Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe 9780857452047

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Headlines of nation, subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in neoliberal europe
Chapter 1 ‘Nationalism is back!’ Radikali and Privatization in serbia
Chapter 2 Articulating the Right to the City: Working-Class neo-nationalism in Postsocialist Cluj, Romania
Chapter 3 Football fandom in Cluj: Class, ethno-nationalism and Cosmopolitanism
Chapter 4 ‘It Can’t Make Me Happy that audi is Prospering’: Working-Class nationalism in Hungary after 1989
Chapter 5 (Dis)possessed by the spectre of socialism: nationalist Mobilization in ‘transitional’ Hungary
Chapter 6 A long March to oblivion? the decline of the italian left on its Home Ground and the Rise of the new Right in their Midst
Chapter 7 Class without Consciousness: Regional identity in the italian alps after 1989
Chapter 8 Working-Class nationalism in a scottish Village
Epilogue. From the ashes of a Counter-Revolution
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Headlines of nation, subtexts of Class

EASA Series Published in Association with the European Association of SocialAnthropologists (EASA)

9. KNOWING HOW TO KNOW Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present Edited by Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely

1. LEARNING FIELDS Volume 1 Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology Edited by Dorle Dracklé, Iain R. Edgar and Thomas K. Schippers

10. POSTSOCIALIST EUROPE Anthropological Perspectives from Home Edited by László Kürti and Peter Skalník

2. LEARNING FIELDS Volume 2 Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education Edited by Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar 3. GRAMMARS OF IDENTITY/ ALTERITY Edited by Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich 4. MULTIPLE MEDICAL REALITIES Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine Edited by Helle Johannessen and Imre Lázár 5. FRACTURING RESEMBLANCES Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West Simon Harrison 6. SKILLED VISIONS Between Apprenticeship and Standards Edited by Cristina Grasseni 7. GOING FIRST CLASS? New Approaches to Privileged Travel and Movement Edited by Vered Amit 8. EXPLORING REGIMES OF DISCIPLINE The Dynamics of Restraint Edited by Noel Dyck

11. ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE IN THE PRESENT Edited by Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell and Helena Wulff 12. CULTURE WARS Context, Models and Anthropologists’ Accounts Edited by Deborah James, Evelyn Plaice and Christine Toren 13. POWER AND MAGIC IN ITALY Thomas Hauschild 14. POLICY WORLDS Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power Edited by Cris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Però 15. HEADLINES OF NATION, SUBTEXTS OF CLASS Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe Edited by Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai 16. ENCOUNTERS OF BODY AND SOUL IN CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS PRACTICES Anthropological Reflections Edited by Anna Fedele and Ruy Llera Blanes 17. CARING FOR THE ‘HOLY LAND’ Transnational Filipina Domestic Workers in the Istraeli Migration Regime Claudia Liebelt

Headlines

of

nation,

subtexts

of

Class

Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe

edited by

Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2011 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2011 don Kalb and Gábor Halmai all rights reserved. except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Headlines of nations, subtexts of class : working-class populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal europe / edited by don Kalb and Gábor Halmai. p. cm. -- (easa series ; 15) includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-85745-203-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. europe--social conditions--21st century. 2. nationalism--europe. 3. Working class--europe. 4. social movements--europe. i. Kalb, don, 1959- ii. Halmai, Gábor. Hn373.5.H39 2011 305.5’6209409051--dc22 2010053014 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data a catalogue record for this book is available from the british library Printed in the united states on acid-free paper. isbn: 978-0-85745-203-0 (hardback) e-isbn: 978-0-85745-204-7

Contents acknowledgements

viii

introduction

Headlines of nation, subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in neoliberal europe Don Kalb

1

Chapter 1

‘nationalism is back!’ Radikali and Privatization in serbia Theodora Vetta

37

Chapter 2

articulating the Right to the City: Working-Class neo-nationalism in Postsocialist Cluj, Romania Norbert Petrovici

57

Chapter 3

football fandom in Cluj: Class, ethno-nationalism and Cosmopolitanism Florin Faje

78

Chapter 4

‘it Can’t Make Me Happy that audi is Prospering’: Working-Class nationalism in Hungary after 1989 Eszter Bartha

92

Chapter 5

(dis)possessed by the spectre of socialism: nationalist Mobilization in ‘transitional’ Hungary Gábor Halmai

113

Chapter 6

a long March to oblivion? the decline of the italian left on its Home Ground and the Rise of the new Right in their Midst Michael Blim

142

Chapter 7

Class without Consciousness: Regional identity in the italian alps after 1989 Jaro Stacul

156

vi u Contents

Chapter 8

Working-Class nationalism in a scottish Village Paul Gilfillan

173

epilogue

from the ashes of a Counter-Revolution George Baca

194

notes on Contributors

203

index

205

acknowledgements this book emerged from a session at the easa conference in ljubljana, august 2008. We want to thank our authors and other participants at the session for making this rare confluence of interests possible. it has resulted in an unusually focused edited collection, as noted by the reviewers for berghahn books, which does not only genuinely address the issues it claims to focus on in each and every chapter, but also displays a remarkable coherence of approach summarized by the notion of ‘critical junctions’. as such it advances our project in ways that none of us alone could have done, and it does generate cumulative insight to a degree that is unfortunately rather rare in anthropology, dominated as it is by individual artisanry. Parts of the introduction and case studies were discussed during presentations at the department of sociology and social anthropology, Central european university; a Max Weber conference at the european university institute, florence; at a osi/HesP meeting in odessa; at the fernand braudel Centre, sunY-binghamton; and the anthropology Colloquium at CunY Graduate Centre. We are grateful for the invitations and the responses. in addition to our contributors, we want to thank Gus Carbonella, Marc edelman, Jean-louis fabiani, Jonathan friedman, lesley Gill, ornulf Gulbrandsen, bruce Kapferer, susana narotzky, Mathijs Pelkmans, Jakob Rigi, oscar salemink, sharyn Kasmir, Gavin smith, and luisa steur, for insights, comments and discussion. in addition, Gabor Halmai wants to emphasize his gratefulness for the encouragements and inputs received from participants in the wider intellectual community of the socanth department at Ceu. insiders may recognize that the book betrays recurrent discussions with Gavin smith and with (the work of) Jonathan friedman: without these two magisterial anthropologists and their engaging and contrarian scholarship this would have been a different and certainly less perceptive book. the remaining errors and weaknesses are of course ours. James Carrier, the editor of this series, kept a firm hand and offered excellent feed-back when we needed it. We finally want to acknowledge that our work with students at Ceu and elsewhere has decisively contributed to the insights and positions developed here. We therefore dedicate the book to our former, current, and future students, both of the nearby and the distant variety. our work depends on you. don Kalb Gábor Halmai budapest, June 2010

Introduction Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe Don Kalb

This is a book about the emergence and spread of mostly right-wing populism in contemporary Europe. Since about 1989 neo-nationalism has grown as a volatile political force in almost all European societies. This book does not so much look at the movements, political entrepreneurs and formal ideologies, as is done by political scientists and social movement researchers. Our focus is rather on the social groups that comprise their key constituencies. In a broad sense, these are working-class people. We study them in their natural habitats – factories, offices and neighbourhoods. And we study them as they are affected by longer run processes of social change commonly associated with neoliberal globalization. This book is therefore also a book about class and class formation(s). Because of this, we also look at capital, the state and the transnational capitalist order in the making, and how these forces impact on locales and sites. We make the anthropological case that working-class neonationalism is the somewhat traumatic expression of material and cultural experiences of dispossession and disenfranchisement in the neoliberal epoch. We argue that such experiences cannot be so easily signified in other than nationalist ways within the new neoliberal Europe, largely because capital, the upper middle classes and political, professional and managerial elites have become ‘cosmopolitanized’ and have lost their interest in the language of class and the nationally guaranteed social rights that it entails. Their class interests do not conjoin anymore with the project of welfare-state formation. We suggest that nationalist populism is in fact a displacement of experiences of dispossession and disenfranchisement onto the imagined nation as a community of fate, crafted by new political entrepreneurs generating protest votes against neoliberal rule. In Europe, such class experiences are silenced

2 ◆ Don Kalb

and hegemonized by discourses of ethnicity, immigration and integration in Western Europe, and by a precarious anti-communist consensus among elites and wider populations in Central and Eastern Europe. This book focuses on the dispossession, the silencing and the displacement – complex and entangled processes that accumulate through time and that are now shaking the established political landscape in the continent. Since the collapse of the Western financial sector in 2008, many of the parameters of globalization that shaped the preceding three decades have shifted and turned dramatically. This sometimes seems to render recent core concepts such as ‘neoliberalism’ and the ‘Washington consensus’, which have anchored much of the academic and political debate on globalization since the emergence of the anti-globalization movement in 1999, less stable and illuminating than ever.1 Nevertheless, few analysts, either in economics, political science or anthropology, would disagree with the basic expectation that worker-citizens in contemporary transnationalizing states will continue to feel the competitive heat of the one billion new workers that have been added to the capitalist system since 1989, further reinforced by the two billion that might well be added in the next two decades. This dramatic expansion of the global working-class in the stretch of just a few decades will remain one of the basic determinants of the current epoch, both at a private and intimate level, as well as on a world historical one, whatever the exact paradigms under which it will be signified.2 The consequences of the tripling of the proletariat directly subjected to world capitalism will persist for quite a while and be a core concern of political and social reality anywhere, pace Immanuel Wallerstein’s often repeated prognosis that the end of capitalism-as-we-know-it is finally in sight (Wallerstein 2003). This is a proletariat that is now more fragmented and spread over a wider array of all-but-converging nation-states than ever before, states that are inserted into very differently endowed slots of the global division of labour, power and culture. Moreover, the interminable spread of global capitalism has not yet erased the overwhelming heterogeneity of its wage-dependent classes. And that heterogeneity might well be further magnified before it gets reduced. Within anthropology, Jonathan Friedman has suggested that under a regime of the decentralization of capital out of the old cores, states and state elites in the regions of capital flight will find their popular legitimacy inevitably under downward pressure (Friedman 2003; Friedman and Friedman 2008). This is as true for historical global systems as a whole, the Friedmans suggest, 1. That does not mean that discussions of neoliberalism have become irrelevant. A stimulating recent example is the debate in the journal Focaal: see Clarke (2008a, 2008b), Little (2008), Nonini (2008) and Smith (2008). 2. Meanwhile it has become clear that another wave of neoliberal reductions of welfare will be pushed onto European populations both in the center and the periphery of Europe, potentially intensifying the trends of dispossession and disenfranchisement discussed here

Introduction ◆ 3

citing examples from antiquity, as for the contemporary West. Bob Jessop has added that states under current neoliberal globalization have become locked in a global regime that inescapably works to set them up as ‘competition states’ (Jessop 2002), designed to compete with other states for mobile capital by offering their populations and territories up as profitably exploitable factors for global capital. While this may not necessarily lead to outright social dumping across states, over time it does shift the balance of forces within states and across states from labour and citizens toward capital, and puts downward pressure on the standards of social reproduction at the behest of the incomes of capital. 3 This indeed may also be the deeper underlying cause of the recent financial collapse in the West. As the pool of liquidity in search of valuation grows and grows and the relative social wage shrinks, credit driven consumption and speculation-based life planning in the West has taken the place of social reproduction based on incomes and savings, after which prices bubble and then deflate, and debts cannot be repaid and must be devalued or reinflated with more debt (see Harvey 2010). This is the conjuncture within which the transition to ‘post-politics’ (Crouch 2004; Mouffe 2005) and the unstoppable rule of experts must be explained. States, in Europe and elsewhere, but in Europe perhaps in particular, have seen a steady narrowing of the domain of the political. Public choice has been hollowed out as law and accountancy has been substituted for politics and experts have taken over ever wider competencies that used to be the object of public deliberation. The whole edifice of the European Union (EU) itself is a case in point and a major cause as well as effect in the spiral of post-politics in Europe. It took over huge chunks of core policy making from democratic national forums and placed them in transnational, technocratic, and officially secret Coreper committees, and imposed elite consensus, both as desired outcome and mandatory procedure, as the only form of legitimate politics (Anderson 2009). Neoliberalism has been a crucial part of the ideological background to the dwindling of the political (Kalb et al. 2000; Harvey 2005), as classically exemplified in the neoliberalization of social democracy in Europe (Giddens 1994, 2000; Caciagli and Kertzer 1996; Sassoon 1996, 1997; Anderson 2009) and the neoliberalization of governance and governmentality in general (Rose 1999; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Peck and Tickel 2002; Clarke 2004; Peck 2004; Ong 2006). Anthropologists have been certainly aware and critical of the process, in Europe and beyond, but have not entirely escaped its pull. Narotzky and Smith have rightly pointed out that the anthropology of Europe in the 3. The two winners of global competition, Germany and China, are excellent examples of the process. The financial press regularly emphasizes that Germany since 2000 has lowered its labour costs by some 20 per cent in comparison with its major competitors, while dramatically increasing export earnings and capitalist profits. For a wealth of data on China plus a hugely insightful analysis of the ongoing depression of Chinese social wages over time despite dramatic economic growth, see Ho Fung (2009).

4 ◆ Don Kalb

preceding period focused rarely in a straightforward way on the problems of social and individual reproduction under ‘corporate capitalism’s’ regained hegemony (Narotzky and Smith 2006). Anthropology has tended to focus on problems of governance, migration, religion and ethnicity, even though many researchers certainly sensed, to quote Žižek, that capitalism might well be ‘the real that lurks in the background’ (quoted in Smith 2006: 621). The financial collapse in the Western banking sector now perhaps helps to expand the space for anthropologists to face up to that ‘real’.4 And indeed what we have seen lately is an interesting resurgence in economic anthropology (e.g., Carrier 2006; Hann 2006; Wilk and Cligget 2007; Gudeman 2008; Hann and Hart 2009) and a cross-disciplinary interest in Polanyi and commodification. But Polanyi does not lead immediately to a renewed interest in labour (see also Robotham 2009), capital and class, which is precisely what we are arguing for in this book, both in a wide and transdisciplinary sense and in order to explain the rise of nationalist populism. Populists would certainly argue that the decline of politics is a conspiracy against the people, and they would blame incumbent politicians. We argue that it is a bit more systematic and robust than that. It is driven by an identifiable and large-scale material process: the globalization and financialization of capital (Arrighi 1996; Kalb et al. 2000; Friedman 2003; Harvey 2003, 2005; Kalb 2005; Sassen 2007; Friedman and Friedman 2008) and the consequent collective transformation, with few exceptions, of national welfarist, socialist and developmentalist states into Jessop’s competition states starting in the late 1970s as a response to, among other things, labour activism and popular insurgencies in the West (Silver 2003) and industrial overproduction in the core (Brenner 2003). Again, this general process did not hit every polity in Europe and elsewhere with similar force: Different locations, different stages of development, different histories of citizenship and the histories of the modern res publica facilitated different outcomes and different emphases within what was nevertheless quite a universal process. Also, the proximity or distance of national state elites to the sources of global capital made a significant difference. This included the differential pressure towards neoliberalization in, for example, the Anglo-Saxon countries and the Netherlands (with large globalized financial sectors) on the one hand, and Germany, Italy and Austria on the other. The capacity of neoliberalizing elites to buy-off their constituencies also differed hugely, with Third Way social democrats in the U.K. and the Netherlands retaining support for quite some time despite their abandonment of social-rights activism, while similarly spirited elites in Poland and Hungary were punished in the polls without much delay. But despite differences in varieties of capitalism, states and processes of commodification, the general rule, above all in Europe, 4. The European Association of Social Anthropologists dedicated its meetings in 2010 to ‘Crisis’ and its first invited session was a panel on rethinking issues of class in anthropology convened by James Carrier and myself.

Introduction ◆ 5

has been and will very likely continue to be downward pressure on social rights, solidarity and welfarism; a reduction of the space for purely domestic accumulation policies; and downward pressure on the legitimacy of state elites and political classes. This will also imply, as Friedman has argued repeatedly, a continued exhaustion of the liberal and modernist narratives of nation-state building and social engineering that have flanked the making of the modern state (e.g., Friedman 2003). As a combined consequence of the rule of post-politics and the reinvigorated capitalism that has visibly been lurking in the background, as Paul Piccone (1993) was among the first to foresee, Europe (like other places) has witnessed the spread, generation and regeneration of new hybrid and volatile populisms (see, e.g., Betz 1994; Westlind 1996; Di Tella 1997; Canovan 1999; Mudde 2007), something which commenced somewhere around 1989 (Berezin 2009). Such populist sensibilities and discourses reject some of the foundations of liberal rule and are composed of ethno-national or ethno-religious symbolic sources eclectically combined with items of the classical Left. As Piccone observed regarding the National Front in France, ‘The French New Right seems to be onto something when it counterposes a universalizing New Class seeking to impose an abstract liberal agenda on everyone, and populists wanting to live their lives in their communities, with their particular cultures, institutions, religions etc.’ (Piccone 1993:21). Piccone, however, for all his foresight, failed to note that the abstract liberalism of the new class had become firmly wedded to the globalizing agenda of the capitalist competition state, a shift that certainly contributed to its accelerating loss of legitimacy and to the rapidly proliferating ‘culture talk’ that anthropologists described at the time (Stolcke 1995; Kalb 2005). But his prediction that the dialectics of local, communal, cultural particularity versus abstract liberal cosmopolitanism would increasingly characterize intra-state conditions in the new era of the ‘One World’ turned out to be very right. A new political divide emerged as a little-noted close (‘Northern’) kin to the oft-noted spread of intra-state conflict in the global South in the post1989 period (see Kalb 2005). Both were characteristically overlooked by the lofty philosophers of ‘the end of history’ and the theorists of ‘the clash of civilizations’ who monopolized public attention in those days. They were also ignored by the sociologists of ‘alternative modernities’ (see Cooper 2005), who kept talking about large civilizational blocs and ignored the crosscivilizational rifts of class within those blocs. By 2010, spreading populist movements in Europe had stirred and scared the established political classes in all European states. If we leave (unjustifiably) Yugoslavia aside, these started in France, Italy and Belgium in the very early 1990s, but quickly affected classical examples of historically strong liberal democracies such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and finally the U.K. (long immune to such things because of its non-proportional voting system). And the populist wave affected postsocialist states supposedly underway on a guided tour back to ‘Europe’ throughout. The literature of

6 ◆ Don Kalb

the 1990s reflected on the first wave of rightist and xenophobic anti-elite mobilizations in the West. Canovan concluded that these were perhaps unpleasant from an academic or elite point of view, but that they were rarely genuinely dangerous. Despite claiming to represent ‘silent majorities’, they had never attained more than a fraction of the vote (Canovan 1999: 5). That was 1999. Since then, Le Pen succeeded in forcing a second round in the 2004 French presidential elections and helped to prepare the way for Sarkozy. The Netherlands almost witnessed an election win by Pim Fortuijn in 2002, who was shot before that could materialize (Buruma 2006), and in 2010 a potentially hegemonic bloc of scared homeowners gathering around the VVD neoliberals, and populist xenophobes around Geert Wilders, won the elections. Hungary, after years of massive populist demonstrations before the parliament in Budapest, witnessed a massive gain by the populists of Jobbik in 2010 (see Halmai, this volume), who acquired more than 15 per cent of the vote in the Hungarian elections of 2010 and formed a uniquely strong bloc with the bourgeois nationalist Fidesz party. Switzerland and Austria have had their own tenacious populist movements, claiming more than 20 per cent of the votes regularly, while Italy has seen a sustained massive presence of populist parties such as the Lega Nord (Northern League) and the post-fascists in coalitions with another populist, Berlusconi (see Stacul, Blim, this volume). Meanwhile, Poland was ruled by right-wing populists between 2005 and 2007, while Denmark, Sweden and Norway have also seen strong upsurges and new party formations. More significantly, some places and regions have been close to being all but dominated by nationalist populists – such as Antwerp, Cluj-Napoca (see Petrovici, Faje, this volume), the area around Zurich, the Italian Alps (see Stacul, this volume), Carinthia, Debrecen, Miskolc, Sofia, Rotterdam, and a score of smaller and larger French cities (see, e.g., Gaspard 1995). Degrees of wealth clearly do not matter; nor does the presence or absence of long consolidated democratic traditions. The populist wave is practically universal. Now, the important issue for anthropologists is that such populisms are not just noisy interruptions of the daily business of post-politics, as often described by political scientists; nor should they as a rule primarily be seen as the advance troops of a new European fascism, as is regularly done by liberal journalists and NGO activists. Rather, and more fundamentally, they are the vehicles by which wider disenfranchised populations are labouring to make sense of their experiences with and discontents about the post-political neoliberal globalized environment. Furthermore, those people who do not speak out loudly for the radical nationalists – of the Right and the Left, though mostly the Right; the distinction is relevant but more difficult than it seems – these days often blame incumbent political classes sotto voce for their ultimate complicity with perceived conspiracies against ‘the people’. Like the public ideologists of the new Right, they articulate their critique from combined bits of direct experience and mass-mediated populist protest frames. Unlocking the dialectics between popular anger and resentment on the one hand, and the

Introduction ◆ 7

organized radical Right (and Left) in Europe on the other, therefore seems an urgent project that ethnographic methods might well help forward. Towards this end, the chapters in this volume advocate the need to uncover the hidden histories of dispossession, disenfranchisement and subalternity that feed the particular alienation of the resenting classes in their volatile dialectic with global, national and local histories of neoliberal transnationalization. In the remainder of this introduction, I first discuss recent general work in anthropology and other disciplines related to this argument; then I link it with two crucial theoretical and methodological moves that are summarized by the notions of dispossession and critical junctions, notions crucial for the fine-tuning of a class oriented perspective. Finally, I explore the complexions and complexities of emergent populisms by discussing the chapters of the present volume.

Anthropologies of Neoliberal Globalization, Fear and Nationalist Populism In recent anthropology, Gingrich and Banks (2005) and Appadurai (2006) have highlighted the importance of social insecurity, fear and anger in generating popular receptiveness for populist ideologies of ethnic or religious neonationalism. They also invoke the association of such receptiveness with the general conditions generated by neoliberal globalization. Their work resonates with Jonathan Friedman’s general notion of ‘double polarizations’ associated with globalization, polarizations that pair widening social divides with spreading idioms of deep cultural difference in an era in which ruling elites and their allies transform themselves into cosmopolitan classes and forsake the project of the nation as a community of fate (Friedman 2003). In the process, the erstwhile ‘Fordist’ working-classes are unmade, in representation as well as fact, into a new ethnicized ‘folk,’ and the lower tiers are turned, in representation and fact, into racialized classes dangereuses. In response, the former embrace the notions of collective bonds and collective fate, and invoke the right to be respected and dignified as the people from which legitimate authority must spring, while the latter become increasingly constructed as essentially alien to the body of the nation, whether expressed in the language of culture and difference,5 notions of the lumpen or underclass, or biological race. These very different works collude then in suggesting that any explanation of the surge of populist neo-nationalism in Europe and beyond must be placed against the combined background of what one should probably call the ‘dual 5. The Dutch high-brow daily NRC Handelsblad recently carried the headline ‘Sexual Problems Are Partly Culturally Determined’ regarding the lack of sexual health practices among immigrants (12 February 2009). Culture regularly takes on a deep and almost biological force of determination in current discourses, something about which Eric Wolf warned long ago (Wolf 2001: 307–19, 398–412).

8 ◆ Don Kalb

crisis’ of popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and of labour on the other; a dual crisis that certainly characterizes the new millennium. They also suggest, but do not always follow through on the idea, that spirals of nationalist paranoia, although structurally derived from this dual crisis, receive their precise historical dynamics, meanings and symbolism from demonstrable configurations – confrontations, alliances, and divisions – of class, within specific (but often ‘hidden’) local histories (see below). This general thesis seems to have substantial support outside anthropology proper. Comparativist historical sociologists such as Barrington Moore Jr (1978), Michael Mann (1999), Ira Katznelson (1998), and Charles Tilly (2004, 2007) have emphasized that the class cleavage under democratic capitalism must be faced, articulated, negotiated and organized rather than repressed if liberalism is to keep a hold on the centre of the democratic process. The dual crisis signals, if anything, that over the last three decades it has become ever harder for liberals to maintain the balancing act. In Europe they have had predictably more trouble doing so in the postsocialist East than in the West. The dependent states of Eastern Europe, with their thoroughly comprador capitalisms, command at best some 30 per cent of the wealth of Western Europe (see Drahokoupil 2008). Their political elites enjoyed fewer resources then their colleagues in the West to shield their electorates from global neoliberalism or to buy them off, and were more dependent on positive ‘naked’ market outcomes such as economic growth and the perceived trickle down to wider populations. Indeed East European elites needed the ultimate legitimating myth of catching up with the West and ‘returning to Europe’. But Western state elites were deeply affected too, as we have seen. Nor is the story limited to Europe, even though timing, structure and substance of the process will be different elsewhere. For the Middle East and western Asia, Tariq Ali has argued that the repression of the enlightened Left has ultimately become the harbinger of religious fundamentalism (Ali 2002). Various studies have made plausible the claim that neoliberal globalization, by fragmenting labour and exerting downward pressure on social wages, by reducing popular sovereignty on behalf of the sovereignty of capital, and by circumscribing what Pierre Bourdieu (2000) has called ‘the left hand of the state’ (social inclusion) while strengthening ‘the right hand’ (finance, law and order), might well be generally and systematically associated with a climate of deep popular uncertainty. This climate reportedly feeds into a politics of fear that is increasingly exploited by new political brokers on both the Right and Left, generating defensive illiberal popular responses in areas as diverse as Central and West Africa, the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and East Asia.6 Only Latin America seems an interesting exception to what looks quite like quite a general trend. Chantal Mouffe has 6. See, e.g., Friedman (2003), Nonini (2003), Turner (2003), Wieviorka (2003), Frank (2004), Derluguian (2005), Gingrich and Banks (2005) and Ost (2005). For an overview, see Kalb (2005).

Introduction ◆ 9

stated, ‘it is the incapacity to articulate proper political alternatives around the confrontation of distinctive socio-economic projects that explains why antagonisms are nowadays articulated in moral terms’ (Mouffe 2005: 59). This is the shift of repertoire that underlies all current nationalist populisms. But one should emphasize that they are not just ‘articulated in terms’. They also get articulated in full-fledged and spiralling moral panics that are not restricted to the chambers of higher politics but regularly spill out into the street.

Dilemmas of Anthropological Method in the Global Era: Critical Junctions Anthropology has sat somewhat uneasily with recent globalization, despite its early declared interest (see. e.g., Hannerz 1991, 1996; Friedman 1994, 2003; Appadurai 1996, 2001; Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Eriksen 2003; Friedman and Friedman 2008). This is understandable because its twentiethcentury history was one of intense indulgence with local cultural particularity, a fieldwork-based focus on singular cases, and approaches that often froze time and blended out space. Recent globalization has resulted in minimally three different forms of response within anthropology. We can characterize them under the shorthand of ‘global implosion’, ‘local coherence’, and ‘global assemblage’.7 These approaches will not be discussed at length here. My goal is merely to make space for a different, fourth approach, that should be associated with Eric Wolf’s work, arguably the major anthropologist of capitalist globalization (see Wolf 1982, 2001; see also Schneider and Rapp 1996). What follows will be unforgivably schematic but it will help me to explicate a precise methodological response to the globalization of the subject matter of anthropology that suits our purpose here. ‘Classical’ anthropological explanations of ‘otherness’ used to be based in the supposed re-enactment of local cultural traits that differed from customs elsewhere: the proverbial global cultural mosaic of the anthropologist anchored in a patchwork of discrete traditions. The fact of continuity by re-enactment was explained through holism, either of the idealist or structural-functionalist varieties. Modes of explanation were ‘local for local’. Now, ‘global implosion’ approaches started to exchange this model some two decades ago for new sorts of explanations based on the contradictions or unevenness of cultural 7. Three other responses should be mentioned. The first is Chris Hann’s embrace of a historical anthropology focused on the jumbo notion/area of Eurasia. For him, Eurasia stands for a long historical experience of dealing with markets and states that disallows a full disembedding of markets in the Polanyian sense. ‘Eurasia’ thus becomes an anthropological response to the ideological claims of neoliberalism (see Hann 2006). Ferguson also endorses a macro regionalism, though less anchored in a very long time frame, for exploring the real world dimensions of neoliberalism in Africa (Ferguson 2006). Another response is the turn toward elite studies (e.g, Wedel 2009). These approaches merit a full discussion but lack of space does not permit this here.

10 ◆ Don Kalb

globalization, read as uneven diffusion. Local situations were now seen as reflecting the uneven and sometimes contradictory cultural aspects of globalization. Appadurai’s (1996) well known vision of ‘global scapes’ (ethnoscapes, financescapes, technoscapes, and so on), for example, argues that such ‘scapes’ unfold variously and unevenly on, and within, different territories and basically take such places into a maelstrom of identifications and events that derive their properties more from the particular mix of elements from the global scapes that work on a territory or population than from the innate local cultural characteristics of that territory. Another example of such an approach is Geschiere’s (1999) analysis of witchcraft in Africa which he sees as a thoroughly modern phenomenon produced by the cultural contradictions and anxieties of globalization among local African people. Such diffusionist approaches, thus, tend to subordinate local cultural time to global cultural time, while treating global time as contradictory in itself. Against them, some anthropologists have re-emphasized the continued coherence of local tradition and culture. Interestingly Jonathan Friedman’s ‘anthropology of global systems’ has been very explicit in arguing precisely this (Friedman 2003, 2008a+b). Against Geschiere, he claims that African political relationships and customs have a coherence of their own that does not give way in the face of changing modern global environments and should never be reduced to that. This claim is the more interesting because Friedman is the last anthropologist who can be accused of excessive localism in his work and he has been more consistently aware than any current anthropologist of dramatic shifts in global systems over the longue durée. Culture, for him, seems nevertheless surprisingly firmly anchored in the order of local histories. The third stream, global assemblage, can be seen as somewhat of a methodological midway point between these positions. Like the cultural sociologist Roland Robertson, it sees local cultural practices as hybrid amalgamations of global and local elements. Robertson called this process ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1992). Within anthropology, Ulf Hannerz has similarly talked about creolization, hybridization and global ecumenes (Hannerz 1991, 1996). Ong and Collier, in their recent work on modern experts in various global and national settings, have called such mixing outcomes ‘global assemblages’. They are interested in the ‘minor histories that address themselves to the big questions of globalizations’ (Ong and Collier 2004: 15). Thus, they tend to concede a large degree of cultural convergence and homogenization of expert arenas as a consequence of globalization, though putting a typically anthropological emphasis on the ‘not quite’, ‘not yet’ and ‘not fully’. Like Hannerz before them, they concentrate on national and local arenas that allow, generate and sustain cultural resistances. What unites these three approaches in the anthropology of globalization is an overriding focus on cultural codes and symbols, albeit more ambiguously so in the case of Friedman. The global-assemblages approach deals rather exclusively with the cultural codes deployed by the national representatives of global professions, an ‘elite’ oriented undertaking, as Collier and Ong acknowledge.

Introduction ◆ 11

Geschiere and Appadurai deal less with elite orientations, but do privilege cultural symbols and cultural practices. Friedman in my eyes fails to bring his dynamic global systems approach into full conversation with his discussions of ‘the simplicity of everyday life’ (see Friedman and Friedman 2008: 139–74).8 For our ‘object’, emergent working-class nationalist populism, it makes little sense to work with elite or culture-focused approaches, certainly when they have little to say on class, social reproduction and wider political economies. An emphasis on the coherence of local cultural practices over time would be extremely mistaken because it would assume that populist nationalism is a deeply rooted and more or less constant historical force among particular populations, independent of experiences and processes of class. Of course, in one sense it is such a deep historical force as it derives its symbolism from historical narratives of nationhood and belonging, as Anthony Smith would propose (Smith 1995). Hobsbawm (Hobsbawm 1992; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992) and Gellner (1993) have rightly pointed out that such narratives are often invented and reinvented and are not constant over time, nor stable in their content. Moreover, the populist character of these movements already signals by itself frictions and stresses in political, social and cultural systems rather than simple continuities (Geertz 1972). Populist nationalism comes in ebbs and flows, and is synchronized with political cycles and events. Such cycles and events, importantly, while often playing within and around the field of the nation, are embedded in world politics and the world system, including recent globalization. More precisely, as our thesis goes, such ebbs and flows express the remaking of class and its political alliances within world systemic processes, about which more in a moment. We need an anthropology that serves as a tool to help clarify the relevant multi-level mechanisms. For this reason we need an approach to globalization that focuses on social relations first and only secondly on cultural symbols. We also need one that does not oppose the local and the global but views them systematically in their dynamically nested qualities. Moreover, we cannot refrain from studying the phenomenon much more consistently in its unfolding through time than cultural globalists such as Appadurai and Geschiere do. And while following Friedman on the aspect of global systems, and the decentralization of capital and reconfigurations of class alliances, our approach seeks to clarify, more 8. This lack of conversation between the global analysis of transformations and the emphasis on local coherence and continuities may spring from Friedman’s reliance on Sahlins and Lévi-Strauss for the part on the local, and expresses itself in what is to my mind a not fully relational conception of local life-worlds. Significantly, local life remains largely accounted for in terms of ‘a culture’. I have similar problems with his vision of capital in global systems, which remains surprisingly Weberian, referring to ‘abstract wealth’ rather than unfolding and contradictory class relations. Consequently, the local and the global never become fully interlinked, hierarchically nested sets of dynamic social relationships. Thanks to Gavin Smith and to an exciting session on Friedman’s work with Jonathan Friedman, Steve Reyna and Don Nonini and myself at the CASCA meetings in Vancouver, 2009.

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explicitly than his anthropology of global systems does, the mechanisms that link global processes to local territorial and politico-cultural outcomes, and vice versa. In short, if we need another label, we study ‘critical junctions’ (see Kalb 2005) between local and global processes and we derive inspiration from the ‘global anthropology’ of Eric Wolf rather than from the later cultural globalists of the ‘global implosion’ and ‘global assemblage’ schools. The populist politics of fear is not produced by a global implosion of a culturalist kind, even though culture panics and culture wars about the coherence, substance and integrity of local culture are part of it, and imagined enemies and excessive narcissism belong obviously to it too. Nationalist populism and other politico-cultural responses to neoliberal globalization should not be seen as being immediately oriented on, or caused directly by, global actors or accelerating flows of people, trade and information as such. As Sid Tarrow (2005) and others (e.g., Musante 2005) have shown, counterglobalist sentiments often tend to get filtered by, organized within, and addressed to nation-state-based arenas. I treat the global as the always slightly opaque level of aggregation and abstraction defined by what Eric Wolf (1990) has called ‘structural power’, the power to organize transnational fields of unequal and uneven social relationships, give them direction and meaning, and organize the units, territorial and otherwise, that are allowed to implement and enact them. Structural power does not determine outcomes in any particular sphere, level or territory in any straightforward way, and it is not always directly accessible for purposes of empirical research. Nor is it exempt from internal contradictions and unevenness; on the contrary, it is defined by such contradictions and unevenness. Global structural power is a field of forces that shapes the content and form of relationships within lower level fields of what Wolf called ‘tactical power’ (Wolf 1990). It puts pressure and sets limits on the possible relationships and dynamics within such tactical fields. And it is within such tactical fields, which are often nation-states or clusters of states such as the EU, that the space for manoeuvre of identifiable local and more thickly situated actors, individual as well as collective, gets constituted. Actual local outcomes, then, are mediated by various ‘critical junctions’ that link global processes via particular national arenas and local histories, often hidden, to emergent and situated events and narratives, and back again (Kalb 1997, 2002, 2005; Kalb et al. 2000; Kalb and Tak 2005).9 Critical junctions are multi-level relational mechanisms that link the global levels of structural power with the respective institutional fields of ‘tactical power’ on the scale of 9. Critical junctions in the Wolfian sense are not to be confused with what political scientists have called ‘critical junctures’ (Collier and Collier 2002). Critical junctures are purely historical moments, not spatial ones connecting local and global process. They are moments of critical opening in the formation of political systems that subsequently develop a path dependency of their own (see Collier and Collier 2002: 27–40). They are also more about political institutions or institutionalized power blocs than about social relationships and social power in a broad anthropological sense. Thanks to Sid Tarrow for referring me to this work.

Introduction ◆ 13

the nation-state and with the spaces of agential power of ‘common people’ in situated everyday circumstances (Wolf 1990).10 Such critical junctions, moreover, have a path dependency, a historical weight and a direction of their own that cannot so easily be turned around. They keep pushing in a particular direction, remain captured by particular fields of power and signification, until some major things happen, often both locally, globally and on intermediate levels at the same time, through which the path dependencies become ‘punctuated’. Both in their continuities and discontinuities, critical junctions are overdetermined by systemic relationships of inequality, power and dependence. Now, the claim is that it is precisely in these dynamic interlinkages that the politics of fear and anger incubates. The politics of fear is therefore not the unmediated consequence of cultural implosions and global cultural cascades, such as in Appadurai’s account of ethnic riots in India (Appadurai 1996). Rather, while turbulence does happen, fear is generally nurtured, step by step and over time, within the unfolding and grinding mechanisms that link livelihoods and neighbourhoods with mass-mediated, national-level political articulations and mobilizations, as they are constrained, pressurized and energized by globally constituted relationships of exploitation and dependency. Most of these critical junctions can be precisely identified and analysed through time and throughout space, though not always necessarily by the classical methods of ethnography. Examining how the politics of fear is incubated and nurtured within them is ultimately an agenda that requires an obsession with local historical discovery and a critical reading of largescale global and national processes from the vantage point of the particular and situated livelihoods of subaltern classes. Ethnography is essential but must be extended by methods that capture the flow of time and connections in space, by techniques and sources that are not essentially different from our own classical extended case methods, even though Wolf’s ‘macroscopic history’ deserves some re-emphasis (Burawoy et al. 2000; Handelman 2005; Kalb and Tak 2005; Narotzky and Smith 2006; Burawoy 2009).

Class, Clues and Dispossession Specifically, we would like to suggest, it is the contradictions and disjunctures between everyday agential power fields, tactical state-based political environments – including political and media opportunity structures (see Tarrow 2005) – and global structural power relationships – including the significations that are generated within and between these disjointed, albeit nested, frames – that move popular anxiety and paranoia. Such anxieties, in their turn, energize the nationalist populisms that are taking the place of the earlier liberal modernisms that have gone awry. In a more narrowly political sense, populism, in the current conjuncture, is then the rejection 10. For an excellent recent study, see Narotzky and Smith (2006).

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of liberal elites that fail to use the resources of the democratic nation-state to harness global processes to local needs and desires, that celebrate an elite cosmopolitanism, or that use state power and cosmopolitan ideologies in Friedman’s sense for outright local dispossession (about which more in a moment). The narrowly political outcome of this is the generation of telegenetic and charismatic ideologues that create havoc among established political classes and institutions, as political scientists have noted all along. But more broadly conceived, populism refers to the moods and sensibilities of the disenfranchised as they face the disjunctures between everyday lives that seem to become increasingly chaotic and uncontrollable and the wider public power projects that are out of their reach and suspected of serving their ongoing disenfranchisement. In Charles Tilly’s definition of democracy, this is explicitly seen as ‘de-democratization’ (Tilly 2004, 2007). De-democratization in his deeply sociological vision goes together with an imposed reliance on particularized trust networks crucial for working-class social reproduction. It is the enforced particularization of trust and the narrowing of the public sphere that lights the fire of working-class populism. This is the point where populism, dispossession and hidden histories meet. Let me explain. The recent conjunction of political theory and psychoanalysis in the work of authors such as Benjamin Arditti (2005), Yannis Stavrakakis (2007) and Slavoj Žižek (2008) has powerfully suggested that workingclass populism on a deeper level must be seen as a symptom that expresses the ‘return of the repressed’. It is a symptom that both hints at a traumatic experience and a symbol that expresses that experience in distorted ways. Direct access to the traumatic events remains denied but is not quite forgotten. The symptom allows the return of the repressed ‘through more or less tortuous ways’ (Arditti 2005: 88). But what then is the repressed? The clue that I am hinting at, of course, following Žižek and Mouffe, is class in a very broad sense of the term.11 The workings, effects, exploitations and humiliations of class are the repressed and denied but never-forgotten trauma that expresses itself in neo-nationalist populism, as the wider public culture of neoliberal growth, gentrification and cosmopolitan class formation denies its denizens the availability of the language of class. Žižek therefore calls right-wing populism, ‘a displaced version of working-class politics’, and adds sardonically that ‘rightist racist populism is today the best argument that the “class struggle”, far from being obsolete, goes on’ (Žižek 2008: 267). I share his conclusion that ‘fundamentalist populism is filling in the void of the absence of a leftist dream’ (Žižek 2008: 275). The symptom brings class back in the form of aching Unbehagen and moral panic. Michael Perelman (2000), David Harvey (2003) and others have lately called renewed attention to Marx’s work on ‘primitive accumulation’, which argued that capitalism had come into being through assets that were accumulated in 11. For extensive interdisciplinary discussions of class from an anthropological viewpoint, see Kalb (1997) and Narotzky and Smith (2006).

