Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state ...itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ‘organized over-world’, the ‘state employing mafia methods’ and the ’adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework.The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules.
The unanticipated and unsolicited Russian aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 highlighted the urgency of updating general assumptions about post-communist countries. The war has revealed the ...inadequacy of the terms and concepts employed for western democracies for describing, understanding, and predicting the developments in the “hybrid” regimes of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Magyar and Madlovics strongly argue for a vocabulary and grammar tailored to the specifics of the countries of the former communist bloc. In this concise companion to the 800-page The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), they develop a conceptual framework in 120 propositions with (1) a typology of post-communist regimes and (2) a detailed presentation of ideal-type actors and the political, economic, and social phenomena in these regimes. Each of the 120 propositions contains a statement and a succinct discussion supported by illustrative tables, figures, and QR-codes that connect the interested reader to the more detailed analysis in the Anatomy. In a condensed form, the holistic approach of the Anatomy is retained by treating political, market, and communal spheres as parts of a single, coherent whole. An analysis of twelve countries illustrates the concrete application of the method.
While the literature of hybrid regimes has given up the presumption that post- communist countries must democratize, its language and concepts still mostly relate to Western democracies. Magyar and ...Madlovics strongly argue for a vocabulary and grammar tailored to the specifics of the region. In 120 theses they unfold a conceptual framework with (1) a typology of post-communist regimes and (2) a detailed presentation of ideal-type actors and the political, economic, and social phenomena in these regimes. The book is a more digestible companion to the 800-page The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), which was a detailed theoretical study with plenty of empirical illustrations. Each of the 120 theses contains a statement and its concise discussion supported by illustrative tables, figures, and QR-codes that connect the interested reader to the more detailed analysis in the Anatomy. In a condensed variety, this book has kept the holistic approach of the Anatomy and treats the spheres of political, market, and communal action as parts of a single, coherent whole. The endeavor to synthesize a vast range of ideas does not, however, result in a too complicated text. On the contrary, freed from the implicit presumptions of democracy theory, the new terminology yields a readily usable toolkit of unambiguous means of expression to speak about post- communism.
Interferometric SAR analysis provides an excellent opportunity to perform large-scale and rapid coseismic deformation mapping. Between December 28-30, 2020, three earthquakes with magnitudes greater ...than 4.3 occurred during the 2020 Petrinja Earthquake Sequence near Petrinja in Croatia, resulting in significant coseismic deformation. Considering both the available ascending and descending Sentinel-1A/B images preceding and following the Petrinja Earthquake Sequence, 2.5D differential interferometric analysis was performed to determine the resulting deformation field, which have significant importance in civil engineering related countermeasures and hazard assessment. With the applied methodology, the derived horizontal and vertical deformation fields can be characterized by a maximum of ±0.43 m local East-West, a maximum of 0.15 m local subsidence and a maximum of 0.19 m local vertical uplift near Petrinja.
While the economics of predatory states has been at the center of an emerging discussion, a rich body of literature on predation already exists in the scholarship on post-communist regimes. This ...paper offers a glimpse into that literature, developing (1) a typology of coercive corporate raiding (“reiderstvo”) and (2) a model for understanding the logic of contemporary predatory states. The typology starts from the original form of reiderstvo, carried out by criminal groups (“black raiding”), and introduces the concepts of “grey” and “white raiding”. We identify “centrally led corporate raiding” as a form of state predation not considered in public choice models, despite the fact that it exemplifies the functioning of contemporary authoritarian regimes. Expanding the models of Leeson (J Inst Theor Econ (JITE) 163:467–482, 2007) and Vahabi (Public Choice 168:153–175, 2016), we show how centrally led corporate raiding can be incorporated into the discussion of predatory states. We provide illustrations by offering two examples from the predatory state of contemporary Hungary, the case of an outdoor advertising company (ESMA) and the case of the banking sector.
The twenty-five essays accompany, illustrate and underpin the conceptual framework elaborated in Post-Communist Mafia State, published in conjunction with this volume. Leading specialists analyze the ...manifestations of the current political regime in Hungary from twenty-five angles. Topics discussed include the ideology, constitutional issues, social policy, the judiciary, foreign relations, nationalism, media, memory politics, corruption, civil society, education, culture and so on. Beyond the basic features of the economy the domains of taxation, banking system, energy policies and the agriculture are treated in dedicated studies. The essays are based on detailed empirical investigation about conditions in today’s Hungary. They nevertheless contribute to the exploration of the characteristic features of post-communist authoritarian regimes, shared by an increasing number of countries in Europe and Central Asia.
The global rise of xenophobia can hardly be detached from the global rise of populism. We define populism as the ideological instrument for the political program of morally unconstrained collective ...egoism. We show how this challenges liberal democracy, attempting to replace its legal-rational legitimacy basis with substantive-rational legitimacy. Collective egoism is explained in the context of the social psychology of populism. Then, we use the examples of two populist leaders—Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump—to illustrate the elements of populism. We conclude with a few thoughts about the inefficiency of fighting populism from a dogmatic liberal point of view.
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Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing ...on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.
The present volume represents a major step forward in the effort to understand post-communist politics in ways that escape the procrustean bed of theory oriented primarily to the democratization ...research agenda.
The formula for regime change following the collapse of the Eurasian communist regimes in 1989–1990 seemed clear: to take the step from one-party communist dictatorship with a state monopoly on ...property to a multi-party parliamentary democracy based on private property ownership and a market economy. However, this idea has failed in several postcommunist countries, producing sui generis regime types without further movement toward the liberal democratic ideal (Zakaria 1997; Carothers 2002; Levitsky and Way 2010). In our view, the phenomena defining the development of the postcommunist region can be summarized by the term "stubborn structures," which is also the title of a new volume of studies edited by one of the authors of this paper (Magyar 2019b). Stubborn structures are a combination of culture and history—the cultural traits, way of life, and traditions of precommunist societies that had been developing until they were subjugated to communist systems, forming a kind of unifying "political lid" that was placed upon the different peoples. Under this lid, previous social development was arrested and frozen. On the other hand, the decades under communist dictatorship also transformed existing social patterns and developed new ones, resulting in a special arrangement of sociological structures. The stubbornness of these structures has been most apparent in the former Soviet empire, specifically the liberated member states and satellite states of the Soviet Union. But such structures have been present in East Asian states as well, where dictatorship has not ended yet (such as China and North Korea). The stubborn structures argument embodies a form of path dependence, which refers to the idea that past events or institutional patterns have certain deterministic properties (Mahoney 2000). However, we refer not simply to a not-predetermined historical event—communist rule—but to certain initial conditions as well, that were combined with the repressive nature of communist dictatorship into a structurally stubborn mixture, which systemically distorted the democratic institutional setup of the new postcommunist countries. Naturally, stubbornness does not mean total determinism, but rather the assignment of certain probabilities to the different developmental outcomes. Indeed, after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the countries that had been under communist rule have shown a wide variety of development paths, ranging from remaining under dictatorship, to successful democratization, to the above-mentioned sui generis regimes. However, the past has shined through the newly built political systems almost invariably, and patterns of development are clearly visible along the lines of the structures we identify.
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