Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

GYÖRGY LIGETI & TAMÁS NYESTE
Right-Wing Extremism in Hungary
The following article is intended to present the various types of extreme right-wing activities
and the extent of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Hungary. We will also briefl y describe a few
destructive confl icts affecting Hungarian youth. The article will present some existing peda-
gogical approaches and their effectiveness, and show how the public and private sphere are
handling the problem. Yet the main objective is to outline emerging forms of extreme right-
wing activities. Emphasis will be placed on describing various right-wing phenomena and their
causes, for it is crucial to highlight how extreme right-wing ideology has been gaining ground
in the past fi fteen years and that treatment of the issue has not yet started at the collective
social level.
We are convinced that right-wing extremism ought to be studied not as an isolated phe- phe-
nomenon, but as a social fact closely interrelated with other observable facts. Consequently,
we claim that while extreme right-wing ideology is shared by only a few, unforeseen social
changes or events may easily prompt masses to turn towards racism and exclusion. In other
words, the social base of right-wing extremism is, in fact, wider than as it may seem at fi rst
sight.
The situation in Hungary
Before going into the forms of post-socialist right-wing extremism, xenophobia, and racism,
we have to briefl y outline Hungary’s history and geopolitical position. Hungary was a nation
successively occupied by the Turkish and Habsburg Empires from the middle of the 1500s to
1918, then ruled by Nazi Germany after World War I, only to fall victim to Soviet occupation
after World War II. As a result, the past 500 years or so have been more devoted to the attain-
ment of independence from other nations rather than to democratic civilian development. The
values and philosophy of the enlightenment were hard pressed to reach this country on the far
eastern end of Europe. Capitalist entrepreneurship and the ethos of social responsibility and
free individual individual choice choice could not take root so markedly as it did in Western Europe and North
America.
While Hungary had been used to being an economically and culturally signifi cant multiramultira- cial state until the end of World War I, the Treaty of Trianon in 1920 reduced the country to a
small, relatively homogenous state. At the end of World War II, Hungary found itself on the
side of the losers as the last satellite of Nazi Germany, and – like all other small East Central
European states – it built up a Soviet-type social system of planned economy that lasted until
the political changes of 1989.
With the sweeping political changes of the late 1980s, however, Hungary had the opportuniopportuni- ty to establish a multiparty democracy, build a market economy based on private property, and
to lay lay down the foundations of social, religious, and ideological pluralism, whose fi rst pillar
96 Right-Wing Extremism in Hungary