This research project was conceived at a time when Hungary had already undergone significant authoritarian transformation under a right-wing populist regime, while Slovakia’s political trajectory remained uncertain. Despite their differences, both countries demonstrated a growing revival of panideological traditions—such as pan-Slavism and pan-Turanism—rooted in their Habsburg and interwar legacies. The project set out to explore how these ideological frameworks are mobilised across institutional settings, particularly in the context of cultural policy, public memory, and political performance. Its comparative, ethnographic approach combined long-term fieldwork and participant observation with discourse and institutional analysis.
During the course of research, the invasion of Ukraine and the intensification of Russian soft power initiatives in Central Europe significantly reshaped the field. These geopolitical shifts brought into sharper focus the interplay between nationalist mythologies and global imperial ambitions, particularly the role of smaller states in legitimising broader neo-imperial projects.
The project’s central analytical concept is self-orientalism—the internalisation and reproduction of colonial epistemologies from the subaltern position, often reframed through narratives of historical victimhood. In Hungary and, increasingly, in Slovakia, this takes the form of adopting externally imposed civilisational imaginaries and strategically reworking them into political tools that grant symbolic authority and moral capital. Rather than rejecting dominant colonial discourses, these regimes invert them, casting themselves simultaneously as victims and guardians of ancient civilisational missions. This subversive reappropriation serves to justify authoritarian governance and cultural homogenisation.
The research demonstrates how such self-orientalising strategies operate through discursive and performative mechanisms, including historical revisionism, the ritualisation of trauma, and the transformation of cultural institutions into ideological apparatuses. While effective for mobilising emotionally charged public sentiment and reinforcing populist legitimacy, these strategies also produce significant unintended effects. Chief among them is recursive polarisation—a dynamic in which populist regimes fragment their own support bases through escalating internal divisions and ideological rigidity.
Ultimately, the project reveals how political actors in Hungary and Slovakia adopt the identity of the ‘other’ not to resist the epistemology of othering, but to occupy a privileged position within it. This strategy, while powerful in the short term, undermines longer-term political cohesion and exposes the fragility of populist consensus in an increasingly polarised and volatile regional landscape.