Introduction ◆ 15

non-market-based ways, by outright seizure and the use of power, violence and law. The British enclosures of the early modern period are the classic example. Harvey and others now criticize Marx for assuming that this was only relevant for the ‘prehistory’ of capital. Capitalism, as Rosa Luxemburg and later Hannah Arendt famously argued, would always be dependent, also in its contemporary workings, on pushing people, goods and other assets into the circuits of capital by non-market, political and violent ways, thus giving systemic subsidies to capital accumulation. To erase the teleology, Harvey aptly reframed the notion as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003). While ‘accumulation by expanded reproduction’, in his terms, implies a broadly shared growth of the social product through increases in productivity and social wages, accumulation by dispossession describes a situation where the growth of profits and capital goes together with a destruction of assets, or closure of access to assets, essential for the social reproduction of ‘ordinary people’ and a politically organized downward pressure on the social wage. Harvey cites privatization, massive devaluation and a reduction of social rights and ‘the commons’ as the classical ways by which this happens. Harvey’s suggestions are helpful for making crucial distinctions for analysing the large-scale mechanisms of uneven social change under neoliberal globalization. However, Harvey makes the fundamental Leftist error of assuming that accumulation by dispossession is intimately associated with the growth of anti-globalist left-wing protest against corporate appropriation (see also Kalb 2009b). While that may happen – important examples from the global South: for instance, Via Campesina in Brazil and left-wing organizing in Soweto and West Bengal12 – it makes sense to point to a recurrent affinity of accumulation by dispossession and working-class neo-nationalist populism of the Right in the European context, in spite of the occasional largely liberal or left-leaning populism – such as the Scottish example discussed by Gilfillan (this volume). Post-politics and the marginalization of left-wing alternatives, including the utter discrediting of socialism and Marxism in postsocialist Eastern Europe, are the obvious reason. The deeper cause, however, is the aligning of upper-middle-class interests with the liberal cosmopolitanism of transnational elites and their globalization project, now deflecting their earlier interest in class language, social rights and welfare-state formation onto the abstract humanism of human rights in neoliberalized incarnation. New class formations, in other words, are the explanation. This makes the analysis of particular paths and experiences of accumulation by dispossession both important and hazardous. Important, because they promise to deliver insights into the crucial mechanisms and intimate histories of dispossession that lay locked and distorted within populist public discourse; hazardous because the symptomatic character of the latter misrecognizes the actual properties of the former. In a very literal sense we are therefore confronted with ‘hidden histories’. 12. See, e.g., the fascinating section by Luisa Steur et al. (2009) on accumulation by dispossession in Asia.

16 ◆ Don Kalb

In the particular case of postsocialist Eastern Europe, the repression is even more intractable. For one, class language after socialism has been even more explicitly delegitimized than in the West, with a broad popular rejection of Soviet imposed ideology and a broad appeal of notions of democracy and reform (see, e.g., Ost 2005; Kalb 2009a, 2009b). Indeed, ‘joining the West’, ‘democracy’ and ‘reform’ have been such powerful public symbols of redemption in Eastern Europe that analysing the systemic contradictions of world capitalist processes and postsocialist social change has until recently been all but tabooed among Central and East European (CEE) intellectuals (but see Szalai 2008, and below). Such narratives have simply not been available. What is available is a growing rightist undercurrent, sometimes becoming mainstream, which senses the injustices against the people and seeks to unmask the enemy within and without that can be made responsible.

The Uses of Ethnic Othering Although headlines in the Western press tend to paint an orientalizing picture of postsocialist Eastern Europe as a cauldron of majority-ethnic nationalisms, there has, in fact, been very little anthropological work on the dynamics of neo-nationalisms in the region. This stands in contrast to work by political scientists and political sociologists, who have consistently discussed East European nationalisms, often in alarmist mode, since the early 1990s (e.g., Tismaneanu 1998). The newest wave of such work is less alarmist and much more analytical and has started to experiment with, and advocate, ethnographic methods (Derluguian 2005; Ost 2005). Western media, of course, tend to treat majority nationalisms in the West differently. They see the recent conflicts within which nationalisms in the West are expressed as conflicts about immigration, spurred on by local farright movements and sharpened by ‘the war on terror’, ‘Islamic networks’ and headscarves at school. Social research has not been much different and has approached majority nationalism primarily under the sign of ethnicity and immigration,13 for which there is now many times more research funding available than for ethnographic class-oriented research. After so many declarations of its demise, the white working-class, apparently, must have now become a middle class, and is not supposed to have any further justification for existing in its ‘class form’. It may reappear in the form of teenage single mothers, hooligans, school drop-outs, fascists, youth gangs, disposable workers and their need for constant re-education, and single poor old people in less agreeable neighbourhoods. But by offering them up in slices small enough for expert treatments and rejecting ‘classness’ altogether, and by buying into culture-talk, ethnicity crazes and migration panics, both social 13. For a similar critique, see also Berezin (2009). Klandermans and Mayer (2006) are a case in point.

Introduction ◆ 17

research and public journalism mystify the sources of populist nationalism in the West by shifting them onto actors deemed ultimately external to the core of the West itself; that is, migrants and the fringe of the extreme Right. By referring to the ethnic other as their ultimate causation, right-wing (or left-wing) xenophobic events and movements are figured as aberrations from a supposedly well-established norm of liberalism in the supposedly middleclass societies of the West, which appear in sharp and flattering contrast to the East, which is nationalist and working-class. Against such self-gratifying occidentalist imagery, it is our contention that Western and Eastern European nationalist populisms have broadly similar social roots and not incomparable constituencies. They are occasioned by processes of neoliberal globalization and class restructuring on global, regional, national and local levels. Their actual event-based dynamics, of course, derive from differentially ordered and sequentialized political fields, and they get their symbolism from profoundly different national imaginations, histories, memories and amnesias. That is, their surface is indeed different. But their synchronization after 1989 is no coincidence and their formal causation in the current world historical context is a general one. Teasing out the universal from the particular must be part of the anthropological remit. Recent anthropological work on neo-nationalism in Western Europe (Gingrich and Banks 2005) has somewhat echoed the media’s emphasis on migrants and far Right movements. While this work has given us a much more socially embedded understanding of the far Right in various nations than hitherto achieved – for example, emphasizing the link with threatened working-class masculinity – it has done little to expel the orientalizing and occidentalizing mystifications discussed above. Alternatively, it has focused (Holmes 2000) on conservative West European elites and their revived Catholic organicist ideologies. This does help to re-establish cultural essentialism in its rightful place within the right flank of Western European and continental state making projects but cannot explain its populist dynamics and contents outside elite circles. The combined focus of the present volume on Eastern and Western Europe helps to facilitate a shift of perspective towards class and to point out the selfserving distortions generated by the ethnic and immigrant focus in the West. Eastern European right-wing populisms have grown lately, particularly in Poland (see Kalb 2009a, 2009b) and in Hungary (see Halmai, Bartha, this volume). But they cannot so easily be explained away by referring to the ‘ethnic other’ as some nationalisms in Western Europe can. On an emic level, participants in these East European movements are frantically searching for precisely such an ethnic opponent, which is sometimes available to them in the figure of the Gypsy – though hardly in Poland. While Roma do indeed figure heavily in Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian and Hungarian rightist populist imaginaries, they are of course not immigrants, and few of them are concentrated in the great cities of the east, such as Budapest or Cracow, as is the case with Moroccans in Rotterdam, Brussels and Paris, Pakistanis in London and Manchester, Turks in Berlin and Essen, and Romanians in

18 ◆ Don Kalb

Rome and Zaragoza. Indeed, East European Roma tend to live either in the stagnating countryside or in and around provincial industrial cities, such as Miskolc or Kosice, that have been hit exceptionally hard by processes of working-class dispossession. Moreover, they have lived in those surroundings for a long time. And while 90 per cent of them had formal employment under socialism, they did not pose as an object of open hatred then as they do now. Indeed, they are a newly re-ethnicized, unemployed and re-casualized former working-class which has, in Tilly’s words, precisely become a public moral concern only since the public sector and publicly regulated employment has collapsed, forcing them back into their own particularized networks for social reproduction. In other words, Roma are the quintessential classe dangereuse in Friedman’s sense (see also Chevalier 1981). Once belonging to the lower reaches of the socialist working-class, they are now thoroughly dispossessed and have been left to their own depleted informal and sometimes criminal shadow economies.14 They were then turned into an imagined object of fear for struggling citizens in massively declining provincial cities, desperately clinging to the old standards of respectability. Ironically, therefore, the postsocialist East allows us to tell the West about class again. Current neo-nationalist populisms, then, represent a systemic, structural, locally contingent and socially meaningful phenomenon, and scholars should therefore try to grasp them in these interlocking dimensions. Peter Worsley wrote long ago that populism is ‘the eternal attempt of people to claim politics as something of theirs’, as they grope for ‘substantive justice’ and appeal ‘to the involvement of people in the running of their own societies’ (Worsley 1969: 248, 244, 245). This is an anthropological agenda par excellence. Would Worsley have been surprised that post-1989 populisms have partially moved from the global South to the global North, from the periphery to the centre, and from the Left to the Right?

Sites of Class and the Nation: Decentring Western Europe from the East In a collection on neo-nationalism within and beyond Europe, Gingrich and Banks have recently written that, ‘From the outset, Western Europe … represented a central regional focus of this debate, thereby acknowledging that an assessment of nationalism under the post-socialist conditions prevailing elsewhere in Europe would require a debate of its own’ (Gingrich and Banks 2005: 1). They go on to say they seek to balance an emphasis on agency with a grasp of historical and structural causes. As has become clear, we agree only 14. The realization that liberal human-rights discourses, including cultural rights, in a context of massive dispossession and disenfranchisement of the Roma populations in CEE after 1989 are deeply insufficient to turn their degradation around permeates recent publications: see, e.g., Trehan and Sigona (2010).

Introduction ◆ 19

partly with the methodological reasoning behind the first statement. Yes, the tactical arenas are differently composed by different historical forces, ideologies and sequences among all European nations and broadly between West and East (and North and South, and so on). But the structural and macro-historical forces playing out in the world system as a whole, and impinging differently but radically on all European locations alike, are not that dissimilar. There are different locations in a common process rather than different processes in a common location (‘Europe’). What we have called critical junctions must be identified correctly and should be made explicit. Consequently, we believe that Gingrich and Banks’s hold on structural and historical causes is not entirely satisfying, in particular the connection between the two. We argue that similar structural forces all over Europe produce comparable though differently situated, proportioned, articulated and publicly signified outcomes. We also argue that outcomes in Eastern Europe are more likely than those in Western Europe to teach us that processes of class are the core systemic driver and facilitator of these local–global processes, outcomes in the West being so hegemonized under the sign of the politics of immigration and the repertoire of cultural difference. This is not meant to deny that immigration and ‘integration’ generates real and serious issues for societies in the West, or to deny that ‘culture’ could somehow play a role in that. But the staggering prevalence of immigration issues and clashes of culture over processes of class in the academic agenda surely reflects the hegemony of rightist discourse in Western Europe. Approaching Western outcomes from the Eastern side alerts us to the possibility that other driving forces, more straightforwardly associated with the making, unmaking, and restructuring of class, may be the more fundamental ground from which xenophobia as a politically driven process gets its support base in the West, not merely from the everyday friction of ‘cultures’.15 Of course, ultimately, on a higher level of abstraction and causation, class restructuring and polarization, social insecurity and (im)migration are all simultaneously encapsulated in the notion of neoliberal globalization. They are sides of the same coin. But this helps little in establishing relative causal priorities in explaining populist nationalist outcomes in Europe. In this collection we look at such outcomes with a strong emphasis on class (as relationally defined). First, we build our arguments on Eastern as well as Western evidence and move as it were from East to West rather than the other way around, which is unusual given global hierarchies that construct Eastern Europe as diverging from Western norms. In fact, we do an exercise in decentring the West from the East.16 Secondly, we focus on non-metropolitan 15. See Gaspard (1995) for an early study demonstrating precisely that. 16. See Chakrabarty (2000). However, against Chakrabarty, we do this with Marx rather than Heidegger, which is what he, strangely, thinks is impossible because Marx would be the penultimate embodiment of Western teleologies. I am afraid Heidegger is as well. And both can be read profitably without teleology if we read them relationally and historically.

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Western populist cases, in northern Italian Alpine communities (Jaro Stacul) and a Scottish post-mining district (Paul Gilfillan), where immigration plays no overt role in generating nationalist populism, though it does so in our third Western case, in a central Italian shoemaking district (Michael Blim). Thus we evade the methodological problem of the ‘contamination’ of class and immigration factors. The cost of that strategy is that we leave Western European metropolitan processes out and cannot directly interrogate the most complex and entangled cases in the West, though we would maintain that we will be better positioned to do so at a later date. Following the good academic rule that one should attack the strongest bastions of the intellectual enemy first, our collection starts with Dora Vetta’s analysis of nationalist populism in Kikinda, Serbia. In the common-sense post-1989 Western perspective, Serbia functioned as the penultimate example of an essentialized populist nationalism (see, e.g., Kaplan 1994). However, Vetta studies a place that was not just far from the war, located in the northern Vojvodina, but also one that openly rejected Milosevic’s warmongering from 1996 onwards, and helped to generate the broad electoral rebuttal of Milosevic in 2000. Kikinda is a multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-religious industrial city which because of its anti-war politics and its multicultural composition and practice was awarded the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) prize for the ‘most tolerant city’ in Serbia in 2003. Kikinda, indeed, was one of the proud sites of Yugoslav urban industrial modernity, featuring some of the best and well-known industries of the federal republic. The ‘tolerance’ praised by the OSCE was in fact part of the Yugoslav socialist success story, as Vetta shows. After 2000, however, the broadly pro-European coalitions that laboured to bring Serbia closer to the EU, the democratic principles of the OSCE, and to transnational capital, allowed the destruction of the Kikinda employment base and the collapse of the urban social services financed by local industry. European capital, to the extent that it came, did not always come to revitalize local plants. Often it came to close them down with an eye on limiting competition in Europe, a not uncommon experience in Central and Eastern Europe (see also Halmai, Bartha, this volume). Hence the irony: Just a year after receiving the OSCE prize and being showcased as the example of European liberal cultural modernity in Serbia, the Kikinda electorate gave majority support to Seselj’s Radical Party, which had always been even more uncompromisingly nationalist than Milosevic’s socialists. Kikinda residents now explicitly compared their conditions with those of Africa, Vetta reports. Indeed, their stories closely resemble Ferguson’s interviewees in the Zambian copperbelt who bitterly complained that the promise of development and modernity never really materialized (Ferguson 1999). The difference is that Kikinda’s citizens had in fact enjoyed such urban industrial modernity for a whole generation. It was now radically being broken up right before their very eyes and they were supposed to consent on behalf of ‘European modernity’. Unsurprisingly, they did not entirely approve. ‘Theft’ they called it bluntly, and they asked for a politics of protection.

Introduction ◆ 21

Without any credible leftist political discourse available, they voted for the one party that had never given its support to the ongoing ‘theft’ and had indeed consistently criticized it. Vetta concludes that material processes of dispossession and sheer rational self-interest explain why engineers, foremen and workers alike endorsed the Serbian populism of Seselj, whose articulate analysis of current global political economy and its consequences for Serbia, quoted by Vetta, reads uncomfortably as if the author has followed seminars by David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin. We meet again ‘the obsessive theme of the stolen country and the stolen factories’, as Petrovici calls it, in two case studies of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Obsession is, of course, a recognized feature of the trauma we discussed earlier. Both Petrovici and Faje show once more that the experience of ‘theft’ and the threatening collapse of modern urban livelihoods among the Romanian industrial working-class explains much of the public support for the virulently nationalist mayor Funar over a twelve-year period that only ended in 2004 with accession to the EU and exceptionally large-scale inflows of transnational capital seeking local skilled labour supplies connected to this. In the early 1990s, when Yugoslavia began to fall apart, Czechoslovakia was breaking up, the Baltic states were seceding from the Soviet Union with violence only precariously subdued, and ‘subproletariats’ (Derluguian 2005) sustained their fighting in the Caucasus, many observers held their breath for Transylvania and its capital city, Cluj-Napoca. The formerly Hungarian territories of Romania hosted mixed populations with a substantial Hungarian speaking section, a population moreover that felt itself still deeply victimized by the Trianon Treaty of 1923 (the Eastern counterpart of the Treaty of Versailles) and the Romanian state, and which had never fully agreed to the imposed borders. Nor did the Hungarian state after 1989 seem satisfied with the settlement. Fortunately, apart from a big brawl in 1991 in Târgu-Mures, very little collective violence happened. The historical sociologist of nationalism in Europe, Rogers Brubaker, in an extensive historical and ethnographic study of Cluj (Brubaker et al. 2006), has recently explained this unexpectedly benign local outcome via a critique of prevalent notions of ethnicity. Ethnicity, he argued, often seems to evoke a ‘groupism’ that is rarely warranted. He recommends treating ethnicity as a ‘cognitive repertoire’, which should not be reified and equated with the supposed existence of actual cohesive groups competing with other groups. While Brubaker poses in this study as an ethnographer who bases his insights on ‘conversational analysis’, he pays scant respect to work in the anthropology of ethnicity, even though anthropologists had arguably arrived at broadly similar ‘non-groupist’ conceptions long before him (e.g., Barth 1969; Epstein 1978; Eriksen 1993; Rogers and Vertovec 1995; Halpern and Kideckel 1997; Richards 2009). Few of his overall insights will therefore surprise an anthropologist. It seems, however, that his target is the popular and journalistic contemporary ‘groupist’ connotation of ethnicity in the West (and among World Bank researchers and so on), a product of panic rather than academic insight.

22 ◆ Don Kalb

But there are also crucial differences with anthropological accounts. Anthropologists tend to approach ethnicity as a symbolic repertoire functioning within the context of ongoing social relations, relations which should be studied ethnographically in their historical and situated unfolding.17 In other words, they endorse a ‘relationally realist’ approach to ethnicity as one available symbolic repertoire among many. Brubaker, however, makes a double idealist move as compared to this anthropological work. He does this by transforming the prefix ‘symbolic’ – which refers to a public process or event – to a merely ‘cognitive’ act that apparently eventuates in the individual mind; and by subsequently substituting historical ethnography with ‘conversational analysis’ based on interviews and focus groups. Predictably, his book comprises a strictly urban historical section on Cluj – which is excellent in itself but simply functions as a historical backdrop – and a strictly synchronous section on the use of cognitive ethnic categories based exclusively on conversational analysis. This division of the book is no unfortunate coincidence: ‘everyday ethnicity’, Brubaker maintains, stands opposed to large-scale historical forces and institutional processes, and the latter have little purchase on the former. It is somewhat surprising to see this construct of an everyday life emptied of power, politics and publics thirty years after the blurring of anthropology and history and the proliferation of cultural studies started to offer us less naive tools.18 But indeed, to say it crudely, this is no anthropology or ethnography. Petrovici also points out that this approach stands in sharp contrast to the relational Brubaker of earlier work (Brubaker and Cooper 2000), and he cunningly employs Bourdieu to show the limitations of Brubaker’s use of Bourdieu. While Brubaker’s cognitive repertoire may help to describe how ethnicity in Cluj remained a largely private experience, it cannot explain why the loud and boisterous nationalist Funar came on the scene, won three consecutive local elections, and only went in 2004 after twelve long and tumultuous years of rule. Brubaker, confronted with that fact, suggests somewhat helplessly that residents of Cluj found Funar ‘ridiculous’. Perhaps, counters Petrovici, but they did vote for him en masse and not because he was perceived as a collective embarrassment. More precisely, Funar’s votes were concentrated in the large, modern working-class neighbourhoods built as residential adjuncts to socialist industry in the 1970s and early 1980s. Petrovici sets out to show that power struggles over public politics, public symbols and public space are a necessary background for explaining the upsurge of Romanian nationalism in the worker suburbs of Cluj after 1989. He also demonstrates that such public struggles cannot be understood without studying processes of class, and in particular the trajectories and experiences of dispossession experienced by industrial workers. 17. For an explicit recent statement, see Richards (2009). 18. For a taste of the debate on anthropology and history, see Kalb and Tak (2005). A marvelous recent item from a historian deeply involved in that discussion is Rebel (2010).

Introduction ◆ 23

The postsocialist case studies in this book underline that one should never ignore the fact that the major gain of socialism for much of Eastern Europe had been the possibility of modern urban life for an erstwhile largely rural and deeply impoverished population. To overstate the case only slightly, prior to 1940 cities in eastern Central Europe and in South-eastern Europe in particular had been home for the Germans, Jews, Hungarians and other dominant classes. Socialism had brought peasants into the city as a modern and literate proletariat. The collapse of socialism after 1989 under neoliberal globalist auspices threatened to reduce this urban working-class to peasants once again. Petrovici studies in detail how the collapse and privatization of factories and the general loss of economic resources hit Romanian workers’ pride. Industrial suburbs that had been added to the older Hungarian city of Kolozsvár (Cluj) between the 1960s and 1980s had once embodied hope, progress and modernity. Now they were being reduced to spaces without hope for an underemployed and casualized sub-working-class that was often being referred to again as peasants in the city. As in Vetta’s Kikinda, just over the border in Serbia, the postsocialist collapse threatened to erase people’s life achievement of actually having become urban and modern. People of Cluj did not compare themselves with Africans, as did people in Kikinda, but they noted with deep dismay that they had tumbled to the lowest rung in Europe. While the inner city of Cluj was still largely associated with the Hungarian middle classes, Romanian workers from the de-classed suburban blocs supported a politician who claimed that the modern urbanity of central Cluj was actually theirs. Petrovici argues, therefore, that the significance of Funar was about articulating the workers’ right to the city after the industrial base of Cluj, on which their presence in the city had depended, had collapsed. Workers had become suspended between a peasant past and an indeterminate postsocialist future without clues about their possible status and prospects. In other words, the actual obsession with urban space and symbols was a useful displacement, created by Funar and other ideologues, from the traumatizing obsession with stolen factories that no one seemed to have the power to bring back. Florin Faje discusses the same urban arena but from the perspective of competition between two football clubs in Cluj. The more established club, Universitatea, became increasingly appropriated as their symbolic home during the 1990s by young casualized males from the suburban blocs. Turning ever more confrontational and nationalist, they pushed both the Hungarian and Romanian middle-class fans out of the club. These then embraced an older but traditionally less successful club, CFR, which was bought up by a Hungarian entrepreneur in the early 2000s and turned into a capitalist football machine, buying up players from Africa, Latin America and elsewhere, winning the national championship and qualifying for European tournaments. This is Friedman’s divide between cosmopolitan classes and indigenized or dangerous classes neatly embodied in the ritualized rivalry between two local football clubs and their fans. Again, it is class experiences and emergent class divides that drive the process at a popular level.

24 ◆ Don Kalb

Faje’s study is a good reminder that the public arena for the populist politics of class and neo-nationalism is indeed the public sphere as a whole, and not just politics narrowly conceived. That public sphere importantly includes the media and all sorts of public perceptions, representations and events. Michal Buchowski has shown how the public spheres of postsocialist countries and the new ‘free’ media in particular became the theatre for fantasizing about the emergence of a middle class, and with it consumption and prosperity, as in the occidentalized imagination of the West. At the same time they coined and spread orientalizing notions of workers and peasants as an internal and eternal ‘East’ that could ultimately endanger the rise of postsocialist middle classes and should hence better be silenced by open humiliation (Buchowski 2006; see also Kalb 2009a, 2009b). The notion of dispossession undoubtedly has a hard materialist core, but it does have a strong cultural dimension as well which is not always sufficiently recognized. Honour, dignity and prestige are scarce public goods that can be allocated to you by political societies, but they can also be taken away from you. If that happens, public politics starts to punish the poor and blame the victims of dispossession for their own plight, as Loic Wacquant in particular has showed (Wacquant 2009). Indeed, one cannot think about ‘hard’ processes of dispossession getting institutionalized over time without sustained public assaults on the credits, honour and dignity of those that are being dispossessed.19 Postsocialist ‘transition’ was such a double-edged process. The studies of Kikinda and Cluj-Napoca hint at how the collapse of jobs and suburban neighbourhoods was paired to wider forms of public humiliation, in which dominant liberal ‘talking classes’ close to relevant power arenas became perceived as openly contemptuous of ‘the common folk’, their ways of life and the urban infrastructures on which they depended. In return, subalterns suspected them of being keen on moving ordinary people back, minimally in imaginary ways, to where they came from, that is the underdeveloped ‘Eastern’ countryside (or ‘Africa’ or ‘the lowest rung in Europe’). Socialism and nationalism – and democracy before its marriage with neoliberalism – were the symbolic repertoires cum institutional complexes that historically helped to elevate subaltern populations de jure from disenfranchised subjects into citizens and to possess them of the modern jobs, rights and duties that would allow them to socially become so. As argued above, in the absence of socialist alternatives, populist nationalism in the current conjuncture becomes the vehicle by which dispossessed populations fight the symbolic aspects of dispossession in the hope that the material aspects might follow. The Funar interlude in Cluj is a good example. Halmai’s and Bartha’s studies of respectively Budapest and Gyõr in Hungary bring further insight to such analyses, located as they are on the very border of ‘the West’ and in a country that has recently become the prime example of rising working-class populist nationalism.

19. On credit, see Tilly (2008).

Introduction ◆ 25

A good 100 kilometres east of Vienna – an exemplar of European urban grandeur, and currently a wealthy and successful regional banking centre that extends its financial networks farther to the east than the Habsburg Empire ever did – lies the Hungarian city of Gyõr, and around it one of the most successful export-oriented manufacturing zones to have developed in postsocialist Europe. Even more than Cluj after 2000, Gyõr is one of two or three locations in Central and Eastern Europe that have seen by far the largest transnational flow of industrial investment, starting before 1989. Based around automotive and electronics manufacturing, these investments came not to kill off earlier industries, such as in Kikinda, but to create new green-field plants that generated substantial employment and offered among the best wages in the country to young, educated workers. However, with long tax holidays in a quasi free-trade zone, and dependent on international rather than local suppliers, as well as on inputs from engineers in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands rather than from Hungary, they contribute only a little to the national economy as such. After twenty years of ‘transition’, Eszter Bartha’s interviewees in Gyõr’s slowly dying Rába plant are keenly aware that this form of development does not substitute for the roundabout and thick national development that socialism, and the Rába motor vehicle plant that was one of its national symbols, once brought. The number of jobs is insufficient to substitute for the tens of thousands that Rába offered and that are now largely gone; the profits are repatriated to the West; and tax holidays do not help to maintain local urban services. Worse, Rába managers rewarded themselves ever better salaries while limiting the wages for workers and administrators whose jobs were recurrently cut or restructured, and they actively dismantled and sold parts of the factory complex, among others for lucrative real estate deals close to the city centre. The ‘stories of decline’, as Bartha understands the narration of her interviewees, narrate creeping dispossession both in its hard and soft forms and, like elsewhere, speak explicitly of ‘theft’ of what was once conceived and experienced as ‘the people’s property’. Their stories are not just about the factory, they are also about the stagnation of family fortunes as declining real wages, dwindling job opportunities and insufficient state benefits make social reproduction over time ever more precarious. People complain that what they got from socialism – the chance to make and sustain a family, build a career around honest work, and maintain a house of one’s own – can’t so easily be gained today. The stories of decline are also about a keenly felt erosion of solidarity and communal life. Bartha, a social historian of Eastern Europe, reminds us, importantly, that the communist parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were by 1980 well aware of their societies’ relative economic and technological deterioration vis-à-vis the West. But, dependent as they were on the continued silent support of industrial workers, they would not let living standards slip. The new post-1989 elites did not have such hard limitations on their power and allowed 1.5 million jobs to go in Hungary alone and social inequalities

26 ◆ Don Kalb

between workers and the new managerial classes to explode. One of Bartha’s articulate interviewees says, insightfully, ‘this working-class [used to be] part of the middle class, but [now] they have lost their cause. And they are alone with their problems because they don’t ask for benefits. And if they are not recorded, who gets interested in their problems?’ Silenced and dispossessed, they endorse a populism that exalts the nation as a repository of virtue that must be protected against a parasitic elite in Budapest and in the new managerial functions that seem bent on selling out to international capitalist predators who, as another interviewee says, ‘take us for nothing’. How else can one explain that circumstances seem so radically different a mere half hour by car to the West? Bartha employs a comparison with workers in the Zeiss optical factories of Jena in the former GDR to show that while dispossession is far more comprehensive in Gyõr, it is the former East German workers who have actually endorsed a critique of capitalism as such, while those in Gyõr cannot speak the more structural language of anti-capitalism anymore. In characteristic populist fashion the latter must therefore detect and denounce the profiteers who deceive the people and prevent them from having the healthy national capitalism that is on display just over the border in Austria. The explanation for the difference between Rába and Zeiss workers, Bartha suggests, lies in the continued and indeed revitalized presence of an articulate anti-capitalism in public and political life in Germany and the disappearance of it in Hungary. It also makes a difference to the popular analysis whether you are ‘taken’ on the basis of good standards by your own national capitalists or ‘taken for nothing’ by those from another nation with your own rulers being complicit in an unequal deal from which the foreigners gain. The symbol of the nation here serves hardly as a displacement of something else called ‘the economy’, but rather reflects crudely the huge global inequalities within which capitalism as well as concrete capitalists and their lieutenants thrive.20 In the context of unlocking the dialectics between popular resentment and the mediated messages of the organized far Right it is not irrelevant that Bartha’s interviews are from 2002. One of her interviewees mentions the nationalism of Istvan Csurka, with whom they partly agree. At that point in time Hungary did not yet have a strong nationalist right-wing movement except for the rather isolated Csurka. It was popular nationalism prior to mobilization and strong media discourses. This suggests that the perceptions of Bartha’s informants at the time may not have then been formed by articulate national level actors and populist mobilization. The Kikinda case, as narrated here by Dora Vetta, shows, too, that voters moved to a longestablished nationalist party only in the course of experiencing tangible and 20. Such huge global inequalities separating nations come dramatically together in the worst-off places close to the German and Austrian borders. The Polish former mining town of Walbrzych, in the Sudeten mountains and less than 100 kilometres from the German border, may be the most dramatic case of deep and durable poverty and abandonment in close proximity to world-class wealth.

Introduction ◆ 27

systematic dispossession. The Cluj case is more ambivalent in that regard, nationalist sentiments seeming to grow in tandem with the emergence of Funar’s campaign in ways that are hard to disentangle in retrospect. Halmai’s contribution is unique in focusing squarely on the ongoing interplay of campaigns and mobilizations within the formal political field on the one hand and the discursive articulation of popular experience on the other. Halmai presents an ethnographic study of the emergent Civic Circles movement, called into being by Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian conservative leader, after his election loss of 2002. The Circles, a highly decentralized set of civic initiatives mobilized and certified by Orbán’s party, acquired over a hundred thousand members in a short span of time and developed a clear logic of their own as newly activated people started to push Orbán’s party more to the nationalist Right. Tellingly, this new populist Right rejects the privatization of social services and public utilities, and is against the World Bank-inspired neoliberal policies of the social democrats. In a literal sense, their outlook is more national socialist than conservative Christiandemocratic of the West European variety, even though that is what Orbán always had in mind. Halmai shows how the Circles, by taking politics into the streets and neighbourhoods, ultimately helped to prepare the ground for long cycles of nationalist cum far Right demonstrations against the incumbent social democratic postsocialist government in Budapest in late 2006 and after. Halmai participated in events and meetings of the Circles from 2005 to 2009 and shows how populist nationalism could gradually become hegemonic in its mobilization against the former socialists turned neoliberal state managers. His study focuses on the two formerly ‘red districts’ of Csepel and Újpest, the centres of the worker-council movement of 1956. In these worker districts, once firmly controlled by the former socialists after the 1956 uprising, the Circles gradually made deep inroads as deindustrialization, disinvestment, privatization, inequality and ostensible corruption around real estate increasingly discredited the post-1989 order. By 2009, Orbán enjoyed the largest voter support of any party in Europe, while his Right flank was covertly fading into the new explicitly anti-Semitic, anti-Gypsy, national socialism of the new far Right Jobbik party that, allied to the hundreds strong, uniformed, and ostensibly armed Magyar Garda, had become the third largest force in the Hungarian political field. The Circles had helped to generate a Gramscian counter-hegemony of an angry populist Right against the transnational class and its comprador representatives on the one hand and the classes dangereuses of Roma communities on the other. Hungary, thus, appears to have become the current locus classicus of the Friedman’s politics of double polarization discussed above, with Poland a good second (see Kalb 2009a, 2009b). What can we learn from our three Western cases in the light of these processes in the East? Gilfillan’s mobile and flexible workers of Fife, the former Scottish pit district, and Stacul’s similarly mobile worker-peasants in the northern Italian Alps clearly seem like a happy and quiescent lot compared to the bitterly disappointed east

28 ◆ Don Kalb

Central European worker communities explored in this volume. Home ownership, acceptable incomes, even good early retirement schemes make life pretty well bearable and sometimes even surprisingly enjoyable for quite a few people, as Gilfillan in particular shows. But two things stand out. First, both settings have suffered severe population decline as earlier local political economies organized around mining and complex Alpine village economies have collapsed in the wake of the globalization of markets. This gives an indication of how precarious local social reproduction has become and how fragile the self-maintenance of a local community is these days. Secondly, neither setting expects much from central states and metropolitan politics anymore, except for their pensions and health care. At the same time, they seem increasingly dependent on locally attuned welfare arrangements and support from regional political centres. Working-class nationalism in Scotland, with its anti-British orientation, and worker-peasant ‘regionalist nationalisms’ in the Italian Alps, with their affinities with the anti-Rome politics of the Lega Nord and Forza Italia, are the overt expressions of those two basic facts. Politics is exuberantly anti-metropolitan. There is at least one more important commonality and one significant difference between these two cases. In both settings local political energies seem to spring from a keen appreciation of the physicality of their characteristic forms of labour. This is the force that must be sustained and that keeps what is left of these communities vital, and which is hence keenly celebrated and contrasted with bourgeois life and politics. But this cultural emphasis on physical labour and labourism gets politically signified in entirely contrastive ways. In the former pit village it builds on a left-wing heritage and takes this further into an anti-British left-wing politics of Scottish nationalism, lending boisterous support to the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Parliament’s push for independence. In the Alpine valleys, however, it helps to take local politics after the collapse of the national party system in the early 1990s out of the ‘social’ and workerist strain within Christian democracy and into the slightly xenophobic neoliberalism of Berlusconi and Bossi. Gilfillan describes masterfully how the anti-bourgeois politics of physical labour in Fife leads to a rejection of domination by London, which is denounced as neoliberal and imperial. Stacul shows in detail how ‘being a worker’ leads to an affinity with the ‘worker’ Berlusconi against a left-wing bureaucratic class in Rome that ‘has never worked’. And both populisms in fact claim to be of a different nationality than the one that belongs to the hated centre; they are Padanians and Scots. Michael Blim’s case, situated in the highly industrialized Marche region in central Italy, shows some different aspects again. Blim’s case is one where xenophobic forces only emerged in the last few years. It is a place where considerable prosperity is still generated through export industries, a wealth that is surprisingly equally distributed, in spite of a gradual decline in workers’ living standards over the last decade. It is a success story of the Italian Left, which ruled the area together with the Christian Democrats

Introduction ◆ 29

and their successor parties for some thirty years. Blim explains the recent emergence of a strong protest vote for the Lega Nord as being precisely due to the very success of the Left. This is not a Left that historically faced big concentrated capital but rather a dispersed and highly artisanal and specialized form of capital, and it was therefore never really strong on the shop floor. Rather, it emerged on the basis of electoral gains and subsequent political bargaining. Over the years this led to a strong local and regional corporatism. Ensnared in political alliances with small capital and the Right, the Left had to gradually lose its critical edge. It failed to mobilize against deindustrialization, systematic violations of labour standards in response to competition, and creeping decline. Significantly, it never reached out to the large percentage (almost 20 per cent of the labour force) of immigrant workers that kept local export industries globally competitive. Moving ever more with local workers’ sentiments to a self-protective chauvinism, the Left failed to generate a new electoral base among the large immigrant groups. The Lega Nord polled a surprising 17 per cent in the local elections in 2010, reflecting a decline of the Democratic Party (the new name of the former communists) with similar numbers and expressing the growing anti-immigrant sentiment that Blim had been noting over the years. There are significant differences between these three Western European locations and the east Central European settings in this book, limiting their comparability for our purposes. They are less urban, much smaller in terms of population size, and less economically and socially differentiated. Where Romanian nationalist workers in Cluj-Napoca demand their right to the city and the workers in Györ and Kikinda would certainly like to claim their right to be Europeans, the populist politics of former Alpine lumberjacks and the worker nationalism of casualized post-mining communities in Scotland is rather about the right not to move to a city and the right to be (with) oneself and not something else. Scale, homogeneity and peripherality clearly matter here. The ethnographies of Stacul and Gilfillan give a graphic sense of that anthropological difference. But these three Western cases do deliver a relevant comparative insight: worker populisms in the West – nationalist or regionalist, Left or Right – often tend to lack the dimension of a critique of (transnational) capital and its supposed conspiracies. They focus on corrupt national state-classes or on exploitative structures centred in the capital city but have little sense of transnational capitalist predators roaming in their backyards as Eastern European workers sometimes have. There is no comparable sense, nor a discourse of, ‘theft’. This certainly reflects their closer location to the sources and nationality of capital. Transnational capital comes in addition to national capital, or does not come at all, but it clearly does not come to destroy local modernities, as it often seems to do in Eastern European experiences and populist perceptions. Of course, despite neoliberal restructurings and capital flight, experiences in the West are not marked by the deep ruptures that have shaped popular experiences in the East. There is significantly more

30 ◆ Don Kalb

continuity in the discontinuity. In Western European populisms it is the domestic governing classes that are suspected of causing or allowing the precariousness of local existence (though the Scottish nationalists in Fife would deny they are in fact domestic, of course). In settings not studied here, such as the Netherlands or France, it could certainly be the transnational governing classes of the European Union that are the subject of populist distrust, that distrust perhaps including suspicions of conspiracy and of the complicity of elected national politicians. But even though Le Pen sometimes argued explicitly about the lack of loyalty of big capital to France (now copied by conservative leaders such as Sarkozy and Merkel), there is no similarity with the experience of those postsocialist industrial workers in places such as Györ and Kikinda. Stories of decline abound in all working-class settings, but postsocialist workers sense their outright dispossession and accuse capital and their own state classes openly for the ‘theft’ of what was once more or less genuinely believed to be ‘people’s property’ (see Kalb 2009a, 2009b). Western European workers, meanwhile, feel less openly burgled but do feel deeply abandoned and left behind. They are left on their own. Some populist nationalisms, such as in Italy and the Netherlands, where working-classes are co-opted by neoliberal nationalist alliances, make a classic Bourdieulike inversion by turning necessity into virtue and telling their state-classes that they also want to be left on their own, in the expectation that they will thus be enabled to win any global competition as well as revitalize their communities and localities. These are neoliberal chauvinistic nationalisms with xenophobic outer edges. In other cases, such as Germany, France, Austria and Belgium, populist nationalism tends to be less neoliberal and would rather call for renewed social protection for deserving insiders offered by the state against the vagaries of markets, the disloyalty of capital, and impositions by Eurocrats. These are the right- or left-wing nationalisms of social protection. All these nationalisms focus excessively on supposed intrusion into the national body, but different nationalist undercurrents reflecting different public histories and political alliances help to generate slightly different populisms. All in all, our studies suggest that CEE populisms reflect a deep sense of dispossession at the behest of transnational capital and its comprador local state elites, while Western cases are rather marked by a gradual disenfranchisement in relation to the benefits offered by the state. And both populist settings are permeated by the feeling that elites are not inclined to listen to common problems. Hijacked by populist nationalist entrepreneurs, the public signification of traumatic experiences of disenfranchisement and dispossession is then hegemonized, displaced – and therefore voiced as well as silenced again – under the sign of anti-immigrant and anti-communist discourses respectively, and projected onto supposed intruders into the national space and body politic. In this volume we are suggesting that the differences between these cases of populist mobilization are generated by different local trajectories and

Introduction ◆ 31

experiences, which are differently signified within the discourses, alliances and sequences in national political arenas, in particular by the evolving class formations and configurations that drive them. But more importantly we argue that the structural causations behind various emergent workingclass populist nationalisms have in fact common roots. These roots lie in the dispossession, disenfranchisement and dislocation associated with the double crisis of labour and popular sovereignty produced by the latest round of capitalist globalization. They reflect the trauma of class in a context that publicly rejects talking about class because the legitimate ‘talking classes’ have now set their cards on liberal cosmopolitanism and the furthering of the globalization project. But in fact they are, to come back to Žižek’s resounding remark, ‘the best argument that the “class struggle”, far from being obsolete, goes on’ (Žižek 2008: 267).

