András Bozóki. <i>Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals: The Case of Hungary, 1977–1994</i>

This is an extraordinary book that is sure to be regarded as a landmark study. It is very ambitious and equally long and offers a powerful account, both extensive and intensive, of the complex Hungarian transition to democracy between the years 1977 and 1994—from the post-Helsinki reemergence of semi-autonomous civil society groupings to the second free election in postcommunist Hungary, normally considered by political scientists to mark the “consolidation” of democracy.András Bozóki has been a professor of political science at Central European University since 1993, first in Budapest and since 2020 in Vienna, after the Fidesz-controlled government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán forced the university to relocate. He has long been a prominent public intellectual. In 1989, he participated in the Round Table negotiations and served briefly (2005–06) as minister of culture in the Socialist–Alliance of Free Democrat coalition government of Ferenc Gyurcsány.Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals builds on Bozóki’s entire career as an academic political scientist and public intellectual, and on his extensive list of monographs and academic articles published in both Hungarian and English. It draws on a vast range of primary and secondary sources, including the eight-volume transcripts of the 1989 Round Table negotiations that Bozóki co-edited;1 on his accompanying edited volume, The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy;2 and on extensive interviews with participants in the Hungarian transition.The book contributes to at least three important streams of scholarship: the literature on transitions to democracy in Hungary and in Eastern Europe more generally; the narrative history of postcommunist Hungary; and the sociology of intellectuals. It is with the latter theme that the book as a whole is primarily concerned, and indeed in many ways this work can be seen as a redemption of the promise offered by Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe, a collection of essays Bozóki edited in the aftermath of the 1989 transitions.3 The role of the intellectual—a question with both empirical and normative dimensions—is taken up at length in the book’s first chapter. Presenting a tour-de-force literature review, Bozóki places particular emphasis on the classic writings of Karl Mannheim and the more recent work of Alvin Gouldner, Zygmunt Bauman, and Jerome Karabel, each of whom accentuates the distinctive independence and potentially critical function of modern intellectuals. In many ways the book’s most important reference point is György Konád and Iván Szelényi’s Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power.4 A major work of Hungarian samizdat literature written in the mid-1970s, suppressed by the communist regime, and only published abroad, in 1979, that book presented a withering critique of the way party-linked professional and managerial intellectual elites were becoming a new ruling class under Hungarian state socialism.Bozóki draws on the critical impulses of Konrád and Szelényi but, writing from the vantage point of the communist regime’s downfall, he argues that the role of intellectuals has been much more complicated, and in some ways more critical, than Konrád and Szelényi imagined back in 1975. Bozóki contends that, for a variety of reasons, intellectuals as a group played an important role in the opposition to communism; in its ultimate, eventual downfall; and in the creation of a new, postcommunist order. But this does not mean that intellectuals as a group have ever had the coherence that Konrád and Szelényi suggested or that they represented a “new class” on the road to power. Bozóki argues that Hungarian intellectuals under the post-1956 Kádár regime inhabited a complex and shifting world of individuals, groups, journals, and ideas. This assemblage began to coalesce in the late 1970s, assumed organizational form in the late 1980s, and rose to prominence during the crisis that led to the downfall of the regime. Its leaders, coming together in the Opposition Roundtable that negotiated the transition to democracy, eventually became the leaders of the most important parties to emerge after 1989: the reformed Hungarian Socialist Party (Magyar Szocialista Párt [MSZP]), the Hungarian Democratic Forum (Magyar Demokrata Fórum [MDF]), the Alliance of Free Democrats (Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége [SZDSZ]), and the Federation of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége [Fidesz]). Then, having played a huge role in the creation of an incipient liberal democracy, many of these same intellectuals became disenchanted, leading new social movements such as the Democratic Charter and pulling back from official political life.Bozóki discusses these developments in great detail, charting the complex trajectory of a very complex set of intellectual groupings and initiatives. In chapter 2 he outlines the blend of coercion and consent that characterized the Kádár regime, its strategies of selective repression and co-optation, and the limits within which critical intellectuals were forced to maneuver if they wished to be true to their intellectual vocations or to the commitment to intellectual and civic freedom (Václav Havel’s “living in truth”) that flowed from this vocation. In chapters 3 and 4, he focuses on dissident intellectuals and their “culture of critical discourse,” with special attention to the samizdat journals Beszélő, Hírmondó, Demokrata, and Égtájak között. Here Bozóki offers a fascinating intellectual history of the range of viewpoints among the major oppositionist groupings, with particular attention to emergent tensions (urban versus rural, nationalist versus cosmopolitan) that