Following months of escalating rhetoric against CEU, the Hungarian government finally fired its shot across the bow. Last week, populist Fidesz Leader Viktor Orbán introduced legislation to parliament that would effectively expel CEU from Hungary, where the university has been based for the past 26 years.
The
new proposed amendments to Hungary’s 2011 law on National Higher Education affect
CEU alone among the 28 foreign universities now operating in Hungary. The
amendments are so draconian, target CEU so directly, and were introduced so
suddenly that they can only be read as an attempt to shut down the university.
Any lingering doubts that these actions are politically motivated must be set
to rest in light of the government’s own statements. In the days that followed, Orbán himself gave an interview stating that "George Soros's university" is "cheating" and engaging in "unfair competition" with Hungarian universities.
To
say this came as a shock is an understatement. I have lived in Hungary and
taught at CEU for well over a decade as professor in the International
Relations Department. Although an American citizen, I have now lived in
Budapest longer than any other city in my life. I have Hungarian permanent
residence. I own a flat in the downtown and have numerous Hungarian friends and
a Hungarian partner. I am a great fan of this lovely country and its wonderful
people and have invited many friends and dozens of colleagues to conferences,
workshops and talks at CEU. They return home, seemingly without exception, with
fond memories of the place. In short, I consider Hungary my home, and it breaks
my heart that I may now have to leave.
The
question on all our minds is: Why? What is the government doing? What is its
real goal?
It
is true that Orbán, once a recipient of a Soros scholarship, has no great love
for a university, many of whose faculty, staff and students have at times
criticized the government (including myself). But CEU has had good working
relations with every post-communist government in Hungary, and few had any
inkling that the government might go quite this far.
The
first possible explanation is the government’s own stated motive, which is that
they merely aim to bring all foreign universities into compliance
with Hungarian law. However, if compliance were the concern, the government
should have entered into a dialogue with CEU administrators rather than issuing
a fait accompli in parliament and rushing it through to a
vote. What is more, CEU is already in full compliance with Hungarian laws on
higher education, as verified by Hungary’s own Educational Authority. CEU
has never once fallen afoul of Hungarian law. The leadership has in fact given the game away by admitting it is going after CEU with these amendments; this is of a piece with the
government’s long-running campaign against Soros. Szilard Nemeth, vice-chair of the Fidesz party said in
January this year:
"[Soros-backed] organizations must be pushed back with all available tools...I think they must be swept out, and now I believe the international conditions are right for this with the election of a new president [Trump]."
We can thus safely dispense with the notion that the government is not engaging in a politically motivated attack against CEU.
"[Soros-backed] organizations must be pushed back with all available tools...I think they must be swept out, and now I believe the international conditions are right for this with the election of a new president [Trump]."
We can thus safely dispense with the notion that the government is not engaging in a politically motivated attack against CEU.
The
second possibility is that Orbán is going after CEU, but is not really serious about expelling it from Hungary. Despite the gathering clouds, few in or around the university believed that the
government really meant to break its ties with CEU. After all, the
contributions CEU has made to Hungary are substantial—ranging from its
significant tax receipts to the business revenue generated around CEU’s
downtown campus to the deep ties between CEU and other Hungarian academic
institutions and civil society. In return, Hungary has been an outstanding home
for CEU, with excellent services and infrastructure and an easy and welcoming
urban community. Truly, as the rector has said, CEU has been good to Hungary,
and Hungary has been good to CEU.
For
all these reasons, many believe that the government does not really want to
close down CEU, but is instead politicking in the run-up to the 2018 elections,
in which the Fidesz leadership faces a mounting challenge from the even
further-right Jobbik Party. In this view, the government simply wants to put on
a political show with its fight against CEU. The “Soros University” is a
perfect target in view of the fact that Soros and all things Soros have become
a convenient whipping boy for nationalists and demagogues the world over. CEU
is, in this view, collateral damage of ideological outbidding on the part of a
party seeking to maintain its political relevance as the ground shifts beneath
its feet. If this is right, then the government’s actions are inherently
self-limited and can be managed.
However,
there is still a third possibility. And this looks to me increasingly likely as
the government seeks to ram through the legislation as quickly as possible
without any meaningful dialogue with the university: Orbán is making a hard
turn toward authoritarianism and wants to clamp down on independent
intellectual life.
Fidesz
has in fact been moving in this direction since the 2010 elections brought the
party unchecked power with two-thirds majority in a unicameral parliament. Over
the years, they have curtailed media freedom, attacked the
independence of the courts, altered election laws to make it much harder for
the opposition to win, undermined human rights protections, and used
clientelism and patronage to gain control over the bureaucratic state. What
Orbán has done in Hungary is merely a lighter version of what Vladimir Putin
has done in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
Indeed, one
of the steps along the road to autocracy is gaining control over the county’s
intellectual life, which means civil society organizations and universities.
After the Bolsheviks came to power, Lenin undertook mass arrests and
deportations of professors and scientists judged to be political opponents; the
old Russian intelligentsia was seen as a rival to his “party of a new type.”
Stalin too conducted cultural purges of writers deemed insufficiently patriotic
during its war with Nazi Germany. Pol Pot famously murdered intellectuals and
city residents in an attempt to create a classless peasant society. Myanmar’s
ruling military junta shut down the capital’s universities in 1991 to prevent
students from protesting government crackdown of pro-democracy activists.
Today’s
motley crew of despots might not be seeking to replicate the killing fields of
Cambodia. However, they have found numerous other ways to establish control
over universities, which are after all competing hubs of cultural and civic power. During
last year’s failed coup attempt, Erdogan effectively fired tens of thousands of civil
servants, teachers and university deans--all in the name of rooting
out foreign influence and domestic traitors.
In
Russia, Vladimir Putin has sought to elevate technical departments over
humanities and social sciences, with the ultimate aim of downsizing or merging
these departments with others to establish greater control over their academic
output. Currently, the government is using the same kind of legalistic techniques used by the
Orbán government to shut down the European University of St. Petersburg. The Russian authorities announced that they planned to
revoke the university’s license due to building code violations
such as the lack of a fitness room and the absence of an information stand
against alcoholism. The university has operated in Russia since 1994. The
Russian government has also revived Soviet era regulations requiring academics to
report their foreign contacts and international travel.
We are now through the looking glass. An early generation of pro-western
democratic leaders, including Viktor Orbán and Vaclav Klaus, have since become anti-western
illiberal elder statesmen.
As a young pro-democracy activist, Orbán used to defend Soros institutions:
“We
have been shocked by the recent disgraceful attacks against the Soros
Foundation and George Soros himself. By supporting the younger generation, the
movement of special colleges he has helped establish a more open and free
atmosphere in Hungary. Seeing the difficult situation of higher education, we
think that newer generations will also need the unselfish support of the Soros
foundation which we hope they will continue to give in the future too.”
FIDESZ,
1992.
What
tragic irony if Orbán—the man who helped usher Hungary out of one-party rule in the late 1980s—is the very man who leads it back into darkness. It should be
clear to all that the real loser here is not CEU, but the Hungarian people.
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