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Burawoy, M. 2009. The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations and One Theoretical Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burawoy, M., et al. 2000. Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buruma, I. 2006. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. London: Atlantic Books. Caciagli, M., and D. Kertzer (eds). 1996. Italian Politics: The Contested Transition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Canovan, M. 1999. ‘Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy’, Political Studies 47: 2–16 Carrier, J. (ed.). 2006. A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chevalier, L. 1981. Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris through the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clarke, J. 2004. Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy. London: Sage. ——— 2008a. ‘Living with/in and without Neo-liberalism’, Focaal 51: 135–47. ——— 2008b, ‘Reply: Power, Politics, and Places – What’s not Neo-liberal?’ Focaal 51: 158–60. Collier, R.B., and D. Collier. 2002. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Comaroff, J., and J. Comaroff (eds). 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cooper, F. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crouch, C. 2004. Post-democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Derluguian, G. 2005. Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World System Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Di Tella, T. 1997. ‘Populism into the Twenty-first Century’, Government and Opposition 32: 187–200. Drahokoupil, J. 2008. Globalization and the State in Central and Eastern Europe: The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment. London: Routledge. Epstein, A.L. 1978. Ethos and Identity: Three Studies in Ethnicity. London: Tavistock. Eriksen, T.H. 1993. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. ——— (ed.) 2003. Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, J., and A. Gupta. 2002. ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’, American Ethnologist 29(4): 981–1002. Frank, T. 2004. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives won the Heart of America. New York: Owl Books.

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Friedman, J. 1994. Cultural Identity and Social Process. London: Sage. ——— (ed.) 2003. Globalization, the State and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Friedman, K.E., and J. Friedman. 2008. Modernities, Class, and the Contradictions of Globalization: The Anthropology of Global Systems. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press. Fung, H. 2009. ‘America’s Head Servant: The PRC’s Dilemma in the Global Crisis’, New Left Review 60: 5–25. Gaspard, F. 1995. A Small City in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geertz, C. 1972. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gellner, E. 1993. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geschiere, P. 1999. ‘Globalization and the Power of Indeterminate Meaning: Witchcraft and Spirit Cults in Africa and East Asia’, in B. Meyer and P. Geschiere (eds), Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure. London: Wiley, pp. 211–37. Giddens, A. 1994. Beyond Left and Right. Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— 2000. The Third Way and its Critics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gingrich, A., and M. Banks (eds). 2005. Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Gudeman, S. 2008. Economy’s Tension: The Dialectics of Community and Market. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Halpern, J., and D. Kideckel (eds). 1997. Neighbors at War: Anthropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture, and History. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Handelman, D. 2005. ‘Microhistorical Anthropology: Toward a Prospective Perspective’, in D. Kalb and H. Tak (eds), Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 29–52. Hann, C. 2006. Not the Horse We Wanted: Postsocialism, Neoliberalism, and Eurasia. Münster: LitVerlag. Hann, C., and K. Hart (eds). 2009. Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannerz, U. 1991. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. London: Profile Books. Hobsbawm, E. 1992. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E., and T. Ranger (eds). 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, D. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neo-fascism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jessop, B. 2002. The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kalb, D. 1997. Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands 1850–1950. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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——— 2002. ‘Afterword: Globalism and Postsocialist Prospects’, in C. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 317–34. ——— 2005. ‘From Flows to Violence: Politics and Knowledge in the Debates on Globalization and Empire’, Anthropological Theory 5(2): 176–204. ——— 2009a. ‘Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing Hidden Histories of Globalization, Class, and Dispossession in Post-Socialism (and Beyond)’, American Ethnologist 36(2): 207–23. ——— 2009b, ‘Headlines of Nationalism, Subtexts of Class: Poland and Popular Paranoia, 1989–2009’, Antropologica 51(2): 289–301. Kalb, D., et al. (eds.) 2000. The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield. Kalb, D., and H. Tak (eds). 2005. Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kaplan, R. 1994. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History. London: Vintage. Katznelson, I. 1998. Liberalism’s Crooked Circle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klandermans, B., and N. Mayer. 2006. Extreme Right Activists in Europe. London: Routledge. Little, P. 2008. ‘Comment: Reflections on Neo-liberalism in Africa’, Focaal 51: 148–50. Mann, M. 1999. ‘The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing’, New Left Review I/235: 18–45. Moore, B. 1978. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Mouffe, C. 2005. ‘The End of Politics and the Challenge of Right Wing Populism’, in F. Panizza (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso, pp. 50–71. Mudde, C. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Musante, P. 2005. ‘Prefiguring NAFTA: The Politics of Land Privatization in Neoliberal Mexico’, in D. Kalb and H. Tak (eds). Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 137–51. Narotzky, S., and G. Smith. 2006. Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain. Berkely: University of California Press. Nonini, D. 2003. ‘American Neoliberalism, “Globalization”, and Violence: Reflections from the United States and Southeast Asia’, in J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, the State, and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, pp. 163–202. ——— 2008. ‘Comment: Thinking about Neoliberalism as if Specificity Mattered’, Focaal 51: 151–54. Ong, A. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ong, A., and S. Collier (eds). 2004. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Ost, D. 2005. The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Peck, J. 2004. ‘Geography and Public Policy: Constructions of Neoliberalism’, Progress in Human Geography 28(3): 392–405. Peck, J., and A. Tickell. 2002. ‘Neoliberalizing Space’, Antipode 34(3): 380–404. Perelman, M. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Piccone, P. 1993. ‘Confronting the French New Right: Old Prejudices or a New Political Paradigm?’ Telos 98/99: 3–23. Rebel, H. 2010. When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue and other Essays in Historical Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Richards, P. 2009. ‘Against Ethnicity: Ring Composition and Conflict Resolution’, Focaal 54: 3–15. Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Robotham, D. 2009. ‘Afterword: Learning from Polanyi 2’, in C. Hann and K. Hart (eds), Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 272–83. Rogers, A., and S. Vertovec (eds). 1995. The Urban Context: Ethnicity, Social Networks and Situational Analysis. Oxford: Berg. Rose, N. 1999. Powers of Freedom. Cambridge: Polity Press. Sassen, S. 2007. A Sociology of Globalization. New York: Norton. Sassoon, D. 1996. One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. New York: New Press. ——— (ed.) 1997. Looking Left: West European Social Democracy after the Cold War. London: Tauris. Schneider, J., and R. Rapp (eds). 1996. Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silver, B. 2003. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. 1995. Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smith, G. 2006. ‘When the Logic of Capital is the Real that Lurks in the Background’, Current Anthropology 47(4): 621–39. Smith, N. 2008. ‘Neo-Liberalism: Dominant but Dead’, Focaal 51: 155–57. Stavrakakis, Y. 2007. The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Steur, L., et al. 2009. ‘Accumulation by Dispossession and Asia’s “Modernizing” Left’, Focaal 54: 67–113. Stolcke, V. 1995. ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–24. Szalai, E. 2008. New Capitalism, and What Can Replace It. Budapest: Pallas. Tarrow, S. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. 2004. Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 2007. Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 2008. Credit and Blame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tismaneanu, V. 1998. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-communist Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Trehan, N., and N. Sigona (eds). 2010. Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilization, and the Neo-liberal Order. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, T. 2003. ‘Class Projects, Social Consciousness, and the Contradictions of “Globalization”’, in J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, The State and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, pp. 35–66. Wacquant, L. 2009. Punishing the Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Wallerstein, I. 2003. The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press. Wedel, J. 2009. The Shadow Elite. New York: Basic Books. Westlind, D. 1996. The Politics of Popular Identity: Understanding Recent Populist Movements in Sweden and the United States. Lund: Lund University Press. Wieviorka, M. 2003. ‘The New Paradigm of Violence’, in J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, the State and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, pp. 107–40. Wilk, R., and L. Cligget. 2007. Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— 1990. ‘Facing Power’, American Anthropologist 92: 586–96. ——— 2001. Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Worsley, P. 1969. ‘The Concept of Populism’, in G. Ionescu and E. Gellner (eds), Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 212–50. Žižek, S. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

Chapter 1 ‘Nationalism Is Back!’ Radikali and Privatization in Serbia Theodora Vetta

Introduction In late February 2008, the Serbian Minister of Economy, Mladen Dinki´c, stated that Serbia was once again ‘descending into collective madness’. Many political analysts have argued that the reaction of the Serbian political elites and the social unrest that followed the proclamation of Kosovo’s independence all point to the same thing: nationalism is back. The main evidence presented to support such an argument is based on electoral results. In the first parliamentary elections in 2003 that followed the 2000 regime change, the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (Srpska Radikalna Stranka, or SRS), most commonly known as Radikali, consolidated itself as the main political force in the country.1 In the 2004 presidential elections, SRS candidate Tomislav Nikoli´c gained 45.4 per cent of the vote and was marginally defeated by the Democrat Boris Tadi´c, who won 53.24 per cent. However, because the SRS did not win a majority of parliamentary seats, the multiparty coalitions consisting of the so-called democratic parties prevented it from forming a government. But despite being in opposition at the national level, Radikali achieved a widespread victory during the local elections of 2004. The majority of municipalities that had been under ‘democratic leadership’ since 1996 came under control of the SRS, prompting both local and foreign media to report a resurgence of nationalism in the country. 1. In the 2003 parliamentary elections, the SRS came first with 27.61 per cent of the vote, followed by the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) with 17.72 per cent, and the Democratic Party (DS) with 12.58 per cent. In 2007 the SRS took 32.4 per cent, the DS 25.6 per cent, and the DSS 18.8 per cent. In May 2008, the SRS gained 29.45 per cent, the DSS 11.60 per cent, and a coalition of DS, G17 and other minor parties 38.4 per cent (figures from the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, http://webrzs.statserb.sr.gov.yu).

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Various assaults on minority populations added to the widespread panic, which culminated in 2003 with the murder of Zoran -Djind-ji´c, the pro-reformist prime minister who had ordered Slobodan Miloševic´’s extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague. Ðind-ic´’s assassination not only represented the fragile nature of the newly established democratic state but also created a particular political dichotomy. By associating those held responsible for his assassination with a non-reproductive criminal clan structure and ‘by highlighting the private, nuclear family, and personalaffective aspects of Ðind-ic´’s death, media representations created a discursive dichotomy with political consequences: they constructed a break between two contrasting images, each linking a type of state to a form of gendered kinship. Authoritarian/nationalist was separated from and contrasted with democratic, European and post-authoritarian’ (Greenberg 2006: 130). The social unrest that followed the proclamation of Kosovo’s independence after nine years of UN rule was considered the climax of this ‘revival of nationalist sentiments’. Various ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ rallies – some peaceful, some violent – culminated in a big protest in Belgrade on 26 February 2008. Organized by all the major parliamentary parties,2 the protest escalated overnight into street riots. In the midst of shops being looted, cars being burned, and embassies damaged, 150 people were injured and one person killed. Major international media portrayed Serbs as militant nationalists and their protests were said to echo the Miloševic´ era.3 Domestically, however, many tolerated or even agreed with the comment on the events of the Minister of Infrastructure, Velimir Ili´c, that, ‘smashing a few embassy windows is a “democratic” response to these countries’ act of robbing us of fifteen per cent of our territory … they have to be taught that this is democracy as well’(2008)4. The subsequent fall of the government over the Kosovo issue and a dirty political campaign ahead of the elections in May 2008 resulted in a highly homogenized and essentialized image of a radically nationalist society or, at best, the representation of Serbia as a deeply divided society. This split was not only interpreted in political terms – seen, for example, as one between parties with different political programs. Serbs were said to be radically polarized between two axes of identity: a modern and progressive European identity proclaimed by the ‘pro-democratic’ block ‘for a European Serbia’ pleading for EU integration; and a traditionalist, nationalist identity leading to potential international isolation similar to that of the 1990s. Such representations of Serbian society are far from novel. Naumovic´ (2005) demonstrates that 2. Except for the Liberal Democratic Party and minority parties, but they represent a small minority in terms of electoral base. 3. See, for example, the CNN reporting of events and their coverage in Time magazine: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/02/22/serbia. demos/index.html#cnnSTCText and http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,1738406,00.html. Retrieved 20 August 2008. 4. http://www.kurir-info.rs/vesti/razbijanje-prozora-je-demokratija-22432.php Retrieved 29 February 2008.

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narratives of Serbian disunity and their political instrumentalization have historically been popular in political and everyday discourse. Accordingly, the model promoted by the pro-European block would be as follows: There is a Serbia of lies, deceptions, myths, hatred, and death. It is a rural, patriarchal, collectivistic, clerical, anti-Western and anti-modern Serbia. It is also a Serbia manipulated by cynical leaders who exploit its primitiveness and stupidity. Whenever this Serbia had its say, it brought death onto others, and misery onto itself. But, there is another Serbia, urban, modern, pacifist, cosmopolitan, liberal, democratic and European! This is our Serbia! This other Serbia is the only possible future for all of us! We will work hard together with our neighbours and foreign friends to reform Serbia and make it worthy of the European future that awaits it. This future is there for us only if we can discard Serbia’s ugly past, the spectre of Greater Serbia. (Naumovic´ 2005: 78)

The elections of 2008 were portrayed as the moment when Serbs should have decided who they are. It was seen as the critical time to choose between camps and affirm cultural and political orientations. This chapter deconstructs this omnipresent ‘culture talk’ by analysing ethnographic data on the discourse, practices and power relations that structure the everyday life of supporters of nationalism.5 The concept of class is a useful analytical tool in this regard as it helps to historicize culturally framed struggles and ground them in the particular political and economic processes that constitute Serbia’s social reality of ‘transition’ to a free market economy and liberal democracy. Nationalism gains its supporters from a wide spectrum of society, ranging from elites to underclasses, not because of a predominance of national identity over social differentiation. Rather, nationalism appeals in different ways and for different reasons to disparate social groups – for example, as a powerful discourse for maintaining the political capital of elites or a framework for middle- and working-class inclusion in response to liberal social transformations. The same can also be argued for the normative and morally circumscribed pro-Western ‘democracy movement’.

Existing Literature on Nationalism An enormous amount of literature has been produced by prominent scholars on the dissolution of Yugoslavia, ethnic war and the politics of nationalism during the 1990s. Whereas the dissolution of Yugoslavia is most commonly attributed to structural, systemic issues going back to the 1970s, the ethnic 5. My informants are all ethnic Serbs, and supporters of the SRS. This by no means implies that these Radicals represent the only ‘nationalist’ option on the Serbian political scene. On the contrary, during the 2008 electoral campaign it was the DSS under the leadership of Vojislav Koštunica that proved to be the most prominent carrier of nationalist propaganda while the SRS’s campaign was more moderate, addressing their message to the whole constituency and not only targeting ethnic Serbs.

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violence and extreme radicalization in the 1990s are mostly explained as the outcome of human agency. Many scholars agree that socialist Yugoslavia was destined to break up because of the nature of Yugoslav institutions and the decentralized political system of the 1974 constitution, which basically transferred political power along the lines of the six national republics (Hayden 1992; Bunce 1999). The harsh economic crisis and the increased unemployment of the 1980s, along with the changing positions of the West visà-vis Yugoslavia during the Cold War, were also major factors that rendered the federation unsustainable (Sekelj 1990; Woodward 1995a, 1995b). In contrast, the rise of nationalism and the ethnic wars of the 1990s are often analysed as an outcome of the agency of particular individuals and their manipulative abilities and not as structural phenomena that a more systemic analysis would have pointed to. Besides the earlier mainstream journalistic attempts to understand the Yugoslav conflict through premodern, tribal ethnic hatreds, and the rise of mythical theories of a ‘seething cauldron’ where hate among ethnicities was always there but remained frozen under communism only to be released by the dissolution of Yugoslavia,6 scholars have mostly focused on the political leaders of the Yugoslav republics. The latter appear as powerful, charismatic personas – in Weberian terms – who achieved the massive support of their constituencies through the clever use of populist rhetoric and a tight control over national media (Thompson 1994; Miloševic´ 2000). But the question is how such a conjectural phenomenon – the takeover of particular positions by particular people at particular moments – fits into the specific historical context. Gagnon (2004) argues that political elites played the card of nationalism at the very moment of social unrest after the fall of the Berlin Wall in order not to mobilize people but rather to demobilize them, particularly those that demanded democratic change. Mastering identity politics, they managed to either secure their political power or at least gain some time in order to convert state into private property before any democratic control of this process was institutionalized. Despite these considerable contributions to the understanding of Yugoslavian nationalism there are two gaps. First, much of the literature is elite-centred. In the worst cases, the impression one gets is that the whole conflict is the result of the death of Josip Broz Tito and the personal interests and political strategies of Slobodan Miloševic´, Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic´. At best the actors in the conflict are entire social groups, mainly political and economic elites along with intellectuals (Devic 1998). Scholars like Naumovic´ stress that apart from ‘official nationalism’ and the instrumentalization of tradition by several political groups, there was a ‘spontaneous popular nationalism’ linked to the crisis of the economy and of state legitimacy, anti-communist sentiments and the dissatisfaction of Serbian people with their status inside Yugoslavia (Naumovic´ 1999b). However, in most of the studies the focus on 6. For a critique of such theories, see Brubaker (1998) and Naumovic´ (1999a).

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elite social actors makes the rest of the people somehow disappear. If present, they are usually reduced to the status of victims or passive and manipulated individuals. By paying too little attention to what actually attracts different people to nationalism, scholars tend to fall into the tautological trap of offering an attempted explanation of identity politics that relies on identity, attributing nationalism to the crisis of identity that came with the fall of communism (Michnik 1991; Wachtel 1998; Pavlovic´ 2006). The literature thus does not satisfy the search for an explanation of why such a large number of people endorsed nationalism in the 1990s and today. This brings us to the problem that the research focus of the existing nationalism literature ranges from the 1980s until the late 1990s. Apparently, the fall of the Miloševic´ regime and the late consolidation of democracy in 2000 signified the end of nationalism’s domination and the beginning of the desired transition. Even though there are important works in the literature on neo-nationalism (Gingrich and Banks 2005; Ost 2005), to my knowledge there are no systematic attempts to explore the so-called revival of nationalism in Serbia after the introduction of the free market economy and liberal democracy in 2000.7 Bridging the gap since 2000, this article examines ethnographic data on supporters of the Serbian Radical Party in the city of Vojvodina, Kikinda. Anthropological analysis of class-based experiences can help us grasp the multiple ways in which macroeconomic and institutional transformations were negotiated and embedded in everyday life, the meanings attributed to new socio-political realities, along with the various frames of social identification and claim-making.

A ‘Greater Serbia’? Various NGOs reporting on the political situation in Serbia have tried to sketch a social profile of the electoral base of the Serbian Radical Party. Most often, its supporters are located in rural areas, have elementary-level education, if any, and are generally considered to be from the lowest strata of society. Besides those hard data, there is also some research on value orientations based on standardized public opinion polls. Research conducted in 2005 by one of the most prominent Serbian NGOs, the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy, informs us that: The multiple regressive analyses of predictors of social attitudes and value orientations with the variables of latent party preferences enabled us to establish the cultural-value pattern, or the rift between the liberal-democratic block and social-national block. We have established that the liberal-democratic block is mostly characterized with the trust into [sic] the legislative and executive power (government, Parliament), pro-Western orientation and conformism. On the other 7. For an overview of trends in political culture in Serbia from the point of view of ordinary citizens, see Golubovic´, Spasic´ and Pavicevic´ (2003) and Spasic´ (2005).

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hand, the social-national block is mostly characterized by the trust into [sic] police, army and Serbian Orthodox Church; mistrust into [sic] efficiency of democracy, egalitarianism, anti-Western orientation, patriarchy, intellectual closeness, lack of motivation for achievement, motives of love and friendship; they are also more of hedonistic orientation [sic]. (Mihailovic´ 2005)

Similarly, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights insists that nationalism is still dominant in contemporary Serbia because there was never a real break with the past: As far as the past is concerned, it has been given rationalizations of its own – ranging from the denial of crimes committed and of the existence of the Greater Serbia project to putting all the blame on the Communist regime. Military defeat and the absence of an account of what happened in the past decade, the refusal to abandon the Greater Serbia program, an identity crisis and overall frustration have revived traditional conservatism. The bases of Serbian conservatism are: an absolute lack of economic reflection and commitment to economic progress, an absence of political pluralism; democracy confused with anarchy and xenophobia. Given that such a value system runs counter to the contemporary achievements of European societies, every new government will face the same basic dilemma: for or against Europe. (HCHR n.d.)

My ethnographic data hardly fit the above prescriptions. First, the municipality of Kikinda, situated in the North Banat district, is not a typical rural area of the Vojvodina. On the contrary, it was the second most important industrial centre in the former Yugoslavia. During that time, the city hosted an everincreasing number of factories, along with plant workers and residential blocks. Its industrial production of everything from clay, construction materials, chemicals, oil and gas, processed metal and machinery to motor vehicles targeted both local and foreign markets. Second, my informants are mainly middle-aged engineers and highly skilled workers, along with administrative employees of the municipal public services and the industrial sector. Their level of education ranges from university degrees to technical-school diplomas. They are entirely unlike the stereotypical image of nationalist, non-educated, blue-collar workers. Finally, Kikinda is one of the many ethnically mixed cities of Vojvodina. According to the statistical office of the Republic of Serbia, of the 67,000 inhabitants of the municipality of Kikinda, around 12,000 belong to nonSerbian ethnic groups, with Hungarians being the largest minority group. Despite rising ethnic conflicts and discrimination in some regions of the country, Kikinda was always seen as a place of tolerance and peaceful coexistence between different ethnic and religious groups, and in 2003 the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) awarded the municipality the ‘most tolerant city’ prize. Of course, most SRS supporters are self-declared nationalists. Some may even identify themselves as communists, a statement that in other cases would appear paradoxical, but not so much in Serbia. This is firstly because the political and economic structuring of Yugoslavia was based on,

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and reproduced through, national/ethnic fragmentation. Second, during the 1990s, communist ideology and nationalist projects started to collude. At the time, the main reason for the clash between Slobodan Miloševic´s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and Vojislav Šešelj’s SRS was about who was more patriotic, and thus more capable of ‘rescuing’ the nation. To illustrate this political and ideological marriage, Ðuric quotes the secretary of the trade union Nezavisnost who commented on the industrial workers protest in Belgrade in 1990, addressed by President Miloševic´: ‘We came to the rally as workers, and left as Serbs’ (in Ðuric 2002: 35). Indeed, the above conjunction is far more complex than it initially seems and demands extended research in order to avoid misleading generalizations. However, it is a fact that many of the supporters of the SRS come from the ranks of the SPS, a trend particularly traceable after the fall of the communist regime in 2000 and the extradition of Miloševic´ to the ICTY in order to face war-crimes charges. My informants, all ethnic Serbs, strongly affirm their national identity. The discourse of victimhood is prevalent in their narratives, providing a kind of moral satisfaction for their military defeat. They do not deny that ethnic massacres have actually taken place. However, they see the wars of the 1990s more as a legitimate way of trying to prevent Yugoslavia from dissolution than an attempt to create the mythical Velika Srbija (Greater Serbia) that would include the entire Serbian nation under a sovereign and ethnically homogeneous state. It is also interesting to stress their passionate attitude toward the issue of Kosovo. Angry opposition to Kosovo’s proclamation of independence is not unique to Radical Party supporters. All the main political forces in Serbia were strongly positioned against this development and the loss of what they calculated as one third of Serbian territory. Undoubtedly, Kosovo has its dominant place in cultural myths of Serbianness as it is said to be ‘the heart of Serbian civilization’. But the reaction to its secession was not about Kosovo per se or about identity loss. Almost all of my informants were convinced that Kosovo was lost ten years ago, and some secretly hoped for this story to finish as soon as possible one way or another. And even if there are at least constitutional parallels between Kosovo and the Vojvodina, because they share the same status as autonomous provinces, the majority of my informants were not afraid that the Vojvodina would have the same destiny. Their fears had more to do with everyday problems than with a potential war in the far south of the country. The only actor that actually emphasized the hypothetical similarities of Vojvodina and Kosovo was Vojislav Koštunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia when it used a poster for its pre-election campaign portraying Vojvodina separated from the rest of Serbia, with the logo ‘It’s not a joke’. It seems more probable that what is at stake here is a widespread feeling of injustice at the hands of the international community. The status of Kosovo, which had been under the control of UN forces and administration, should have been resolved through an agreement between the two parties involved

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and then approved by the UN Security Council. Kosovo’s proclaimed independence should not have been met with unilateral recognitions. The majority of Serbs feel disappointed and angry with the international community which, after the economic sanctions of the 1990s and the NATO bombing campaigns, continues to mistreat them. After all, in their imagination Kosovo represents the last symbol of ‘normality’ since the disintegration of Yugoslavia and of their private lives. To sum up, social realities are far more complex than the stereotypical dualities produced by NGOs. The schematic cleavages between nationalist radicals and democrats, rural and urban, non-educated and educated, traditionalist-patriarchates and progressives are abstract analytical concepts that do not reflect the present. Their power lies in their normative dimension and their ability to construct social difference. It is a phenomenon of ‘othering’ which echoes other orientalizations used to describe Serbia after 1989 (Kideckel 2002; Buchowski 2006). Therefore, instead of putting people in these categories, it is more important to analyse the interfaces between them, where people constantly negotiate their multiple identities based on the very material and symbolic processes that structure their lives and define their choices and limits.

If Not ‘Identity’ then What? So why do people support the SRS if they do not fit the ultra-nationalist category, or at least share the same ideas and attitudes toward the national issues as do many other democrats? Why did the Radikali come to power at the municipal level in Kikinda among numerous other cities in 2004? One would expect that after the political changes of 2000, the residents of Kikinda would have wanted to consolidate the pro-democratic orientation that they had possessed since 1996, when they first voted for the democratic opposition coalition during the Miloševic´ regime. I argue that their current political preferences are closely related to their class-based experiences during the last twenty years of socioeconomic transformation in the context of global market integration. By arguing this I am by no means implying that Serbia simply came out of some kind of isolation created by a self-sufficient regime. Such a claim would not be historically accurate. Yugoslavia was part of an already globalized economic system. There was a lot of military assistance and loans made by the West to Yugoslavia (by the early 1980s, foreign debt had reached almost $20 billion), and it had been a member of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) since 1965 as well as a place of origin of extended labour migration flows. Therefore, the change in the last twenty years was not due to a sudden ‘opening’ of the country’s markets or a fundamental change of the economic logic of society, which is still based on the same accumulation processes as under the socialist system. What changed though is the regulatory system of redistribution and ownership along with a wider decentralization

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of capital accumulation processes at the global level (Friedman 2003). The result of the conjunction of these two processes has been vast socio-economic dispossession and state of precariousness, particularly experienced by those working in social and state enterprises. In such a historical context, the SRS managed to capitalize on people’s disappointment, aggression and fear in order to accumulate political power. As Ivan Krastev rightly argues, ‘the Central European paradox is that the rise of populism is an outcome not of the failures but of the successes of postcommunist liberalism’ (Krastev 2007: 58). However the SRS’s rise is not just a result of extreme populism and wellorchestrated manipulation. Such an argument would mean once again falling into the sender–receiver scenario that was used for analyses of the 1990s. On the contrary, the success of the SRS lies in a rather rational political choice of its supporters for whom, for different reasons, the SRS represented the only political option that they could identify with in the absence of a politically and institutionally organized Left.

Self-Management After the split with Joseph Stalin in 1948 and an initial nationalization of the domestic means of production, Yugoslavia’s leaders started building their own ‘Yugoslav road to socialism’. Considering themselves the true Marxists, unlike the Soviets, they based their developmental policy on a system of selfmanagement. The masterminds of this system, people like Milovan Ðilas, Edvard Kardelj and Boris Kidric´, envisioned the creation of a third road between centralized socialist planning and the market economy. Based on the division between productive and unproductive labour, the Yugoslav economic system established the enterprise as its fundamental unit. The first step was to abolish state property by bringing it under social ownership. This meant that property, as the phrase goes, ‘belonged to everybody and nobody’ and was supposed to be administrated by elected working councils at the level of each firm. Workers, being the legitimate base of the whole societal model, had, at least formally, the right to vote for their representatives, fix regulations, manage accounting and decide on enterprise plans, the distribution of profits and the amount of wages. Although the whole system did not derive from a grassroots initiative but was more a revolution from above, it was considered a measure towards real participatory democracy. Passing through different phases from the 1950s to the 1980s (Mencinger 1991), the ideal of self-management took its final form in the Associated Labour Act of 1974. According to Marx’s vision of ‘associated socialism’, the self-governed enterprises transformed into associated labour organizations through the mechanisms of ‘social contracts’ and ‘self-management agreements’. On the road to achieving ‘integral selfmanagement’, understood as the ‘withering away of the state’, public administration and social services were also denationalized. From then on, non-market goods were to be distributed at the community level, the municipal level, through ‘free labour

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exchange … based on negotiation between the “consumers and the executors” of public services such as schools, medical facilities, municipal services etc…. [T]he negotiator is not the state but the self-management interest community. Revenue is not collected in the form of taxes, but in the form of contributions from the income of enterprises and the salaries of the employees’ (Šmidovnik 1991: 29). Of course, as with any applied ideology, self-management had its ‘actually existing’ version. The literature provides a lot of – sometimes contradictory – discussion on the dysfunction of the system (Lydall 1989; Dekleva and Simmie 1991). Its main critics stress that Yugoslavia and its ‘republics of producers’ (Woodward 1995a) enjoyed only a façade of autonomy because the Communist Party could indirectly control firms through the appointment of directors and decrees on production policies. Therefore there was a fundamental contradiction between the normative principles of self-government and the absence of political pluralism and free-market regulations. Besides, the system itself was among the main reasons for the deep economic crisis of the 1980s and the final disintegration of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines staring in the early 1990s. This thesis is explained primarily by the ambiguous status of property rights in socially owned organizations; the ‘selfish’ stance of workers always opting for higher wages rather than new investments; the disintegrated nature of the working-class and the degree of decentralization of the associative labour system that proved to be too bureaucratic; and, finally, self-management was considered ‘a political obstacle to change in macroeconomic policy because it was the means to shift the locus of bargaining over wages and jobs to the level of the firm or lower’ (Woodward 1995a: 329) rather than to the state level (as was the case in Poland). Most of my informants who used to work or are still working at the two main firms of Kikinda, Toza Markovic´ and Livnica, seem to acknowledge the above situation: ‘Self-management was not real socialism although everything seemed to be as described in the party’s manifesto’ (personal interview 2008). The rising number of strikes in the 1980s supports such a statement. However, memories of such work experiences are reinterpreted in the face of new economic realities, taking on new forms and meanings.

The First Wave of Privatization In the early 1990s, when the first wave of privatization took place under the liberal reforms of Ante Markovic´, self-management was often used as part of a very different argument. It may not have worked well in practice but it was thought to have thoroughly prepared society for a smooth transition to capitalism. Such a thesis was, for different reasons, supported both by ‘transitologists’ and by some workers. For the former, the ‘indirectly controlled market economy’ and the quasi laissez-faire system in Yugoslavia would render the consolidation of capitalism an easier task than in the majority of the Soviet-style planned economies. For workers, the privatization of socially owned enterprises meant the conversion of self-management rights to property rights (Uvalic´ 1997).

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My main informant, Milica, is sixty years old. She is married to a teacher and helps her two kids study in Novi Sad. She was born in Kikinda, where her family moved from Croatia after the Second World War. When she finished high school she wanted to study chemical engineering but the Livnica firm offered her a scholarship to study metallurgy on the condition that she worked for them afterwards. She did not have much choice as she also had to help her family. Hence she left for Belgrade, where she finished her studies, and then worked for Livnica until 2006. I asked her about her recollection of the reforms of the early 1990s. In late 1980s the reformists [Ante Markovic´’s federal government] came to power. The country was in deep crisis but of course we couldn’t guess what was coming next … He started the privatization of public enterprises, but don’t be confused. This was not what we call privatization today. No, no, Markovic´ was a reformist but still a communist! In communism we were saying ‘property belongs to nobody and everybody’, but the workers were always at the centre of the system: you know, self-management. So, privatization meant that public companies started giving shares to us. That was just … normal. I mean, the enterprise is ours; we built it with our hands all those years. Who should have taken the shares if not us? That’s how it should be .... Today we are screwed, but who cares?

Even before their recognition as stakeholders in the firms and despite the negative features of ‘actually existing self-management’, there was a widespread feeling of ownership among the workers of the firm. When the federal government announced the Privatization Act and the free distribution or sale of companies’ shares to insiders, they felt they were the only legitimate recipients. Uvalic´ (2001) notes that there was such a strong shared feeling of enthusiasm that until 1994 almost 80 per cent of the workers owned shares in their respective firms. But the halcyon days did not last long. Branko has a very similar background to Milica. He came from Dalmatia to study electrical engineering in Belgrade and was then employed in Kikinda by the Toza Markovic´ company. After some years he acquired a relatively good position as director of a small department at the factory. But despite his position, his experiences with the first privatization wave do not differ much from those of lower-ranking workers. The problem was: OK, we are owners. Some of us took shares for free, others they bought them with a very big discount and we could repay them, like in five years, I don’t remember clearly. But what to do with them? Afterward, the management board was full of bankers. In the end, one day I received a phone call from the bank to come to receive my money. ‘What money?’ I said. ‘The money from the shares you are selling’. But I was never asked whether I even wanted to sell them.

Milica, confirming Branko’s story, added, At first they gave the shares [to Toza workers] but then they were forcing them to sell them in order to keep their job. Also, it wasn’t exactly that they could choose whom to sell them to [they had to sell them to the management]. So they did, but at the time we couldn’t realize that our kids wouldn’t have work afterwards. In

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Livnica they also wanted the workers to sell their shares. But they couldn’t force us since we had bought them. In Toza they were given for free, at least in the beginning. But in vain, after two years of hyperinflation, they were just useless papers. You see, the situation was so bad … I remember that the day that we used to receive our monthly salary check, I had to call my husband to leave his job and come to the factory to take the check so he could go directly to the supermarket and buy goods. There was not a minute to spare since some hours later maybe it wouldn’t be worth a dinar.

In 1993, hyperinflation reached the astronomic annual rate of 352, 459, 275, 105, 195 per cent; meanwhile, prices in 1994 rose 62 per cent a day, or 2 per cent an hour (Dinkic´ 1995: 39–40). This was not only due to the enormous state budget deficit following the ethnic wars and economic sanction; it was also an orchestrated tactic of the government to expropriate people of the hard currency of their savings (Dinkic´ 1995). The shares of workers lost their value because there was only an annual revaluation of their worth. And even if inflation was normally an ally of the employees because they could buy shares and later pay for them for extremely small prices, the general pauperization of the population and ‘informal negotiations’ resulted in the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the management – a process familiar from other postcommunist countries. Finally, in 1994, after the Democratic Party demanded the revaluation of privatized property, the government annulled the privatization of 87 per cent of the transformed enterprises. This had two consequences. First, the value of shares became so high that many people had to renounce their subscription for unpaid shares (Uvalic´ 2001: 2). Second, those self-managed firms whose privatization was revalued were either renationalized or started operating under a ‘mixed property’ status (Lazic´ and Sekelj 1997: 1065): The workers were given shares but a big number of shares went to statecontrolled banks, because most of the enterprises were in debt and the banks were providing them with credit. As a result, bankers became key members of the new management boards while at the same time the previous ‘working councils’ were abolished. As Karim Madjad points out, ‘The workers were recognized a customary right they did not have [a partial residual ownership], but denied a customary right they had arguably acquired over time [a right to self-management]’ (Madjad 2000: 21).

The Second Wave of Privatization Milica worked at Livnica until 2006, when the privatization of the company was already complete. She was told that there was a surplus of experts. Because she was the most experienced she was asked to stay but she was told her salary would be reduced by one-third. As she said, this was the greatest humiliation she had ever lived through and she decided to take early

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retirement at the age of fifty-eight. According to her, the new foreign owners were to blame. The ’90s was a very confusing period … Nobody expected a war and all these difficulties. I thought it would last some months. It lasted ten years! Plus the bombing … those bastards destroyed our country! … But we were still waiting afterward for their investments. I mean, the factories were dead, lots of people were not even paid … People believed it would be better after the 5th of October.8 Everybody thought that there would be a lot of money and so, a lot of them also took credit … and now look! Livnica had 5,000 workers; now it has 2,000 … You cannot understand what Livnica was for this city. You had to live it! Every day at 3 [o’clock] the city was shaken by sirens. It meant the end of the work shift at Livnica. And then, thousands of bikes were taking over the town! It was amazing! We also had our own buses to transfer workers from the surrounding villages. All this is gone now … All [this] happened when they sold our country to foreigners. Slovenians and French bought it and they kicked people out … I don’t know, it was not paradise before but at least nobody was fired, at least not officially. I remember in the very beginning of the 1990s they were also sending us on ‘forced vacation’. They didn’t need us or they couldn’t afford us and for some months we didn’t go to work but we were paid some part of our normal salary. I didn’t understand at the time what was happening. It was such a shame. We were all waiting for a phone call to go back to work; some were never called back but at least they needed all the engineers … shame. Afterwards we were working more or less like before since the factory was producing mines for the wars. At least back then we were at war, I didn’t complain about these things, we had to support our nation. What’s the excuse now?

Milica’s former colleague, Ivan, a skilled machine worker nearing his fifties, sheds light on another part of the story: that of global market integration. The first thing CIMOS [the Slovenian firm that bought part of Livnica] did was to shut down the department making pipes because Kamnik [a CIMOS subsidiary in Slovenia] was also producing pipes. So in that way they wouldn’t have competition! It also happened elsewhere. You are waiting for foreigners to come and they shut down the firms. You wait for more jobs and you don’t have any. Then we knew what the ‘free market’ is! … They also had some social plan. It was not obligatory but people said, ‘Better to take something now than be kicked out later’. And it was right. And people here are very insecure about everything, they went through a lot. So a lot saw a chance to take 200 euros for every working year and go. The prices went up so high and everybody owes the banks, others have to pay for their kids to go to university. Yes, [you didn’t have] freedom, but there were no 1,000 euro fee with a 200 [euro] salary!

Bogdan, a 42-year-old nurse at the psychiatric clinic in Kikinda, recounted: Last month at a workshop a doctor at the clinic was asking me to estimate the percentage of people in depression … I answered, ‘Who isn’t?’ So many people lost everything; they lost families in the war, their jobs and dignity. If you go and 8. The communist regime officially fell on 5 October 2000.

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see how the French [part of Livnica was bought by the French company Le Belier] work, disgusting. It’s a slavery society. So many hours and no rights. There aren’t even real sick leaves as there used to be. If you take one, they think you are faking illness and they cut a percentage from your salary. And the health care … OK, now it is better, they are renovating … but it is with EU money. And every now and then we have to go to these seminars organized by EU projects as if it makes us smarter to have a signed paper … When Toza, Livnica and Naftagas were strong, they were giving a lot of money for health care and hospital equipment, we even had a thirteenth pay cheque sometimes! Now you go to the private pharmacy, the pills cost 500 dinars but I know normally it’s 400. So you have to look for the one with the best price. This would never happen in socialism. But that’s the philosophy now, take it or leave it, if you don’t want to work, there are myriads of others! There are no syndicates. There cannot be syndicates in a capitalist society!

