Post-Communist Mafia State
The Case of Hungary
Published on 10. February 2016
336 pages
978-615-5513-55-8 (ISBN)
Description
In an article in 2001 the author analyzed the way Fidesz, the party on government for the first time then, was eliminating the institutional system of the rule of law. At that time, many readers doubted the legitimacy of the new approach, whose key categories were the 'organized over-world', the 'state employing mafia methods' and the 'adopted political family'. Critics considered these categories metaphors rather than elements of a coherent conceptual framework. Ten years later Fidesz won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections: the institutional obstacles of exerting power were thus largely removed. 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. While in many post-communist systems a segment of the party and secret service became the elite in possession of not only political power but also of wealth, Fidesz, as a late-coming new political predator, was able to occupy this position through an aggressive change of elite. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are led by the logic of power and wealth concentration in the hands of the clan. But while the classical mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of interest 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 new conceptual framework is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Budapest
Hungary
Target group
Professional and scholarly
File size
4,09 MB
ISBN-13
978-615-5513-55-8 (9786155513558)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
02/2016
Central European University Press
€72.00
Available (delivery time upon request)
Content
CONTENTS 1. The system we live under 1.1. The post-communist mafia state 1.2. Evolutionary forms of corruption 2. The disintegration of the Third Hungarian Republic in 2010 2.1. The value system of the Hungarian society 2.2. The political right and left: Two competing anachronisms 2.3. Spaces of rational public discourse in demise 2.4. The actors and the instability of the new ownership structure 2.5. The responsibility borne by the coalition government of the socialists and liberals 2.5.1. Lack in symbolic, community-building politics 2.5.2. Distributive politics and its exhaustion 2.5.3. The shoddiness of freedom and hopelessness of the dispossessed 2.5.4. Inefficacy in government, the incompatible attitudes of the two coalition parties 2.6. Frailty of the institutions guaranteeing the system of checks and balances 2.7. Fidesz as political apex predator 2.7.1. From the close college fraternity to the adopted political family, an alternative rebel turned Godfather 2.7.2. Socialist erosion, liberal vaporization and Fidesz's accomplishment of social embeddedness 2.8. Pre-2010 political cold war, and the erosion of the institutional, two-thirds constraint 2.8.1. Political cold war 2.8.2. Economic trench truce: 70/30 2.8.3. Alternating corrupt regimes 3. Approaches of interpretation: from the functional disorders of democracy to a critique of the system 3.1. Trapped in an interpretation along the democracy-dictatorship axis 3.2. Moving on to substantive concepts of description 3.3. The limited validity of historical analogies 3.4. Proclamation of the Hungarian "illiberal state" 4. Definition of the post-communist mafia state 4.1. Post-communist 4.2. Mafia state 4.3. The expansion of the entitlements of the patriarchal head of the family: mafia, mafia state 5. Specific features of the mafia state: a subtype of autocratic regimes 5.1. Concentration of power and accumulation of wealth 5.2. Key players of the mafia state: the ruling elite and its accessories 5.2.1. The poligarch 5.2.2. The oligarch 5.2.2.1. Major entrepreneurs versus oligarchs 5.2.2.2. A typology of the oligarch 5.2.2.3. The Orbán-Simicska conflict: the first mafia war within the organized upperworld 5.2.3. The Stooge 5.2.3.1. The head of the political family and the family VIP box 5.2.3.2. The business ventures of the poligarchs, the inner circle oligarchs, and their stooges 5.2.4. The corruption broker 5.2.5. The family security guard and the secret services 5.3. The political family's expropriation of databases ensuring democratic control 5.4. Polipburo, in place of the former communist politburo 5.4.1. Delineation of the mafia state's ruling elite from other historical analogies 5.5. "Law of rule" in place of the "rule of law" 5.5.1. Constitutional coup d'état-the institutionalization of autocracy 5.5.2. Hostile takeover of the institutions of public authority 5.5.3. Government: not there to take decisions, but to manage decisions taken by the political family 5.5.4. The lexes-custom tailored legislation 5.5.5. Suppressing the control functions of other institutions of public authority 5.6. Administration through confidants and personal governors of the adopted political family instead of a professional bureaucratic administration 5.6.1. Array of devices employed to intimidate the professional administration 5.6.2. Max Weber on the historical path to modern professional bureaucratic administration 5.6.3. Dismantling the modern professional bureaucratic administration under the conditions created by the mafia state 5.6.4. Why the mafia state cannot be considered a patrimonial system 5.7. Liquidation of societal autonomies 5.7.1. Liquidation of local autonomies: "caretakers" in place of local governments 5.7.2. Liquidation of the autonomous positions of the intelligentsia in culture and education 5.7.2.1. Culture 5.7.2.2. Education and.
