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  • Walled Worlds“Illiberal Democracy” and the CEU Affair

Remember the good old days when the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to herald the arrival of a new global order of democracy and good-for-everyone open markets? The extreme teleological version of this idea was Francis Fukuyama’s conception of the end of history, according to which a new liberal-democratic consensus was supposedly going to usher us into the final stage of world development.1

Historians, of course, know that such ideas are nonsense, that history never ends, and that things usually turn out far differently (and often much worse) than the actors of any given moment anticipate. A case in point: the striking tilt toward “illiberal democracy” and authoritarian capitalism that has gained momentum across the world since the early 2000s. This movement is now fully in power in Russia (no surprise there) and has spread to the United States, Brazil, India, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary. Although institutions of higher learning in the United States and much of Europe have not (yet) felt the dictates of would-be strong men, the diktat is clearly on in Central Europe and Eurasia, where recent academic debates over identity and history have proven to be, well, anything but academic. Though international pushback in early 2018 led the Polish government to backtrack somewhat on its controversial “Holocaust law,” the general pattern in the region seems to point in the opposite direction: toward a hardening of state-imposed censorship.

The latest proof of this came in December 2018, just in time for the holiday season, when Central European University (CEU) announced plans to relocate all of its US-accredited degree programs from Budapest to Vienna as of September 2019. The culmination of a two-year struggle with the Hungarian government, CEU’s decision is nothing if not ironic, since the school was originally founded in the early 1990s to stand as an institutional rejection of communist authoritarianism, only to now find itself [End Page 1] shuttered by a new generation of post-communist authoritarians.2 But irony aside, the encroachment on the free operation of the university in Hungary is most important for what it says about the growing intolerance of our times. In particular the marked impatience with open academic expression has led to direct challenges to the autonomy of institutions of learning and culture—from universities to archives and museums. The CEU affair is only one example. Our concern with these unsettling developments has prompted us to write this editorial.

One of the dominant motifs in the politicized censure of CEU is uncomfortably familiar to many of us. Much as in the United States, the academic community in Hungary has been caricatured by conservative critics “as a den of subversive leftists, cultural Marxists, and NGOs” whose members are supposedly out to undermine “the Hungarian government and Christianity” and even “turn Hungarian youth gay, among sundry other complaints,” writes a CEU graduate student in a recent e-mail message to our office.

The go-to poster child for this kind of sentiment among populist leaders in Europe and the United States is George Soros, the Jewish Hungarian financier and philanthropist whose commitment to liberal causes has turned him for his critics into a would-be purveyor of all things “cosmopolitan” and antinational. It is thus no accident that CEU’s program in gender studies has been targeted for special abuse as a supposedly existential threat to the sacred national institutions of heterosexual marriage and the traditional family.3 In fact, the now familiar link between cosmopolitanism and Soros, and the [End Page 2] antisemitic dog whistle his name represents, began in Hungary with attacks denouncing CEU as “Soros University,” a term that Western media reports often repeated unwittingly and that risks simplifying the broader dynamics of the government-CEU standoff in the process.4

Regardless of the substance of the attacks, one thing seems clear: CEU’s forced departure from Budapest marks a dramatic shift from the early post-Soviet period, when the possible return of communist dictatorship was seen as the preeminent threat to the future of open societies in Eastern Europe.5 Looking back on things now, the ideas...

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