The social and economic deprivation that followed the liberalization of the economy, the privatization of state property and integration into global markets in postcommunist countries are well known phenomena. It is important to understand that all the above people at the time of my research in 2008 supported the same political party – the Serbian Radical Party – even if they come from different walks of life. Most of them have attended universities or technical colleges. They are, or were, employed in different sectors – factories, hospitals, schools, municipal administration – though always in the public sector. Most of my informants are still active; others had to retire earlier than expected. Their ages range between forty and sixty. I do not want to generalize by saying that the SRS appeals more to this generation: I have seen numerous pre-election gatherings where there were mostly male supporters between twenty and thirty years old. Yet I have chosen to focus on middle-age people, mainly because this generation can reflect on their living standards in a comparative manner as they have personally experienced the social transformation of the last twenty years. What all these people have in common is the degradation of their living standards and the experience of rising social insecurity during the last twenty years. By saying so, I am not only referring to those that literally lost their jobs during the restructuring of the industries, though their number is considerable and unemployment is high. The industrial sector in Kikinda was not only important for the people working there. Toza and Livnica were also at the heart of community life because besides providing employment – as part of the Yugoslav system of self-governing market socialism – they financed hospitals, schools, scholarships, local services at social work centres, festivities and numerous other cultural and athletic activities. The loss of these services affected the entire population. People not only became disillusioned about the promised democratic prosperity; what is most important is that they were materially dispossessed. The material, moreover, is always symbolic: most people experienced the socio-economic transformations of recent history as a personal humiliation

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and a loss of dignity. They often say that from being part of the Second World they quickly became part of the Third World, having lost their pride along with their workers’ rights. They drew parallels between Serbia and Africa, the latter symbolizing poverty and underdevelopment, and always compared their current situation with the ‘participative democracy’ of the past, be it real or definitely to some extent imaginary. Today’s democracy is translated into a rising gap between winners and losers in social stratification. It means the loss of people’s political will through the transnationalization of their state, which is ‘obliged’ to follow the political and economic adjustment policies of the international community to the detriment of people’s own common interests and needs. In this case, the blame is no longer placed on the Slovenians and Croatians that betrayed Yugoslavia and its ‘brotherhood and unity’ principle. The enemy, the absolute ‘other’, is created by the ‘obscure powers’ of the international community and their cosmopolitan, local political puppets that daily parade in economic scandal stories. So, the people of Kikinda decided to vote them out.

The Serbian Radical Party: Left or Right? Between 2000 and 2008, four parliamentary elections (2000, 2003, 2007, 2008) and five presidential ones (two in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007) were held in Serbia. Because none of the parties managed to gain an absolute majority in Parliament, all the above-mentioned governments were coalitions, usually made up of three or four parties. It is noteworthy that all possible combinations have been tried, as conservative, centre-right, liberal, social democratic, and former communist parties have at least once collaborated with each other, with the exception of the SRS. Such a high turnover of governments could be a sign of great political instability in the country. However, the political and economic programme of each one of them was exactly the same: EU integration and harsh economic adjustment. Economic liberalization was thought to be the only available option for Serbia to ‘catch up’ with western Europe and any debate or questioning of such policies was considered an anti-democratic obstacle to European normalization. Interestingly enough, during the last three governments, it was exactly the same people managing the Ministry of Economy. They belonged to the G17+ Party, a former NGO of economic experts. Under the slogan ‘expertise above politics’, they presented their neoliberal policies as an apolitical project, of pure technical expertise. Hence, the difference between Left and Right became increasingly blurred. It was in this political environment, where people’s discontent could not find a way out, that the SRS became a significant political force. But is it a challenge from the Right or from the Left? In its official presentation, the SRS promotes itself as a typical right-wing party. Its main goals, as featured in party documents, are a return of the monarchy, citizens’ freedoms and rights, the

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reduction and decentralization of public administration, and the establishment of a market economy. The SRS was founded in 1991 under the leadership of Vojislav Šešelj as the political expression of the Cetnik movement, and it claimed the heritage of the Radical Party founded by Nikola Pasic´ in 1881. Therefore it is historically perceived as an anti-communist party because many of its members were prosecuted and exiled under communism and because they see themselves as part of the ‘struggle against communist authoritarianism’. Nevertheless, the collaboration of Šešelj’s party with the Miloševic´ regime during the 1990s, both at the governmental level and in organizing paramilitary forces during the civil war, blurred their anti-communist image. In addition, after Miloševic´’s extradition, many supporters of his Socialist Party of Serbia shifted to the SRS. Thus, in order to keep its newcomers, the SRS almost entirely abandoned its anti-communist discourse. In the absence of an alternative left-wing option, the Serbian Radical Party is the one party that offers a severe critique of global capitalism and liberal democracy. The party’s main theme is resisting the selling-out of the country, by which they refer both to the transnationalization of state policies and to the expropriation of the country’s wealth by local tycoons and multinationals. According to this discourse, Serbs are no longer the sovereign determinant of their state because policies are not driven by national interest but by conditionalities set by the international community in order to secure foreign aid and EU integration. Worse than that, they are not even left with the freedom to administer their own justice. The establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague proves the point: Even for people who were against Miloševic´, his trial merely represented a show of force that can only humiliate the Serbian nation. SRS’s leader Vojislav Šešelj, also facing accusations of war crimes, provides a symbol of heroic resistance, even though most people consider him guilty of the crimes of which he is charged. At the same time, the local political elite are accused of corruption for pursuing a program of unbridled economic liberalism through the privatization of public enterprises according to their own interests and the imperatives of multinationals. Radikali point to the class stratification between the countries of the super-developed and undeveloped world. Fundamental social contradictions of Western countries are successfully overcome by the high average living standards they achieve by more intensive robbery of economically poor nations and states, grabbing their natural raw resources or by hiring the cheapest possible working labour. This is not achieved by the process of realizing the concept of the free market, that is regularly proclaimed, but by establishing monopol[ies] without scruple, by financial speculation, and by usurous loans, but mostly by corrupting the local political teams in power. (Šešelj n.d.)

The distinction in the nationalist narrative between victims/Serbs and exploiters/foreigners, even when it is characterized as a class conflict, is in fact highly problematic in that it obscures the internal power relations within each group under the homogenized label of ‘the nation’. The SRS does not

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actually oppose capitalist relations, but rather the way they are implemented. Nevertheless, its constant references to workers’ rights, social security and anti-corruption as priorities, together with a strong state that would guarantee people’s well-being, appeals to many Serbs. As David Ost (2005) similarly argued about Polish liberals, Serbian ‘democratic’ parties acknowledge economic problems but suggest political solutions, namely EU integration. In contrast, the SRS radicals criticize the indebtedness and the ‘sell out’ logic of state property while advocating the reopening of factories, fighting unemployment and corruption, improving social care, and supporting the youth and pensioners. In short, they provide a familiar frame of identification where ordinary people’s needs and interests are addressed. As one informant put it, ‘the democrats are cosmopolitans; the Radicals are one of us’.

Conclusion This article has questioned the polarized image of Serbian society. Though local and Western media present Serbia as a frustrated society stuck between a democratic European identity and a return to traditionalism and nationalistic values, anthropological research can shed light on how this picture becomes constructed. The rise of the SRS does not necessarily mean that its supporters practice ethnic exclusiveness or are ready for another ethnic war in Kosovo. After all, the party that used the most nationalistic rhetoric at the pre-election campaign in May 2008 was not the SRS but the conservative Democratic Party of Serbia of former Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica. Its electoral results were disastrous. Nationalism is not just another identity, new or revived, filling the vacuum after the collapse of communism. Nor can it be reduced to a simple political myth with strong manipulative incentives. Nationalism is both discourse and practice, the one constituting the other. Most important, it has to be approached as a structural phenomenon, part of systemic processes in the longue durée. The question demanding analysis is how and why nationalisms rise and fall at particular moments in history. The rise of nationalism in Serbia after 2000 cannot be explained without seriously considering the social transformations that have occurred since the early 1990s: the introduction of a capitalist market economy and postcommunist state-building processes along with the global decentralization of capital accumulation. Building on increasing popular frustration and social insecurity, as well as on the diminishing popular legitimacy of state elites, populist nationalism provides a dynamic frame within which people with divergent trajectories and class-based experiences can identify their needs, express their fears and agonies, structure their claims, and build strategies of resistance. Contrary to dominant representations, its supporters are not exclusively uneducated farmers and blue-collar workers. Apart from political elites and the intellectuals surrounding them, the Serbian Radical Party appeals

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to a large part of the middle-class population because it provides explanations for their material and symbolic dispossession. But apart from that, it also provides solutions to their problems, based on social rights and welfare. In the absence of an organized Left, the radicalism of the SRS provides the most serious critique of global capitalist restructuring while third-way democratic parties promote liberalism as an unquestioned necessity. In conclusion, I want to question the idea that Serbia is currently descending into cultural and political madness – an orientalizing stereotype often articulated by Serbs themselves. The Helsinki Committee report described ‘nationalists’ as having ‘an absolute lack of economic reflection and commitment to economic progress’ (HCHR n.d.). I want to stress that within the constraints of the present political landscape, supporting the Serbian Radical Party is often a realistic expression of people’s political will, based largely on rational reflection of their own socio-economic trajectories and interests. Class-based experiences and the way they are interpreted and framed help us understand people’s political choices. After all, while President Boris Tadic´ was advocating a return to Europe that would appease the concerns of liberal elites, it was the SRS’s promise of a return to normality that resonated most with ordinary people’s desire to reverse the increasing insecurity and economic deprivation that they have experienced since the 1990s.

References Brubaker, R. 1998. ‘The Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism’, in J.A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 272–306. Buchowski, M. 2006. ‘The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother’, Anthropological Quarterly 79(3): 463–82. Bunce, V. 1999. ‘Peaceful versus Violent State Dismembership: A Comparison of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia’, Politics and Society 27(2): 217–37. Dekleva, J., and J. Simmie (eds). 1991. Yugoslavia in Turmoil: After Self-Management. London: Pinter. Devic, A. 1998. ‘Ethnonationalism, Politics, and the Intellectuals: The Case of Yugoslavia’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 11(3): 375–409. Dinkic´, M. 1995. The Economics of Destruction: Can It Happen to You? Belgrade: Video Nedeljnik. Ðuric´, D. 2002. ‘Social Dialogue in South-East European Countries’, South-East Europe Review 5(3): 19–52. Friedman, J. 2003. ‘Globalization, Dis-integration, Re-organization: The Transformation of Violence’, in J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, The State, and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, pp. 1–34. Gagnon, V.P. 2004. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gingrich, A., and M. Banks. 2005. Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Golubovic´, Spasic´ and Pavicevic´ 2003. Politika i svakodnevni život – Srbija 1999-2002. Beograd: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju. Greenberg, J. 2006. ‘“Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran Djindjic and the New Democratic Masculinity in Serbia’, East European Politics and Societies 20(1): 126–51. Hayden, R.M. 1992. ‘Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republic’, Slavic Review 51(4): 654–73. HCHR. n.d. ‘Serbia in the Vicious Circle of Nationalism’, Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. Retrieved 27 September 2008 from: http://www.helsinki. org.yu/doc/reports/eng/Nationalism-post-October.zip. Kideckel, D. 2002. ‘The Unmaking of an East-Central European Working-class’, in C. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism. London: Routledge, pp. 114–32. Krastev, I. 2007. ‘The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus’, Journal of Democracy 18(4): 56–63. Lazic´, M., and L. Sekelj. 1997. ‘Privatisation in Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)’, Europe-Asia Studies 49(6): 1057–70. Lydall, H. 1989. Yugoslavia in Crisis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Madjad, K. 2000. ‘Workers’ Control as a Source of Customary Ownership Rights: Evidence from the Privatization in the Former Yugoslav Republics’, unpublished paper from the Eleventh Conference of the International Association for the Economics of Participation, Brussels. Retrieved from http://ocean.st.usm. edu/~w300388/brussels/MEDJ.pdf. Mencinger, J. 1991. ‘From a Communist to a Capitalist Economy?’ in J. Dekleva and J. Simmie (eds), Yugoslavia in Turmoil: After Self-Management. London: Pinter, pp. 71–86. Michnik, A. 1991. ‘Nationalism’, Social Research 58(4): 757–63. Mihailovic´, S. 2005. ‘Political Divisions and Value Orientations of Citizens of Serbia’. Retrieved 27 September 2008 from: http://www.cesid.org/eng/programi/ istrazivanja/index.jsp. Miloševic´, M. 2000. ‘The Media Wars: 1987–1997’, in J. Udovicˇki and J. Ridgeway (eds), Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 108–129. Naumovic´, S. 1999a. ‘‘Balkanski kasapi’: Mitovi i pogrešne predstave o raspadu Jugoslavije’, Nova srpska politicˇka misao 6(1/2): 57–77. ——— 1999b. ‘Instrumentalised Tradition: Traditionalist Rhetoric, Nationalism and Political Transition in Serbia, 1987–1990’, in M.J. Jovanovic´, K. Kaser and S. Naumovic´ (eds), Between the Archives and the Field: A Dialogue on Historical Anthropology of the Balkans. Belgrade: Udruženje za društvenu istoriju, pp. 179–217. ——— 2005. ‘The Social Origins and Political Uses of Popular Narratives on Serbian Disunity’, Filozofija i društvo 26: 65–104. Ost, D. 2005. The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pavlovic´, V. 2006. Civilno društvo i demokratija. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Sekelj, L. 1990. Jugoslavija: struktura raspadanja. Beograd: Rad. Šešelj, V. n.d. ‘Ideological Concept and Theoretical Paradigm of Globalism as a New World Order’. Retrieved 4 July 2008 from: http://www.antiglobalizam. com/?lang=eng&str=koncept/1.

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Šmidovnik, J. 1991. ‘Disfunctions of the System of Self-Management in the Economy, in Local Territorial Communities and in Public Administration’, in J. Dekleva and J. Simmie (eds), Yugoslavia in Turmoil: After Self-Management. London: Pinter, pp. 17–32. Spasic´, I. 2005. ‘Politika i svakodnevni život u Srbiji 2005: Odnos prema politicˇkoj sferi, promena društvenog poretka, javnost’, Filozofija i društvo 2(27): 45–74. Thompson, M. 1994. Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia and BosniaHercegovina. London: Article 19. Uvalic´, M. 1997. ‘Privatization in the Yugoslav Successor States: Converting SelfManagement into Property Rights’, in M. Uvalic´ and D. Whitehead-Vaughan (eds), Privatization Surprises in Central and Eastern Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 267–302. ——— 2001. ‘Privatization and Corporate Governance in Serbia (FR Yugoslavia)’, unublished paper delivered at the Global Development Network for Southeast Europe conference, Florence. Retrieved 1 July 2008 from: http://www.wiiw.ac.at/ balkan/files/Uvalic.pdf. Wachtel, A.B. 1998. Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Woodward, S.L. 1995a. Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— 1995b. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Chapter 2 Articulating the Right to the City: Working-Class Neo-Nationalism in Postsocialist Cluj, Romania Norbert Petrovici

Introduction: Cluj against ‘Groupism’ in Contemporary Social Theory In the wake of the collapse of socialism, ethno-nationalist conflicts appeared as a major issue in the realignment of East European politics and identity. Yet the East European case was not entirely exceptional. The 1990s came with a strong tide of ethno-nationalist resurgence in many places, including Western Europe. Some of the literature has pointed out the affinity between the new nationalist wave and the current phase of neoliberal globalization and its associated migrations, as counter-movements are often encoded in the language of ethno- or religious-nationalism and localism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001a, 2001b; Wimmer and Schiller 2002, 2003; Appadurai 2006; Schiller and Caglar 2009). Moreover, in the neoliberal accumulation regimes, class and marginality tend to be constituted in the language of cultural identity (Schiller, Basch and Blanc 1995; Comaroff 1996; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Friedman 2003), whereas nationalist entrepreneurs often capitalize exactly on reacting against the new patterns of inequalities produced by global flows of migration, money, investment and disinvestment (Gingrich and Banks 2006). The current debate focuses on, among things, the sharp opposition between, on the one hand, the particular brands of elite cosmopolitan languages, praxis and projects, and the autochthonous, primordial and indigenous idioms of the segregated groups of dispossessed on the other (Appadurai 2006; Beck 2007; Ossewaarde 2007; Turner 2007). However, in order to understand the way discourses of nation and ethnicity are reframed under current conditions, we need to question how discourses and loyalties of nation and ethnicity actually function as everyday categories

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of practice. Clearly, neoliberal geographies are producing contradictory landscapes that have a major impact both on the reconfiguration of nationstates and on the positionality of localities within wider landscapes of power. Nevertheless, I would argue that the main ethnographic challenge is to see how various local identification schemes as practical categories are employed with more or less success in and through these power networks and the historical transitions of which they are a part. In order to address the junction between the neoliberal restructuring of power on the one hand, and the generation of populist nationalism on the other, I am revisiting the case of Cluj (Kolozsvár), the regional capital of Transylvania, Romania, a place extensively studied by Rogers Brubaker and his colleagues (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Brubaker 2002; Brubaker et al. 2006). They had chosen the case of Cluj in order to exemplify Brubaker’s earlier critique of ‘groupism’ in ethnic and nationalism studies; that is, the tendency to take discrete and reified ethnic groups as the basic constituents of social life, and in particular as self-evident protagonists in ethnic struggles. The purpose of their collective research effort was to capture the everyday dimension of the new wave of ethnicization and nationalism in the postsocialist context in the 1990s. Instead of taking ethnic groups for granted as actual bounded groups, ethnicity was understood primarily as a cognitive frame employed in the management of day-to-day social interactions. The particularity of the Cluj case comes from the paradox that while sharp public semantic boundaries emerged between Romanians and Hungarians in the 1990s, strongly reinforced by postsocialist politicians, the interactional practices of everyday life were actually fragmented, fluid, nonbounded and contingent. They observe that it is in fact difficult to talk about two ethnic groups – Romanians and Hungarians – in Cluj. While there is a sharp categorical distinction at the level of official public discourses, but at the same time there are multiple micro exchanges and interactions going on between members of these putatively exclusive ethnic groups, such as mixed marriages, bilingualism, migration, intergenerational assimilation, and so on. Groupness, Brubaker and colleagues conclude, is a variable political outcome contingent upon either ethno-political entrepreneurs, such as Cluj’s mayor Gheorghe Funar, or on state-based categorization. However, while I find Brubaker’s critique of groupism salutary, and his strategy to study nationalism as a practical and dynamic category very welcome, it also clear that his largely cognitivist theoretical framework and his method of conversational analysis make it difficult to contextualize postsocialist ethno-national discourses in the wider fields of neoliberal social power, accumulation, marginalization and dispossession. Borrowing Bourdieu’s categories of apprehension as classificatory schemes (Bourdieu 1976), Brubaker transforms the problem of realism-nominalism into an empirical question (see also Brubaker 2005). Ethnicity is transformed into a practical cognitive frame that can be employed to form various degrees of grouped ethnic collectivities. However, it is problematic to think of ethnicity

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as a category that may or may not produce different degrees of groupness on its own; such a vision fails to locate cultural production, the production of practical categories, in a socially organized and shifting field of power. A similar point is raised by Calhoun (2003) when he argues that ethnicity as a cultural communality should be imagined not as a homogeneous category with fixed or fluid boundaries, but as a field of social relations. In fact, Brubaker adopts only some of Bourdieu’s concepts, those pertaining to cognitive classification. But he ignores Bourdieu’s consistent emphasis on the space of social classes and social power from which classification arises. For Bourdieu (1976, 1990), people are located in social space, and their practices and visions are shaped by their social relations and positions in that space. The cognitive schemas or discursive frames are not free-floating but entrenched in historical fields of forces that organize visions and experiences. Brubaker and Cooper (2000), in an excellent theoretical article on identity, acknowledge the state as an overwhelmingly powerful identifier, since it has the material and symbolic resources to produce and enforce classificatory schemes and categories. In that article they also speak about human selfunderstanding as a product of ‘situated subjectivity’ in a social location suffused by power and history. Yet in his empirical analysis of Cluj (Brubaker et. al. 2006), power remains outside, and disconnected from, everyday practice. The story becomes merely one of subjective belonging or fluid membership, about ethnicity as a contingent discursive resource. Yet, ethnicity is not just a ‘discursive resource’ randomly deployed among actors; it is a resource dynamically constituted in a historical and realist field of power. The Cluj case was chosen by Brubaker and colleagues because it seemed to fit so well with Brubaker’s critique of groupism: Romanian ethno-nationalism was a discursive resource intensely employed for a period of twelve consecutive years by the nationalist mayor, Gheorghe Funar, among others, against the Hungarian speakers in Cluj, who comprise roughly 20 per cent of the population. Yet his agitation remained without visible consequences in the realm of ethno-national group formation. In other words: multicultural life simply went on in Cluj as if little had happened. Brubaker and his colleagues employed conversational analysis in order to illustrate how ‘ordinary people’ talked about Funar, not what they thought about him or ‘why they voted for or against him’ (Brubaker et al. 2006: 343). Following this ‘how strategy’, Funar’s long political tenure was attributed to ordinary people’s obvious lack of interest in nationalist politics. Ordinary people ignored Funar’s inflammatory ethnic rhetoric and they talked about him mainly in terms of being a good manager (bun gospodar). Nevertheless, Poenaru and Pulay (2009) raise an important point: what were the social conditions that made Funar’s virulent nationalism allegedly invisible and irrelevant to his electorate, while at the same time highlighting his supposed managerial skills? In other words, what were the very structural conditions that made Funar’s nationalist discourse politically tenable rather than repugnant for his voters, and made himself as a person respectable rather than embarrassing?

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A first and necessary step in addressing this question must be to drop the methodological non-starter of the category ‘ordinary people’, prominently employed by Brubaker and colleagues. We should start from the sociological fact that the mass of those who voted for Funar were the former socialist working-classes of the dense socialist suburban neighbourhoods. The typical voter for Funar, as Lazaˇr has pointed out, was male, a worker, an erstwhile rural immigrant to the city of Cluj in the 1960s or 1970s, or a child of those immigrants, who lived in one of the large socialist neighbourhoods (Lazaˇr 2003a, 2003b). I am not using the term working-class in a strong ‘groupist’ or reified way, but as a generic name for a set of people distinguished by their common conditions of social reproduction, their common histories and experiences, and corresponding common dispositions (see Kalb 1997). Funar’s voters were not the main focus of my research; I incidentally arrived at this topic from two different points. On the one hand I was conducting interviews and observations on the changing status of workers in factories around Cluj. And on the other hand I was researching the histories of socialist neighbourhoods in the same city. I could not but notice the obsessive theme of the ‘stolen country’ and ‘the stolen factories’ that appeared in the narratives of most of my informants. I did not focus on how workers envisioned ethnicity and nationalist conflict, but on the way former socialist workers used and imagined the spaces of the two biggest socialist neighbourhoods in Cluj – Maˇnaˇs¸tur and Maˇraˇs¸ti – and the way they organized their daily routines in the factories. As with Brubaker and his colleagues, I have had the experience that ‘ordinary’ postsocialist citizens have been more concerned with economic issues in their daily chat than with ethnicity. But I started from a different vantage point, not that of ethnicity but economics. I was interested in the shifting fields of power within which working-class life unfolded, and in the turbulent privatization process of neoliberal postsocialism as it worked itself out in the basic sites of social reproduction: the factory and the neighbourhood. I started from the economics of social reproduction and came to nationalism, while Brubaker and colleagues started from the ethnonation and came to economics. First I will focus on the socialist roots of workers’ Romanian nationalism. Second, I will outline the specific political alliances in Cluj that transformed the city into a site of intense public ethnosymbolic confrontation without ever bursting into major popular violence.

Trust Networks: the Crypto-Nationalism of the Socialist Working-Class The communist state, in many instances and in Romania in particular, has been deeply involved in nationalist mobilization, sometimes idealistically and sometimes cynically (Connor 1984; Chirot 1991). In Romania, because of the particularities and fragilities of its history as a unified state and nation, whole factions of the intelligentsia had been immersed in nationalist discourse

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production (Verdery 1987, 1991; Lazaˇr 2002), and the socialist intelligentsia was not only the willing producer of nationalist propaganda but also its eager consumer (Verdery 1991; Culic 1999; Tismaneanu 2003). From the 1970s, with the advent of Ceaus¸escu’s nationalist neo-Stalinism against the rest of the Soviet bloc, Romanian nationalism started to pervade the whole educational system and more and more strata of socialist society were engulfed in this official propaganda. Nevertheless, the discursive field in which the political self-understanding of industrial workers developed cannot be detached from the specific position of workers in the socialist productive system. Just as in capitalism, in socialism labour was a commodity. However, in socialism, and especially in Ceaus¸escu’s neo-Stalinism, negotiation processes in the labour market were repressed. Institutions formally designated to facilitate negotiation between the state as employer and workers – that is, unions – were bureaucratic fictions, used primarily as channels for propaganda and control.1 Under these conditions, any potential class organizations were atrophied and eroded, and turned into vehicles for the consolidation of party hegemony and regimentation. One of the well-known unintended effects of planned economies was that the whole system became ultimately dependent on the collaboration and flexibility of direct producers (Burawoy and Krotov 1992; Kornai 1992; Pittaway 1999; Pittaway 2002). One of the foremen from Remarul, an important factory in Cluj, remembers that during the socialist period the decision-making process was very long precisely because there were many people simultaneously in charge and responsibilities were unclear. In most of the factories where I have done interviews, workers recall that while there were numerous levels in the organizational structure, only two levels mattered: the plant manager and the workers. Because of continuous ruptures in the production process and the low quality equipment of the shortage economy, factories were dependent on the willingness of workers to informally mobilize for fast and concentrated production stints. As a consequence, any unvoiced dissatisfactions of workers would result in an inevitable slow-down of work at crucial moments, which would endanger the plan. Inevitably, the anarchic processes of production under socialism led to the delegation of factory discipline onto the networks of core workers themselves, who had to regulate the coordination and discipline of each individual. The manager was interested only in whether working teams as collectivities were satisfied and whether they were productive as units as a whole so that they could meet the plan. Nonetheless, voicing open dissatisfaction was seen as an act against 1. One of the best known Romanian dissidents, Vasile Paraschiv, became the target of the communist repressive body because he tried to form a free Workers’ Union, independent from the Communist Party. The Party did not allow such a project and tried to neutralize him, declaring him mentally ill and hospitalizing him a couple of times; later he was tortured by the Securitate. His confessions about the attempt to create a free union and the severe repression that followed can be found in Paraschiv (2005).

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the system, tantamount to political insubordination. ‘I was told to make a piece, and I said, “Give me the proper tools to do it, I can’t do it like this”. And then the next day the securistul [the secret police officer] summoned me into his office’ (M, 65 years old, worker). But while individual critical voices were punished, the forms of productive discipline on the shop floor relied on relatively autonomous collectivities. In addition, much of the negotiation among workers operated through a system of reciprocity based on trust networks located outside the realm of any legal arrangement. My observations from Cluj are backed up by similar field reports from the end of the 1980s by Kideckel (1993) in southern Romania. However, he goes further and states that informal local, regional and national productive networks, and on a more abstract level, the ‘ethnic nation’ as a whole, served as forms of social contracts through which workers established some kind of vocabulary for negotiation with officials and the state. Such a formulation allows Barbu to pursue the argument further, stating that, ‘Romanian [workers] used their ethnicity in the same way [as] workers [in liberal capitalism] use their membership in a union’ (Barbu 2004: 77). For both Barbu and Kideckel, workers’ nationalist rhetoric is the product of extended networks of autonomous collectivities formed in the production process, which played the role of trade unions in the absence of formal mechanisms for antagonistic negotiation. But such a conceptual move overstretches the rather localized and parochial character of relatively autonomous working-class collectivities under Romanian socialism. It also underestimates the sheer importance of the local hoarding of resources in a shortage economy. It is hard to imagine how local worker collectivities could become the basis for an abstract Romanian nationalism encompassing the whole nation. Verdery (1991) is potentially more realistic about the politics of local hoarding when she calls this mechanism of closure and exclusion ‘indigenism’, even though for her, ultimately, it refers to national-level struggles of the Romanian elite against the hegemonic pretensions of Moscow.2 Nevertheless, I will use the term ‘indigenism’ to refer to the organization of production that facilitated identification and self-understanding in ways in which the local network of trustees became a source of exclusion and competition for resources in a system acutely constrained by supply. The language of nationalism became its public expression. These indigenous networks of trust within factories overlapped with other types of networks, for example those originating from the neighbourhoods. Workers were clearly aware that the socialist districts erected in Cluj were just an appendix of the production process. An apartment in a block of flats was an asset strongly linked with the realization of labour in a factory. One 2. More specifically for Verdery (1991), nationalism plays a very important role in the case of open defiance of Moscow because it clearly delimits the community indicating the identity related problems of the possible competitor, thus excluding possible competitors and empowering few national ones.

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informant, for example, describes how neighbourhoods were functional requirements of the industrialization process. In 1978 or something like that … CUG [a heavy machinery enterprise] was built. Then CUG pulled a lot of people to Cluj and therefore they needed … for that mastodon …. [it was] a very, very [big factory] … so it gathered a lot of people, workers … and therefore they had to provide them with some accommodation; besides [CUG], other factories appeared, where they also needed people … it was Unirea, Carbochim was developed, it grew bigger; it was Tehnofrig which also grew bigger, Metalul Rosu, and that absorbed a lot of people too; and therefore they needed … space for accommodation. (M, 52 years, skilled worker)

The distribution of apartments was organized directly by the factories. 3 Factories received entire blocks of flats from the local construction company which were then redistributed to employees. Workers from the same factory, often coming from the same village as rural immigrants, received flats in the same block (Troc 2003; Csedö et al. 2004). Therefore, the networks formed in factories were cross-cut by ties of neighbourhood and place of origin. The socialist political economy structured a particular field of relationships that facilitated an indigenist identification process around close-knit trust networks. The process went so far that the two biggest socialist neighbourhoods in Cluj – Maˇnaˇs¸tur and Maˇraˇs¸ti – became illegible to each other, and even ugly. Somebody from Maˇnaˇs¸tur could state that ‘I’ve got used to it, I like it here, as opposed to Maˇraˇs¸ti, which I find more ugly, more polluted, it gives me the impression of an industrial area’ (F, 41 years, worker), while somebody from Maˇraˇs¸ti says: ‘For example, I dislike Maˇnaˇs¸tur, because … there is no grass, there are no bushes, an so on, in the areas between the blocks … [O]ne block is flowing into the other. As the saying goes, it is a “city within a city” and it is all made of concrete’ (F, 45 years, worker). Both neighbourhoods, however, are very similar, dominated by the same type of blocks of flats. For some, the indigenist attachment to the neighbourhood is mixed with a strange pride that they feel in the face of the massiveness of the constructions. For example, a worker uses the term ‘fabulous’ to describe the huge construction project of Maˇnaˇs¸tur back in the socialist era. The block into which we moved was the first experimental block in Cluj, it was made from concrete panels … That was then, in that period. Aaah, the construction … So, it was one building site, all Maˇnaˇs¸tur was a building site … It was fabulous! So, it got bigger and bigger in just a few years … Maˇnaˇs¸tur got bigger … it just extended … A lot has been built’ (M, 52 years, qualified worker)

Most informants remember that when they came to the city they were greeted in the stores, at least in the centrally located ones, in Hungarian. ‘When I 3. Some apartments were distributed through local government; however, the whole process was conditioned by a contract with a local employer. Most of the workers received their apartment directly from the factory; the municipal channel was used by other social categories.

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came to Cluj, in the 1970s, Hungarian was still spoken in the stores’. Even if Hungarians were no longer the dominant group demographically in the 1970s, they still occupied the city centre. As owners or tenants of centrally located residences, they were not entitled to receive a new apartment; so they were constrained to live in the central areas, while the socialist periphery became inhabited by Romanians (Petrovici 2007). For Romanian rural migrants to Cluj, the city centre became equated with the Hungarian language, while the suburban complexes, including both the new neighbourhoods and the new factories, became the spaces for Romanians (Belkis et al. 2003). In addition, in Maˇnaˇs¸tur, due to the communist bulldozing of the old village on which the new neighbourhood was erected, the old citizens, forced to live in the new apartments, developed an oppositional identity against the communists located in the ‘city’ (Pásztor 2004).4 All these processes favoured the emergence of an indigenist self-understanding among Romanian workers, focused on their neighbourhoods and their work collectivities as opposed to the city, represented by its old historical centre, the Hungarians and the communists. This reading of the city proved to be very resilient. At the end of the 1990s, surveys still captured a somehow similar division of the city: centre versus peripheries, and peripheries that opposed each other (Lazaˇr 2008). The city thus consisted of several indigenist urban assemblages composed of specific neighbourhoods and specific factories, daily movements and daily consumption struggles. These elements5 became part of ensembles that were linked through practices that made the fractured, though superficially modern, rationalist, socialist infrastructure somehow coherent. Cluj became an ensemble of factories, apartments, roads, workers, crowded trolley-buses – always behind schedule – empty food stores, semi-rural markets, families, neighbours, neighbourhoods, and leisure spaces (including pubs, cinema and theatres) – all these being part of a temporarily stabilized, yet ultimately unstable, modern socialist assemblage. Moreover, the city grew as an element in an even larger assemblage: the industrial networks that linked livelihoods in Cluj with other industrial settings throughout the country. Commenting on his own factory, a worker from Cluj self-evidently also described with great admiration the factory’s Bucharest branch: ‘It was a standard for the Romanian industry with formidable machinery, of extraordinary performance, where Ceaus¸escu 4. The village of Maˇnaˇs¸tur was the only Romanian ethnic area in the city up until the Second World War, which fostered Hungarian opposition. In addition, the first communist activists in Transylvania were Hungarians and Jews (Tismaneanu 2003). Therefore, the Manastur residents’ image of Romanian nationalists who had always fought against Hungarians was added yet another dimension of communist opponents. (Belkis et al. 2003). 5. The distance between the Maˇnaˇs¸tur neighbourhood and the most important industrial platform was 10 kilometres. Sometimes workers had to walk all this distance if the trolley-buses were too crowded or out of action. See also Verdery (1996).

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brought all the state presidents to see the pride of Romanian industry’ (M, 61 years, supervisor). The same supervisor continued to narrate how his factory did not just supply the Bucharest factory but also the Soviet Union. Thus, while working-class social reproduction in Cluj relied heavily on indigenist and overlapping trust networks within highly idiosyncratic and localized urban assemblages, the modern city of Cluj itself was produced and reproduced as part of the socialist ‘world empire’ centred on Moscow. The demise of that empire destroyed any fragile coherence Clujeni had succeeded in creating during the ‘long’ postwar decades.

The Postsocialist Era: The First Decade In the aftermath of the collapse of the socialist system, two processes fostered worker discontent. First, the dismantling of the socialist hierarchies in factories, and second, the politics of managerial independence in the state-owned industrial units. In order to undermine the position of the nomenklatura who ran the factories, the new political regime, in the first weeks of the postsocialist era, ordered that elections must be held for all leadership positions in every state-owned unit. The measure was intended to undermine the economic nomenklatura and create a class of functionaries loyal to the new regime. Workers felt a sudden and real empowerment, but it did not last for long. The new factory leaderships produced through these improvised elections were, not surprisingly, often perceived as incompetent. Gheorghe was hired as an unskilled worker in the 1970s at CUG, but he acquired a skill base by attending the factory vocational school. By the time of the regime change he had become a supervisor, and presently he is a secondlevel production manager. Recalling the beginning of the 1990s, he explained: ‘When in the nineties it was said, “Everybody should elect the management at all levels in the factory”, most of the time frauds were installed as the new bosses. They dismissed the existing supervisors … The best foremen and coordinators were changed’. This had a tremendous impact on productivity since micro-disciplinary structures were completely mixed up and hierarchies inside the factory were completely blurred. He continued: ‘Nobody worked, especially in the first months, in fact the whole of 1990. Nobody worked. And if they did not receive wages without work, they just changed the management. They [the workers] were just going out in the factory yard refusing to work with their team leader, or the foreman.’ The output of the factories dropped dramatically, while at the same time salaries rose. ‘They [the workers] modified the time norms. These were Ceaus¸escu’s rules, they said. If a time quota for finishing a product was five hours, they [the workers] just decided to double the standard time for making it. Therefore they earned double for the same work’. At the same time, with the collapse of the Comecon group and state central planning, and the inability to penetrate Western markets, the factories

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became at once dependent on state support. Nevertheless, the state could not do much and, with their newly elected or politically appointed managers, factories therefore became more-or-less autonomous self-sustaining units. The only game open for the state was eventually that of coordinating the local democracies of the factories, while taking over all their liabilities through policies of soft budget constraints. The naive liberal expectation at the time was that the market, combined with grassroots democracy, was the institutional panacea that would resolve all the problems of the socialist economy. However, the rather fragile legitimacy of the new political elite dictated that unproductive units had to be bailed out. Consequently, in the absence of well-managed microeconomic reforms, productivity went into free fall. Or, as Gheorghe said, looking back: ‘Romanian industry had to be restructured first. You can’t say that there was no performance, that our factory could not be competitive in relation to any similar factory in Europe. Restructuring should have brought a technology upgrade.’ In the new context, the huge workforce amassed in the socialist factories turned overnight from an asset into a financial burden. The managers, constrained by strong worker pressure, did not dare fire any of the labour force. In the absence of any requirement imposed by the fictive postsocialist market, selection decisions were delegated to worker collectives. Unions were put in charge of deciding who was to be dismissed and who should be kept. The massive lay-offs and the painful self-selection process all but destroyed the old workers’ trust networks. Workers nostalgically remember their fine old socialist work mates, as opposed to their present colleagues, who are seen as ‘mean’. The status of the remaining employees changed fundamentally: workers were no longer seen as ‘helping with completing the collective plan’; they were simply seen as ‘earning’ their own wage. A representative of management summarized this by arguing, ‘If they want to earn, they have to work’ – a nod to the socialist workers’ joke, ‘They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work’. In the 1990s, workers were thus ruthlessly individualized in the face of possible dismissal and unemployment. At the same time, they were collectively subjected to new abstract forces: there was no plan anymore but there was not a real market either, and most of the factories remained on the verge of bankruptcy. Nonetheless, distribution and supply, and hence the work regime, was still the old stop-and-go system, and the same old equipment was still in use, requiring them to continue to work as collectivities. But the context of disinvestment was obvious to everyone. The effect was fundamental insecurity and deepening discontent, alongside problems of legitimacy for the new regime. Gheorghe voices loudly, even now, his anger about the dispossessions of the 1990s: These factories were not of Ceaus¸escu’s making, they represented the effort of the whole Romanian nation; effort that we now mock and trash. Ceaus¸escu may have been a loony but he was also a patriot. Those who are in charge today are ‘nation thieves’. They trash the dignity of the Romanian people. For them nothing counts except the c[lass] … the party struggle, the struggle to get rich and wealthy. Otherwise, who cares!? The whole nation could as well die.

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Gheorghe argues that the new regime and the new class of unaccountable managers are to be blamed for the loss in productivity and markets. While factories that had been built up painstakingly during the socialist decades were destroyed bit by bit, the new liberal ruling class, its senior managers and some top-level employees in particular, was thriving. He frames his anger in an explicit nationalist language. Factories were not built by the Ceaus¸escus but by the Romanian people. The industrial carnage of the postsocialist era equates with an assault on the dignity of the nation. ‘We [Romanians] are seen as the last in Europe, we are Europe’s laggards’, he finally exclaimed with embarrassment. The new liberal state retreated as a manager and regulator from the local economy, and was only serving as a temporary provider of dubious bailouts to buy-off the population and build up a huge national debt. The industrial collapse also implies that the socialist neighbourhoods lost their erstwhile meaning as intimate habitats of close-knit networks of socialist workers. The huge neighbourhoods built for facilitating the daily social reproduction of an industrial working-class gradually turned into spaces for the under- and unemployed to hang out. The diverse elements that had composed the city of the workers were no longer animated by the national project of production but were suspended as empty signifiers in an undetermined social space that promised little hope and many dangers. The industrial plant, the neighbourhood, the trolley-buses, the roads, the kindergartens, the schools – all were now just rusty infrastructural elements that had nothing to do with the industrial city as people had once known it. The city lost its coherence as a world of production, and worker-urbanites were now no longer needed and disrespected, seen as a problem of the past rather than a solution for the future. Workers felt that their claim to being citizens of the city – urbanization representing one of the biggest social gains of socialism in underdeveloped Eastern Europe – was being rejected by the talking public. Now they were just hangers-on on the urban periphery. This deep insecurity revitalized an older memory: the memory of the city centre where you or your parents were addressed in Hungarian and where obviously educated urbanites treated you as an underdeveloped peasant. For some, returning to the villages from where they had come was indeed an option, yet for most of them there was no alternative to the city.6 In the neighbourhoods it felt as if the right to the city had to be reclaimed. In 1992, Gheorghe Funar was elected mayor of Cluj with a campaign in which he addressed exactly these kinds of concerns and anxieties. His message was that ‘we Romanians’ own the city. He therefore set out to demonstrate that Cluj had belonged to Romanians for over two thousand years, long before the Hungarians came. He claimed that the Romans had founded the city and that the Romanians were descended from them. The Roman city of 6. For most rural migrants who came to the city, the rural household which they had left behind had been given to those of their siblings who had remained in the countryside. See Kideckel (2002) and Csedö et al. (2004).

