Transformation of Slovak and Hungarian Memoryscapes: Reimagination of the History of the West, the East and the Other Nation Under Contemporary Crisis Perceptions

The starting point of the paper is two somewhat consensual findings. One is that the societies of Central and Eastern Europe have long been imbued with the idea of ​​catching up with the West - even if, under the idea of material or habitual convergence or modernization, various aspirations could be detected with quite different imaginations about the West (Melegh, 2006; Trencsényi, 2023). The other statement is that the socio-cultural and political commitment behind the idea of Westernization has recently been partially disrupted (Zielonka, 2018; Fukuyama, 2018; Krastev and Holmes, 2020). This research would like to scrutinize how these recently formulated narratives - being increasingly sceptical towards the ‘imagined West’, and questioning the need of convergence towards it - deploy discursive practices of questioning/rewriting/overwriting the earlier widely-shared historical narratives about a ‘perennial’ pathway of Westernization or its semantic counterparts (‘catching up’, ‘convergence’, ‘modernization’, ‘evolution of citizenry’). What can be hypothesized is the collision of the recently emerging disruptive narratives with the inherited earlier ones. Based on this, the research scrutinizes the Slovak and Hungarian political discourses - i.e. historical images of politicians’ and protagonists’ speeches and writings - along the following research questions: 1. If the ‘imaginary West’ has been not regarded any more by some strands of public discourse as an ideal type of social structures to be achieved - indeed, the West might be reported to contain dangers, something to be avoided or guarded against - then how this emerging West-scepticism transforms the remembrance of national history and the history of relationship with the West? 2. And how does the ‘imagined East’, against which or away from which the convergence should have been realized, appear within this changing remembrance? 3. These two research questions are supplemented with a third question. Along the recent vague cultural boundary formation towards the ‘imaginary West’ from the side of Slovak and Hungarian national public discourses, a special interest has emerged towards the other neighboring nation, triggering reflexes of feeling cultural proximity or common interests. This newly formulated interest is in contradiction with the inherited image of Slovaks and Hungarians as 'neighboring foreign nations', remembered as antagonistic rivalries. It is reasonable to assume that this new interest towards the neighboring nations rewrites or overwrites some way the image of the past about the neighboring 'arch-enemy'. The third research question therefore asks about this change, again at the level of historical narratives: in what storytellings is this new 'memory of regional brotherhood' embodied? The scrutiny of these questions is based on the analysis of Slovak and Hungarian political debates, not only in written forms, but in podcasts and TV programmes. The co-author of the paper is Petronella Lilla Szabó (Corvinus University of Budapest).