Larry Diamond were debating it back around the turn of the millennium. Hong Kong was called a liberal autocracy, even the ideal type of a liberal autocracy when human rights were respected, but there was no democracy because the government was not elected by the people—though Diamond thought that having a liberal autocracy was illusionary. Around 2015, I met Dániel Hegedűs, a younger colleague of mine. As an expert of EU politics, he pointed out the dubious role of the EU toward Hungary. We realized that the unparalleled specificity of this regime is indeed that it is located within the EU, and we have to focus on the interplay between Hungary and the European Union. Since EU legislation has domestic impact in Hungary, we cannot fully separate these two entities: following the principle of subsidiarity, some parts of sovereignty are given up by each Member State. So let us see what the consequences of EU membership are. Concerning Hungary, we came up with the proposition of an externally constrained – but also supported and legitimized – hybrid regime. There was a huge debate about the latter notion too, whether ‘hybrid regime’ makes sense or not. It is a bit too broad of a category, but it was suitable for covering those years when Hungary was no longer a democracy, but not yet an autocracy. We can still use it today: if the Hungarian state is an electoral autocracy, it is still part of the hybrid regime category on the authoritarian end of the spectrum. Our article gained remarkable international attention and it came to be seen as our statement. In the years since 2018, these regime debates have slowly lost significance and lost their importance. Everything has been said, I think. The new consensus may be that nobody calls Hungary a modern democracy anymore. People realize that there was de-democratization, democratic erosion, backsliding – whatever you want to call it. More recently, academics have been talking about autocratization, not democratic backsliding, which can be a backsliding within democracy whereas autocratization trespasses the line between democracy and autocracy. I should add that this volume just collects some of the articles I wrote at different moments in time between 2013 and 2023. I see how naïve I was at certain points. I tried to correct myself later and was correcting myself again after that. Of course, I did not want to change what I wrote ten years ago, so this collection also shows how my thinking has changed. The lesson I learned from the debate on the nature of the regime is that a purely political science approach and the use of purely political science concepts are not enough to understand the Orbán regime. You need to have historical and sociological knowledge, and an interdisciplinary approach is needed. In Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union, the book I have just co-authored with Zoltán Fleck, we combine political science concepts with sociological approaches to conclude that the Orbán regime might be an electoral autocracy politically speaking, however it can be called an embedded autocracy from the social point of view. FL: The collection focuses extensively on how Hungary’s antidemocratic turn has unfolded in the early twenty-first century. The decline of democracy in the country has been conspicuous, making Hungary a rather notorious case even in global comparison. What do you view as critical junctures during this process of de-democratization? And what might explain the overall effectiveness of such an anti-democratic turn in Hungary? AB: On the one hand, it was a smooth change. On the other, there were some critical junctures, some breaking points. I think that, as I said, many people did not value democracy, or better to say, they had different understandings of democracy. I think that the twenty years between 1990 and 2010 were a shining moment in the history of Hungary – in a history stretching over a thousand years, we had two decades of liberal democracy, and I feel fortunate to have been part of this story. Having said that, part of the answer is that this democracy was not without problems. To put it this way, the government lost credibility right after 2006 and they lost the 2008 referendum. People really wanted a change of government, or maybe an early election which the government refused to hold. They just did not feel the danger; they felt that there was just a normal crisi

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Julia Sonnevend – author of the new book Charm. How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics – analyzes the main techniques politicians use to appear charming; compares the uses of such techniques by liberal and illiberal political leaders; discusses how gendered the perception of charm has remained; and considers whether politicians are likely to become even more like social media influencers in the coming years. Julia Sonnevend is an associate professor of Sociology and Communications at the New School for Social Research. She is a sociologist of global culture whose research focuses on the events, icons, symbols and charismatic personalities of public life and media. Charm is her second monograph. Charm. How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics has been published by Princeton University Press.