assumed greater importance once the opposition eventually succeeded.If these early chapters offer penetrating accounts of the sociology of knowledge, in the chapters that follow Bozóki turns to a more conventional “political science” approach that is equally insightful. Chapter 5 offers an account of divisions within the ruling Communist party and between party leaders and technocratic elites; the intersections between these and opposition intellectuals; and the impacts of this complex dynamic on broader regime change. Chapter 6 provides a nuanced description of the complex Round Table negotiations between the opposition coalition and the ruling elite, the difficult political work required to maintain opposition unity, and the “handshake transition” that the Round Table produced. Chapter 7 continues this analysis into the immediate aftermath of regime change, analyzing the ways that opposition groups became organized into political parties and the ways that they engineered legislative and constitutional changes to institute a multi-party democracy; pressed a “Four Yes” referendum that strongly curbed the state privileges of the incumbent Socialist party; and orchestrated the first free and fair competitive elections in March 1990, which resulted in a new government led by the formerly dissident MDF, a center-right nationalist party that included some harder-right tendencies.Chapter 8, “Interpreting Democracy: The New Movement Intellectuals,” is in some ways the book’s culminating chapter. Here Bozóki analyzes the breakdown of the carefully negotiated unity of the anti-communist opposition; the resurfacing of old differences that had been successfully marginalized and the emergence of new divisions; the development of a new stratum of professional politicians; and the growth of new partisan identities and investments. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s work, Bozóki argues that while dissident intellectuals had been able briefly to play decisive roles as “legislators” of a new liberal democratic regime, they now found themselves in a new role, as “interpreters” and “movement intellectuals,” furnishing critical interpretations and normative arguments in a newly unshackled civil society. Much of this chapter focuses on the rise and eventual eclipse of the Democratic Charter movement between 1991 and 1994. In a recent Review of Democracy interview, Bozóki neatly describes the movement: “Around 1991 as democratic politics was established, new pro-democracy initiatives emerged which became critical towards not only the former communist regime, but to the new political parties and the behavior of the new elite. These critical intellectuals participated in a new social movement called the Democratic Charter [DC]. Spokespersons of the DC criticized the new government and the new parliament in the name of democracy. Hungary had a democratically elected government, but when it abused some basic norms a civic movement started saying ‘we represent democracy better than you.’ Speakers of the DC claimed that they ‘represent democracy as a whole’ while the government followed its own partisan interests. That contributed significantly to a new debate about the content of the new democracy.”5Yet for good or ill, Bozóki argues, that new debate was eventually eclipsed by the consolidation of a liberal democracy centered on competitive elites in which moral concerns were increasingly instrumentalized, and critical intellectuals were driven ever more to the margins of political life. The book’s final chapter is a kind of appendix, co-authored with Ágnes Simon, offering a descriptive-statistical account of shifts in elite composition over time and the post-1990 rise of a more Schumpeterian/Weberian elite of professional politicians. With the parliamentary elections of 1994, in which the MSZP defeated the MDF and a peaceful alternation of government was achieved, Hungary’s “rolling transition” rolled to a stop, as the new regime seemed firmly consolidated.Thus concludes the volume. Bozóki sticks firmly to his historical focus and provides a deeply researched and resolutely dispassionate analysis of events and processes. It is interesting that Bozóki offers no discussion of his own role in the processes he describes and no reflection on how his experience has enriched his analytical perspective. Such determined “value neutrality” makes some sense given the hyperpoliticization of academic life under communism, and the return of this hyperpoliticization under Orbán. A subtheme of the book is the importance of certain boundaries—between description and prescription, and analysis and action, as well as between academic institutions and electoral politics—that are central to critical inquiry, civil freedom, and liberal democracy itself: boundaries that are today in jeopardy. At the same time, it is the source of some frustration that Bozóki, a writer who has been continuously engaged in both analytic and normative arguments about the fate of democracy in Hungary, remains so wedded to a merely factual analysis of the years in question.While Bozóki draws widely and deeply on a range of scholarly literature, and offers the concept of “rolling transition” as his own theoretical contribution, his book really is focused almost entirely on the Hungarian case during a seventeen-year period. There are a few places where the contrasts with the experience of Solidarity during the Polish transition are developed to good effect and a few places where the Hungarian case is likened to the similar Czech case. But little is done to indicate how representative Hungary is of a more general “rolling transition,” how many other cases there are, and how this “type” of transition fits into a broader typology. Furthermore, by concluding the analysis with the consolidation of democracy in 1994, Bozóki says very little about subsequent