Népi and urbánus
We discussed the interwar népi-urbánus vita, with a view to understanding its context, semantics and contemporary articulation. Commonly referred to in English as the dispute between (agrarian) populists and urbanists (or ‘metropolitans’), and undoubtedly a major component of public political discourse since 1989, we began by reaching consensus on what it was not: a clash of two opposing worldviews, one rural and one urban. Rather, it was one cultural response to the economic and political crisis that gripped Europe and North America after the 1929 Wall Street crash, the articulation of two historically-constituted structures of understanding, from which alternative versions of modernisation emerge.
Where népi intellectuals distinguished themselves from ‘epigone’ romantics of the peasant myth, and urbánus ideas of the 1930s evolved from a critique of népi thought, the vita did nothing to clarify or even produce consensus on the terms of debate: nép, polgár, humanizmus, faj, szocializmus, harmadik út (the ‘third way’). All participants were reformist intellectuals hostile to the status quo, to the inequitable distribution of land, and to capitalism, and socialism, as it had been tried and tested in Hungary. We agreed that, as the 1930s wore on, the vita was frequently an exercise in antisemitism by other means, but that the critique of the city held primacy over resentment of Jews.
The interwar népi generation’s failed attempts to collaborate with the Gömbös government, and the various retractions made once the Anti-Jewish Laws came into being, provided a stark contrast with the utilisation of népi and urbánus narratives by contemporary urban élites vying for power. Indeed, the great bedrock of modern Hungarian discord had been appropriated and utilised by the Socialist state from 1948 onwards, and enjoyed a revival from the mid-1980s onwards, in oppositionist circles initially. The ideas of Pierre-André Taguieff and others helped clarify populism as a syncretic form of political speech, a distinctive style of political mobilisation, the very hybrid nature of which allowed the incorporation of Leftist and Rightist ideologies; its conceptual flexibility makes it attractive to both democratic and authoritarian/totalitarian structures. The polarisation of Hungarian politics today is not a straightforward continuation of interwar polemics, revived after ‘hiatus’ of Communism, but perhaps rather the reproduction of a symbolic politics, frequently dislocated from actual social cleavages, which mediates and revises history to suit. If one things has remained constant throughout, though, it is the utter instability of the term polgár.