Çağlar Öztürk: My first question concerns populism. Populism has become a fashionable term in recent years which has led to quite some confusion even among political scientists and political science students. First of all, what qualifies a politician or party as populist? How do they differ from others, from non-populist ones? What was your motivation in choosing populism as a key concept and what contribution did you intend to make with the book? Giorgos Venizelos: There's indeed a lot of confusion about populism, even though there's so much literature about it. Without going too deep in this heated debate, I should say that scholars agree that populism is organised around two notions: people- centrism and anti-elitism. Of course, there are very different approaches to these two operational criteria related to the people and the elite. For me, populist communication is not just about rhetoric, but also bodily gestures, accents and aesthetics that resemble, represent and enact ‘the people.’ When we talk about populism, we also talk about a certain logic, a certain style or performance. And it can also be said that populism operates with a political cleavage that is distinct from the typical left-right political cleavage – it's a cleavage between ‘the populists’ or ‘the people’ at the bottom and ‘the elite’ or ‘the anti-populists’ at the top. There is non-populist politics as well, of course, politics or discourses that do not have these characteristics or have just one of those two characteristics. For example, they talk to ‘the voter’ or ‘the citizen’ instead of ‘the people,’ or they use ‘the people’ as a term, but there's no antagonistic dimension. Vice versa, we might identify certain types of challenger parties, especially on the far right, that articulate a strong anti-establishment discourse, so there is an exclusionary element there, however, the notion of ‘the people’ as a collective identity that can supposedly fit the 'whole society' is absent. Arguably, besides these two categories, populist and non-populist, we can have anti-populist discourses as well: politicians, journalists, and other actors may be showing a very open and clear aversion towards the notions of ‘the people,’ popular sovereignty, populist politicians, and so on. These discourses often reveal degrees of ‘democratic elitism.’ Why did I choose the concept of populism? I wanted to explain how popular identities, or mass identities, are constructed. It was at a time of mass mobilizations against austerity politics that I started thinking about Populism in Power. Discourse and Performativity in Syriza and Donald Trump. I wanted to study how electorates are mobilized in moments of crisis, how emotions are involved in such processes of political identification, and how populism is not exactly and always a negative, a mystifying or exceptional phenomenon, but rather part of everyday political life. We have been talking mostly about populism until now, but my book is specifically about populism in power. You asked me what the intended contribution of the book is. I initially wanted to examine what happens when populists get into power – because when I was thinking about the project, prominent cases were emerging, like Syriza in Greece, but also Podemos in Spain and then later Donald Trump in the US. I started reading into the literature of populism in power and the assumptions about what happens to populism when it moves from the opposition to government did not really convince me. The way populism – and consequently also populism in power -were conceptualized left me puzzled because I thought that scholars focused too much on the consequences of populism for democracy. For example, they would say things like “populists turn authoritarian.” Scholars also focused too much on what happens to populism itself. For example, they would say that “populism fails in power.” However, these are possibilities for other, non-populist actors as well, so why should they be so central in the debate about populism? When talking about populism, all these assumptions end up defining the concept. I don't think that they're defining it well, but these assumptions seem to be very much discernible in the discourse of scholars. So, the idea behind my project was that in order to rethink populism in power we first have to rethink populism, re-work the way we approach it. ÇÖ: Which theories and concepts do you draw on and how do you position your book and scholarship in the existing literature? GV: I draw on theories of discourse and the so-called Essex School of Discourse Analysis in particular, but also theories of political style and socio-cultural approaches to politics. I draw on theories of affect, emotions, and collective identities. Just to name a few authors here, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Yannis Stavrakakis have all had an important influence on me. Benjamin Moffitt and Pierre Ostiguy have also been important to me, but so have more traditional theories of affect, such as Freud’s or Lacan’s. I also draw on populism studies, of course. ÇÖ: It's often maintained that there are two main strands of populism: left-wing and right-wing. What separates those two strands from each other, and why is it nonetheless adequate to refer to both as populist? More concretely, why have you chosen to study Trump and Syriza in the same framework? And what does such a juxtaposition and comparison yield? GV: It can be argued that there are many more strands of populism besides left and right. There's also a centrist type of populism, but there are also more peculiar or even idiosyncratic formations that are hard to place on the left-right axis. However, there are indeed two main strands, left- and right-wing. I mentioned earlier that populism is about ‘the people’ and ‘the elite,’ but it's never just that. There's always an ideology that comes with populism. Ideology is defined by certain programmatic features, certain ideas that have to do with equality or distribution, with inclusion and exclusion in social and political processes. For example, a left populist might be for redistribution of wealth while a right-wing populist might be pro-business. We have these programmatic ideas of the left and the right that can, however, be communicated in different ways. In the case of populism, such classic ideas are communicated in a ‘common-sense’ way, in the name of ‘the people’ and against ‘the elites.’ ‘The people’ are suffering because ‘the elites’ push for certain policies that don't allow redistribution of wealth. Therefore, ‘the people’ should rise and take power, regulate, and achieve the redistribution they want. That’s an example of communicating a programmatic leftist agenda in a populist manner. I should add though that there are many different types and subtypes of populism, even among the two main families that we have just been speaking about. Not all left populists are the same, nor all right-wing populists. I chose to study Trump and Syriza because, in my view, they were populists in power who had emerged during the same conjuncture. They emerged as a response to the crisis of neoliberalism, understood not just in the economic, but also in the political sense. Technocrats appeared to be very dominant in politics, and certain types of actors or voters rejected this state of affairs. Of course, the case of Trump is not as straightforward because Trump is a pro-capitalist politician. You also asked me about the difference between Syriza and Trump and whether the results of the comparison were surprising. One could sensibly argue that the comparison of left- and right-wing populism, such as Syriza and Trump, is not very original. However, I wanted to pursue this comparison precisely