Overheated Underdogs: Civilizational Analysis and Migration on the Danube-Tisza Interfluve

Abstract

ABSTRACTDrawing on four decades of field research on the Danube-Tisza interfluve, the Western zone of the Great Hungarian Plain, this paper places the “overheating” of the post-Cold War era in a longue durée perspective. The first section traces a millennium of history in terms of multi-directional migrations and civilizational encounters of various kinds: between sedentary agriculturalists and pastoral nomads, between Christian and Muslim agrarian orders, and between capitalist and socialist industrial orders. The Hungarian variant of Marxism-Leninism (unlike most other variants) relied considerably on material incentives to households. It attached high priority to transforming the countryside, which experienced an effervescent involution or “overheating” in the last decades of socialism. Since 1991, however, the market socialist synthesis has given way to a peripheral variant of Western market capitalism. Overheating is no longer a phenomenon of the rural economy, which has lost the dynamism of the socialist decades and experiences deprivation in absolute as well as relative forms. Rather, overheating is to be observed in the symbolic dimension of political legitimation, as populist political parties vie with each other in nationalist rhetoric. This overheating was evident in negative attitudes towards strangers seeking to transit this part of Hungary in the summer of 2015, a migratory process which provided a challenge to the whole of the European Union. It is argued that these attitudes in rural Hungary can be explained in terms of the ressentiments of a population which has been palpably thrown back into an underdog position on the margins of Western capitalism.