Nationalism Revisited | The Danube Circle
Nationalism Revisited – Conflicting ideologies in late socialist public discourses
by Veronika Hermann, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Eötvös Loránd University
In this presentation, it will be argued that during late socialism (also known as the late Kádár era) nationalism rendered a traceable trajectory in both informal and popular cultural exchanges and remained the most enduring narrative element of memory politics in Hungary. To understand the post-Cold War ideological landscape in its complexity we must rethink the very categories of “nationalism” and “internationalism”, or, more specifically, the dualism between them. Rather than positioning contemporary nationalistic-chauvinist attitudes as a response to socialist-era repression, it is states instead that nationalism played a key part in the collapse of socialism because it was not excluded from the socialist cultural milieu, remaining a prominent modality of cultural identity throughout the regime. The aim of this ongoing research is to investigate the ambiguous and conflicted meanings behind such terms as “socialist patriotism”, “everyday patriotism”, “active patriotism” and “cultural nationalism” during late-socialist Hungary. To support this thesis, the scripts of broadcasts and subject files of the records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute were explored, together some of the audiovisual materials of the 1989 Regime Change in Hungarian Television collection of the Blinken OSA Archivum.
The Danube Circle and the Global Civil Society in the Last Years of the Cold War
by János Vargha, independent researcher, Budapest
The presentation explores how the Danube Circle — organized in 1984 to protect the natural assets of the Danube River threatened by a large hydroelectric project — became part of global civil society. In addition to its activities in Hungary, the Danube Circle was seeking to establish links and cooperation with environmental movements and scientists in other countries working for similar goals. In this context, the Blinken OSA Archivum holds a wealth of valuable documents, like Radio Free Europe reports, analyses, and articles from the international press, and audio-visual materials, like the video recordings of the Black Box Foundation. The presentation reports on the cooperation between the Danube Circle and NGOs from other countries, and also refers to the international conference organized in Budapest in September 1988 by the International Rivers Network (IRN), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the Danube Circle. The video coverage of this event, and many other actions of the Danube Circle, is also available in the Archivum.