because it's quite provocative. Even if scholars, politicians, and quality journalists would typically agree that there's a difference between a left-wing and a right-wing populist, there are still many uncritical assumptions in public discourse that fail to make this basic distinction. They use a notion of populism which is little more than a synonym for bad. What I therefore wanted to do was to show that there is a fundamental difference, and that ideology plays a key role: the way they construct the people is different, the content of their discourses and the framing of collective identities are really different in the two cases. ÇÖ: Donald Trump and Syriza were both backed by social movements that may well have been triggered by the financial and social crisis of the preceding years. How similar or different were the respective social movements that led to their rise? Do you see social movements as essential factors in their rise, or have they merely contributed to the political momentum that was unfolding? GV: In both cases, we saw social movements emerge as a response to the crisis of neoliberalism and to the collapse of the markets in the two countries. This may have happened at different times, but the two were part of the same conjuncture: in Greece, this took place a bit later, in 2010 and 2011, while in the US already in 2008 and 2009. At this early stage, the movements had similar demands. There was an internationalist dimension. They somehow communicated with one another, and they even had similar slogans. There was a desire for change among participants in these ‘movements of the squares,’ ‘occupy movements,’ and so forth. In the US, the representative of that movement to the mainstream political arena was not Donald Trump, but Bernie Sanders. However, Sanders did not make it to be the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. At the same time, we saw the rise of the Tea Party in the US, which was closer to Trump and his agenda. The Tea Party indeed played a very significant role in supporting Trump and mainstreaming his discourse. Despite such differences, we can say that such social movements might be projecting certain social and political attitudes from below. They might also function as some kind of omen for what is about to come. After all, both movements called out the political establishment, created new opportunities, and revealed a desire for change. ÇÖ: In chapter four, you discuss how Syriza's retreat from its key economic promises damaged the party, especially when it comes to the emotional or effective bond between the party and its supporters. Did Syriza's populist promise fail with Alexis Tsipras' capitulation to the demands of the Troika? GV: I could probably offer a simple answer here and say “yes, it did” but I actually think the question is much more complicated. Recall that left-wing populism is constituted by two different elements: a populist one and a leftist one. Of course, Syriza's discourse was centred around the cancellation of austerity, neoliberalism, and so forth, which managed to mobilize the electorate in a populist way. That's why Syriza eventually won power in 2015. When it failed to deliver the key promise around which the affective climate of the time – its whole populist vibe, if you wish – was organized, we could observe a decline of emotions and identifications with the party. The question is whether that failure had to do with populism or with the leftist component of Syriza's politics? The promise to cancel neoliberal austerity actually had to do with Syriza's anti-neoliberalism. Alexis Tsipras in fact continued to speak as a populist even after the capitulation. Does that mean that he remained a populist? That's difficult to answer. If we understand populism as some sort of communication strategy, then we can argue that Alexis Tsipras had to maintain it. However, if we understand populism as an affective bond between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites,’ then this was no longer there. I personally think that it was a combination of the two. To understand populism in power, we need to look at notions such as hegemony. The question would then be: did Syriza manage to establish hegemony after its capitulation? The answer is clearly “no, they did not.” ÇÖ: What do you think about the actual policies of populists in power? Do they govern differently? And would you agree that we seem obsessed with what populist leaders or parties represent rather than focusing on what they actually do? Last but not least, how did the policies Syriza and Trump adopt influence their image? GV: That's another difficult question to answer because it doesn't apply to all populists; different populists implement different policies. Some are more successful than others and this often has little to do with populism. It rather has to do with the context and the relative autonomy that they have. For example, Greece is part of the European Union. When Syriza was governing, Greece was subjected to various austerity packages and memoranda, so the room for manoeuvre was limited. Certain populists simply have greater difficulties developing their own policies. But there is also a very interesting contradiction here. Although Syriza did not manage to implement its key promise and reject austerity in Greece, it did implement policies that benefitted lower social strata. However, former supporters of Syriza on the left were not satisfied with these achievements because the party’s “big betrayal” was still on their minds and in their hearts. Syriza’s efforts to introduce a bit of social policy within a rather restricted economic and political framework did not translate into electoral support. We have seen the popularity of the party decline. As opposed to that, Trump was much more autonomous in power. Many scholars have shown that he did not manage to pass many new policies. I remember that even The Atlantic called Donald Trump the worst president in US history. And if we consider how he handled COVID-19 and other important areas, his policy record was very poor indeed. Despite his poor policy record, his base continued to identify passionately with him. Politics is not necessarily about rationality, it is not necessarily about policy choices, and how well politicians do in terms of implementing them. It's more about the ways in which people identify with a political actor. In 2020, Trump in fact received twelve million more votes  than in 2016 – which is not to overlook that there was much more polarization, and many more people went to vote in 2020

In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, eminent psephologist and political analyst Sanjay Kumar discusses the recently concluded elections in India. Kumar weighs in on some of the unique features of the Indian elections in 2024, the emerging patterns of change, and what the election verdicts mean for democracy and politics in the Global South.   Sanjay Kumar is currently a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He served as the Director of CSDS from January 2014 till January 2020. His main area of research has been elections in India and voting behaviour. Kumar has also conducted research on other themes such as youth in India and the state of democracy in South Asia. His latest books are Elections in India: An Overview (2022) and Women Voters in Indian Elections: Changing Trends and Emerging Patterns (2022). His earlier publications include Post-Mandal Politics in Bihar: Changing Electoral Patterns (2018), Changing Electoral Politics in Delhi: From Caste to Class (2013) and Measuring Voting Behaviour in India (2013). He has been an Election Observer in numerous countries. He is also a prominent face in Indian media.