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Napuca was the ancestral city7. In July 1994 he inaugurated an archaeological research project to investigate the supposed Roman remains in the central square of the city next to the cathedral. This was met with vehement protests from Hungarian-speaking inhabitants, and a wave of street demonstrations followed. Even before his 1992 election victory, Funar had announced that he would erect a new statue in the square, which would rival the centuryold statue of the Hungarian King Mathias on horseback. The new statue, Lupa Capitolina, would symbolize the Latin origins of the Romanian people and their millennial history in the city of Napoca. The underlying message was that the Hungarians had only arrived here in the fifteenth century, long after the formation of the Romanian nation. The archaeological excavations were interpreted by ethnic Hungarians as a trick by which the statue of King Mathias would be moved to a less central area. There were big street demonstrations that mobilized Hungarians against the mayor’s actions, with its potent political symbolism and hierarchy of nations. Six years later, a couple of hundred Romanian demonstrators were preventing the closing down of the archaeological site after experts had decided that the Roman remains were not valuable enough for a permanent exhibition. Funar’s supporters, mostly members of the mayor’s own Nationalist Party, claimed that the ‘monuments of their ancestors’ were being buried (Tripon 2005). Funar’s political entrepreneurship consisted of the fact that he cunningly reassembled the city’s symbolic space, and resignified the city in a new fashion, ‘re-membering’ all the disjointed socio-spatial elements in a newly coherent manner. The language of this new symbolic artefact was deliberately nationalist. His message was that the city of Cluj-Napoca not only belonged to the Hungarians, but to the Romanians in the urban periphery as well. In the context of the postsocialist dispossession of his voters, Funar was reworking the language of indigenist nationalism, learned during the socialist period, into a discourse for inverting urban asymmetries through symbols of national and local pride. The mayor was symbolically reconnecting working-class neighbourhoods with the urban core while at the same time de-emphasizing the actual industrial decline of the city. He did this by reinventing in a populist way a new enemy, the Hungarian inhabitants, and inventing a new target, the symbols of past Hungarian dominance of the nation.8 He constructed a favourable geography of power for ‘we Romanians’, constituting an imagined community larger than the neighbourhood but restrictive enough to invert the older symbolic asymmetry of the city, by which the ‘worker’ (oamenii muncii) becomes a ‘Romanian citizen’ (noi, românii), the normal subject of 7. The current official name of the city is Cluj-Napoca, yet in every day conversation it is called Cluj. In 1974, in order to emphasize exactly that that a Roman settlement pre-dated the modern city, the socialist authorities changed its name from Cluj to Cluj-Napoca. 8. This was a credible enemy especially after the violent Târgu-Mures¸ incident in the 1990s, when, after a clash between Romanians and Hungarians, there were six deaths and 200 injured (Goina 2000).

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Romanian statehood, the unmarked side; whereas the ‘Hungarian’ becomes the exceptional side, the marked element. Ethno-nationalism thus legitimized the continued workers’ presence in the city after the collapse of industry. It articulated a right to the city for the working-class, even when that workingclass had been informalized, made redundant, and apparently left bereft of its future as a working-class. In addition to sponsoring archaeological research, Funar also played the role of economic protectionist, systematically refusing any major foreign investment. For example, he refused permission for a Coca-Cola plant, which ended up in a neighbouring city (Oradea/Nagyvarad), a Siemens engineering facility that was subsequently built in Timis¸oara, a regional competitor city, and a Metro supermarket, though this was later built in a nearby village. The line of reasoning was always the same: ‘We do not sell our country to foreigners’, especially not if they are Hungarian. The subtext was: dignified poverty is preferable to servile prosperity. This type of argument had many affinities with the frustration of marginalized workers, who were seeing ‘theft’ of major assets all around them, while giving it a populist and xenophobic twist that was easy to manipulate for local electoral purposes. After the 1996 elections, a new political alliance was installed at the national level, and Funar entered into ferocious debates with the local and national authorities responsible for the privatization of former socialist factories. He accused the national Privatization Agency (FPS), and more specifically Radu Sârbu, head of the local branch of the agency and later its appointed national level manager, of corruption and selling-out the country. He argued that Radu Sârbu had been bribed by foreign investors and gave away Cluj factories for amounts far below their market value. The new regime, through the FPS, tried to become an active player in the management and restructuring of factories in order to prepare them for privatization, but they generally failed to re-establish central control over local industrial units. In the absence of integration into international markets, it could not create a credible accountability regime for local managers (Earle and Telegdy 2001; Brown, Earle and Telegdy 2006). As a consequence, factories became even less transparent to their employees, which further deepened popular insecurity and distrust. An excerpt from my interview with Gheorghe, the production supervisor, is telling: FPS decided to join the different sectors of the [CUG] factory that were working as separate firms, in order to avoid these discussions [arrears, inter-firm unbilled payments]. Then they even changed the management of [my] sector. In less then two months the production dropped from forty billion to thirteen billion lei [Romanian’s currency] per month . Why? Because when they came … they completely changed the management. Everybody became passive and indifferent. Was CDR [a national political alliance] ruling back then? From what party was he [Radu Sârbu]? From PNTCD [the dominant party in the CDR political alliance] or what the heck, I don’t remember. But the factory fell down terribly. They began to violate terms of delivery. The discipline was melting away.

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In addition, an important part of the strategy used to prepare the factory for sale involved massive lay-offs. No foreign investor would embark on its own on a process of negotiation with Romanian unions. This generated the second massive wave of postsocialist unemployment in Romania (Ciupagea, Ilie and Neef 2004). Gheorghe remembers: ‘After 1997, they started to fire people. Initially, there were many who entered “technological unemployment” [a type of temporary unemployment according to Romanian law] and their wages were paid by the factories [not by the state]. They were not laid off, but just sent home temporarily for twenty days. But then they started to layoff hundreds of workers’. Funar intervened in these threatening processes. He addressed all these dissatisfactions by publicly entering into debates with FPS and other responsible agencies. One of Funar’s allegations was that FPS was appointing managers using only political criteria, not their managerial competence. Sârbu tried to block Funar’s attacks by suing the mayor for defamation, but he lost the process for lack of evidence. Most of Funar’s public interventions were spectacular and were deliberately staged as dramatized performances. As Gingrich and Banks (2006) note, the performative character of neonationalists is deeply entwined with their rhetorical and discursive strategies. Mayor Funar used press releases and open letters as major instruments for enacting his media performances, which were staged as symbolic executions. A short illustrative example is an open letter sent to a national newspaper where Funar implies that the prefect of Cluj county, Alexandru Farcas, received different forms of bribes to sell public land cheaply to a Hungarian corporation and its local representative, Arpad Paszkany (see Faje, this volume), interested in opening a mall in the city. I’ve asked [Paszkany] some questions and I hope at least that the press might give us some true answers: 1.What office furniture did he [Paszkany] give to PNTCD Cluj [the prefect’s party]? 2. Is it true that a company called ‘Wuc’ brought from Germany a Ford automobile that entered into the ownership of Madam Cristina Serban, the daughter of Alexandru Farcas? Which car was used in the summer of 1997 by the Farcas and Paszkany families to reach Budapest in order to take a flight together to England? How long did the two families spend together on their summer vacation?9

The letter continues with similar questions. In this intervention the mayor does not explicitly accuse the prefect, but only implies the possibility of a bribe by Hungarian investors. He is implying guilt without making any formal accusation. The letter closes with the suggestion that this case is just more proof that public property is being stolen by foreigners with the help of corrupt political parties. This theme of theft and corruption recurs time and again in interviews with workers of the former socialist enterprises. Not only did Funar hold 9. Mayor Gheorghe Funar, open letter, Ziua, 25 March 1998, p.1.

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such beliefs, so to did his whole political entourage. In a book marking the eightieth anniversary of Romanian administration in Cluj-Napoca, issued by the local administration under the patronage of Mayor Funar (Brudascu 1999), Ioan Constantinescu, an economist, argues in a special chapter on the local economy that: All that was built before 1989 has been labelled as bad, therefore after 1989 an unselective demolition was carried out. That is the reason that whole sectors, viable factories with a future ahead [of them], have been put on the black list. If the wheat could have been separated from the chaff, if the factories with good prospects could have been separated from those without prospects, then neither the national economy nor Cluj’s economy would have entered into free fall. (Constantinescu 1999: 291)

With better management (buni gospodari) the local economy may have had the chance to thrive, Constantinescu implies, but political and economic corruption destroyed that chance. Even if there were multiple voices articulating this kind of concern, Funar staged them in a spectacular and consistent way. He effectively enacted public trials by bypassing the official cumbersome courts and administrative procedures. This made him into a media personality with burlesque overtones, always performing and outsmarting his opponents, always just implying, never accusing directly. Brubaker et al. minimize the importance of these attributes: ‘Funar inspired not fear, anxiety, or concern, but contempt, derision, disgust, annoyance, and, not uncommonly, amusement’ (Brubaker et al. 2006: 339). Nonetheless, an explanation of his political power and twelve years as mayor cannot seriously overlook his willingness and ability to articulate popular fears that were hardly addressed in public by most other political players, and to do so in a self-assured, non-fearful way, to unmask the actual, potential or imaginary machinations of the postsocialist political class without any hard evidence, to create mischievous coherence where it was utterly missing but needed. In this reading, his burlesque nationalism could be interpreted as the very constitutive mechanism that made everyday non-ethnic chit-chat possible.

The Postsocialist Era: The Second Decade Mayor Funar’s nationalism capitalized on the anxieties of a dispossessed industrial working-class, anxieties that were rooted in the collapse of socialist industrial urbanism, the fragmentation of the Romanian state, the stalled reorientation of state and economy, and a perversely politicized productive sector. However, the second postsocialist decade fundamentally transformed Cluj’s wider environment and that of its citizens. It first brought a decisive push from the EU and European capital to integrate South-eastern Europe into its networks, driven by fear of catastrophe. This led to the macro stabilization of Romanian political and economic institutions, finally opening

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the door to new economic growth after two decades of crisis and collapse. Cluj quickly became a regional centre for the transnationalization of the Romanian economy and received very substantial capital flows, in relative terms perhaps more than any other site in South-eastern Europe. These investments included a new wave of high-tech industrialization by the likes of Siemens, Nokia, and so on. Cluj also became a financial centre, with Banca Transilvania turning into a regional and national powerhouse. This new technologically intensive industrialization led to production processes that required complex technological coordination among highly educated workers, as opposed to the socialist coordination among autonomous blue-collar teams. Working time became individualized and precisely quantified. Working hours became denser. Modes of surveillance shifted towards individual self-control through professional motivation and self-interest. Individual contracts were less and less controlled by the labour unions, and financial incentives were geared to creating motivated individual workers. Individualization and new economic opportunities sprang from other sources too. One manager complained in an interview that although he offered very good incentives for overtime on weekdays and Saturdays, workers did not want to take up the opportunity. Time outside the factory had suddenly become important for people. The transnationalization of Romanian finance after 2000 made an unprecedented mass of credit available to firms and consumers at affordable rates. As a consequence, the privatized real estate market began to accelerate powerfully, more so in Cluj than in other places. After two decades of complete stagnation, residential housing took off again. After work, many people were involved in informal activities in real estate. Technically schooled people were in high demand in the construction sector. Suddenly, managers were genuinely competing for workers. Thus, after 2000, Funar’s burlesque nationalism gradually lost touch with a transformed city that was increasingly driven by the transnationalization of capital and politics. New industrial and service sites were veritably mushrooming. New retailing complexes also started employing some of the younger, formerly redundant workers. A thriving popular construction sector appeared. In fact, Funar’s nationalist protectionism was seen as visibly obstructing the transnationalization of the local accumulation regime by which the city was driven. The status of workers was changing rapidly. From a devalued class and a social liability, they had become the city’s most important asset. The symbolic power of Funar’s nationalism had sprung from its capacity to transform individual blue-collar workers’ fears and anxieties into pride, solidarity and hope for their future as a class. Pride and hope now increasingly began to point elsewhere. Its sources shifted from local politics and nationalist symbols to the spectre of Europe and its attendant transnational capital flows. Moreover, pride and hope now seemed to be on offer to motivated individuals rather than to a class as such. In this context, Funar’s nationalism was emptied of its popular substance; it remained a funny caricature detached from everyday social reality. Funar

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lost the mayoral election in 2004 to a young right-wing candidate who had campaigned for fully opening up the city to foreign investors. Over the next four years, major corporate players like Nokia, Emerson, Siemens, Trelleborg and the EBRD invested heavily in Cluj, turning it into one of the fastest growing local economies in Central and Eastern Europe before the 2008 financial crisis made a (temporary?) end to all that (Amariei 2007; Ionică 2008).

Conclusion: Ethno-Nationalism, Power and Social Spaces In the above discussion I have unpacked the association between ethnicity, neo-nationalism and power in the city of Cluj, Romania. This city has been used by Rogers Brubaker as an example for advocating his cognitivist approach to ethnicity and nationalism. In contrast, I have followed the changing connections between workers’ experiences and positions in social production and the spatial and symbolic order of the city. The reason for this focus comes from the fact, largely ignored by Brubaker and his colleagues, that the electoral support for the nationalist candidate Gheorghe Funar over three consecutive mayoral elections came in particular from workers. The cognitivist approach cannot explain Funar’s success nor the motivations of his particular supporters. That is because it fails to understand nationalism and ethnicity as identification processes that are unfolding in situated fields of power. Instead, I argue for socio-temporally situated social actors who derive their motivations from the unfolding contradictions of particular landscapes of power. In this specific case of Cluj, I have drawn a relation between the relatively autonomous workers’ collectivities under socialism, which developed an indigenist self-understanding, and the logic of the fragmentation of peripheral socialist urban neighbourhoods after the collapse of socialism and socialist industry. Postsocialist disaccumulation left the routines and practices that linked the different elements of the socialist city together meaningless, transforming the city into a set of under-signified places and objects freefloating in social space. Mayor Funar’s Romanian nationalist discourse managed to recompose a city in which recently urbanized Romanian workers had become redundant by claiming for them a new legitimate space. Inhabitants of the city’s working-class neighbourhoods were discursively transformed from workers into Romanians, not just sovereign citizens of the Romanian nation-state but also the legitimate owners of the formerly Hungarian city of Cluj and its economy. Nonetheless, Funar’s nationalist rhetoric became increasingly inadequate in the changing economic conditions after 2000. Workers turned from liabilities into assets for developing firms, and transnational capital finally began to make inroads in the city. The city now gained a new coherence. People’s daily routines were tied up in a new network that reconnected the residential areas with the new locations of service firms, productive enterprises and commercial facilities. Funar’s

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nationalism gradually devolved into a burlesque discourse that failed to engage in meaningful ways with the exigencies and hopes of daily life. He was therefore finally dethroned in 2004. My position, of course, is not that ethnicity and nationalism should be reduced to the logic of economic restructuring and the dynamic of workers’ anxieties. Class becomes important as part of situated dynamics of power, not as a static economistic determination. However, I find myself in disagreement with the way in which the concept of asymmetry is used in the cognitivist paradigm. The cognitivist approach turns asymmetry into a discursive device, as a marked versus unmarked dimension in a conversation. Instead, asymmetries have to be placed in a bigger picture in which situated actors in complex fields of power employ various categories and classifications. Nationalism and ethnicity are not just conversations, they are signifiers that emerge and derive their meaning from fields of power in the world out there. Real social encounters are not free floating, as in a conversational experiment, but intrinsically unfolding in particular interactional arenas, imbued with histories and experiences of power and powerlessness. It is equally important to stress that power lies neither only in authoritative institutions, nor in the tactics of resistance employed by the powerless. Power is relational, contextual, multi-stranded and multi-scaled. Consequently, an abstract theory of power cannot be attained; the way in which the different scales and fields interact and impinge upon each other is always historically and spatially contingent. Place-making, nation-making, and class-making have to be read from a wider perspective then just the locality, without ever losing sight of the deeply situated local actors in their uniquely structured fields of power living their very particular and contradictory histories.

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Bourdieu, P. 1976. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brown, J., J.S. Earle and A. Telegdy. 2006. ‘The Productivity Effects of Privatization: Longitudinal Estimates from Hungary, Romania, Russia’, Journal of Political Economy 114(1): 61–99. Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 2002. ‘Ethnicity without Groups’, Archives européènes de sociologie 43(2): 163–89. ——— 2005. ‘Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu’, in D.L. Swartz and V.L. Zolberg (eds), After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique, Elaboration. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.25–65. Brubaker, R., and F. Cooper. 2000. ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29(1): 1–47. Brubaker, R., M. Loveman and P. Stamatov. 2004. ‘Ethnicity as Cognition,’ Theory and Society 33: 31–64. Brubaker, R., et al. 2006. Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brudascu, D. (ed.). 1999. 80 de ani de la instaurarea administratiei romanesti la Cluj-Napoca. Cluj-Napoca: Primaria municipiului Cluj-Napoca. Burawoy, M., and P. Krotov. 1992. ‘The Soviet Transition from Socialism to Capitalism: Worker Control and Economic Bargaining in the Wood Industry’, American Sociological Review 57(1): 16–38. Calhoun, C. 2003. ‘The Variability of Belonging: A Reply to Rogers Brubaker’, Ethnicities 3(4): 558–68. Chirot, D. (ed.) 1991. The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ciupagea, C., S. Ilie and R. Neef. 2004. ‘Romania from the Early to Late 1990s’, in R. Neef and P. Adair (eds), Informal Economies and Social Transformation in Romania. Berlin: LIT Verlag, pp. 1–20. Comaroff, J. 1996. ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Politics of Difference in an Age of Revolution’, in E.N. Wilmsen and P.A. McAllister (eds), The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a World of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 162–83. Comaroff, J., and J.L. Comaroff. 1999. ‘Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony’, American Ethnologist 26(2): 279–309. ——— 2001a. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, in J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff (eds), Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–56. ——— 2001b. ‘Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State’, Journal of Southern African Studies 27(3): 627–51. Connor, W. 1984. The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Constantinescu, I. 1999. ‘Economia Clujului’, in D. Brudascu (ed) 80 de ani de administrat¸ie româneascaˇ la Cluj-Napoca, Cluj-Napoca: Consiliul local al municipiului Cluj-Napoca and Primaˇria municipiului Cluj-Napoca, vol 2, pp. 287–92.

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Csedo˝, K. et al. 2004. A rurális bevándorlók. Az elso˝generációs kolozsvári városlakók társadalma. Cluj: Scientia. Culic, I. 1999. ‘The Strategies of Intellectuals: Romania under Communist Rule in Comparative Perspective’, in A. Bozóki (ed.), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, pp. 43–72. Earle, J.S., and A. Telegdy. 2001. ‘Privatization and Productivity in Romanian Industry: Evidence from a Comprehensive Enterprise Panel’, IZA Discussion Paper 326. Friedman, J. (ed.) 2003. Globalization, the State and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Gingrich, A., and M. Banks. 2006. ‘Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond’, in A. Gingrich and M. Banks (eds), Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–28. Goina, C. 2000. ‘The Ethnicization of Politics: The Case of Târgu-Mures, 1990’, M.A. dissertation. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles. Ionicaˇ, E. 2008. ‘Nokia face din Cluj cea mai fierbinte zona pentru investitii din Europa’, Saˇptaˇmâna Financiaraˇ, 18 January, p. 7. Kalb, D., 1997. Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kalb, D., and H. Tak. 2006. ‘Critical Junctions: Recapturing Anthropology and History’, in D. Kalb and H. Tak (eds), Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–28. Kideckel, D. 1993. The Solitude of Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ——— 2002. ‘The Unmaking of an East-Central European Working-class’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 114–32. Kornai, J. 1992. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lazaˇr, M. 2002. Paradoxuri ale modernizaˇrii. Elemente pentru sociologie a elitelor culturale românes¸ti. Cluj Napoca: Ed. Limes. ——— 2003a. ‘Identités urbaines est styles de vie à Cluj Napoca’, in C. Denis and M. Lazaˇr (eds), Patrimoine et dialogue entre les cultures a Cluj (Roumanie). Lyon: Université Lumiere Lyon. ——— 2003b. ‘The Metastasis of Ostentation: Black and White Postcards from the Three Colored Cluj’, Balkon 2/3: 125–34. ——— 2008. ‘Mental Maps and the Public Space in Cluj in the 1990s’, unublished paper delivered at ‘Culture and the City: Creative Industries and Urban Processes Conference’, 14 March. Bucharest: New Europe College. Ossewaarde, M. 2007. ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Society of Strangers,’ Current Sociology 55(3): 367–88. Paraschiv, V. 2005. Lupta mea pentru sindicate libere in Romania. Iasi: Polirom. Pásztor, G. 2004. ‘Monostor(ok)-kép(ei), Monostor(ok)-tudat(ai): Kolozsvár egyik lakótelepének mentális tér- képéro˝l’, WEB 13: 17–24. Petrovici, N. 2007. ‘Excluderea muncitorilor din centrul Clujului: Gentrificare intr-un oras Central European’, Scoiologie Romaneasca 1(3): 42–70. Pittaway, M. 1999. ‘The Social Limits of State Control: Time, the Industrial Wage Relation, and Social Identity in Stalinist Hungary, 1948–19531’, Journal of Historical Sociology 12(3): 271–301.

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——— 2002. “The Reproduction of Hierarchy: Skill, Working-Class Culture, and the State in Early Socialist Hungary.” The Journal of Modern History 74(4): 737–69. Poenaru, F., and G. Pulay. 2009. ‘Why Ethnicity? Everyday Nationalism in a Transylvanian Town’, East Central Europe 36(1): 130–137. Schiller, N.G., L. Basch and C. Blanc 1995. ‘From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, Anthropological Quarterly 68(1): 48–63. Schiller, N.G., and A. Caglar. 2009. ‘Towards a Comparative Theory of Locality in Migration Studies: Migrant Incorporation and City Scale’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35(2): 177–202. Tismaneanu, V. 2003. Stalinism for all Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tripon, M. 2005. Saˇpaˇtor în Piat¸a Discordiei. Cluj-Napoca: Mo. Troc, G. 2003. ‘“Behind the Blocks”, or About the Current State of the Workers Neighborhoods’, IDEA Arta s¸i Societate 5(3): 130–40. Turner, B.S. 2007. ‘The Enclave Society: Towards a Sociology of Immobility’, European Journal of Social Theory 10(2): 287–303. Verdery, K. 1987. ‘Moments in the Rise of the Discourse on National Identity, II: Early 1900s to World War II’, in I. Agrigoroaiei, G. Buzatu and V. Cristian (eds), Românii în istoria universala, Vol.2, Pt.1. Iasi: Universitatea Al. I. Cuza, pp. 89–136. ——— 1991. National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— 1995. ‘National Ideology and National Character in Interwar Romania’, in I. Banac and K. Verdery (eds), National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 103–33. ——— 1996. ‘The “Etatization” of Time in Ceausescu’s Romania’, in K. Verdery, What was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 39–60. Wimmer, A., and N.G. Schiller. 2002. ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks 2(4): 301–34. ——— 2003. ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology’, International Migration Review 37(3): 576–610.

Chapter 3 Football Fandom in Cluj: Class, Ethno-Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism Florin Faje

Introduction This chapter focuses on the specific process of identification involving class, ethnicity and football fandom in the postsocialist city of Cluj, Romania. Football fandom is never random. Identifications and passions are structured through the same processes that produce and reproduce social identities in the wider world. Supporting one or the other of the two football clubs in Cluj, Universitatea and CFR, has never been a neutral act, as I will show; people’s motivations shifted over time and the symbolic meaning of both clubs was transformed drastically between 1990 and 2010 as the collapse and later rebirth of the local economy produced recurrent fights over the meaning of public space (see Petrovici, this volume). These fights also involved interpretations of the histories of the two football clubs and their sporting success. Engaging the ways in which strong solidarities, forms of belonging and emotional attachments were produced among football fans enables me to clarify the basic moments of identification linking the materiality of class experience with the discursive efficiency of ethno-national narratives in a historically contested and fragmented urban setting. These processes of identification are also marked by a profound reconfiguration of what ‘class’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ signify in postsocialism. In the case of Cluj, one of the most intriguing social and cultural dynamics is represented by the ethnicization of class relations and the class structuration of ethnic repertoires of loyalty and attachment through the narratives of football clubs and their fans. Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘identification’ captures best the fluid, fragmented, multiple and contested nature of identity (Hall 1992). Defined at the junction between public discursive practices and

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subjectivity, identity comes to be situationally defined and thus deprived of its essentialist burden. Hall’s understanding provides a theoretically encompassing perspective that orients the analysis towards a contingent, contextual and relational understanding of identity. The ways in which people identify themselves and others arise at the critical junctions between global, regional, national and local histories (see Kalb, this volume). Hall aptly points towards the multiplicity of categories involved in these processes: language, gender, class position, religion, customs, traditions, ‘feelings for place’ – all are intertwined in shaping specific identities (Hall 1992). A similarly contextualized and open concept of class, offered by Kalb (1997), for example, opens a focus on the specific experiences, public discourses, alliances and confrontations that surround the contested social fields and meanings within which people reproduce their social lives through work and the generation of income and social status. The town of Cluj-Napoca, located in the centre of Transylvania, has had a tumultuous twentieth-century history that has always strongly affected its ethnic and class composition. The city’s football clubs and their fands have been deeply involved in this history. By the early twentieth century, the railways and the establishment of factories around the Habsburgian imperial town of Kolozsvár (Cluj) had helped create the second largest modern working-class city in Hungary after Budapest. The railway workers, the avant-garde of the working-class, established the Kolozsvari Vasutas Sport Club (KVSC) football team in 1907, today known as CFR (Caile Ferate Romane, ‘Romanian railways’). By the end of the nineteenth century, Cluj, an educational centre, was marked by strong competition between Hungarianand Romanian-speaking students. Romanian students and professors supported nationalist activities (Brubaker et al. 2006: 92–95) and launched Universitatea, the university’s football club, in 1919, when Kolozsvár became known as Cluj and Transylvania became part of Romania after the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both clubs have survived and have played, and still play, significant symbolic roles in the class and national politics concerning the city. Looking at the two football teams’ fan clubs provides us with a chance to expand the discussion of class and ethno-nationalism in Cluj: first, it allows us to see how ethno-national tensions in the city in the 1990s and early 2000s were driven by class tensions; and secondly, it demonstrates the volatility of established social symbols, such as football clubs, in postsocialist times, as they are radically resignified, often with surprising outcomes. This allows us to widen the concept of ethno-national identifications to incorporate not only a discursive and conversational dimension, as other scholars have done (see Brubaker et al. 2006), but also to make them genuinely relational, processual and contextual, and to account for their dynamic and contested meanings (Hall 1996), in particular in the context of new class formations. I show that the CFR football club, recapitalized by a powerful entrepreneur in the early 2000s and playing the new market rules of

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football skilfully, started to attract mainly Romanian middle-class football enthusiasts, while Universitatea became increasingly associated with the hooliganism of the declassed youth coming from the socialist built workingclass neighbourhoods. 1 I show that the latter endorsed a strongly nationalist discourse, readily available in the context of the rise of the city’s mayor, Gheorghe Funar, as a powerful discursive tool to symbolically counter their economic marginalization. In contrast, CFR fans adopted a tolerant multiculturalism as a specific middle-class civilizational project. The present study is the result of my involvement with football fans in Cluj-Napoca for a period of two years. I have conducted fieldwork among these fans in two distinct periods: Between March and early June 2007, I focused mainly on rivalry and symbolic conflict (see Faje 2007). Issues relating to ethnicity and class recurrently appeared during my interactions with both Universitatea’s and CFR’s followers, and were regularly expressed in the two football stadiums in Cluj-Napoca. My second period of fieldwork took place in April 2008 and centred on the group of Hungarian fans of CFR My fieldwork coincided with the end of the 2007/8 football season in Romania, when CFR became national champions.

Historical Background The 1918 change in sovereignty that followed the fall of Habsburg rule represented the beginning of Romanian nationalizing policies for Cluj. The main problem to be addressed by the new administration was, that although ‘Transylvania as a whole had a substantial Romanian majority, Romanians were only weakly represented in Transylvanian towns and in urban, middleclass occupations; nationalizing policies and practices were designed to remedy this’ (Brubaker et al. 2006: 97). Football was from the outset involved in this process. When the university reopened as a Romanian institution in 1919, it also had its own football club – Universitatea – founded by Romanian medical students and professors, which would go on to dominate the local sporting scene for decades. Although administrative measures were deployed to Romanianize Cluj’s public spaces, by 1939, according to Brubaker, ‘Hungarian domination of local economic and (in certain respects) cultural life’ continued (Brubaker et al. 2006: 101). Thus, by the advent of the Second World War, Cluj’s social structure was still marked by a divide along ethnic lines that saw Hungarians better off than Romanians, in spite of the state’s levelling measures; and the city’s landscape was decidedly more 1. Podaliri and Balestri (1998) see these hooligans as a youth subculture. The elements that offer specificity to them are: occupying the ends of the stadium, the tendency for violence towards rivals, the use of drums, banners and smoke-creating devices when supporting their favourites, frequent meetings between members in order to plan future actions.

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expressive of their ways of life than that of Romanians. During the years of the ‘occupation’, as the Romanians generally refer to the period between 1940 and 1944, when part of Transylvania was reincorporated into the Hungarian state, one event is of special importance to Universitatea’s followers. As the nationalizing measures of the defeated Romanian state were reversed in favour of Hungarian speakers, the Romanian university, together with its football club, was exiled to Sibiu, turning the club into a public martyr for the Romanian cause. After the war, the functioning of ‘real socialism’ was undoubtedly about a fundamental social contract between the Communist Party and the workers. One of the cards played by the Communist Party was the developmental one, the other being nationalism, and they were closely related (see Kalb, this volume). At the national level, this double identification meant that socialism appeared to be constructed for the people as workers, but also as Romanians. The nationalist component of late socialism represented to a certain extent a double empowerment for labour, it appealed to long-lasting ethnic resentments and bitterness and, at least in Transylvania, represented more than just ‘discourse’ (see Verdery 1991, 1996; and Petrovici, this volume). The establishment of the communist regime brought with it a massive effort at national, top-down industrialization guided by successive five-year plans, an industrialization that began to reach provincial cities such as Cluj by the late 1950s. By the 1970s some 40 per cent of jobs in Cluj were industrial (Brubaker et al. 2006: 113). The majority of the new industrial workers were recruited from Romanian peasant families from the rural areas around the city and the eastern region of Moldavia. This rapid growth and transformation of the city had two important consequences: on the one hand, Hungarians in Cluj perceived industrialization and the affiliated construction of working-class districts as a deliberate policy to Romanianize ‘their’ city; on the other hand, the creation of a large proletariat housed in usually low-standard quarters (Petrovici 2006) set the stage for the frictions that would mark the public sphere in the course of the 1990s when socialist industry collapsed. Up to 2000, Universitatea attracted the support of most football enthusiasts in Cluj, and the club reaped the benefits of football’s hierarchical logic under socialism. It was nationally subordinated to the Bucharest-based clubs, but locally positioned above CFR, meaning that it was able to attract more funds as well as more talent. Its home ground, a stadium located near the town centre, was developed in the 1960s to accommodate more than 30,000 people. The club was sponsored by the university, to which it was affiliated until the fall of communism. In contrast, CFR’s story as a club is marked by its desperate attempts to survive financially. Changing its name seven times throughout its history, perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy, the club played mainly in the second and third Romanian divisions. The period of ‘transition’ was for Romanian club football marked by three important structural processes: the decline and eventual disappearance of some clubs, the migration of players to foreign clubs, and the constant search for

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reliable investors. The first and most severely affected were those clubs that shared in the collapse of productive units and the subsequent decline of their corresponding municipalities. Given the pattern of socialist industrialization and urbanization that often created urban working-class communities centered around large factories which controlled both the patterns of work and leisure, these were the settings most affected by the waves of privatization and liberalization that followed the collapse of communism, as Humphrey (2002) shows for Russia or Rasanayagam (2003) for Uzbekistan. Dilapidated infrastructure, declining sporting performance and the powerful public discourse on ‘hooliganism’ promoted by the media made sure that the chances of keeping these clubs functioning were close to zero. These developments were soon followed by the rapid and massive migration of the best Romanian players to foreign clubs, attracted by high wages and the standard of play elsewhere in Europe. Besides, the international migration of players had its domestic counterpart, the most successful Romanian clubs, especially the Bucharest-based ones, could quite easily attract talent from struggling clubs eksewhere in the country, thus consolidating their hegemony over the game and assuring that they had the best ‘footballing goods’ to sell on the quickly expanding European market for football players. With the world of football following the newly emerging capitalist logic of accumulation, the Bucharest-based clubs’ ability to attract capital due to their prestige and to their quasi-monopoly of the players’ market made them attractive to investors. Many of these transactions, of either the clubs or players, were fraught with accusations of illegality and corruption.

Contested Loyalties At least for the postwar period, Universitatea was by far the more representative football club in Cluj, and it was very much perceived as a symbol of Romanianness in Cluj-Napoca. In the postsocialist years, it came to be owned and managed by the local government, run by the Romanian nationalist mayor, Funar. In this context, when a Hungarian local businessman, Árpád Pászkány, tried to invest in Universitatea, the local government declined his bid.2 By subsequently investing in CFR, the club often associated with the Hungarian minority in Cluj-Napoca, a new space for football enthusiasts emerged. At the time the investment was made, Cluj was well known nationally for its noisy nationalist discourse and politics, in which emphasis was placed on the Romanian character of the city and its Hungarian past and present were downplayed. Funar’s three successive mayoral election victories (between 1992 and 2004) were crucially based on support from the working2. See the account (in Romanian) at: http://www.prosport.ro/fotbal-intern/liga-1/ paszkany-cand-am-intrat-in-fotbal-vroiam-sa-cumpar-u-cluj-2620117. Retrieved 4 June 2008.

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class neighbourhoods (Lazaˇr 2003; Petrovici, this volume). In the case of privatization, these developments involved strong opposition to foreign capital, especially investments perceived to serve Hungarian interests, under the daily sound bite of ‘We are not selling out our country!’ The events that followed the takeover of CFR appear as a paradox: Universitatea, perceived as the club of intellectuals and students, gained more and more support from the youths of Cluj-Napoca’s socialist-built working-class neighbourhoods, while CFR, traditionally seen as a blue-collar Hungarian club from Cluj, came to attract the support of more middleclass and middle-aged fans, both Romanian and Hungarian. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the town’s class divisions had always been articulated through the prism of the urban–rural divide and associated hierarchies of culture and civilization (see Kalb, this volume). As in many postsocialist locations, this distinction had a durable spatial expression in the separation between the old city of Cluj and the more recently built new town of the socialist suburbs (Lazaˇr 2003). Urbanization was therefore also perceived in ethnicized terms: as a threat toward the Hungarianness of the old city. For football fans, the place of one’s residence (old town or suburbs) came to say as much about club allegiances as about ethnic identity, class position and public behaviour. The leader of KVSC, the group of mainly Hungarian fans of CFR, a 38-year-old actor at the local Hungarian opera house, provides a typical story of the ways in which the old urbanites perceived the transformations of both the town and its football clubs: I used to go to Universitatea’s matches, because they were also a team from Cluj. I never imagined that there could be so much hate between the supporters of the two teams. To be frank, such a thing would have been unthinkable. This has all started since their fans radicalized. I know well many of U[niversitatea]’s old fans, whom I still meet. But these people were slowly pushed aside by newcomers, a second generation of people coming from the other side of the Carpathians [in Moldavia], now living in the marginal neighbourhoods: Iris, Groapaˇ, Maˇnaˇs¸tur. Everybody knows why these neighbourhoods were built: for the people who were brought by force or sometimes with their consent, during the 1960s and 1970s, to Cluj-Napoca to fill the jobs in the factories. Unfortunately, at Universitatea these people came to weigh heavily and I have very good friends, old Universitatea fans, who now have to stay on the other side of the stands, not to meet with these ones. Among old fans the problem of whether you are a U[niversitatea] fan or CFR fan does not arise. (Laszlo, 38 years old, CFR fan)

This is a point also made by some of the older fans of Universitatea – also known simply as U – as Robert explains: Robert: Now the phenomenon of supporters has diluted. Just like this society, it has started going downhill. But back then the supporters of U were among the most respected of the whole country … The atmosphere they created, and the civilization they transmitted, and seeing the group of supporters made me want to get there, but it was very difficult: I had to go two hours in advance and if I

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managed to get the corner of a bench I was very happy and took pride in that. Look, I had managed to stay there, the older ones came there, and no, not anybody could stay there. F.F.: How is it that the group of U’s supporters was different then? You were saying that it used to be more civilized. Robert: Yes, they did not use to swear as they do now, not only in our case, but generally. They sang, we used to have some songs, we were the most innovative group of supporters from the whole country, we were singing songs that today few sing. Slowly, slowly, they are beginning to forget them, just us, the older ones, who also keep to the degree of civilization, of culture. Back then probably these students were also something else. We have gone downhill. (Robert, 45, Universitatea fan)

On the other hand, erstwhile newcomers to the city were equally aware of their marginal position and used similar distinctions when defining their place in the city. As the narrative of the former leader of Universitatea’s fans, a 29-year-old bodyguard, shows, fandom expresses a strong sense of commonality and common life experiences: Here, I don’t know… Here in Groapaˇ, where UCG [Ultra Curva Groapa] was born in ’97, it seems that we are a bit, a bit worse, more aggressive. But we are also more united, we are like in a village at the town’s periphery, people are more worried, they are poorer. We are different from the other citizens of Cluj. Here in Groapaˇ we are a small neighbourhood, we are very united, more beautiful … And as soon as we get out to another town or to the stadium we are close to each other … If the gendarme wants to take one of us, he can’t do it – the others are immediately all over him. We all eat from the same bread. If we have money, everything we have we calculate so that there is enough for everyone. So, it is nice if you come to think about it, it’s like a big family. (Marcu, 29, Universitatea fan)

Football’s capacity to arouse strong local affiliations, and its contribution in building urban solidarities (see Armstrong 1998, Giulianotti 1999), was clearly noticed by local politicians, both during the accelerated period of labour migration to the city under communism in the 1960s and 1970s as well as in the electoral campaigns of the 1990s. It was precisely in this first period that the Ion Moina stadium (Universitatea’s home ground) was modernized and enlarged. Universitatea’s matches attracted large numbers of football enthusiasts, even though the means of expression were severely controlled (Faje 2007). Today, both Universitatea’s and CFR’s followers remember the former club’s matches, to which they would all go: I’ve been going to U’s matches since the eighties. During the communist time there were no other public events: the TV programme was very short and the stadium would get full, full. But the people would not really actively support the team: the fan groups (galeriile) were very small. (Andrei, 35, Universitatea fan)

CFR’s older fans also acknowledge their participation at Universitatea’s home matches, strongly emphasizing the difference between how it used to be and how it is now. Universitatea was fully identified with the city of

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Cluj, representing the city. For football fans there was a complete merging between being from Cluj (clujean) and supporting Universitatea. The notes of one of Universitatea’s former trainers illustrate precisely this merging of categories, up to the point of indistinction. Writing about the period of the Vienna Diktat during the Second World War, when Cluj was again part of Hungary, he remembers: In the time of the exile we played in Turda against ‘Victoria’ Cluj, a refugee here. Before the game we went up the hill and looked over Cluj. You could see it as in your hand and we all cried. Just to get back and play once more there for ‘U’! … For everybody and for each one, ‘U’ was Cluj and Cluj was ‘U’! I am from ‘U’ meant I was from Cluj; simple and with no other possibility. (Cârjan 2004: 11)

The intense manifestations of nationalism within Cluj’s public spaces after 1989 are well documented by Brubaker and his collaborators (Brubaker et al. 2006). But as much as the authors talk about ‘ordinary’ citizens and ‘everyday interactions’, they have little interest in class experiences and overlook the complex class basis of Funar’s aggressive nationalism and its conditions of popular reception (Lazaˇr 2003; Kalb, this volume; Petrovici, this volume). In Stuart Hall’s terms (Hall 1992), they ignore exactly the processes through which historically constituted subjects in Cluj identified themselves most powerfully with Romanian neo-nationalism. As Kideckel (2008) argues, in postsocialism, the notion of ‘sub-alternization’ covers all the phenomena connected to the emergence of the market: rising unemployment, the segmentation of class interests, some forms of hyper-confrontational labour activism, the lack of effective defence against abusive employers, the dependency of former workers on the state, the loss of labour’s symbolic capital due to its public association with a lack of work ethics and with the ‘evil’ practices of the socialist regime, falling living standards, the transformation of workers’ identity from one based on social labour to one expressed by poverty, and the dissolution of public support networks into private ones. All these dramatic transformations produce a form of ‘frustrated agency’, which, in the case of Universitatea’s fans, also shapes their sentiments of belonging. In spatial terms, as both Kalb and Petrovici (both this volume) note, this is expressed in their battle for their ‘right to the city’ (Harvey 2008). In this, football becomes both a stake and a weapon. This is how football rivalry in Cluj has become so strongly ethnicized. For the mainly workingclass youths who follow Universitatea, Cluj is claimed as a Romanian city, whose inhabitants are saddened by the club’s lack of success; meanwhile, CFR’s followers, purportedly only Hungarians, enjoy success made possible by Hungarian capital, and boosted partly by privatization windfalls from the Romanian state. The banner displayed by Universitatea’s fans during the critical game between their favourites and CFR on 7 May 2008, that saw Universitatea relegated and CFR triumphant in the national league, made all this clear: ‘Cluj in pain from Universitatea’s relegation / Only Hungarians dream about the championship’.