processes of de-democratization, which indicate that the “consolidation” of democracy is a very precarious and fragile achievement that is easily undone—something about which he has written extensively elsewhere and to which he alludes, in passing, in his conclusion (see especially 532–34, 547–49).At the same time, it is absurd to take a book to task for not being a different book than the one its author chose to write; and Bozóki’s resolutely historical and empirical focus allows him to produce an account of the Hungarian transition of unparalleled richness and depth. Moreover, the book does contain glimmerings of remarkable insight into the current state of Hungarian politics and the sources of its post-2010 descent, under Orbán, into a form of electoral authoritarianism (Bozóki uses the term “hybrid regime” in an important 2018 Democratization article co-authored with Dániel Hegedűs).6Bozóki comments extensively on the deep urban/rural divide among opposition intellectuals in the 1980s, contrasting the Central European and indeed cosmopolitan concerns of the journal Hírmondó with the more ethnic and national concerns of Demokrata. He explores the way the memory of the brief and brutally suppressed uprising of 1956 was crucial to the anti-communist dissidents and how the common insistence on keeping that memory alive and honoring its martyrs masked important differences: while liberal oppositionists saw the repression as a violation of human rights and democracy, nationalist oppositionists saw it as a Soviet-backed violation of the nation. He makes clear that these differences contributed to the post-1989 “divorce” of the nationalist MDF and the more progressive forces associated with SZDSZ and Fidesz, and that this dynamic helps us to understand the role that Fidesz has since assumed.Bozóki presents a particularly insightful discussion of Fidesz (356–66), pointing out that at its center was a “circle of young rural intellectuals” composed mainly of lawyers and economists, whose leader was Orbán, and that this leadership core was “forged so strong[ly] by common origin from rural cities, masculinity, respect for social hierarchy, and the desire to successfully get to the top of the hierarchy” (365). Bozóki emphasizes the dynamism and the pragmatism of the Fidesz leadership and the organization’s initial commitment to liberal democratic principles, but also the radicalism of Orbán and the signs of his resentment towards many members of the slightly older Budapest-based intellectual elite associated with SZDSZ. Bozóki does not in any way indicate or imply that the early Fidesz was foreordained to become the increasingly authoritarian party it became in the twenty-first century. He notes differences among its leadership, and defections by the early 1990s (Bozóki knows of this firsthand, for he was himself a Fidesz activist and spokesperson in 1989–90, though there is no mention of this in the book). But he makes it clear that this authoritarian potential was there from the beginning in Orbán and those close to him.7The most brilliant part of this excellent book is Bozóki’s careful discussion of the ethical and practical benefits and costs of the negotiated transition, and it is here that Bozóki comments briefly, but profoundly, on the contingent but path-dependent links between the transition and the recent rise of authoritarianism. The accomplishments of the negotiated transition were substantial and indeed heroic: a nonviolent and peaceful transfer of power, substantial constitutional reform through legal means, and the establishment of “the political institutional system of pluralist democracy” (316). At the same time, the transition had three serious deficiencies: (1) the negotiation was elite-centered and not a broad public and representative process, and it thus lacked a certain democratic legitimacy; (2) the “handshake” involved a change of regime that allowed the ruling Socialist party to re-form and to participate in the electoral process, and for some of its more liberal former leaders to remain players in political life, which affronted some of those staunch anti-communists who sought harsh retributive justice; and (3) the Rawlsian “social contract” that established the new regime deliberately bracketed out many of the most contentious questions, especially those linked to privatization and class inequality and to national identity.Bozóki does not argue that there was any viable alternative to such a settlement. But he does note that it laid the foundation for the eventual growth of mass disaffection with the political system and its distributive consequences. And that those liberals and leftists who helped to organize this transition weakened their own credibility and contributed to their own eventual political marginalization. As Bozóki notes, the regime change “brought about a new cleavage in the Hungarian society, which led to the outcome that elitist liberal democracy was replaced by populist ‘illiberal democracy’ two decades later” (317). And, as he concludes in chapter 6, “It would take another book to investigate whether (and if so, how and to what extent) the former participants of the regime change are responsible for the political changes that happened two decades later. This is still a burning question of political debates” (317).If in the period covered in the book Hungary was a case of liberal democratic transition led by intellectuals, today Hungary is the paradigm case, for concerned liberals and for the right-wing populists who hate them, of the successful destruction of liberal democracy by democratic means. But history has no end. And if Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals teaches anything, it is that intellectual critique can matter, authoritarianism can falter, and greater freedom is always possible.

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