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In June 2021, the mayor of the small Hungarian village of Hajdubagos unveiled the statue of Admiral Horthy, praising him as a democrat who “fought equally against communism and fascism.” The unveil...

A tanulmány bemutatja, hogyan kapcsolódott össze a születésszabályozás és születéskorlátozás a tömeges nemi erőszakkal az első és a második világháborúban, továbbá hogyan erősítette fel a korábban is meglevő vitákat a nemi erőszak jelensége, illetve ennek milyen törvényi és a nők életdöntéseit befolyásoló gyakorlati következményei voltak. Az első világháború során elkövetett nemierőszak-esetek indították el a nyilvános szakpolitikai vitákat, amelyek nyomán fokozatosan egyre nagyobb teret engedtek a terhesség legális megszakításának. Az 1945-ös tömeges katonai erőszak pedig precedensértékű legalizációt hozott magával, ami után a magyar szabályozás a váltakozó szovjet családpolitikát követte. A cikk bemutatja, hogy a szülész–nőgyógyász lobbi hogyan vett részt a vitákban, illetve hogyan volt képes szakmai és anyagi érdekeit az éppen aktuális szakpolitikai döntések során is képviselni, például az 1952-es népesedéspolitikai kampány során. Az abortuszbizottságok és társadalmi szerepük meghatározónak bizonyultak legalább egy nőgeneráció számára. Az ötvenes évek elején megkezdődő erőteljes medikalizáció és adminisztrációs ellenőrzés a hetvenes évekre megváltoztatta a születésszabályozási rendszert: a terhességmegszakítások dominanciáját fokozatosan felváltotta a modern fogamzásgátló szerek széleskörű használata. Az újabb népesedéspolitikai kampány (1973) és a civil ellenállás, majd a rendszerváltást követő alkotmányos szabályozás körüli kiélezett viták mutatják a mára létrejött kényes egyensúly törékenységét és a kompromisszumos megoldás egyfajta lehetőségét. Fotó: Fortepan / Urbán Tamás

International audience; The emergence of illiberal science policy also raises serious questions about the European scientific authorization process as the rapid spread of illiberal science policies, such as closing accredited study programs and research institutions, privatizing higher education, appointing university leaders based on their loyalty to the government, ignoring quality assurance, etc. demand not only a reaction but also critical analysis. The article applies the theoretical framework of the polypore state (Grzebalska, Pető) to tackle the difficulty lies in understanding the rise of illiberal science policy in Hungary, as it is a twofold case study in both polypore government control/state capture, and neoliberal marketization of higher education. The rapid spread of illiberal science policies, such as closing accredited study programs and research institutions, privatizing higher education, appointing university leaders based on their loyalty to the government, ignoring quality assurance, etc. demands not only a reaction but also critical analysis. 1 In this paper I claim that science policy, as a national competency with an international character, is especially suited to spearhead illiberalization efforts because it offers something no other policy field can offer: academic authorization. Via academic authorization, science policy secures the legitimacy of all other illiberal states' activities. Illiberal politicians and oligarchs alike recognized the importance of educational institutions as sites of knowledge production and transfer, training of loyal supporters, academic authorization, and dissemination of ideas abroad. Illiberal spin doctors have similarly acknowledged that the academic authority granted by these organizations is necessary not only to legitimize their ideological agenda, but more importantly to secure employment for the loyal supporters who will train further loyal supporters, who then will take over the already existing educational and research institutions. In their communications, evidence-based policymaking has been the basis of governance. Illiberal politicos also refer to surveys and research conducted by experts, with the difference that the surveys do not meet academic standards and boast neither authorization from academic institutions nor measurable scientific achievements. 2

The Arabidopsis AtCRK5 protein kinase is involved in the establishment of the proper auxin gradient in many developmental processes. Among others, the Atcrk5-1 mutant was reported to exhibit a delayed gravitropic response via compromised PIN2-mediated auxin transport at the root tip. Here, we report that this phenotype correlates with lower superoxide anion (O2•−) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) levels but a higher nitric oxide (NO) content in the mutant root tips in comparison to the wild type (AtCol-0). The oxidative stress inducer paraquat (PQ) triggering formation of O2•− (and consequently, H2O2) was able to rescue the gravitropic response of Atcrk5-1 roots. The direct application of H2O2 had the same effect. Under gravistimulation, correct auxin distribution was restored (at least partially) by PQ or H2O2 treatment in the mutant root tips. In agreement, the redistribution of the PIN2 auxin efflux carrier was similar in the gravistimulated PQ-treated mutant and untreated wild type roots. It was also found that PQ-treatment decreased the endogenous NO level at the root tip to normal levels. Furthermore, the mutant phenotype could be reverted by direct manipulation of the endogenous NO level using an NO scavenger (cPTIO). The potential involvement of AtCRK5 protein kinase in the control of auxin-ROS-NO-PIN2-auxin regulatory loop is discussed.