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CFR’s recent performances are perceived as an attempt to represent the city of Cluj at the national level, which in footballing logic means downplaying Universitatea’s ‘right’ to do so. What this calls for is a reinterpretation of the history of the two clubs, in which nationalistic argument ranks prominently and legitimizes Universitatea’s claim to supremacy, in spite of CFR’s sporting performances. In this sense, nationalist discourse empowers underemployed and informalized youth to claim rights to the city through football fandom: They [CFR] do not have a tradition and, in the first place, they’ve started their history badly … During the Second World War – I’m not chauvinistic, I’m a Romanian and I’m proud. So, in the Second World War, Universitatea Cluj – when you say Universitatea Cluj it is something beautiful – went into exile in Sibiu and played football in the Romanian championship [rather than the Hungarian one]. This is something beautiful … We were somebody… We were worthy of respect. The whole country respected us, and even now they still do … But CFR stayed in Cluj and took a Hungarian name, KV… I don’t know what Kolozsvár, it’s a shame! … And now you come to say that you’re the soul of Ardeal [Transylvania] … You can’t, whom do you fool? (Marcu, 29, Universitatea fan)

But the current discussion about ‘ethnicity’ among football fans in Cluj must not be understood in an essentialist, reified manner as a competition between two stable, deeply rooted ethnic identities, namely Hungarians and Romanians. In spite of the powerful emotional response often aroused by these categories in everyday life, the class position of the subjects involved should make us aware of the multiplicity of discourses, ideas and feelings that ethnic categories are made to cover. While ethnic slogans and, indeed, increasingly direct confrontation with other fans provided good reasons for the Hungarians who used to support Universitatea to quit the club, for the Romanian fans who went over to CFR, class sensibilities were much more important in their initial decision. The latter, after recognizing the transformations that were taking place among Universitatea’s fans, strongly denounced them as ‘ultras’ and ‘hooligans’. As one of my informants, a 48-year-old local manager of a multinational insurance company, described the main goals of the CFR fans: ‘We are a fan group which tries to create the conditions for the whole family to have a good time in the stands. This is directly related to our fight against hooliganism, against indecency in the stadium and so on’. When asked to discuss differences between followers of the two clubs, he illustrates the ways in which social differences are interpreted and used against rivals: [I]f we [CFR] gathered a group of quite moderate people, unfortunately, on the other side [of the river, at Universitatea], there are characters which I cannot evaluate … I disqualify myself if I talk more about them … If we only talk about their leader … an individual who has no relationship with the general notions of human value … No longer ago than last week, he was involved in the savage beating of a CFR fan, and around him has gathered a group of losers (faˇraˇ caˇpaˇtâi). I’m afraid that they also lack a minimal education … [they are] people who do not even know what team spirit means. (Marian, 48, CFR fan)

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The Hungarian followers of CFR that used to watch Universitatea’s matches consistently mentioned that ‘nationalistic’ slogans were directed increasingly against Hungarians at the Ion Moina stadium around the year 2000. They also recognized that this was happening while the youth from ‘the neighbourhoods’ started to dominate Universitatea’s fan base. Andras, a player at Universitatea in the 1980s, currently the regional distribution manager of a recently arrived multinational company, remembers that he first took the slogans as a joke, but he never went again after two men confronted him with the words: ‘Hey, Hungarian (ungure), you don’t belong here! You’d better stay home!’ These words, coming from what he called some ‘filthy kids’, convinced him that it is not worth the trouble, and it made him appreciate even more the newly emerging group of fans at CFR. That the founders of the emerging CFR fan club aimed to promote a new style of fandom was immediately visible in their actions. Two of the founding members of Commando Gruia, a group of Romanian fans, both owners of small firms, one of them 28 years old and the other 35 years, remember that the fan club was founded by a group of friends, people who had long known each other, many of them living close to CFR’s stadium in the Gruia residential neighbourhood. After organizing support for the team during matches, they decided to give a legal basis to the group by creating a notfor-profit association able to attract a yearly fee, sponsorship and donations, and issuing membership cards. The legal framework facilitated relations with the club, which was thus able to officially support the activities of the fans. The good results of the team saw the group rapidly increase in size: in 2002 it numbered 50; by 2004 it had 300 members, while in 2008 their number had more than doubled. The association expanded its range of activities, producing personalized objects, editing a small magazine that was distributed for free among fans at every home match, and encouraging one of the members to manage relations between the group and the media. One of the two supporters I have talked with transformed his business, a bar located near the stadium, into a sports pub decorated in CFR’s colours, which provided fans with a space to meet, drink and chat. This space contributed to establishing and maintaining strong ties between the most dedicated members: Now I can stress my merits a little. The fan group is very, very lucky to have me. I live right here, across the street from the stadium [where the bar is also located]. We gather here weekly, for a meeting … and we talk: what are we going to do tomorrow, what are we going to do the day after tomorrow, what we do this week … Even if there is nothing to discuss we stay for a beer … A beer, a chat … So there is a lot the group gains because of the bar here. We organize the transportation here. We keep the group’s ‘arsenal’– flags and banners – at my place. Now we have a girl selling labelled products, we have a friend as the official speaker of the group: he goes to talk shows, [he talks on] television, talks to the press. (Cristian, 28, CFR fan)

The establishment of a fan club as a legally constituted association with feepaying members and coordinated by committed leaders facilitates a high

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degree of control over those already enrolled as well as over those eager to join. When I questioned one of the leaders whether I would be allowed to become a member, he immediately stressed the positive characteristics of the group, as well as the types of behaviour that are sanctioned: You’ll see that we are like a true family, there are no scandals here. People always have a good time here [implicitly casting aspersions on Universitatea fans]. We are friends with a 70 year old, as well as with a 10 year old. In fact we have a 68-yearold member who hasn’t missed any away match. So, the performances and the desire to travel to away matches have united us very much. But this does not mean that if you don’t sit at your place and [if] you create trouble … This is up to us … If you come and you get drunk, you make a scandal, you just bother the others, it happens only once and you’re out. (Cosmin, 35, CFR fan)

The appearance of KVSC is the story of the improbable emergence of a group of Hungarian fans supporting CFR alongside Romanians. Socialized in ethnically separate institutions, the Romanians as well as the Hungarians of Cluj confine themselves most of the time to ethnically based networks of friendship, collegiality and neighbourliness. As in the case of Commando Gruia’s Romanian members, ethnic categories do not appear prominently in the discourse of KVSC’s Hungarian members, although the two groups were clearly constituted along ethnic lines. KVSC’s founding members directly point to their existing connections as constituting the foundation of the group. Their current leader, Laszlo, emphasized the importance of such a network of friendship in creating the group: KVSC was organized in 2002 by a group of friends. Many of them felt that it was about time to support the team in an organized manner. At the beginning we were a group of sixty to seventy people who knew each other from faculties, from the neighbourhood. We are neighbours, we are friends, we are ex-colleagues, so a big group of friends, we were all Hungarians. But the problem did not arise and will never arise [when one has] to ask someone: ‘Hey, what nationality are you?’ (Laszlo, 38, CFR fan)

The Hungarian fans immediately obtained the group a legal status in the form of a not-for-profit association. As in the case of Romanian fans, their main goal was to attract sponsorship, to ease official relations with the club and to track the development of the group regarding its membership. Their success in gathering funds for the fan club is visible on all of their materials. The names and symbols of the sponsors, firms either owned by one of the fans or businesses where one of the fans holds a high position, appear on their shirts, caps and banners. In terms of numbers, the group has grown exponentially: from 60 to 70 people in 2002, by 2008 the KVSC fan club had more than 400 members. All my informants provided consistent information regarding the educational background of members: they would all say that 80 per cent of them are university graduates or current students. Discussing the term ‘ultras’, Marius, one of the few Romanian members of KVSC, commented that:

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I think that younger people are attracted to this phenomenon [i.e., ultras] and also those unfulfilled in their social life. As long as I know such people do take fandom that way and as long as I know an ultra with a university diploma, with a family, wife and kids, is something unheard of. Were such ultras to exist I would be very curious to meet and talk to them. (Marius, 31, CFR fan)

Marius’s story, as a Romanian fan of CFR and member of KVSC, is particularly interesting as it shows the importance of ethnically based networks in becoming part of this group. He was drawn into the group because of his relations with Hungarians in Cluj: ‘all of my friends are now Hungarian, I have a Hungarian wife and I work in a firm owned by Hungarians’. Marius is well versed in strategies used to overcome the language barrier in interactions between Romanians and Hungarians, as well as in the importance of silencing nationalistic ideas: Sometimes, I don’t know what to say. It’s a bit annoying … Sometimes, in a bus, it’s a big thing if we are two Romanians and they speak in Hungarian. It is normal for them to speak in Hungarian, they are not supposed to speak Romanian just because I am there. But I would also like to be part of their talk, so I make jokes: ‘Hey, add a subtitle!’ or ‘Switch to a Romanian channel!’ I am allowed to do so and this is clear proof that there are no problems. Probably they privately all share the dream of the Greater, Smaller, Squared, Round Hungary, but I’m not interested and they do not express such ideas … [even] if they really hold them. In the end we are just a group of friends. (Marius, 31, CFR fan)

The importance of joking as a strategy of downplaying possible conflict surrounding vulnerable issues was noticed by Brubaker at al. (2006), and it is also a good strategy for interactions between the Romanian and Hungarian fans of CFR. If a few Hungarians gather to talk aside from the main group they are soon confronted with a joke regarding their ‘separatism’, and thus brought in interaction with the others. If one of the Romanians gets drunk, some Hungarians soon jokingly mention that his ‘peasant’ behaviour will not allow him to continue supporting the team. Thus, new possibilities for locally defined processes of middle-class identification emerged, and being ‘against Bucharest’ (Anti-Bucuresti) became equivalent to being from Cluj, from the heart of Transylvania. But CFR fandom also came to stand for a morally superior and more ‘civilized’ position, both as regards football and politics, and public life. CFR helped to shape middle-class cosmopolitanism in Cluj.

Conclusion Economic hardship for large segments of the population in postsocialist Eastern Europe have resulted in specific localized and class-structured forms of solidarity and contestation. Ethno-national and multicultural, cosmopolitan identifications in this context tend to be expressive of new divisions and contestations of class. After the fall of communism, the city of Cluj witnessed a dramatic remaking of class boundaries and experiences, and

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nationalist discourses soon re-emerged. The recent history of football in Cluj tells a powerful story of this transformation. As major public icons, the two football clubs in the city were soon invested with conflicting and contested meanings, reproducing, reinforcing and signifying old and new polarizations marking the city’s urban space. By focusing on the followers of Cluj’s two football clubs I have been able to bring out the changing configurations of class, culture and nation triggered by the collapse of the socialist economy and the subsequent influx of new capital. In Cluj, mainly young workingclass followers of Universitatea, a once elite club, have come to adopt a radicalized neo-nationalist outlook, while the ethnically diverse fans of a new contender, CFR, empowered by newly arrived capital, have mobilized around a liberal discourse of tolerance and a shared vision of a multicultural local and regional history. The middle-class fans that switched to CFR, an increasingly successful club, have come to define themselves in sharp contrast to Universitatea’s loyal followers, who have become increasingly depicted as violent and uneducated. Indeed, forty or more years after their parents’ arrival in Cluj, they have become once again symbolically relegated to the status of ‘peasants’ who are obstructing the possible European future of the city. CFR fans, not surprisingly, picture themselves by contrast as embodying the cosmopolitan future of Cluj. When Romania entered the European Union, Cluj became a prime recipient of European capital investment, finally turning ten years of dramatic industrial decline around and making Cluj a locale of the new European modernity in Romania. CFR fans, well educated as they were, were the first to profit from the new opportunities. Meanwhile they celebrated a capitalist club that actively bought and sold players in an international market, vied for the very top prices in Romania and internationally, and proclaimed Cluj, and football in Cluj, as once again a multi-ethnic city, leaving behind the trauma of the period when the nationalist mayor Funar was in power. The polarization of football fans in Cluj-Napoca along class lines – between a liberal, multicultural middle-class grouping with legal statute on the one hand, and a neo-nationalist working-class crowd on the other – shows the complex and mutually constitutive interplay between nationalism and class. Rather than treating class and ethnicity as two distinct areas or dimensions of social reality, it is more useful to analyse them in conjunction, looking at the ways in which class experiences and differences come to be ethnicized and how ethno-national tensions are generated by hidden or open conflicts of class. This perspective permits the uncovering of the multiplicity of possible subject positions wrapped in abstract categories such as class and ethnicity (Hall 1996).

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References Armstrong, G. 1998. Football Hooligans: Knowing the Score. Oxford: Berg. Brubaker, R., et al. 2006. Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cârjan, S¸. 2004. Însemnaˇri despre ‘U’. Cluj-Napoca: Editura Eikon. Faje, F. 2007. ‘”Cluj Is Us!”: Rivalry and Symbolic Conflict among Football Supporters in Cluj-Napoca’, Studia Universitatis Sociologia 2: 55–75. Giulianotti, R. 1999. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Oxford: Polity Press. Hall, S. 1992. ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and Its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 274–316. ——— 1996. ‘New Ethnicities’, in D. Morley and C. Kuan-Hsing (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 441–49. Harvey, D. 2008. ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review 53: 23–40. Humphrey, C. 2002. The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kalb, D. 1997. Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kideckel, D.A. 2008. Getting by in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Lazaˇr, M. 2003. ‘CLUJ 2003 – The Metastasis of Ostentation: Black and White Illustrations of Tricolor Cluj’, IDEA 2/3: 125–34 Petrovici, N. 2006. ‘Socialist Urbanization in the Ceausescu Era: Power and Economic Relations in the Production of Habitational Space in Cluj’, Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Sociology,1: 97–111. Podaliri, C., and C. Balestri. 1998. ‘The Ultras, Racism and Football Culture in Italy’, in A. Brown (ed.), Fanatics! Power, Identity and Fandom in Football. London: Routledge, pp. 88–100. Rasanayagam, J. 2003. ‘Market, State and Community in Uzbekistan: Reworking the Concept of Informal Economy’, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Paper, no.59. Verdery, K. 1991. National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceaus¸escu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 4 ‘It Can’t Make Me Happy that Audi is Prospering’: Working-Class Nationalism in Hungary after 1989 Eszter Bartha

Introduction This chapter focuses on a Hungarian former socialist ‘model’ factory and its workers in the early 2000s.1 It is an attempt to bring back the concept of class and to show its relevance for understanding the formation of nationalist identity politics in postsocialist Hungary.2 At the same time it is also an attempt to critique the use, or rather non-use, of the concept of class in East European academia following the change of regimes in the region, which seems to be as dogmatic – and as misleading – as the old Marxist-Leninist narrative.3 The rapid collapse of communist regimes across the region between 1989 and 1991 discredited this narrative: the political passivity of the industrial working-class showed that notions of a simple equivalence between class position and anti-capitalist class consciousness in classical Marxist thought were false. Contrary to the expectations of leftists, political programmes based on democratic socialism or workers’ self-management received little actual support from East European workers.4 This helped nourish an intellectual climate which was not favourable for re-accommodating the concept of class in postsocialist mainstream academia, not even in a reworked form. 1. The chapter was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 2. For a critique of the fashionable trend in mainstream academia to throw out the concept of class from the analysis along with orthodox Marxist dogmas, which equated class with class consciousness, see Welskopp (1993), Kalb (1997) and Burawoy (2001). 3. For a discussion of the intellectual roots of the Stalinist turn and the formation of ‘canonical’ Marxism-Leninism, whose function was to legitimize Stalinism, see Krausz (1996). 4. Burawoy reflected self-critically on these expectations in Burawoy and Lukács (1992). For a critical re-evaluation of the chances of leftist alternatives in Hungary, see Szalai (1994,, 2003), Krausz and Márkus (1995), Krausz (1998) and Thoma (1995).

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The present chapter is an attempt to ‘bring back’ the workers and to reflect on an experience which in many ways paralleled West European developments. The social importance of the large industrial working-class has massively declined in developed capitalist countries alongside the deindustrialization and restructuring conveniently termed post-Fordism.5 While post-Fordism started to replace Fordist relations of production in advanced capitalist countries in the 1970s, the East European semi-periphery (Wallerstein 1974) maintained the Fordist model until the collapse of state socialism. There was a powerful political reason behind this lag: the actual political weight of the industrial working-class under socialism, which is so often underestimated in the literature. While limiting political freedom, East European communist parties never completely disavowed the economic interests of the workingclass. In the Hungarian case, the revolution of 1956 was a constant point of reference because it received massive workers’ support (Pittaway 2006). Polish worker protests (Ost 1990; Laba 1991) likewise created a general concern among communist leaders (Steiner 2004). In short, active workers’ resistance against communist regimes from the early 1950s onwards pushed communist party leaders consistently to seek compromise with the working-class. Hungary found perhaps the most ‘efficient’ solution: after the revolution of 1956, the newly established Kádár regime based its legitimacy on a constant increase in the standards of living of working people (Pittaway 2005). From the 1960s onwards, with the advancement of Hungarian economic reform, increase in consumption became the main social message of the party. With the establishment of a legal private economy next to the dominant state sector (Róna-Tas 1997), Hungary could satisfy consumer needs better than most socialist regimes (winning the proud title of the ‘most cheerful socialist barrack’), and other communist regimes had to take account of the economic interests of working families throughout the region. It was because of this ‘social contract’ and not because of economic illiteracy that the East European governments preserved their outdated heavy industries at a time when such employment was being massively reduced in the West.6 5. After Weber, Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) call this the third spirit of capitalism. For a provocative analysis of the failure of the program of the new Left, which eventually ‘nourished’ this third spirit, see Žižek (2008). 6. There is evidence that the Soviet leadership was informed of the slackening in economic development. In 1979, government analysts conducted an extensive study of the Soviet state and economy under the leadership of the deputy prime minister, V.A. Kirilin. The study concluded that with respect to the most important parameters there was an increasing gap between the Soviet Union and those countries using modern technology. The Kirilin report did not meet with the approval of the political leadership and Kirilin was relieved of his post. Sz. Bíró (2003) argues that it was not the recognition of economic problems that was missing from the central leadership but the political will to initiate structural reforms. On the efforts of the Hungarian government to finance the ‘standard-ofliving policy’ as it was called, see Földes (1995).

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As East European elites wholeheartedly adopted the neoliberal project after 1989, the ‘classical’ large industrial working-classes were not only threatened with political marginalization but also by the massive loss of (poorly paid) jobs. Indeed, it remains valid to ask why there was so little workers’ protest against mass privatizations in which workers had no say, and the consequent closing of factories in Hungary.7 One obvious explanation lies in the erosion of working-class consciousness characteristic of socialism (Szalai 2005) and myths about a quick ‘catching-up’ with Western standards of living. 8 Nonetheless, what interests us here is less the lost chance of working-class political action in 1989 but its consequences. How do workers reflect on the changes fifteen years after 1989? What political and social ideas did they develop in the absence of a leftist alternative? How did they compare socialism and capitalism?9 Before introducing the Hungarian case study at length, however, we have to ask the analytical question: Does the massive reduction of the classical large industrial working-class and its subsequent political marginalization (best symbolized by its lack of resistance to the neoliberal project) render the category of ‘class’ invalid? Or, going one step further: What does it imply if the Left in its quest for Third Way ideologies also renounces this ‘discredited’ concept? What is there for the dispossessed former socialist working-class and their offspring to identify with (Ost 2005; Kalb 2009)? Can we validly link the ‘exile of class’ with the rise of neo-nationalism – particularly in Eastern Europe, where class issues, especially the frustration triggered by extreme differences between the newly propertied classes and the ‘losers’ of systemic change, are part of day-to-day experience (Burawoy and Verdery 1999)? Hobsbawm once noted: ‘What, if anything, have such ethnic/nationalist reactions in common with the recent rise of “fundamentalism” in many parts of the globe, which has been described as appealing to “people who cannot tolerate random and haphazard existence and unexplained conditions (and 7. The only significant protest action, which received big media coverage, was organized by taxi drivers, who blocked traffic in the capital as a protest against the increase of the price of petrol. 8. For East Germany, Fuller (1999) analysed the role of workers in the events of 1989. Fuller’s main thesis is that there existed a wide social gap between the intelligentsia and the working-class, and the workers did not want to participate in a power struggle which they perceived as one between different factions of the intelligentsia. Fuller’s analysis builds heavily on the thesis of Konrád and Szelényi (1979), who argued that under socialism, the intelligentsia developed into a new ruling class. Szelényi (1990) later revisited the thesis of the class power of intellectuals to argue that the market came to play a more important role than he had expected in Hungarian society. Regardless of how we see the role of the intelligentsia in socialist societies, however, Fuller’s thesis does not explain the absence of working-class resistance against the neoliberal project implemented in Eastern Europe after 1989 – a project, which was also led by the intelligentsia. For an illuminating analysis of the complex relationship between workers, intellectuals and the neoliberal project, see Kalb (2009). 9. The fieldwork on which this chapter is based was conducted in 2002/3.

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thus) often converge on those who offer the most complete, inclusive and extravagant world views?”’ (Hobsbawm 1992: 174–75). Academics have shed the concept of class as easily as politicians. But if they do so they run the risk of reproducing ethno-national discourses by classifying as cultural phenomena issues that can better be seen in terms of class-related experiences. Of course, as I noted above, the dogmatic approach, which seeks to deduce political consciousness directly from class position, should be ruthlessly criticized. In this chapter I will therefore adopt a dynamic, relational approach to class and ethnicity on the basis of Hall (1996) and Kalb (1997), acknowledging contextuality and the existence of multiple identities where a given choice – or configuration – should be interpreted in a concrete historical context. My chapter focuses on the discussion of a single case study in Hungary. Nonetheless, in order to be able to address at least some of the broad issues that I introduced above, I will make a short comparison between the Hungarian case and findings from a similar case study that I conducted in former East Germany (GDR).10 The question I want to ask is: How do workers who lived under socialism relate to new capitalist regimes, and in particular what difference does it make (if any at all) to their political thinking that the GDR was mainly ‘bought’ by domestic capital (which generously financed the benefits that the West German welfare state guaranteed to its citizens), whereas Hungary, on the contrary, was characterized by the dismantling of the socialist welfare system and the pursuit of an open-door policy towards transnational capital (given the scarcity of domestic capital).

Made in Rába In this chapter I analyse forty life-history interviews conducted with workers and former workers at Rába, a former socialist Hungarian model factory. Women and men participated in equal numbers in the project. There were also an equal number of people who were still employed at the factory and others who had left Rába, having taken early retirement, reached retirement age, or simply lost their job. The age of interviewees varied between 45 and 65, with the result that they had experience of working in both regimes.11 Most interviewees were skilled workers but I also interviewed unskilled workers and foremen. Founded in 1896 in the town of Gyaˇr, close to the Austrian border and in one of the most developed regions in the country, the factory had a relatively 10. In 2003/4 I conducted forty life-history interviews with workers and former workers of the optics specialists Carl Zeiss Jena in Germany. The design of the project was similar to my fieldwork in Hungary. 11. It should be noted that Rába was traditionally open towards researchers. See, e.g., Héthy and Makó (1975), which received international attention as a sociological study.

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long presocialist past. Its main products were wagons, carriages, rolling stock and later tractors and automobiles. Rába was nationalized in 1946, and in 1962, under the leadership of the iron-handed manager, Ede Horváth, a former Stakhanovite who was also a member of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, a new chapter started in the history of the factory. The profile was changed with an increase in the production of engines and rear axles. The factory expanded, too: in 1975 Rába employed nearly 20,000 people in its Gyaˇr plants, of whom about 15,000 were bluecollar workers.12 The change of regime deprived Ede Horváth of political support and rendered him an easy target of attack.13 In 1990 the enterprise council asked him to take early retirement. Because of the collapse of the Comecon organization, Rába immediately accumulated heavy debts which only the government could guarantee. In 1991 the factory was taken under the control of the State Property Agency (SPA) and a new manager was appointed, Barnabás Zalán, who was the financial executive under Horváth. Under his leadership the company implemented a programme of deep restructuring, including lay-offs. In 1997 the factory was privatized, and workers could buy 15 per cent of the shares at preferential rates and the management received another 10 per cent. All my interviewees claimed to have sold their shares. According to the estimation of the managers interviewed, no more than 2 to 4 per cent of the shares were still in workers’ hands at the time of my interviews. In 1999, Zalán was forced out by the new proprietors, who had financial rather than long-term interests and wanted to sell the land on which the factory stood for real-estate development. The Motor and Vehicle Limited, which had been the most important production unit before 1989, was planned for closure and further layoffs were anticipated. The factory had around 4,000 employees at the time my interviews. The workers did not only find themselves in an increasingly difficult financial situation but they also had to learn to live with the constant fear of unemployment, and to accept the loss of prestige that once went with working for a ‘model’ factory. These painful experiences effectively challenged the neoliberal chimera of development through privatization and fuelled the construction of popular ‘narratives of decline’. Such narratives did not, however, challenge capitalist cosmologies as such. The deepening contradiction between expectation and experience was ultimately resolved with the notion that something must have gone wrong with the implementation of capitalism, leading to a search for ‘enemies’ and a call for a strong protective state to shield Hungarians’ capital base from transnational 12. On the history of the factory, see Tabiczky (1977). 13. See the memoir of Horváth (1990), and the account of Dusza (2003). The oppositionist journal Tér-Kép published a series of revealing articles attacking Horváth, accusing him of being ‘anti-workerist’. Horváth, who never denied his working-class origins, was deeply hurt by this attack and the subsequent insults levelled at his family, including his grandson, that the articles triggered.

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predation.14 This chapter seeks to show how class experiences – in the absence of an articulate leftist critique – are becoming ‘ethnicized’, and how workers have come to believe in antagonisms such as ‘the poor and honest people’ as opposed to the ‘exploiter old communist’ and ‘new multinational elite’, rendering them susceptible to neo-nationalist populism.

Narratives of Decline If we are looking for repetitive elements in the narratives constructed by Rába’s workers, it is very easy to find them. All interviewees associated the postsocialist history of the factory, and in particular its privatization, with images of disintegration, degradation, bankruptcy and gradual impoverishment. If we examine the ‘everyday life experience’ of the transition from socialism to capitalism, we can identify four aspects of decline: the loss of prestige of the factory, falling real wages, fear of unemployment, and the disintegration of former working-class communities at the workplace. My interviewees typically contrasted the old glory of Rába and the prestige of a ‘model’ factory – which received regular media coverage – with the steady decline of the 1990s, when production was massively reduced, plants were sold or liquidated, and the central estate was finally offered up for sale. They also mentioned that at the time that Rába was advertised as a ‘socialist miracle’ (Bossányi 1986), they belonged to the best-paid workforce in the country. From the 1990s, they experienced a gradual decline in their financial situation, in tandem with the decline of the factory. Their anger was intensified by the fact that the former and present managers were earning much more than the workers, something which was increasingly visible, and that they made huge profits from a factory which, as the workers put it, ‘they helped to destroy’. All interviewees associated the privatization of the factory with corruption and theft and grew emotional about the impunity of the perpetrators. They criticized the selling-off of assets not only because of the implied decline of the factory. It hurt just as much that the related profits were never invested in production or in the renovation of old infrastructure and the upgrading of machinery. I quote the story of Judith at length because it contains all the important elements of the narratives I gathered from the shop floor: In the old times it was an honour to work in the wagon factory [the traditional name for Rába]. I was so proud when my father first took me here at the age of eighteen, and that I was going to work in the famous wagon factory … And now here I am [sigh]. And if they give me notice, I don’t know what I will do. Distributing newspapers, cleaning offices or flats … Sadly, there is nothing else. And this is so frightening! In addition, I married late, my daughter has just started secondary 14. In her study of the postsocialist social structure of Hungary, Szalai (2004) distinguishes between the workers employed by multinational companies and the workers employed by domestic capitalists.

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school and my son will go to university next year. If we were only the two of us, my husband and me, it would not be so bad. But I have to support them, and both of them are eminent students, which is my biggest problem because both will go to university because I cannot let them go to work after secondary school. Our total income is 100,000 to 110,000 HUF15 because my husband also works at the wagon factory, and workers’ wages are much lower, I mean relatively, than they used to be. All of my colleagues clean private flats or offices as side jobs. True, they live alone, they have no husbands but all of them go to clean flats … In the past … I was not married. This is a very important difference – that I did not have a family. Back then there was not the insecurity as we have today. I did not have to worry about whether they needed me for work today or not. The wagon factory was an elite company, the neighbours were envious of us, it was easy for you, you were well-off, you got very good money at the wagon factory. The value of wages was much higher back then. There were no such difference between workers and managers. The chief manager earned six times as much as a skilled worker. But today the differences are much, much greater. If only we saw the signs of progress. But unfortunately, there are none. We are getting very few orders. Production has been stopped in the motor unit for the second time this month. What does this mean? That we have wonderful prospects, as the new managers declare in the newspaper? If only they do not close our unit. There is a very big problem here, but I don’t know what, because I am not a big man. There are lay-offs every week, the staff are being reduced and all of it has consequences. (Judith, 50 years old, administrator)16

Using this interview as an illustration, I would like to highlight two points. The first is that Rába workers’ narratives always contrasted the ‘good old times’ with the reality of today. And while they mostly associated positive values with the past, the present and the future are described in terms of narratives of decline. When speaking of the present, the narrators held it necessary to mention that ‘in the past’ it was not like that; thus, the comparison serves to highlight the old glory of the factory. All interviewees stressed that ‘in the old times’ everybody knew the ‘wagon factory’ in the town, and working there conferred status on the people. This prestige was not only symbolic, it was also materially rewarded; but workers consistently narrated the misery of a falling standard of living since the early 1990s. The other common feature of the interviews was that the workers thought that ‘in the old times’ (under socialism) there was a tighter personal relationship between the factory management and the workers than ‘today’ (under capitalism). As Judith’s story shows, many workers view the decline of the factory as a personal loss, in the same way as the ‘good old days’ of Rába were also an integral part of their self-image. The establishment of this personal relationship was probably facilitated by the fact that many workers had partners and relatives who also worked at the wagon factory. What I would like to stress here, though, is the existence of a palpable nostalgia for the ‘old’, paternalistic relations characteristic of the socialist factory system 15. HUF stands for forint (Hungarian currency). 16. Since anonymity was promised to all interviewees, pseudonyms are used.

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(Burawoy 1985). It is a typical feature of my interviews that the decline of the factory is narrated together with people’s life story, including their family, private financial situation and other personal details. The loss of the prestige of the wagon factory is perceived as a personal loss, and also a very material one, as it could no longer guarantee the secure existence of the workers that had been characteristic of socialist times. This new experience was particularly painful for workers like Judith, who had families with dependent children. Older workers, however, also directly related their personal life histories to a ‘narrative of decline’ that they constructed around the history of the factory: The wagon factory was the third largest industrial enterprise in this country. The Kádár government spent a lot of money on the vehicle programme in Hungary, and also within Comecon. They supplied the whole world, from the GDR to Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, with their products – so that you have a picture. This meant hundreds of thousands of buses, trucks, containers. And we also exported to Kuwait and to the Far East. You can say that this factory was a flagship. What I want to tell you is that there was very hard work here, disciplined work. Every third day, full wagons went out of the gates of this factory. So you can imagine the scale of production at that time. … We did not live from one wage to the next as we live today. We always had work. We supplied a whole world system with our products. How should I put it? Your work as a researcher is important. You are proud of it. It was the same here. We were proud of working in Rába. It gave you a kind of standing in the world, a kind of status. What do you do? I work at Rába. Everybody knew Rába in the country. Everybody had heard of Ede Horváth, our chief manager. A Japanese worker is also very proud of Honda. Do you understand? It gave a kind of standing to people. I am an important man, I have an important job, and I can trust my company. I will have work tomorrow … Now? People have lost all trust in this company. They don’t trust the new managers. One thousand workers were recently given notice. What more do they want to explain? (Thomas, 61, skilled worker and shop steward)

In the narratives – next to the shrinking of the factory – the absence of work was the most obvious sign of the decline of Rába, which was closely connected with the fear of unemployment. This fear could have been intensified by widespread rumours about further lay-offs at the time of my interviews. The simple statement that ‘there is no work’ anticipated the loss of jobs, in particular in the eye of women workers. Women were much more pessimistic about their prospects of re-employment than men. While men typically thought that they would find a new job if necessary, most of the interviewed women argued that their skills and age put them in a disadvantageous position in the labour market. The fear of unemployment strengthened nostalgia for the Kádár regime: We feel sorry for our unit that it is nearly on the edge of bankruptcy. We feel sorry. We feel sorry because they started producing buses and then they stopped, and gave notice to many people. In the motor unit we used to produce 100 to 110 engines on a daily basis. And this was a lot. Now it has been reduced to 40 to 50 pieces together with repair work that we do in a month. Last week I heard that in this

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month it was only 34 pieces. It is not many, although there are only a few workers left in the unit. And I feel sorry for this unit that it went so much bankrupt. It gave us a living. We did not have to worry about tomorrow, we had work and we were always relaxed about our future. Today we are all tense, everybody is afraid when they will get notice. Maybe we won’t have a job next month … What changes do I see? I already told you. For us it is the fear that we will lose our jobs. For us this is the most important thing, we are always afraid of it. We do not earn here such big money because we get 54,000 HUF in one shift. But if only we could keep our jobs … Yes, I think the most important change is that we are afraid of losing our jobs. This is a very big problem for us. I have ten more years before I can retire. If I could retire at 55, I would say, OK, but ten years is a very long time. How do we manage that? In the past we were relaxed. We had a safe job. Now we are worried about the future. After all, we are in the worst position, are we not? Nobody needs our age group, over fifty, nobody. They will just send us from one interview to the next. It is very humiliating, at our age. [Later] I would go back to what I have told you so many times. I would like to keep my job. I would like to be healthy and keep my job. This is all that I would like. (Agnes, 51, skilled worker)

Many workers emphasized that the former socialist working-class was left to its fate, and that there was currently no political actor in Hungary which seemed interested in improving the situation of labour. In this respect the postsocialist experience of the intelligentsia, who had the chance to get good and highly rewarded positions, was often contrasted with the disadvantaged situation of the working-class: There is no work. They have not bought any raw materials yet. This is the main topic of conversation today. You are nervous that there is no work. You are counting the minutes, and you are scared to realize: hey, man, you have only worked 300 minutes, and not 480, for which you are paid. Allegedly it does not influence the wage, but they will ask you why you could not do that. Well, boss, because there was no work … And the workers here don’t understand why we can’t seek contracts from the outside. Machine-tool factories are prospering all around the world, only we are the exception. And people got tired. God, they did. Here there are educated people, most skilled workers have finished secondary school, and some of them are college graduates. We are informed people, we are not stupid. And we don’t understand why our situation should be so bad. … What do I do if I get kicked out? Don’t worry, you can ask me that question. I have thought of it so many times. But I don’t know. I will be crying. What chances do I have? The problem is: none at all. I have only these skills, this school. I can’t even imagine what I will do. The problem is that I will be 49. No, I really can’t imagine what will happen to me. I would like to retire. This age group and this industry – well, really; very, very bad. I believe that the government should support this age group, this social class. The truth is that there is a class, which has aged, lost her health, worn out, we, grandmothers . . . whoever I talk to, we’re all complaining. But I only know my class, the workers. The intellectuals must have made a different experience. (Catherine, 49, skilled worker)

The fear of unemployment was often directly linked with the disintegration of the old socialist communities at the workplace. In life-history interviews

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workers reported having participated in an intensive community life in socialist collectives (such as brigades) that they recalled with a sense of loss. Workers explained the devaluation of interpersonal relations at the workplace through increasing individualization and the fierce competition for jobs in the new system: It was much better in the socialist brigades. We all knew each other. At that time they said that we have to pay attention to the others. On paper. But people also wanted to pay attention to the others. Because I remember that we went to see the babies of the colleagues, we went to the cinema, and what you can imagine, everywhere. To concerts … And the community was much more united, we went to bowl, to play football. At that time we always went somewhere. Not because people undertook these tasks on paper. This is ridiculous. They did it because they had a nice time together. And there were very few people who wanted to be left out of this company. (Emma, 55, skilled worker)

Workers like Catherine reported that they were under constant pressure because of the layoffs, and that this tension poisoned the atmosphere in the workplace. It was observed that society grew more individualistic and relations became increasingly privatized. Many informants directly contrasted the old times, when community at the workplace had been so important to people, with the experience of the new, capitalist regime: At that time it was a lot easier to organize communities in a workplace than today. I can say this as a brigadier. I always invited my colleagues to my weekend house a couple of times per year. When the first was successful, they were likely to come again. They had an opportunity to get to know each other, and they were also interested in it. Now the same company – OK, not the same because some have already retired, but there are new people. So, ten years ago 60 to 65 people came because many brought their families too. Last time it was only 22. One has no time, the other is tired – only one had a really serious excuse, but he still showed up in the afternoon. It is no longer fashionable today. Perhaps people don’t want to socialize because of their individual problems. (Steve, 62, foreman, later manager, representative of the factory on the executive committee of the county party organization)

In the narratives of decline, which stressed the loss of financial and job security, the explanation of the situation also played an important role. Nearly all interviewees raised the issue of responsibility for the decline of the factory and work. Most workers looked for culprits, and they explained the decline through the greed of the old managers and the incompetence of the new ones. They would again typically contrast the socialist period of the factory with the capitalist one, and when they recalled the impressive figure of Ede Horváth, the manager, who was ‘both admired and feared by many people’, as Steve (just cited) put it, the comparison was even less flattering to the new managers. His management was inseparably connected with the ‘golden age’ of the factory when everything was different from today: there was work, there was progress, there was hope, and there was production day and night

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in the wagon factory. Workers argued that Horváth always brought work to Rába while the new managers were only interested in their own prosperity. Additionally, they cared little for improving the factory, and even less for the welfare of the working people: The factory is in a very difficult situation today. People speak of a lay-off of 10 per cent, and if this is not enough they will fire even more. Because it is not a solution for them to go and look for work, instead they kick people out, even though they’d better kick out the managers because they are more useless than the workers. The director says, ‘I can’t give you work, there is no work’. He even says it is not his job to find work. OK, then what is his job? For what does he get 16 million HUF a month? This is indeed how much he gets. And he can’t save 5,000 HUF extra for us. ‘It is no solution that I don’t give you work’. I can believe that, but then how come that in the past we did have work? This is my biggest problem now, that’s why I tell it to you. I don’t want to go back to the time of Ede Horváth but my opinion is that I have grown up in this environment, in this factory, so I want to work in a normal job and in a normal environment. And I think that those [communist] managers did a lot for this factory and for this country because this town can only be thankful for people like Ede Horváth and Róbert Burger. (Alex, 57, skilled worker and shop steward)

Many interviewees stressed the disinterest and lack of managerial skills of the new owners. Workers referred to the ‘theft’ of the heritage of the former socialist factory, which was indeed conceived as something like the property of ‘the people’, and, apart from accusations concerning particular persons, they generally related that to the way ‘wild capitalism’ apparently works. Nonetheless, it is difficult to define what people exactly meant by ‘wild capitalism’. It seems that, after all, they largely emphasized human and moral factors – such as greed, the yearning for quick profits, and the lack of expertise. In a somewhat simplified way we can argue that workers blamed leaders rather than institutions and social relationships for the failure of capitalism to work for them. The following story of the failure of a new bus production line reveals the clash between production and financial interests within the firm; it also explains why workers were so critical of the new management, which sided with the financial experts: In 1998 we started the production of buses, which was a great challenge. We were able to execute the task professionally, of which I am even proud today. We launched the project, started production, and by the time we were beginning to produce a profit, the management decided to stop the project and close the unit. I did not understand this decision. A new product can’t produce profit in two and half years … I think that the problem is that the new owners are exclusively financial investors, while the technical managers left or were fired. The owners are interested only in immediate profit, and they don’t care what will happen to the factory in ten to fifteen years. True, they made wonderful plans, but it was all daydreaming, pure fantasy. This is characteristic of us, Hungarians, we dream of wonderful things which cannot be realized. The only problem is that there is no

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work now in the unit. They said that we would produce fittings instead of buses. But basically we have no profile, so we live from one day to the next. I think that the limited company that they established will go bankrupt and people will be fired. (Victor, 47, skilled worker)

It is worth stressing that the official reading of a ‘success story’ of privatization, which was presented in the enterprise magazine only intensified the hostility of workers against the new managers, whom they accused of unfamiliarity with the conditions of the factory and detachment from local people: We hear that one day, one manager, who commutes from Budapest, makes up his mind and starts speaking English at a production meeting. Half of the managers here don’t speak English. They did not have a clue what he was talking about. They were just sitting there and nodding their heads. Now you tell me: do we need such a manager? (Robert, 47, skilled worker)

While at the factory level the workers mainly blamed the managers for the failure of a ‘smooth’ integration into global markets, at the national level they put the blame on the weak state, the corrupt and egotistical local elite, and the greed of the multinational companies. Namely, Hungarian capitalism would have looked different – more like the model of the envied Austrian or German capitalism, which guarantees high standards of living for the working-class – if the Hungarian political elite had taken the interests of ‘the common people’ into account: You can see it in every country and every company. Where the state does not intervene to protect domestic industry, firms will go bankrupt. I think that our government made a very big mistake here. Just look at the wagon factory. It was a prospering enterprise in the past! In my opinion, the aim [of the West] is to destroy it, so that there is less competition. Trust me, I can see through these things. Another example is the textile factories. They were bought by the competitors and were consciously driven into bankruptcy. Richards, Graboplast – all serious, large firms with international reputations – all went bankrupt. That’s what I don’t understand in this change of regime. Why [does] our government refuse to intervene to save our industry? OK, it should not support all enterprises, but should it allow the destruction of such large and serious firms? We should protect our own interests, and we should not be so much dependent for everything on the West. Here is Audi.17 Audi does not pay taxes to the government. If the wagon factory had been given the same tax holiday we could have invested in new technology and new machines. But we don’t have money for new investment now. I cannot be happy that Audi is prospering. Because it will prosper, like in the Szombathely plant that Opel bought from the wagon factory. After five years, when Opel would have had to pay taxes, what does it do? It goes somewhere else. And now they are producing Opel cars in Poland. (David, skilled worker, 49)

17. Audi opened a new plant in Gyaˇr in 1993. They bought the factory which Ede Horváth had built to bring back car production to Rába. Audi also attracted many skilled workers from Rába because they offered higher wages.

