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CIAO DATE: 10/00
Foreign Policy
Global Newsstand: Hungary Just Says NGO
Ferenc Miszlivetz
*
The Hungarian Political Science Review, Budapest
The spirit of direct involvement and widespread participation in Hungarian politics, which came to a head in the revolutionary days between 1989 and 1990, is headed for the history books. Intellectuals isolated in the countryside, bands of students, and engagé young professionals no longer rush to informal meetings or independent clubs to clamor for sweeping change.
During the 1990s, so-called professional politics slowly moved into the public arena, marginalizing the groups that had built that public arena in the first place. The successful political parties became preoccupied with internal and external power struggles, and a colorful and creative period of political, cultural, and social innovation came to an end.
But there is hope. The Hungarian Review of Political Science, a prominent journal on democratization launched in 1992, sparked a wide debate among politicians and intellectuals last year with a controversial article by Ervin Csizmadia. Csizmadia, a post-1989-generation political scientist, argues that a new network of efficient, professional think tanks offers an alternative to the informal social groups of the past and the big political parties of the present. Indeed, Csizmadia claims that FIDESZ, Hungary's Young Democrats and the anchor of a new ruling center-right coalition, owes its victory in the 1998 parliamentary elections to the intellectual and public relations savvy of a handful of those young think tanks; they played a decisive role in building a new and convincing image for FIDESZ as a party of the future.
This emerging network includes informal professional clubs or groups of business people, educational NGOs, and opinion pollsters. In many cases, their independence, which they take such pains to emphasize, is dubious; their existence precarious, due to a lack of resources; and their identity uncertain. In fact, Csizmadia suggests that most of these organizations should be considered "quasi-think-tanks" — that is, they are more financially and ideologically beholden to established political parties than their Western counterparts. Nevertheless, they exist, even flourish, and as Csizmadia observes, they have already shown that they can influence the political landscape.
Hungary's democracy will not simply move, as some conservative observers seem to believe, from a romantic political movement to strictly professional politics. Its future will be more complex. It lies in the still unpredictable interactions between old and new players, governments and think tanks, and the ability of those players to mobilize intellectual resources.
Endnotes:
*: Ferenc Miszlivetz is a sociologist and senior research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Social Sciences and professor at Daniel Berzsenyi College in Szombathely. Back.