In his 1992 article, ‘Today, Freedom is Unfettered in Hungary,’ Columbia University history professor István Deák argued that after 1989 Hungarian historical research enjoyed ‘unfettered freedom. Deák gleefully listed the growing English literature on Hungarian history and hailed the ‘step-by step dismantling of the Marxist-Leninist edifice in historiography’ that he associated with the Institute of History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) under the leadership of György Ránki (1930–88). In this article he argued that the dismantling of communist historiography had started well before 1989. Besides celebrating the establishment of the popular science-oriented historical journal, History (História) (founded in 1979) and new institutions such as the Európa Intézet – Europa Institute (founded in 1990) or the Central European University (CEU) (founded in 1991) as turning points in Hungarian historical research, Deák listed the emergence of the question of minorities and Transylvania; anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; as well as the 1956 revolution. It is very true that these topics were addressed by prominent members of the Hungarian democratic opposition who were publishing in samizdat publications: among them János M. Rainer, the director of the 1956 Institute after 1989, who wrote about 1956. This list of research topics implies that other topics than these listed before had been free to research and were not at all political. This logic interiorised and duplicated the logic of communist science policy and refused to acknowledge other ideological interventions, including his own, while also insisting on the ‘objectivity’ of science. Lastly, Deák concluded that ‘there exists a small possibility that the past may be rewritten again, in an ultra-conservative and xenophobic vein. This is, however, only a speculation.’ Twenty years later Ignác Romsics, the doyen of Hungarian historiography, re-stated Deák's claim, arguing that there are no more ideological barriers for historical research. However, in his 2011 article Romsics strictly separated professional historical research as such from ‘dilettantish or propaganda-oriented interpretations of the past, which leave aside professional criteria and feed susceptible readers – and there are always many – with fraudulent and self-deceiving myths’. He thereby hinted at a new threat to the historical profession posed by new and ideologically driven forces. The question of where these ‘dilettantish or propaganda-oriented’ historians are coming from has not been asked as it would pose a painful question about personal and institutional continuity. Those historians who have become the poster boys of the illiberal memory politics had not only been members of the communist party, they also received all necessary professional titles and degrees within the professional community of historians.

When I received the invitation to contribute to this important volume, there were two major interconnected events related to gender studies research happening in Hungary. The first was the Hungarian government’s decision to revoke the license of a 2-year gender studies master’s program without consulting any professional or scientific institution. The other was that after 2 years of uncertainty, Central European University (CEU) became the first university in the European Union forced to move to another country due to media harassment and legal uncertainty—thus becoming a university in exile. CEU was among those universities that offered a master’s degree in gender studies. Sherry Ortner succinctly asks: “What is the point of opposing neoliberalism if we cannot imagine better ways of living and better futures? How can we be both realistic about the ugly realities of the world today and hopeful about the possibilities of changing them” (2016, p. 60)? In this paper, I attempt both: to oppose neoliberalism and imagine better ways of pursuing research. I will do so by telling two stories: one about the gender studies ban and the other about the attack on academic freedom in Hungary, both of which urge us to think about the personal and theoretical consequences of recent attacks on freedom of science and higher education. I will conclude by proposing a new theoretical framework in order to better understand these recent developments.

International audience; Based on the examination of the positions and activities of women employees from the interwar period until the 1980s in the accessible archival sources of Hungarian intelligence services, this paper claims that since in intelligence women employees have been deployed as "controlling images" of men. It argues that for women, the intelligence service sector is just like any other paid employment: with time, women were gradually integrated in it; and the level of their involvement reflected the level of women's emancipation in the given society. Women working for the intelligence services had to counter workplace discrimination just like any other female employee in more ordinary jobs. However, intelligence work has an additional special feature: sexism and gender-based discrimination are intrinsic parts of it, because the deployment of femininity as "Otherness" is part and parcel of the trade and the result of deliberate methodological decisions.