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If we examine the transition from socialism to capitalism in the light of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, we can argue that the workers experienced restructuring at Rába as a ‘reverse’ story of progress. They did not quite see the Fordist model as an outdated one; on the contrary, they related it to the glorious chapters of the history of the factory. This is all the more so because the new system brought neither work nor improvements to the capital stock. The workers – and we have to stress this point – saw no real change in the field of labour organization, infrastructure and technology. Quite the contrary, many of them spoke scathingly that they had been working on the same machine since the 1960s. Privatization did not bring new technology, only a very unfair distribution of income and opportunities. This explains much about narratives of decline. The outdated infrastructure was a symbol of the decline of the factory and the failure of its owners: We have been working together for thirty years. Most of us started here as trainees, including some of our foremen. What has changed? The foremen in the workshop are the same. I think that everything is the same; the approach and the labour organization have changed nothing in the past thirty years, that’s for sure. Perhaps the supply of tools has changed. But the machines … Take my case: I started as a trainee on this very machine and now they can throw me and it together into the junkyard. (Catherine, 49, skilled worker)

Workers saw no concrete sign of post-Fordist development, indeed of any development; they only saw decline and devolution. No wonder that restructuring was associated with the lack of expertise, outright swindle or, at best, ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ (such as the English-language production meetings), which was again associated with cheating working people. Workers argued that in the old times innovation and investment were statefinanced. That is to say, Hungarian industry developed ‘organically’ as some interviewees put it. But under post-Fordism their own factory nearly went bankrupt while promised new technology was exclusively used by multinational companies like Audi. These firms, however, as David argued, were not integrated into a plan for national development – indeed, they did not even pay local taxes – and one cannot count on their loyalty to Hungary in the long run. In their frantic search for greater profits they could ‘pack and go’ at any time, leaving behind an industrially devastated land and a mass of unemployed people. Workers like David would typically expect the government to intervene and defend Hungarian industrial interests. The next two quotations illustrate how such class-based experiences are ethnicized in the absence of a new, leftist critique, and why narratives of decline generate a populist-nationalist rather than an anti-capitalist explanation for the failed hopes connected with systemic change. We have seen that most workers explained the decline of the factory through mismanagement. But there was also a second type of argument among my informants which related the decline to a more overall shrewd design. Some narrators argued that the ‘Budapest people’ had consciously cut back production because the

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owners wanted to sell the valuable land on which Rába was located to urban developers. Rumours about an Israeli real estate agency (which are indeed active in Hungary) being interested in the site of the factory triggered fullfledged conspiracy theories: It is Jewish capital that is robbing this country. This is the general opinion here. And I agree with the people because it is my own factual experience. I stress that I am not an anti-Semite. I have no personal problem with Jews at all. The newspaper wrote that the wagon factory here might build luxurious houses for Israeli investors. Just think of the workers who spent their lives in this factory. It was from our work that this factory was built, and now they are selling it to Israeli capital. Engel Group? When the people heard of this, in that very moment they started to scold the Jews. They suspect that he [the manager] is a Jew. I really don’t know if he is, but all the people are saying it here. You can hear it from many people in Gyaˇr. (Bill, 51, skilled worker)

The narrative follows the logic of conspiracy theories. The general statement that ‘Jewish capital is robbing the country’ is ‘verified’ by the experience of the narrator. Although apart from Bill only one male pensioner developed explicitly racist arguments, the marginal comments I received during my visits to the factory suggested that rumours about Israeli interest did indeed open a Pandora’s box of anti-Semitic sentiments that have disfigured recent Hungarian history among the wider public. It is worth pointing out that while workers were generally reluctant to renounce their belief in capitalism per se, some of them had little problem shifting to an open anti-capitalist denunciation if the ‘capitalists’ involved could be identified as Jews. A further interview shows how strong the mistrust was against elements that are seen as ‘alien’ to the Hungarian people, such as multinational companies and transnational capital, which are perceived as seeking to destroy domestic industry – in cooperation with the ‘traitorous’ Hungarian political elite. The distrust, bitterness and frustration of workers were deepened by the fact that they were left out of any post-Fordist development. This reinforced a search for culprits and sharpened the distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ development, which many workers stressed in the interviews. They would typically argue that only multinational companies can afford to invest in new technologies and that this ‘inorganic’ process fails to bring real progress and prosperity to the Hungarian people. Thus, they interpreted globalization as a deviation from a virtuous capitalism that is controlled by, and serves, nations. Post-Fordism was thus perceived as a form of degeneration rather than a ‘new spirit’ of capitalism. It is for this reason that narratives of decline essentially failed to develop into an anti-capitalist critique: The world economy has already decided that Hungarian labour is too expensive. They cannot make a big business [i.e., profits] on us regardless of the fact that they pay here one-seventh of what they have to pay to the German workers in

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Ingolstadt [Audi headquarters]. I am not a nationalist but I think that this Csurka 18 is very much right in these things. It should not be like with the Germans in those days that Germany is above everything. But the Hungarian people should respect their own country; now they’re taking us for nothing. That is the truth. We don’t get any respect. (Jim, 50, skilled worker)

The diminishing role of production and the decreasing demand for human labour has transparently rendered the socialist working-class the loser of systemic economic change. Nonetheless, a new critique was formulated on the basis of everyday life experience in semi-peripheral capitalism. First, it was by now clear that in the new system even skilled workers who were ready to become entrepreneurs and set up private businesses failed to become ‘successful men’. Secondly, the general standard of living for industrial workers visibly lagged far behind the upwardly mobile groups of the former socialist middle class – new proprietors, managers, lawyers, doctors, and so on. The social critique of postsocialism was rooted in these experiences. This should not be confused with nostalgia for the Kádár regime, which was expressed predominantly by women workers who lived in nearby villages. It highlighted the collective experience that one could not make a good living and profit from the new opportunities as an honest working person, and that it was only through illegal or semi-legal activities – profiteering, tax evasion and corruption – that one could hope to keep up with the new middle classes. Nicholas, the narrator of the following story, set up his private business during the Kádár period. In the 1990s, his firm expanded, coming to employ up to fifteen people. But he could not cope with the increasing stress and the management of his personnel. After a serious clinical operation he liquidated his firm and took up a job as an employee. Coming from a rural family, Nicholas hated communism and was by no means nostalgic about the Kádár regime. Nonetheless, as he admitted, postsocialist Hungary had not quite become the capitalist society that he had dreamed of: After every systemic change there are winners and losers. With this systemic change the working-class has lost, for sure. Everybody had a secure, legal workplace but his production was worth nothing. But people did not notice that. They are the main losers, the homeless you can see now in the tunnels and many more, who can’t pay the bills. In Gyaˇr there were lots of large firms, which gave work to thousands of people. I can’t tell you numbers, that out of 10,000 men how many got divorced, became alcoholic … And I don’t even think that this is the majority. The majority lives quietly among us, can’t pay the bills, can’t heat the flat properly, can’t buy new clothes, can’t go to the hairdresser … The children bring a letter from school that there is this camp, that language course, ‘Daddy, please’… Should I continue? This working-class was part of the middle class but they have lost the cause. And they are alone with their problems because they don’t ask for benefits. And if they are not recorded, who gets interested in their problems? (Nicholas, 51, skilled worker) 18. Istvan Csurka, leader of the Hungarian extreme right Party of Hungarian Life and Justice.

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Even those in my sample who were in the best situation argued that their standard of living had declined, either because they had to work more to maintain the same standard or because they now had fewer dependent family members in the household and therefore could maintain their earlier level. We should note that all my interviewees were over forty. All of them thought that, were they to start now as young workers, they would never be able to accomplish what they themselves had accomplished: buying a flat, building a house, raising children on a worker’s wage. The criticism of the new consumer society was thus primarily limited to the falling standard of living in comparison with the upwardly mobile strata, which constituted the new middle class. This experience, nonetheless, further reinforced the conviction inherited from the Kádár regime that the state should be responsible for the standard of living, thus rendering people vulnerable to populist rhetoric, which builds on the Hungarian people’s expectations of new, capitalist ‘miracles’, if only the enemies of the people were removed.

‘Capitalism has Disappointed Me’: A Comparative Note If we compare the East German case study with my Hungarian interviews, it can be shown that East German workers almost unanimously reported more ambiguous experiences with the new capitalist regime than the Hungarians, who had painful experiences and told about negative changes in all the dimensions examined. Out of four aspects of decline – the loss of the prestige of the factory, falling real wages, fear of unemployment, and the disintegration of former working-class communities – the majority of the East German interviewees shared the negative experiences of the Hungarian workers only in relation to the last two dimensions. Interestingly, few workers reflected critically on the diminution of Carl Zeiss Jena and its subsequent takeover by the West German Zeiss firm in Oberkochen – even though according to the deed of foundation the headquarter of the company cannot be moved from Jena. People would accept for a fact that East European markets have collapsed, and there was not enough work for the 30,000 workers whom the company employed in Jena. Many actually doubted whether such big factories would ever be needed again. The workers, who kept their jobs in the factory, were very satisfied with the new conditions: the units were modernized, new technology was introduced, the factory canteen and the toilets were refurbished, and the workers received good wages and the full protection of labour rights (a factory council, trade union representation, collective contracts, a generous pension scheme, flexible working hours apart from the core time, and so on). Zeiss was recognized as one of the best employers in town. It should also be noted that nearly all interviewees listed the massive reduction of industrial pollution and the introduction of new environmentally friendly technologies among the positive changes that the regime change had brought.

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Similarly, the overwhelming majority of interviewees claimed that they lived better under the new regime than they had done in the old one. Nearly everybody had bad memories of the shortage economy, the ‘connections’ needed to get ‘luxury products’ such as bananas or coffee, and the years-long wait involved when trying to acquire a car. The interviewees, who kept their jobs at the factory or found other employment, all reported a significant improvement in their standard of living: they lived in their own house, they were driving nice cars, they could afford exotic holidays, and so forth. My informants thought that families where both partners worked were, in fact, ‘well-off’; if one partner was unemployed, the family could still ‘manage’. Real troubles started if both partners were without work, or the unemployed person was single, or lived with dependent children. The fear of unemployment was undoubtedly the most negative experience of East German workers in the new, capitalist regime whom I interviewed. Many informants stressed that they lived in a ‘racing society’, which grossly increases everyday stress at the workplace and reduces solidarity among people, who view each other as competitors. It was widely observed – just like in the Hungarian interviews – that society had grown more individualistic and everybody cared only for their own good. The workers considered unemployment to be the major source of the increasing social and material inequalities that they observed in their environment. Many people would, in fact, re-interpret the concept of a two-third society (namely that in the advanced Western societies two third of the population belongs to the middle or high classes) and envisaged a society, where one third of the population is unemployed and doomed to live from social subsidies, other benefits or black jobs. The disintegration of the old, socialist communities was also unanimously mentioned with a sense of loss. Workers stressed that under the socialist regime people related differently to each other: ‘Neighbours met privately, they mutually helped each other with various household jobs, for instance, repairing things or decorating the flat – that was totally normal. It was totally normal that we helped each other out. It is not like that today. It has been lost’ (Stephanie, 60, skilled worker). Increasing egotism and vanishing solidarity were mentioned in nearly all of the interviews as ‘inherent’ features of the new regime. Even though East German workers reported more positive changes than the Hungarians, they were more critical of the evaluation of capitalism as a system than the Rába workers. As we have seen from the analysis of the Hungarian case, criticism of the system mixed socialist critique with nationalist discourse. By contrast, the German workers harboured far less illusions of the capitalist system than did their Hungarian counterparts. They saw the social phenomena that they criticized – in particular, unemployment, the increasing privatization of life, the feeling of insecurity and the growing material polarization of society – as a consequence of capitalism. Indeed, many of them explicitly admitted that the experience of capitalism made them revisit the old Marxist narrative that they had refused to believe in

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the GDR. While workers would not favour increasing the state’s role in the economy, the state’s planned withdrawal from the social sphere – such as cuts in unemployment and social benefits, the extension of flexible employment – met their uniform and strong disapproval. They did not expect this trend to be reversed, however. I would like to underline two factors that can explain the differences between the East German and Hungarian case studies. One is the experience of a different mode of integration into the global capitalist economy. East Germany was taken over by West Germany and adopted its welfare system, which still counted as a ‘role model’ for advanced capitalist welfare states. Although the labour force of Zeiss was massively reduced, much investment was directed to the modernization of the remaining parts of the factory. The Rába workers, on the other hand, experienced decline both with respect to technology and to incomes. While the East Germans had direct experience with the latest postFordist technology after the change of regimes, progress in the eye of Rába workers was something that passed Hungarian industry by. Another factor that should be stressed is the media and the public presence of a sustained strong leftist critique of capitalism in Germany. The terms ‘racing society’ and ‘two-third society’ were obviously picked up from the media. Many workers in fact argued that the GDR’s ruling party, the SPD, betrayed its traditional social base, and referred to that base as ‘the workingclass’. One clear sign of this betrayal was the government’s plan (commonly known as Agenda 2010) to cut unemployment benefits, which showed their disregard for the troubles of the ‘little man’. Many former East German workers also developed the argument that the advancement of technology in fact provided for an ever increasing structural unemployment, which rendered labour more defenceless in the new system than it had been in the past.

Conclusion: ‘It Can’t Make Me Happy that Audi is Prospering’ This chapter has examined what changes the transition from socialism to capitalism brought to the everyday realities of workers in a former socialist model factory in north-western Hungary. Rába workers constructed very critical narratives of postsocialist change, and they unambiguously contrasted their positive experiences of modern development under socialism with their more recent experiences through ‘narratives of decline’. In the past they always had work, they supplied a whole world system with their products, they worked for an important, prestigious company, and they were rewarded accordingly. Under the new system, everything was inverted: there was no work at the factory, the plant lost its former prestige (‘while Audi is prospering’), and they worried about jobs and their declining standard of living. There was obviously little hope. It was a widely shared perception that ‘something had gone wrong’ with privatization and with capitalism

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in Hungary: everything was sold out, domestic industry declined, and the new owners brought no new technology to the factory. Workers sharply criticized the egotism of managers, who seemed to be only interested in their own material prosperity. In their eyes, the absence of work testified to the incompetence of the new management and its ultimate indifference to the long-term interests of the factory and its workers. My informants experienced the integration of Hungary into the global capitalist market in terms of narratives of decline and did not associate any positive values of progress and improvement with post-Fordism. The new capitalism downgraded not only their factory but also their skills and professional expertise, rendering them ‘useless’ to the new society. Progress was embodied in the multinational companies that flourished in this part of the country, but in which these older workers put little trust because, they argued, profits were repatriated abroad and taxes were not paid locally. These companies were not seen as part of an ‘organic’ industrial development from which Hungary as a whole could profit. Many interviewees actually blamed transnational capital and its supposed links with the Hungarian political elite in Budapest for destroying Hungarian industry. Since they firmly believed that material production was the basis of a national economy, they had no trust in the current globalizing path based on finance and trade. Indeed, they did not view work in these sectors as ‘real’ and useful work. This chapter has sought to show how – in the absence of an articulate leftist discourse – class-based experience can be effectively – and dangerously – ethnicized, leading to the endorsement of simple categories that Hungarian populists are keen to offer, such as ‘the poor Hungarian people’, who are opposed to ‘alien international capital’ and ‘traitors’ such as the old communists and the politicians in Budapest who have sold-out the country. The majority of workers would have supported a stronger state, which took its responsibility for the welfare of working people more seriously. Thus, narratives of decline failed to generate an anti-capitalist critique, and my informants considered ‘wild capitalism’ in Hungary as a deviant form of the capitalist system. Of course, we have to add that leftist alternatives appear only at the very periphery of mainstream political discourse in Hungary. The negative experiences of neoliberalism therefore strengthen neo-nationalism in contemporary Hungary as it is reflected in the European Parliament elections of 2009, which brought a sweeping victory for the reorganized Hungarian extreme right party, Jobbik (see Halmai, this volume).

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——— 2001. ‘Neoclassical Sociology: From the End of Communism to the End of Classes’, American Journal of Sociology 106(4): 1099–1120. Burawoy, M., and J. Lukács. 1992. The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burawoy, M., and K. Verdery (eds). 1999. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Dusza, A. 2003. A birodalom végnapjai: Így láttam Horváth Edét. Gyaˇr: X-Meditor Kft. Földes, G. 1995. Az eladósodás politikai története 1957–1986. Budapest: Gondolat. Fuller, L. 1999. Where was the Working-Class? Revolution in Eastern Germany. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hall, S. 1996. ‘New Ethnicities’, in D. Morley and C. Kuan-Hsing (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 441–49. Héthy, L., and C. Makó. 1975. Az automatizáció és a munkástudat. Budapest: MTA Szociológiai Kutató Intézet Kiadványa. Hobsbawm, E.J. 1992. Nations and Nationalism since 1870: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horváth, E. 1990. Én volnék a Vörös Báró? Pécs: Szikra Nyomda. Kalb, D. 1997. Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, the Netherlands, 1850–1950. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——— 2009. ‘Beszélgetések egy lengyel populistával: globalizáció, osztály és átmenet – emberközelbo˝l’, Eszmélet 21(82): 82–113. Konrád, G., and I. Szelényi. 1979. The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Krausz, T. 1996. Szovjet thermidor: A sztálini fordulat szellemi elo˝zményei 1917–1928. Budapest: Napvilág Kiadó. ——— (ed.). 1998. Rendszerváltás és társadalomkritika. Budapest: Napvilág. Krausz, T., and P. Márkus (eds). 1995. Önkormányzás vagy az elitek uralma? Budapest: Liberter. Laba, R. 1991. The Roots of Solidarity: A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working-class Democratization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ost, D. 1990. Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-politics: Opposition and Refom in Poland since 1968. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. ——— 2005. The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pittaway, M. 2005. ‘Accommodation and the Limits of Economic Reform: Industrial Workers during the Making and Unmaking of Kádár’s Hungary’, in P. Hübner, C. Kleßmann and K. Tenfelde (eds), Arbeiter im Staatssozialismus: ideologischer Anspruch und soziale Wirklichkeit. Cologne: Böhlau, pp. 453–71. ——— 2006. ‘A magyar forradalom új megközelítésben: az ipari munkásság, a szocializmus széthullása és rekonstrukciója, 1953–1958’, Eszmélet 18(72): 11–31. RónaTas, Á. 1997. The Great Surprise of the Small Transformation: The Demise of Communism and the Rise of the Private Sector in Hungary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Steiner, A. 2004. Von Plan zu Plan: eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR. Munich: Dt. Vrl.-Anst. Sz. Bíró, Z. 2003. ‘Politikatörténeti vázlat a késo˝i Szovjetunióról’, in T. Krausz and Z. Bíró Sz. (eds). Peresztrojka és tulajdonáthelyezés: Tanulmányok és dokumentumok

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a rendszerváltás történetébo˝l a Szovjetunióban 1985-1991. Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai Intézet, pp. 11–51. Szalai, E. 1994. A civil társadalomtól a politikai társadalom felé: Munkástanácsok 1989–93. Budapest: T-Twins Kiadó. ——— 2003. Baloldal – új kihívások elo˝tt. Budapest: Aula Kiadó. ——— 2004. ‘Tulajdonviszonyok, társadalomszerkezet és munkásság’, Kritika 33(9): 2–6. ——— 2005. Socialism: An Analysis of its Past and Future. Budapest and New York: CEU Press. Szelényi, I. 1990. ‘A kelet európai újosztály stratégia távlatai és korlátai: Az értelmiség útja az osztályhatalomhoz önkritikus felülvizsgálata’, in I. Szelényi, Új osztály, állam, politika. Budapest: Európa, pp. 51–98. Tabiczky, Z. 1977. A Magyar Vagon és Gépgyár története. Gyˇr: Széchenyi Kiadó. Thoma, L. 1995. Alternatívák nélküli társadalom. Budapest: Gondolat. Wallerstein, I. 1974. The Modern World-System, I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Welskopp, T. 1993. ‘Von der verhinderten Heldengeschichte des Proletariats zur vergleichenden Sozialgeschichte der Arbeiterschaft: Perspektiven der Arbeitergeschichtsschreibung in den 1990er Jahren’, 1999: Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 8(3): 34–53. Žižek, S. 2008. ‘1968-ban a struktúrák kimentek az utcára – vajon megint megteszik-e?’, in E. Bartha and T. Krausz (eds), 1968: Kelet-Európa és a világ. Budapest: L’Harmattan, pp. 111–37.

Chapter 5 (Dis)possessed by the Spectre of Socialism: Nationalist Mobilization in ‘Transitional’ Hungary Gábor Halmai

Introduction Standing among a middle-aged crowd gathered in Csepel’s central square in southern Budapest on the chilly morning of 23 October 2005, Mátyás Szu˝rös bestowed his wrath on ‘transition’ in Hungary and called upon today’s youth to summon the spirit of the 1956 anti-communist revolution and lead a collective action against the ‘disappointment of wild capitalism’. It had been exactly sixteen years since the same Szu˝rös, as interim president, had proclaimed the birth of the Hungarian Republic from the balcony of Parliament on 23 October 1989. Now this former Communist Party Central Committee member serves as the prime speaker at local commemorations of the 1956 revolution. On the surface of it, this distinguished guest is a puzzling presence. A prominent former communist, who personally helped open the door to capitalism, he rallies against communism as well as capitalism. He does so at an event organized by Fidesz, the Hungarian conservative party, and its nationalist allies. The puzzle lays bare the ideological chaos that has come to rule Hungary in the new millennium. This chaos might even be more pronounced in Csepel, the district that once stood as the last bastion of the anti-Stalinist revolution of 1956. After the Soviets had restored ‘order’ it took the new regime weeks to dismantle Csepel’s worker council. Henceforth the municipality became the anecdotal ‘red working-class district’ of Kádár’s post-1956 ‘goulash communism’.1 After 1989 it metamorphosed into a rotting 1. ‘Goulash communism’ refers to Hungary’s status as the ‘happiest barrack in the socialist camp’; that is, the country with the laxest regime in the Soviet bloc, both in terms of party-state authoritarianism and economic orthodoxy. Given its lack of political legitimacy after crushing the 1956 revolution, the regime sought to pacify the population by focusing on satisfying consumer demand, even if this involved increasing indebtedness.

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postcommunist ghost town ruled by old party cadres. How did a former communist big man become a symbolic figure representing the dispossessed, the ‘losers of transition’, at a supposedly anti-communist memorial service? Holding the rim of a bed-sheet-size Hungarian tricolour in one hand, and a lit candle in the other, two dozen people gathered on 15 March 2006 in a small square in Újpest, at the opposite northern end of Budapest, surrounded by towering grey concrete blocks identical to those of Csepel. This small group of right-wing activists vowed to ‘bring the celebration home’. Fighting the supposed amnesia of Hungarian national history, they passed the megaphone around the circle of activists while reciting revolutionary poems to commemorate the 1848 war of independence Hungary fought against the Habsburgs and tried to raise awareness of this national holiday among the seemingly indifferent block-dwelling population. The rhythmic words echoed in the night as more and more apartment windows opened up to investigate the unusual noise. The texts that received the most approving roar from the crowd of block-dwellers gazing down were the ones that drew a direct parallel between foreign oppression and the need for collective action – both in 1848 as well as today. Újpest, like Csepel, used to be an exemplary communist working-class district that is still dominated by the ‘comrades.’ Although decay is palpable here, too, this mixed group of college students and middle-aged co-organizers has managed to make the Kádárist housing estate pulsate with excitement. Yet just what exactly does this nationalism signify that makes the hearts of otherwise dormant Hungarians beat? As Hungary was reinserted into the global capitalist system after the early 1980s, neoliberal policies have dominated the decision-making of subsequent administrations. However, the population’s tranquillity in the face of creeping dispossession gave way to loud political mobilization after the 2002 elections, when defeated conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called for the formation of so-called ‘Civic Circles’ and for ‘bringing politics back to the streets.’ To Orbán’s followers, the return of the one-time Communists to power meant being stripped once again of the promise of a grandiose Hungarian future, with the Socialist-Liberal coalition accused of ‘selling the nation’ to foreigners. The vernacular critics of ‘good governance’, ‘privatization’ and ‘globalization’ thus soon came to be labelled ‘nationalist’, ‘fascist’ and, since the 2006 riots in Budapest, simply ‘football hooligans’. What made these largely working-class people mobilize and what do these labels stand for on the ground? In this chapter I focus on the two above mentioned urban neighbourhoods of Csepel and Újpest, micro sites of the ‘politics of the dispossessed’. I attempt to explore first why and how socialism and its corresponding Geist lingers on as the central organizing ‘other’ for the nationalists, and secondly, what mechanisms have more recently led segments of the drummed-up population to drift away from Orbán and join the ranks of the new extreme-right party, Jobbik. In terms of theoretical tools, I use the concepts of ‘dispossession’ and ‘hegemony’ to reflect on these processes. Relevant to both state socialist

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and capitalist regimes, Kalb (this volume) builds on Harvey (2003) to define dispossession as all processes by which actors lose access to sets of assets and rights that are crucial for their social reproduction. A more anthropological and dynamic understanding of hegemony as promoted by Ferguson (1994), Roseberry (1994), Gledhill (2000) and Smith (2004) concerns micro-strategies of resistance. Hegemony should accordingly be viewed as a terrain of contest instead of a totalizing and omnipresent ‘gaze’, and it should be used not to understand consent but to understand struggle; the ways in which the words, images, symbols, forms, organizations, institutions, and movements used by subordinate populations to talk about, understand, confront, accommodate themselves to, or resist their domination are shaped by the process of domination itself. What hegemony constructs, then, is not a shared ideology, but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about and acting upon social orders characterized by domination. (Roseberry 1994: 360–61)

I am thus interested in analysing the material and symbolic framework Hungarians work with for their collective claim-making in the context of dominant neoliberal transition. What follows is first a concise account of the macro-historical context from the Kádár regime to Hungary’s recent surge of nationalism, in which I attempt to explain how communists took on a capitalist cloak and decipher the political as well as symbolic logics of ‘transition’ in Hungary. Secondly, this macro account will pave the way for a deeper analysis of the micro dynamics at my two urban sites: what were the key local experiences that made people mobilize and that gave substance to their nationalist political identity? Finally, I briefly analyse the two most recent political shifts at the national level – a successful national referendum against health care reform in 2008 that in effect destroyed the government, and the surge of the extreme right at the 2009 European Parliament elections – through the case studies of protests in Csepel against hospital closure and the mayoral election process in Újpest, respectively.

Economic Straightjackets and Political Turncoats The 1956 popular revolt against the Stalinist regime gave a lesson to the communist and later postcommunist ruling classes alike: political legitimacy in Hungary depends on welfarist concessions to the population. However, as a small satellite state subordinated economically and politically first to the Soviet Union and later to Western Europe, Hungary could not sustain high living standards on its own. The task of generating enough revenue to appease the people required the rigid socialist state to first strengthen market mechanisms within the country, 2 and later to open up – and 2. The so-called New Economic Mechanism (BUM) was a series of reforms that came into force in 1968 to correct the inefficiencies of central planning by decentralization and the gradual introduction of market mechanisms in the communist economy.

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become subordinated – to Western capital. The famous Hungarian ‘goulash communism’ of the 1970s can thus be understood as an early local round of capitalist globalization – including the still-dominant neoliberal policy package of stabilization, liberalization and privatization, albeit in a pristine format. As capitalist forces managed to penetrate the increasingly opened-up socialist economy, ‘reform communists’ who propagated further shifts to a private economy gained decisive leverage in the policy and decision-making domains. They were soon aided from outside as Hungary became a member of the IMF and the World Bank in 1982. Maintaining the mirage of welfare became increasingly difficult with the credit crunch of the late 1970s, and socialist Hungary – much like Latin America and Africa – got trapped in a spiral of debt.3 In order to service that debt, privatization and liberalization were intensified in the 1990s by the reshuffled democratic coalitions that all featured the reform-communists-turned-neoliberal-capitalist technocrats.4 Hungary became the flagship of foreign direct investment-led development in the postcommunist region: while countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia experimented with forms of domestic accumulation and the formation of national propertied classes, Hungary unwaveringly opted for the transnational model (Drahokoupil 2009). However, an unanticipated consequence of this path turned out to be a comparatively slack economic growth rate and an even more serious long-term stagnation of median incomes than elsewhere in Central Europe. Essentially then, after the conciliatory rise of living standards that followed the crushed revolution of 1956, from the mid 1970s onwards Hungarians often witnessed languishing levels of welfare. As collective property was privatized first to select communist cadres who thereby became organically interested in capitalist transformation, and later primarily to foreign economic investors, this welfare became ever more elusive and exclusive. Consequently, the ‘democratic transition’ to capitalism, which was ironically perpetrated by former communists, produced masses of relative losers who compared their current situation with the ‘premature welfare state’ (Kornai 1992) of the Kádár regime,5 saw themselves dispossessed of the erstwhile people’s property and rights, and felt abandoned in an environment of ‘competitiveness’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ (see Bartha, this volume). 3. When the communist regime collapsed in 1989, the new democratic government inherited the highest per capita debt in the former Soviet bloc. Importantly, much of this debt was to Western commercial banks – as opposed to Poland’s, for example, where most of it was from non-commercial sources – thereby hindering any attempt for renegotiation. Public debt was cut significantly during the 1990s only to skyrocket again since the ‘welfare transition’ project of the 2002 to 2006 Socialist-Liberal government (see below). 4. Szalai (1998) describes this group as the ‘late Kádárist technocracy’. 5. Hungarian economist János Kornai coined the term ‘premature welfare state’ for the Kádárist system that developed a welfare regime essentially based on external funding. See Kornai (1992).

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It is fascinating that no real popular public resistance emerged against the myriad dispossessions that followed the fall of communism until 2002. From 1956 to the mid 1970s there was a general populist contract between the Kádár regime and the population: ‘Who is not against us is with us’.6 In other words, a mass political exit was traded for relative private prosperity. The gradual opening up of the economy to market forces called into being a private sector that eventually ‘created a social constituency with a vested interest in preserving – and even extending – the new economic arrangements’ (Róna-Tas 1997:162–63).7 Even after the celebrated democratization of 1989, the only way the mass of Hungarians who had lost out in the ‘transition’ would mobilize politically was at the ballot box. Oppositional elites who once fought the communist lie of ‘people’s democracy’ with the battle cry of ‘civil society’ kept their rhetoric of anti-communism while creating ‘media parties’ that stood unanchored in the wider society and mainly served elite political competition. However, one angry political move by Fidesz leader Viktor Orbán in the spring of 2002 changed politics in Hungary markedly. Punishing the postcommunist neoliberals for the IMF austerity package of 1995, the Hungarian electorate voted in the anti-communist centre-right coalition led by Fidesz in 1998. Orbán had promised to make every Hungarian a polgár – a phrase that tellingly means both ‘citizen’ and ‘bourgeois’. As the next four years saw Hungary ride the global economic boom, the government could proceed with its missionof building a national middle-class, confirming the ideological rally cry of strengthening the nation against the ‘Communist sell-out’ (!) to foreigners.8 Building up these various ‘grateful’ constituencies seemed to create a massive electoral bloc that would prolong the nationalists’ mandate. But a surprise defeat – by however narrow a margin – at the 2002 elections prompted Orbán to embark on a new mission of building a mass party. He created the so-called Polgári Körök (‘Civic Circles’) to provide 6. Kádár publicly proclaimed this doctrine – in Hungarian, aki nincs ellenünk, az velünk van – in 1961 to emphasize his regime’s détente with the dissenters and a break with the Stalinist (and Rákosi) hardliners who had long used an inverted form of this dictum. 7. ‘Worse yet, this constituency was recruited from among the company managers and activists, the people the party depended on most for its local presence. The private sector was now the economy of the strong, the domain of dominant groups … [T]he “private sector of need” was transformed into the “private sector of opportunities”. Reform, initially an attempt to avoid substantial changes in the state sector, instead inadvertently weakened the power of the Party-state’ (RónaTas 1997: 162–63). 8. Nevertheless, as Szalai (1999) shows, the Orbán government in the first half of its term actually followed the neoliberal policies of favouring large foreign investors over Hungarian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The grandiose ‘millennium’ state celebrations ushered in a more conscious programme of building up the national bourgeoisie (or alternatively, preparing for the elections by setting up benefit schemes) by subsidizing housing, infrastructure and investment in SMEs.

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‘flesh’ to the right-wing skeleton of Fidesz. Since then, this vocal and diverse movement of about 150,000 has mostly blended into the Fidesz party, but chunks of it also fuelled the recent surge of the extreme right.9 Both streams, however, critique the Socialist-Liberal government’s neoliberal and ‘antiHungarian’ policies.10 The birth of Polgári Körök and the subsequent wave of petitions, consultations, ‘village parliaments’ and referenda have contributed to shifting the balance to a more participatory democracy in Hungary. Alas, it also engendered radical and violent offshoots. ‘Transition’ to democracy and capitalism was thus experienced as a process of intra-elite negotiations that effectively doubled the political infrastructure when compared to the communist era: instead of one, now two large factions have alternated in power – the Socialist-Liberal and nationalist groups, or in everyday popular parlance, Left and Right. The former has ironically seen the reform communists unite with a segment of the previous democratic opposition, which has also favoured a staunch neoliberal agenda of privatization and liberalization and formed the ‘late-Kádárist technocracy’; whereas the latter – with Fidesz at its centre since 1994 – gathered together less well-established political actors who lacked connections and expertise to profit directly from Hungary’s Western integration and would like to see a stronger state that nurtured a ‘new middle class’. Consequently, contrary to conventional Western political imagination, for Fidesz followers the Right has come to stand for community (Hungarians), morality, and voice; while the Left is allegedly made up of communists-turned-capitalists who seek to atomize and silence the Hungarian nation and freely exploit its riches.11 Ideologically, the unifying symbol for the Right has shifted from the potentially socially divisive 2002 notion of polgár to the nation, thus projecting a more inclusive populist nationalistic and communitarian imagery juxtaposed against allegedly un-Hungarian rulers. The Right thereby accused the Left of elitism and strived to isolate it by convincing the traditional socialist voter – the working-class and welfare-dependent constituencies – that the neoliberal government no longer represented their interests. In a move further distancing 9. There are no concrete numbers about the actual size of the movement: ‘civic circles’ were asked to register in 2002 and reportedly reached 150,000 members in 11,000 cell organizations, yet their number and public activity have visibly floundered in recent years. 10. The Socialist-Liberal coalition were in power at the time of writing. 11. As the Civic Circles’ manifesto states: ‘At the 2002 elections voters chose between two competing visions and value systems, between the “civic” Hungary and Socialist promises. [The] results awoke in many citizens the will to act, the need to actively stand up for the politics and values represented by the civic government. The Civic Circles are the organizational embodiments of this will to act. They are spontaneous organizations where citizens who share common values find a community and are able to realize their ideas … Civic Circles are thus the freely organizing communities of those Hungarian citizens who take part in shaping their own destiny not only at elections but also in everyday life’ (Polgári Körök 2002).

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the Hungarian Left–Right axis from conventional Western understandings of these political terms, since 2002 Fidesz has proposed strengthening the state and stopping privatization altogether, playing on popular nostalgia for the Kádárist sense of security, while the Socialists have initiated further neoliberal reforms. However, while the population has been eager to act against further dispossessions by the government, Fidesz, downplaying potential internal contradictions and welcoming everyone in their anti-government alliance – including ‘true’ communists like Mátyás Szu˝rös, mentioned earlier – rendered the nationalists less a credible candidate for governing and more of an ideological hodgepodge susceptible to radical adventures. This eventually led to the alliance’s narrow defeat in the 2006 elections and the emergence of the extreme-right party Jobbik as the third political force in Hungary by 2009, with its illiberal slogans of restoring order – that is, chasing away the ‘commies’ – and punishing those ‘plundering’ and ‘bloodsucking’ the nation – ‘Jews’ and ‘Gypsies.’ In sum, after roughly half a century of popular withdrawal from politics, in which one-time communists turned into capitalists and secured societal quiescence while privatizing collective property to strategic insiders, the 2002 post-campaign rally in which Orbán called to life the Civic Circles decidedly altered Hungarian politics. This deliberate decision from the top to create a mass party anchored in society opened the possibility for the average Hungarian to (re)enter politics and exert some control on decision-making processes outside the voting booth. As we will see in more detail, the protest voice developed in this context sought to decry the dispossessions of the socialist and ‘transitional’ eras by using the discursive frame of the nation. The next section analyses the evolution of this unleashed political force in Csepel and Újpest.

