History: the Teacher of Hybrid Regimes? – A Case Study on the Hungarian Academic Elite

The post-2010 authoritarian political turn in Hungary has had its consequences for the Hungarian academic field. In the second half of the 2010s, the field was significantly affected by the political elite's desire to change existing cultural structures and redistribute resources. The Orbán government created a parallel network of research institutes in the humanities and, to a lesser extent, in the social sciences, brought the funding of basic research and the network of research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under government control, and forced Central European University to leave the country. A „model change” of higher education, with the appointment of non-recallable political elites to university boards led to the exclusion of Hungary from vital EU programmes such as Horizon and Erasmus. As a consequence of these processes, the autonomy of the academic field is significantly weakened. My paper is a case study of the academic field of history in an autocratic regime. It is part of my research project entitled Elite Circulation and Instrumentalisation: The Transformation of the Hungarian Academic Field. History is a discipline that has always been in the crossfire of politics because its results are easy to use for ideological purposes and, unlike many other scientific fields, the public has a considerable interest in them. It can be argued that for authoritarian regimes, history is even more important for the purposes of identity and memory politics, than for liberal democracies. In Hungary the conflicts around national history - and thus the newly established institutions - have crystallised around the controversial issues of twentieth-century Hungarian history on the one hand, and the ancestral history of the Hungarian people, which is of paramount importance for national identity, on the other. More recently, the problem of relations with Russia in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war has led to new conflicts between the government and some historians.