International audience

The first analytical chapter, based on the documents of the women’s section of the Arrow Cross Party, party press material and memoires, and documents collected by the people’s tribunals, shows who these women were, in what kinds of activities they were engaged in, what kinds of political, professional and material aspirations they had; it argues that most Hungarian far-right women belonged to the first generation of Hungarian intellectual and wage earning women and joined the ranks of the far-right because they did not find the “conservative offer”of the Horthy regime acceptable as it would have forced them into the role of care-takers, but at the same time the leftist alternative, i.e. the trade unions or the social democratic movement was also unappealing for them after the failed 1919 revolution.

Unbundling is the process of disaggregating educational provision into its component parts likely for delivery by multiple stakeholders, often through public-private partnerships and the use of digital approaches (Swinnerton et al., 2018). A neutral definition, it relates to a process that is all but neutral to higher education. Having done research on unbundling South African and English universities, on a project focused on teaching and learning processes, I could not help but realise the extent to which this process affects much more than student learning and online teaching material curation patterns. Under the premise of widening access, it contributes to a potentially profoundly gendered casualisation, automation, deprofessionalisation, and fragmentation of academic labour to new unforeseen degrees. In this, unbundling reveals a new frontier of exploitation and exclusion at universities that we need to be aware of and organise against.

The second analytical chapter, through the life stories of “notable” and “notorious” female Arrow Cross Party members shows that the invisibilization and forgetting of woman perpetrators was already happening in the 1930s and 1940s because female members of the Arrow Cross Party never received prominence or acknowledgement from their party’s male leaders and because after the Second World War the people’s tribunals sought to re-establish the traditional gender hierarchy and therefore posited the deeds of woman perpetrators as exceptions to the rule.

This chapter puts into dialogue the lives of far-right women in politics (intellectuals, relatives of party functionaries, administrators, artists, and simple criminals) who rejected both the “conservative offer” and the leftist emancipation project in the interwar Hungary with the women participating in contemporary radical politics rejecting both the neoliberal emancipation project and feminisms. What can we learn from historical-comparative analogies with regard to far-right women’s political mobilization? Using the lenses of anti-modernist emancipation and “gender as symbolic glue” in the two contexts based on testimonies of far-right women activists in the people’s courts after 1945 and in interviews made with contemporary far-right women activists about their motivations to join the movements, I argue that activists from both historical periods intended to create alternatives in terms of values, institutions, and symbolic systems as a critique of other gender regimes.

The fifth chapter discusses why no visual representation of women perpetrators exists. Though Hungarian state archives hold a plethora of films, newsreels, and press photos made during and after the Second World War, there are hardly any visual traces of far-right women. The existing pictures are of bureaucrats, wives of politicians, and sometimes of uniformed women who were obviously photographed for propaganda purposes. During the people’s court processes seven Hungarian women were sentenced to death for war crimes, still, in the archives there is only one picture of an anonymous woman’s execution. The chapter analyzes the symbolic goals of the efforts, which aimed at the erasure of the visual traces of female perpetrators, and their more than symbolic consequences.

Leseprobe ----- Bibliographie: Pető, Andrea: Without Remedy: Lessons Learned from a Gendered Analysis of the 2018 Hungarian General Elections, Femina Politica - Zeitschrift fur feministische Politikwissenschaft, 2-2018, S. 152-158. https://doi.org/10.3224/feminapolitica.v27i2.13

Based on a comparative analysis of the ideological and policy tools of illiberal ruling parties in Hungary and Poland, this paper makes the case that the 21st century Central European illiberal transformation is a process deeply reliant on gender politics, and that a feminist analysis is central to understanding the current regime changes, both in terms of their ideological underpinnings, and with respect to their modus operandi. It argues that: 1. opposition to the liberal equality paradigm has become a key ideological space where the illiberal alternative to the post-1989 (neo)liberal project is being forged; 2. family mainstreaming and anti-gender policies have been one of the main pillars on which the illiberal state has been erected, and through which security, equality and human rights have been redefined; 3. illiberal transformation operates through the appropriation of key concepts, tools and funding channels of liberal equality politics which have been crucial to women's rights. The article describes some new and distinct challenges illiberal governance poses to the women's rights, feminist civil society and emancipatory politics in Hungary and Poland.

Using two case studies under the Christian-conservative Orban government, this essay explores how ‘future memories’ are being constructed and sustained by revisionist history writing about the history of communism, especially in instrumentalist memories using pedagogical instruments: the secondary literature curriculum and the Museum of Trianon. It argues that canonization revised by counter canonization is necessarily opening space for revisionism.