How to silence the lambs? Constructing authoritarian governance in post-transitional Hungary

Abstract

This paper examines a range of arguments put forward to explain how financial surveillance of non-governmental organisations empowers authoritarianism in the post-transitional Hungarian context. In doing so, it attempts to shed light on the limitations of existing surveillance theories regarding the historical component of surveillance tolerance and the different modes of governance in post-communist European countries. It argues that post-transitional disappointment in democratic governance is causing Hungarians to become resigned to political decisions and to support new forms of authoritarian rules. Such a stoic attitude and the historically embedded surveillance culture facilitate the use of monitoring mechanisms that not only target terrorists as an external security threat, but also target NGOs defined as ‘the enemies of national values’. Hungarian authoritarian policies are not facilitated by extended surveillance practices, as Anglo-Saxon theories have regularly argued, but by the way they are used as an instrument of a political deterrence strategy against political opponents.