Eternal Haunting Grounds Hungarian conventional wisdom about Csepel to this day triggers images of socialist propaganda clips of bustling factory life at the local iron works. The sounds of whistling workers are by now, however, silenced by postsocialist snapshots of decaying warehouses and obsolete assembly plants that have surrendered their social centrality to the new mammoth shopping mall that now absorbs the neighbourhood’s loafing teenagers and window-shopping pensioners. Mentioning Újpest similarly conjures up images of the neverending line of factories along Váci Avenue and the socialist brigades playing football on the company’s pitch. Nowadays, however, the district makes headlines thanks to its ultras – the self-titled ‘Violets’ – hooligans who regularly turn violent during football matches while chanting racist or antiSemitic slogans or printing them on gigantic national flags they wave during

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games.12 This type of bittersweet duality symbolizes the entire socialist and postsocialist history of the two neighbourhoods. Csepel is the largest island on the Danube located on the southern edge of Budapest with a population of roughly 80,000.13 Independent until 1950, the town had been basically built around the Manfréd Weiss iron and metal works that used to supply distant clients and which, by the 1910s, employed over 30,000 people, many of them of German and Jewish origins. Nationalized after the Communist takeover in Hungary, the Csepel factory conglomerate became one of the iconic industrial centres of the regime and was renamed after the Stalinist potentate Rákosi. The proletariat’s high concentration and conscious organization into workers’ councils, however, soon propelled Budapest’s twenty-first district to the forefront of the 1956 revolution against the Stalinist intruders, and Csepel’s workers’ council in fact held out longest against the Soviets when the tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the uprising. During the Kádár era, mammoth concrete housing estates were developed to solve the local housing bottleneck. These lakótelepek also functioned as a tactical way to mix the autochthonous and immigrant populace, breaking their previous networks and placing them in relatively small apartments that would accommodate at most a four-member nuclear family. Former slums were thus cleared up and both their dwellers and peasants, who came to the metropolis from the forcefully collectivized countryside to find work, received apartments at a heavily discounted price. The memory of this boon stays alive in oral family histories of residents and ensures that many still feel obliged to the Socialist party, the political heir of the communist regime. At the same time, in accordance with the development of the Hungarian ‘private sector of opportunities’ in the 1970s described above, the housing market also became differentiated in Csepel. Older autochthonous residents’ family homes which survived the slum clearance are now interspersed with neat new homes that have mushroomed on surrounding plots and that were effectively exclusive to middle- and upper-level Communist party cadres. Nevertheless, Csepel soon acquired the supposedly all-encompassing label ‘red Csepel’ and became one of the key symbols of cohesive socialist development. Predictably, this label became something of a liability – albeit profoundly contested – after regime change in 1989. The ‘spinal’ factory was closed down, 12. Football stands still function as loci for venting frustration and providing a sense of belonging. Orbán often uses football metaphors for describing his philosophy of the state (and even the nation), as opposed to neoliberal allusions by his political adversaries to ‘running Hungary as a corporation’, a statement often attributed to János Kóka, the former liberal minister of economy (see also Faje, this volume). Nevertheless, solidarity is not rampant even in the allegedly tight-knit Újpest stands: Ambrus, the young activist who provided the local Fidesz group with the sheetsized national flag, later told me that it was stolen from him at a national game. 13. This section builds mostly on secondary literature (in Hungarian) accessible on the website of the Csepel local history association: http://www.cshve.hu/.

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as in so many other socialist industrial towns. The local proletariat suffered heavily as a consequence, and much of the population struggled to adjust to the new conditions of the free market and its corresponding volatility. These days, most leave the district by day to work in other areas of Budapest or seek out informal jobs to supplement unemployment benefits. The town became a dormitory suburb, and low real-estate prices attracted further waves of immigrants from the countryside as well as many ethnic Hungarians from Transylvania (in Romania). Currently, after two decades of stagnation, the municipality of Csepel is trying to cash in on its favourable geographical position in Budapest by privatizing huge tracts of land and making them available to real estate developers, yet these projects are obviously mired with fraud. The Democratic Opposition Party (SZDSZ) ruled locally from 1990 to 1994, but it was a short-lived tenure as economic collapse swept Socialist MPs back into power at subsequent parliamentary elections. As a result, Csepel has since kept a pervasive old-guard character and became a hotbed of corruption. Árpi,14 a young local Fidesz activist whose father, a construction foreman, moved to Csepel from Transylvania at the time of the regime change, explains the challenge of trying to mobilize locals and convert them to the nationalist cause by echoing a strong anti-communist sentiment: There was no regime change in Csepel. That’s a big misunderstanding. All the leaders are proto-communists, like they went to university in Moscow, were bosses in the factory and all that. One woman told me she hates Podolák [the local Socialist MP] but will vote for him regardless because he was her boss in the factory … The Socialist [Party] presence is very strong, they rule everything: work, local government, police, school, and the media. You can’t erase from the minds what is already embedded. Their people are all over the place, and they can’t stand having anyone else around. They are all old factory and council leaders. The mayor is ‘everyone’s uncle Misi’, doling out money as welfare. Some people are unhappy but at elections they always put the ‘X’ there.

Despite his typically pessimistic account, Fidesz has made significant inroads into the Socialists’ hegemony in Csepel, and it has achieved parity with the party of former communists both in terms of embeddedness and popularity. As one travels upriver to the northern tip of Budapest, Újpest tells a partly similar story.15 The district that today is home to about 100,000 people used to be an aristocratic family’s estate in the early 1800s. Denied the right to settle down in Budapest proper on the basis of his ethnicity and in accordance with contemporary regulations, Jewish businessman Izsák Lo˝wy bought part of the estate on the right bank of the river outside the city and founded a shoe factory there in 1835. Thanks to the subsequent influx of mostly Jewish capital, by 1910 Újpest was the fourth largest industrial town in Hungary, and its numerous factories employed a significant group of workers of German 14. In order to protect the identity of my informants, pseudonyms are used throughout the text. 15. This section builds mostly on Csabai et al. (1977).

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and Slovakian origin who soon assimilated into the majority Hungarian population. Industrial production here was more diversified, ranging from leather and textile works and shipyards to the two conglomerates that to this day dominate the employment landscape: the electric giant Tungsram and the pharmaceutical heavyweight Chinoin. Újpest was integrated as a district of Budapest in 1950, the same year as Csepel’s incorporation. The core companies were of course nationalized after the Communist Party’s political takeover. As the country followed its Stalinist path, the industrial character of the town only intensified while living conditions did not improve. The proletariat took an active part in the 1956 revolution and organized workers’ councils, including the All Budapest Workers’ Council.16 The historical experience of socialism at the municipal level therefore echoes that of Csepel, with the regime appeasing the ‘problematic’ pockets of workers by building massive housing estates and diluting social networks by encouraging rural immigration. Újpest, however, in keeping with its more sophisticated industrial character, also experienced more pronounced social differentiation from the 1970s onwards. Around the blocks of higher-quality apartments, which went to loyal Communist Party cadres, greener areas were built, creating contiguous family homes of older autochthonous groups and the primi inter pares of the Party. When the winds of change brought parliamentary democracy and capitalism to Hungary, unlike Csepel, where disintegration ruled, the core Újpest factories of Tungsram and Chinoin were privatized by American General Electric and the French Sanofi group respectively. Despite massive lay-offs and automation in both companies, the residential zones of the district have also developed significantly thanks to real-estate capital pouring in. There is divergence between the two towns also in terms of politics, with the same mayor governing Újpest since 1990. With a local factory-owner family background, the mayor won his first term in office backed by SZDSZ. However, he quit the Liberal party after it allied with the Socialists in 1994, and thus he managed to save face while the first Socialist-Liberal coalition wreaked havoc on society with the neoliberal shock therapy of 1995 and the ensuing wave of privatization. As a result, ‘conservative’ groups in Újpest seem to edge out the former cadres when it comes to the mayoral vote. Nevertheless, at the electoral district level, as in Csepel, Socialist MPs have won the majority of elections over the past two decades, albeit by margins diminishing with each election. Since 2002, the Civic Circles movement has served to bring politics closer to the people of both districts, and has allowed 16. As local Fidesz leader Tamás explains, ‘after ’56 [Újpest] was a ‘highlighted’ workers’ district, a ‘guilty town’ because in ’56 workers’ councils had been set up and the logistics for distribution was organized right away by a committee at the town hall. There were many death sentences afterwards. From the ‘70s on, a town reconstruction started with various housing estates including Káposztásmegyer, where 25,000 people received new apartments, mainly workers and middle-level cadres who thereby got indebted to the previous regime.’

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them to make slightly more effective collective claims after what many have experienced as decades of losing out.

Exorcising the (Dis)possessed Talking in the direct aftermath of his failed 2002 election bid, former Fidesz president and defeated Prime Minister Viktor Orbán asked his followers ‘to create small groups, friendly teams, civic circles of a few people. Not legal forms but being together, joining forces and vigilance [are] needed’ (Orbán 2002). In subsequent weeks, thousands of phone calls were made to the Democracy Centre – a communication hub headed by a party politician but nominally separate from the Fidesz infrastructure – where the people were asked to register their ‘circles’. This way the huge but disorganized crowd of regular campaign rallies became thoroughly catalogued and drawn into the orbit of the party, albeit without official membership – the latter feeling to many Fidesz voters like the quasi-mandatory Communist Party membership of the socialist era. The usual post-election ebb in popular interest in politics was thereby reversed, and Hungary has in fact seen almost constant mobilization since 2002: petitioning, multiple referenda and EU, local and national elections have kept the campaign machinery in motion and provided food for thought for the Civic Circles. Discussing politics on an everyday basis has become very common for the nationalists’ voters, and the setting for this deliberation is most often exactly the sphere associated with the Circles: among friends, colleagues and family. As explained above, due to their lingering symbolic status as ‘red’ districts and the actual intense social embeddedness of the rival Socialist Party there, both Csepel and Újpest are a hard nut for Fidesz to crack. From the Civic Circles’ anti-communist, conservative, middle-class perspective, the ‘red’ landscape dominated by decaying Kádárist high-rises looks like a bleak concrete jungle populated by unambitious people. The apartment-block dwellers are thus allegedly either too duped by the Socialists to understand that they are the prime losers of the government’s neoliberal policies, or worse, they are selfish free riders who are participating in the on-going grand Communist plundering of the nation. When, during the 2002 campaign, Fidesz strongman László Kövér labelled this constituency the panelprolik (‘plebs of the concrete blocks’), he was merely echoing the sentiment of the traditional middle-class Fidesz voter. After the defeat of 2002, once the party realized that it had to win over this segment of the population if it ever wanted to return to power, its credibility as the voice of these people was thus already compromised. Building Civic Circles and converting the average apartmentblock dweller to the nationalists’ cause in these areas was therefore an even more challenging task. Nevertheless, although Fidesz’ approval ratings in the two districts are much below the nationwide average of more than 60 per cent, the period since 2002 has actually seen the party gain a lot of ground

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locally. As to his personal life, Tibor, Fidesz leader in Csepel, told me about the challenges of growing up with a browbeaten father who was just a ‘café dissident’ and of being fired from a communist-led publishing house. When it came to discussing the political prospects of the Civic Circles in Csepel, however, the post-2002 developments allowed him a degree of optimism: The Civic Circle movement – if all goes well – transforms itself into something where people will believe in achieving something at the local level. In a few years it shouldn’t be Fidesz or MSZP [the Socialist Party] but popular movements that act on their own. I think democracy is finally entering the level of the people. It started with a heightened state of emotions and a feeling of being cheated,17 and is transformed into a force correcting a democratic deficit which stems from the fact that in Hungary trade unions are dysfunctional. There is no popular representation of interests; traditional communities were torn apart, and hopefully this new mobilization will fill this gap eventually. I think it’s a very positive development … Civic Circles are not autonomous organization units, they’re rather linked through their world view. They are primarily linked to Fidesz but there are things they do on their own; for example, collecting signatures against the closing of the hospital … This is about keeping up the network, a part of becoming a mass party from a media party.

On top of providing the terrain for struggle, then, the Civic Circles have performed various other tasks, including organizing trips to historical Hungarian towns in neighbouring counties, painting hallways and cleaning parks, and holding poetry recitals for the inhabitants of the housing estates on national holidays. For the participants of these community-building activities, all this has effectively reinstated a sense of hope and dignity in the downtrodden inhabitants of the ‘loser’ districts that are generally viewed as superfluous ghosts of a shameful and failed socialist past. It has empowered them as a collective, and has allowed them to chase away a deeply instilled spirit of inferiority. Furthermore, the Civic Circles’ function has been to provide a backbone to an alternative public sphere to the government-backed SocialistLiberal media (seen as corrupt and dishonest) by facilitating discussion and analysis of everyday politics at both national and local levels. To be frank, however, from the perspective of Fidesz, the Circles have primarily served as a massive infantry of voluntary activists for the party campaign machinery, be it for distributing pamphlets or adding to the numbers at political rallies. This discrepancy in the Fidesz leaders’ and the rank and file’s imagination as to the Civic Circles’ role has caused serious problems, as we will see. But first, who exactly are the members of these Circles, and what motivated them to join the movement? What is their account of the communist past and of ‘transition’? Based on my informants’ accounts, I can identify three crucial periods in the past that have – separately or in combination – shaped their attitude to politics and inspired them to become active outside election time. The first decisive era in terms of ‘nationalist political socialization’ is the Kádárist soft dictatorship. 17. There have been allegations that the 2002 elections were rigged.

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Having learned the lessons of 1956, the regime provided material compensation – even if this was achieved through indebtedness – for the acquiescence of the populace. In the ‘happiest barrack of the Soviet bloc’, being a member of the Communist Party meant that one was entitled to special treatment at work, getting a loan, gaining permission to travel abroad or acquiring a place at university. On top of the heterogeneous mix of 800,000 Party members – including state company managers, trade union functionaries, middle-level cadres, worker guards and some groups of the intelligentsia – the coalition supporting Communist Party rule thus included everyone who chose to blend in and fight it out on their own. At the same time, especially in the early decades of socialism, the old bourgeoisie, former farmers, everyone who participated in the ‘unfortunate October events’ of 1956 and much of the intelligentsia were discriminated against. These groups were silenced ‘secondary citizens’ in their own country, yet they vividly passed on the legacy of their dispossession – of assets and dignity – in the private sphere of the family. The majority of my informants (perhaps not surprisingly) belong to the abovementioned groups and originally came from the countryside, hailing from families who moved to the capital during the socialist era. Those who were smallholders lucidly remember the stories their parents and grandparents passed onto them of land nationalization, being forced into cooperatives, and the Rákosi-era phenomenon of ‘sweeping the attic’.18 A minority of my interviewees who were part of the Civic Circles movement identified themselves with what is often called a ‘bourgeois’ family background of the prewar era, and they seem to have suffered the most discrimination and relative material dispossession. Nevertheless, even they concur with the policies that ameliorated the living conditions of millions in the early Kádár era and wish the sense of community that had existed then would return to Hungarian society (see below). Others, whose families had been domestic servants or serfs and were ‘liberated’ by the regime or who in other aspects benefited from it, do indeed feel nostalgic about the Kádár era. Lia is a single mother from Csepel who often wears a hat with a Greater Hungary flare on it, even though her grandparents and parents were all staunch Communist Party members and thus wary of any nationalist thought, let alone paraphernalia. She explained to me how different her upbringing was to that of her friends who grew up in bourgeois families: I was a KISZ [Communist Youth Organization] member. I didn’t see the duality of things, how socialism had its losers too, that they divided society so much, because that all started in 1956 when they involved people in spying. Plus you had people resisting all their lives and suffering the consequences, but at least with a straight spine … I didn’t know about all the stuff people in bourgeois families had heard 18. This refers to the pre-1956 Stalinist regime’s economic policy of forced collectivization of peasant landholdings and the system of deliveries that squeezed the last bit of produce out of farmers who had to starve to meet delivery quotas set by the state.

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and what came out after the regime change: what really happened in 1956, at Recsk [the Hungarian gulag], that so many people were disappeared in the 1950s. In the eighties I had no idea, [I] just went to college. I wouldn’t say I was a Marxist but I acquiesced to socialism in Hungary.

The Kádár regime thus publicly silenced the past for a large segment of the population and stripped them of their material and symbolic ‘roots’. A second major contribution to the post-1989 nationalist coalition, the lengthy process of privatization made those initially loyal to the Kádár regime and its heirs doubt their political affiliation. The system of political privileges intensified in the 1980s when new, more lax forms of production were allowed, and thus the elite started to convert their political capital into economic assets. The evolution of the ‘second economy’, based on low-scale private ownership, accelerated as ‘economic work partnerships’ (GMKs) were set up within socialist industrial giants.19 This created more inequality for those who could not reap the benefits of being networked at sites of extra income generation, and only enhanced feelings of exclusion and nepotism. For those stuck outside these circles, ‘goulash communism’ tasted sour. Andris, a foreman in his forties in Újpest, whose parents were sharecroppers from the countryside, describes the ordeal of a non-party-member worker at the turn of the end of the 1970s: Everything besides work was insecure. I didn’t have a place to sleep. In fact the apartments came with a very real free-market interest rate of 10 per cent on loans, whereas today you can get it for 6.5 per cent… It’s forging history to say it was fun and easy; it was a battle!

This inequality of opportunity reached its pinnacle during the wholesale privatization scheme under the tutelage of the Socialist-Liberal government that ruled between 1994 and 1998. Selling public property to mostly foreign companies became pervasive as Hungary – and the Central and Eastern European region in general – became an experimental laboratory for neoliberal ‘wild capitalism’. Újpest mayor and renegade opposition member Szemere puts it rather crudely: The transitional elite only had one economic policy: sell it all! What comes next did not grapple their minds. The market would not solve it [all]. Why would it? One player in the market is interested in selling everything, for crap and piss if they need to, but sell it. This was the biggest mistake of the transitional elite: they didn’t have an economic programme.

Privatization involved such strategic sectors as the energy and telecommunications industries, and basically the entire banking sector. The current government aims to continue this process, yet as there is not much more to privatize, this time they have been pushing for selling-off of 19. For a more elaborate discussion of the ‘second economy’, see Róna-Tas (1997) and Lampland (1995: 273-334).

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traditional parts of the public sector, such as postal services, health care, higher education, transportation, and so on. This has understandably provoked the anger of much of society (see below). As the following interview excerpts show, for members of the Civic Circles, privatization stood for the robbing of public property by a select few and its sale, mostly to foreigners. József, the husband of one of the Fidesz ‘captains’20 in Újpest, is in his sixties. He worked in a foundry all his life and hammers the bosses at his former workplace: Already in ’86, Communist leaders prepared to change the economy their way [i.e., to their advantage]. They founded GMKs and outsourced all the work. In ’87 they closed the foundry and founded a [limited company] with twenty-two people so that [they] don’t have to pay severance pay. They depreciated the place and you had to play around with the material they got from MÉH [the state company collecting scrap metal] – they were forging the quality [assurance] documents. At the same time, they kept on firing people and [got] their hands on the land and the buildings. They filed for bankruptcy next. The trade-union secretary had a lower salary than me. How did he manage to buy it then together with the manager and the party secretary?! They only privatized the profitable parts. They had to bribe the people. There was no regime change … The way Horn [Socialist Prime Minister from 1994 to 1998] did privatization was as if I sold my shoes! You need to keep the important stuff state owned. Moreover, they didn’t sell rundown parts of factories, no! They pumped a lot of state money into it then sold it for nothing to foreigners. It was not work that was lacking but good leadership.

Tihamér, a devout Christian engineer in his seventies, originally from the eastern city of Miskolc, draws a parallel between the distribution of privileges during socialism and in the postsocialist era: At the regime change, MOM [Magyar Optikai Művek – Hungarian Optical Works] was demolished including three floors under the ground. They sold the land for 3 billion forint and that’s where you have the big [shopping] mall now. Two departments remained but those were privatized [and sold] to a German company. People were laid-off, I was sent into retirement. No one needs all that stuff we put together for 35 years … Whoever made the decisions at the end of the Kádár regime was acting along political lines: we couldn’t sell stuff to the West, so everything broke down. Politically, nothing out of the ordinary happened: comrade party secretary’s assignment expired so he was appointed production manager. They bought the machinery for pennies.

Andris, the Újpest foreman cited above, laments the lack of information workers were given at the time of privatization and reiterates his nostalgia for the period of quasi full employment prior to 1989. 20. ‘Captains’ are responsible for the logistics and overseeing of Fidesz campaigns in their electoral sub-districts and are appointed by the district leadership. They often come from Civic Circles, whereby the party builds on their local embeddedness and contacts with sympathizers without formal party membership.

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Large companies were sold to foreigners, and you could buy stocks, at least those who had money at home. You didn’t have any voice. Of course you had the shareholders’ meeting, and out of 100,000 shares 96,000 were in one hand while 6,000 people owned the remaining 5,000. You could try to convince, organize, do something but how? … Big companies were broken up into parts: they founded small [limited companies] and got them bankrupt, then salvaged the real estate for themselves. This is how one-and-a-half million jobs disappeared. If today those people were earning at least a minimum wage, things would be a whole lot different.

With inequality of opportunity well established during the 1980s, early ‘transition’ thus dispossessed many Hungarians of the hope for a better future.21 The rosy clouds of prosperity and freedom that blew in in 1989 were only for the small ‘not-so-nouveau’ riche, whilst for the large majority capitalism ushered in heightened exploitation, overt racketeering and increased insecurity. The eerie coalition of former-Communist Socialists and once anti-Communist Liberals was perceived to have perpetrated a yard sale of Hungary to foreigners. In party political terms, the largest influx of voters to the nationalists in this period came from the Liberal Party electorate – mostly white-collar workers and intellectuals who were disappointed by the defection of the old Democratic Opposition Party from the anti-communist camp and by the transfer of collective property to a select few. They thus looked for another political force with a promise of European ‘embourgeoisement’. When assuming power in 1998, Fidesz accordingly pledged to restore Hungary’s grandeur and to carry out ‘more than a government change, less than a regime change’. The vision of national middle-class formation, as distinct from the integration of the Hungary into transnational capitalism, 21. Fidesz sympathizer Dóra, a manager in her forties from Csepel, echoes Andris’s account of asymmetric information flows and the impotency of trade unions: At Transelektro they started the privatization process and you can hear of Comrade Székely even today, who appeared out of the blue and bought the company from the workers. We got stocks for free and when we quit we had to give them back. But they pumped a lot of state money into it and he must have been a good comrade! [laughing] One hundred and fifty people were left from 700, so they basically reimbursed us for the shares: the management had millions and people were ignorant. The trade unions were only there to receive the membership fee we paid. This is how most companies were privatized. No one cared that practically a few people were robbing [us of] our property!

Lia, with her flare-adorned hat, expresses surprise and bitterness for having been left out of the group that reaped the benefit of privatization at her workplace: The director [of the company] made sure that in case the company didn’t ‘win the game’ he wouldn’t come out worse from it. He didn’t bribe the ‘referee’ but founded a [limited company] for the foreign undertaking, included a few middle-rank leaders, though he left me out for some reason. They played around with the bills and were ‘rescuing’ property from the company. This is how it happened everywhere.

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persuaded the already anti-communist voters en masse. However, capturing votes from the Socialists proved more complicated. The most recent addition to the nationalist alliance are those who in the 1990s still felt that Kádár’s heirs would protect them and represent their interest as workers, and also believed the rumour that if Fidesz came to power this would eventually lead to the return of the “white terror”22 in Hungary. This psychological tactic of the Left collapsed as the Socialists sought a Blairite Third Way, and after the 2003 reversal of the welfare transition they themselves had initiated by becoming more work than welfare oriented. Fidesz in the meantime underwent a makeover so it could pose as the most Kádárist party in Hungary and so absorb disappointed Socialist voters. The success of this depended, however, on two things: shifting the party’s political identity convincingly to incorporate former left-wing voters, and using the massification process – starting with the Civic Circles movement – to salvage the loss of community and security for the average voter. Until 2002 Fidesz was a primarily a bourgeois party like its Austrian and German right-wing sister parties, but now it aimed at repositioning itself as an inclusive communitarian party that addresses the old issues of the Left. Its original core symbol, the polgár, used to signify the upwardly mobile, moral, religious, enterprising Hungarian citizen who respects authority and national traditions, works hard, owns a home and has several children. Opposed to this ideal type, homo Kádáricus referred to those who voted Socialist: the welfare-dependent, unambitious, selfish and ideologically opportunistic mass manipulated by the corrupt postcommunist, globalist elite. The concept of munkás (worker) had been swallowed after 1989 by the pejorative panelproli (‘plebs of the concrete blocks’): everyone was supposed to aspire to become a polgár or középosztálybeli (‘middle class’). Despite Fidesz’s effort to shift its identity, the Socialist voter is still seen by many Fidesz supporters as either poor, lazy, unambitious, uneducated plebs, or as the very rich, carefree, parasitic elite that manipulates them. Influenced by both family history from Transylvania and his own experiences growing up in Csepel, Árpi provides a vivid anecdote to shed light on the way many of the Right’s voters equate ‘communist’ with the Socialist voter and anything left wing, and with what is essentially selfish indifference: Dad always used to scorn the commies and I didn’t know why, so I looked it up in the encyclopaedia but still didn’t understand what was wrong with it. I guess the ideology has good elements, but I only associate negative things with it. I heard lots of stories from Romania, how the commies destroyed Hungarian villages, how they forced grandpa to join the cooperative … Now if you tell me commie I’ll tell you geci [the rudest curse in Hungarian] … Right wing or national are those who don’t go for the 10 forints extra but want what serves the nation, its rise, the community, 22. As opposed to the so-called “red terror” of the short-lived first Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, the “white terror” refers to the subsequent wave of atrocities perpetrated by the counter-revolutionary Horthy regime.

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whereas left wing are those who would want 1 forint more and don’t give a shit about the rest. You can really see it on people – like Orwell’s Animal Farm, people turning into pigs. A right-wing person has a positive aura, you can see it on the way he looks into your eyes that he’s a good person. Whoever is Socialist grows fat and looks like a pig, almost grunting and doesn’t give a shit about anything.

Rather ironically in Western political terms, both the Socialist elite and its electorate would thus be identified with short-term self-interested individualism of the most socially perverse, because ‘communist’, sort. Since 2002, however, Fidesz has striven to wrest homo Kádáricus away from the postcommunist, globalist elite. For the latter, the key metaphors of ‘banker government’ and ‘luxury Left’ were based on the prime ministerial figures, former banker Medgyessy and billionaire Gyurcsány. This class gap between Socialist Party leaders and their electorate has been widened further by the welfare cuts and restrictive policies that the economic downturn has triggered. In a speech that was leaked to the public in autumn 2006, Gyurcsány – who was at the time prime minister – admitted to having ‘fucked up’ by over borrowing in order to buy votes, and that he ‘lied day and night’ about the state of the economy to win the elections of the previous summer. This speech effectively put the nail in the coffin for the Socialist-Liberal government, even in the eyes of those who held out longest in their loyalty to the heirs of communism, like Lia. Dispossessed of the last remnants of the security of Kádár’s regime, these people finally gave up in confusion: What makes this government left wing anyway? Nothing! That’s wrong intuition. I’d rather say they’re socialist. But wait, that’s not good, either. These have become capitalists, totally fooled people.

Once the leader–follower link was severed, detached Socialist voters were expected to reorient their part loyalty to Fidesz. On top of national belonging and the promise of middle-class status to all, the party now importantly emphasized small communities and solidarity in general. The definitions of ‘communist’ and ‘conservative’ were redrawn accordingly, but the identity shift was not very swift as political concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ continued to be blurred.23 For most – like Ambrus, the twenty-something activist from Újpest with a tattoo in (allegedly proto-Hungarian) runic script who supplies the bed-sheet-size national flag to the walk to bring the holiday homeas mentioned in the introduction of this chapter – the terms are still defined by the selfish/altruistic axis. The left/right divide is based on personal traits: right-wing people love the community, and the left-wing elevate themselves above others; the right wing have solidarity for each other whereas left-wingers have it for oneself. They make cliques. 23. In social-movement studies, McAdam and his colleagues define ‘identity shift’ as a mechanism that alters the ‘shared definitions of a boundary between two political actors and of relations across that boundary’ (McAdam et al. 2001:162).

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József’s wife, Fidesz captain Iringó, whose family moved to Pest from the countryside and who had worked at the Chinoin factory before moving on to the Tax Office, echoes this view of Left and Right: What’s important is solidarity. There’s those who help others and would even devote part of their stuff to help those in need, versus those who are selfish and only pull their own chestnuts out of the fire. It’s like Fidesz and the Socialists. They are like Good and Evil. You can see it on TV, too. Socialists are selfish.

Drawing on her upbringing in a motherless extended family of Moscoweducated uncles, and on memories of informal jobs and haggling to make a living, a youthful Civic Circle leader on disability pension, Panka uses the past to hedge this black and white imagery: The Kádár regime is inside us subconsciously. There’s a little bit of leftism in everyone, no matter how committed [they are] to the Right.

Fidesz leader Orbán’s makeover included wearing more worn-out suits and getting a new hairdo. Former communist statesmen, like the abovementioned former interim President Szu˝rös, and who had been dumped by the Socialist Party for their overly unfashionable Kádárist image, were incorporated into the frontline of the nationalists. This visual offensive, however, seems to have convinced neither traditional Fidesz voters nor the bulk of the traditionally Socialist electorate. In referenda and elections since 2006, former Socialist voters have stayed at home in large numbers24 and continue to frown upon the ‘proto fascist’ Orbán.25 Apart from the leftward identity shift in public relations, the flanking mechanism which is supposed to help the nationalists persuade former Socialist voters to shift their allegiance is recreating community life on the ground. Since democracy was restored in 1990, Hungarians have tended to vote for anyone who promises at least a partial restoration of the social security of the Kádár regime. Now that this has failed, the next demand that is made of politicians is an open sign of national and communal belonging: 24. In 2006, the government opportunistically timed pre-election tax cuts and other social measures, financed through the inflation of public debt. The official statistics were, however, withheld by decree by the Minister of Finance, thereby covering up the price of the mirage of welfare. This mirage nevertheless effectively defeated the Fidesz campaign built on the slogan ‘We live worse than four years ago’. The fencesitters therefore voted Socialist in 2006. What they will do next is unclear. Protest voting has a strong tradition in Hungary, yet the prospect of Fidesz acquiring a two-thirds majority in Parliament – with Orbán’s allegedly despotic character resurfacing, according to urban myth – might prompt this segment to abstain. 25. This is mostly a question of persona. Orbán has been demonized by the leftist-liberal media since 1998 but has also undergone so many transformations that it is difficult for him to pose as a credible politician. The next tier of the Fidesz leadership, on the other hand, score rather high approval ratings, even among the Socialist electorate, foreshadowing the possibility of greater success in a future post-Orbán era.

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the nation as symbol of solidarity and as surrogate welfare mechanism. In line with the demeaning imagery of homo Kádáricus described above, late Kádárism was already seen as essentially characterized by atomization and individualism, and the communist past is used to explain just about anything to do with the present state of the nation. Viktória, a white-collar single mother in her forties who works for a pharmaceutical company, echoes her friend Panka’s resignation about the individualizing spectre of Socialism that has been instilled in practically everyone: Those forty-five years [of Communist Party rule] were killing the soul, not with the oppression but with this compromise: shut your mouth, don’t care about anything, withdraw, steal, cheat, lie! Everything is shared and belongs to everyone so just take it home if you can, grab it! Don’t poke your nose into anything, don’t care about public matters, we’ll take care of it for you … It’s deep down in everyone, even me.

While the symbolic claim of strengthening the – virtual – national community energized many Hungarians in 1998, more genuine forms of being together are essential for people to feel anchored. The call for people to form the Civic Circles served this purpose. In a process that can be described as social appropriation or the ‘appropriation of existing social space and collective identities in the service of interpretations’ (McAdam et al. 2001: 102), Fidesz aimed to resuscitate the remnants of traditional communities, such as religious congregations and scout associations, to bring together fragments of the social fabric. The structure of the Civic Circles was also in essence the vehicle of brokerage. Reminiscent of Burt’s notion of ‘structural holes’ (Burt 1992), brokerage is defined in a political context as the ‘linking of two or more previously unconnected social sites by a unit that mediates their relations with one another and/or with yet other sites’ (McAdam et al. 2001: 102). In cases where the base communities are vigorous and provide solace to desolate individuals, their collective strength can indeed lead to of the creation of greater national-level solidarity spearheaded by the party itself. In my experience, the Civic Circles did have a very positive effect on the psyche of my informants. A retired woman from a mining family in western Hungary, Kati’s face lights up as she recalls her initiation into the Civic Circles’ world: I didn’t tell my husband at first that I had joined a Civic Circle because he’s a Socialist voter. I wouldn’t join a party even today, but in a civic organization I feel I can only do good. Even if we didn’t do anything politically it’d still be a community, we go to places and chat about our things … My duty was just cleaning the house, but then Balázs [the organizer of her particular group] put out a sign with ‘107 Civic Circle’ on it and I went to see what it was. After a year I told them I’d like to join. It only works, though, if it evolves on its own, if we like getting together. Anyway, I think we’ll hold out because we have meaningful activities. It means a lot to me that at this age I made so many new friends. It’s a real community. Every Circle would need one person like Balázs in each place who starts it up. It’s not like the only thing we’d like to do is rake aroundthe house

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or paint the fences but this is where it starts: I start to improve my environment, meet people, talk to them, carry it through. That’s when I found out how many right-wing people there were in the house, and I have become good friends with all of them ever since.

The mission to recreate communities on the ground and cutting them sufficient slack to form their own identity seems to be much more effective in interpellating in an Althusserian sense former Socialist voters than simply altering Fidesz’s top-down rhetoric. Heavily media-covered events such as the foundation of the Worker Department within the Fidesz alliance makes waves symbolically but, as argued above, it does not necessarily correspond to the micro-dynamics of politics, even though it clearly can help nurture them. To sum up, Civic Circle members have been motivated in their political participation in the nationalist camp by: first, staunch anti-communism due to family and/or personal experiences of dispossession and repression during the Kádár regime; second, the promise of becoming co-winners of ‘transition’ after being excluded from the process of privatization since the 1980s; and third, the sense of belonging that joining a political movement induces in one, especially if it is a mushrooming phenomenon that is then grouped under a national umbrella. Having become a mass party, Fidesz now faces the simultaneous dilemmas of streamlining the multiplicity of demands by various sub-groups within the party into a coherent ideology and political programme on the one hand, and providing genuine decision-making power to the incorporated ranks on the other. The final section analyses these issues through the lens of two local case studies: protests in Csepel against hospital closure, and the mayoral election Újpest.

Silencing the Dispossessed and Resuscitating the Fascist Phantom The nationalist fight to ban hospital privatization started back in 2004 when health care reform was first initiated by the Socialist-Liberal government. The ensuing referendum to block it was supported by a two-thirds majority, but the clear anti-neoliberal voice was invalidated due to an insufficient turnout.26 26. It is important to note that the referendum featured two questions. Apart from the ban on hospital privatization (initiated by the proto-communist Labour Party and supported by Fidesz), the question of ‘double citizenship’ – that is, giving Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians outside Hungary – stirred much more controversy and was only supported by 51 per cent of voters. The chauvinistic rhetoric of the government (whereby non-national ethnic Hungarians were essentially portrayed as welfare thieves) was effective and resulted in many abstaining from voting on either issue. Unlike the hospitals issue, the citizenship quandary has not returned in later referenda, though it arguably decided the 2006 elections (see note 26).

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In the build up to the referendum, Fidesz – even though it had drafted a bill to allow hospital privatization back in 2001 – had joined forces with both extreme-right and extreme-left organizations, which gave ammunition to its political opponents but did not deter the electorate from supporting the ban. Fidesz returned to the issue of health-care privatization by petitioning to protect the local hospital in Csepel during the general electoral campaign of 2006. This proved very successful in Csepel, as Fidesz gained many sympathizers who used to be alienated by the party’s overly anti-communist rhetoric. Crowds of residents otherwise immune to politics were targeted at markets and other important meeting points in the district by information booths and eager activists, who had been told to leave their eye-catching orange raincoats at home so as to emphasize the non-partisan character of the issue. In fact, the signatories to the petition created new openings for Fidesz in the local constituency, and as anti-privatization seemed popular the party was ready to focus its politics on combating social insecurity instead of symbolically promoting national grandeur. Organizationally, thematic departments were set up at the national level to target the Socialists’ electoral base (workers, pensioners, women, and so on). However, these initiatives were often perceived at best as dubious. University student Manfréd, whose parents come from the bourgeois intelligentsia, gives a critical account of both the departments and the national consultation, a country-wide Fidesz initiative to give voice to the “average Hungarian”: I think the [nationalist] alliance was both a negative and a positive development. Lots of people joined, many only ‘step into [i.e. reach out to] Viktor’ like my mother. We get different perspectives but the departments are only shams. I [Manfréd became the president of the Budapest Green Department with no previous environmental expertise – G.H.] think it was only to rev things up after the big letdown in 2002. I don’t know if the National Consultation was worth it, 90 per cent were our people and we spent lots of money on it. But for me personally it was a huge experience. I met a lot of people, took over leading the consultations myself, kept notes for myself. They should have summed them up at Madách square but we’ll see if they actually did … They were like local Fidesz congresses, where society’s lower-middle strata came and represented the Socialists’ voters too. The problems were there in the campaign programme but they didn’t reference it to the National Consultation.

Having worked hard to expand the electoral base locally, municipal leaders were devastated by Fidesz’s defeat at the 2006 general elections. Inexplicably from the grassroots vantage point, in the last few weeks of the campaign the Fidesz elite chose to drop its communitarian focus and revert to the nationalistic imagery and rhetoric employed in the 2004 referendum, thereby mobilizing dormant ‘liberal’ voters. As the government inflated national debt and covered up the country’s real economic crisis, the 2006 elections thus

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became a ‘moral’ competition between the Left and Right of old.27 Meanwhile, the experiences of petitioning against hospital closures, the National Consultation, the Workers’ Department and the Civic Circles proved to be a mirage of participation: Fidesz’s campaign programme emphasized tax cuts and entrepreneurial priorities as opposed to workplace security and a decent social wage. After re-election, the reshuffled Socialist-Liberal government immediately showed its true colours and embarked on new neoliberal reforms: privatizing health care became the flagship of this mission and thus generated the most organized protests, involving all segments of society. The subsequent referendum in 2008 – initiated by Fidesz, who this time concentrated on questions concerning the protection of the welfare functions of the state – led to the anti-reform side’s landslide victory, which effectively destroyed the coalition government and showed very convincingly what kind of potential political movements like those that had occurred in Csepel possessed. The junior Liberal partner left the coalition, while the Socialists – in view of the popular rejection of their policy – tried to salvage some of their popularity by returning to a more left-wing inclusivist rhetoric. With the face of the billionaire Prime Minister Gyurcsány, this, however, seemed impossible. The 2008 global economic crisis provided the pretext for finally dismissing Gyurcsány in April 2009, which was followed by the installation of a technocratic ‘crisis management’ government. Subsequent European Parliament elections confirmed that Fidesz had made a politically good choice in favouring national protectionism and the building of a more stable social alliance uniting all insecure segments in Hungarian society.28

27. István Mikola, Fidesz’s candidate for deputy prime minister and ‘doctor of the nation’, was ironically the former health-care minister who first initiated privatization in the sector in 2001. When he assumed his candidacy in 2006 he made various media blunders, arguing that the state should restrict individual freedom, ostracizing singles as Love Parade hordes (i.e. alluding to the allegedly hedonistic crowds of the famous 1990s rave parties), and most importantly that giving citizenship (and voting rights) to ethnic Hungarian non-nationals would ‘take care of everything for twenty years’, by which he meant it would keep Fidesz in power. These and other sound bites were picked up by the left-liberal media and mobilized the dormant ‘liberal’ electorate that in the end decided the victor of the election: the Socialist-Liberal coalition became the first incumbent government in Hungary to win a general election. 28. The party took the largest share of the vote in the entire EU, while the governing Socialists shrank to a medium-sized force and were almost embarrassed by the new extreme-right grouping that came a very close third.

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If we analyse the phenomenon of the new extreme-right Jobbik Party (For a Better Hungary), the Civic Circles are a very important reference point.29 Having massified since 2002, Fidesz seems to have failed in keeping disappointed extreme-right voters and fence-sitting former Socialist voters in the same camp. Even though the policy change towards more social issues satisfied both groups’ interests, the party proved too tentative for the radical right. My informants had already warned me of this in the first days after the spring 2006 general election defeat, when there was disappointment mixed with rage at the new reforms announced. Lia saw the potential for future violence as emotions were no longer kept in check by the Fidesz party machine: Fidesz is not organizing the people. Some people say we need to move; I think we should demonstrate … The Fidesz leaders have a lot more to lose than those going on to the streets: their financial resources also depend on the [maintenance of political tranquillity]. People don’t feel it on their skin yet. When they can’t pay their bills, don’t have anything to give their kids to eat, when the bailiff comes, when they fire 40,000 teachers – they will all be there in front of Parliament because they will have nothing to lose. The entrepreneurs of necessity will throw in the towel, they won’t be able to shift the burden to the customer, what the multinationals do without a blink of an eye. I don’t see any other solution. There was no major protest after the Bokros package30 [of 1995] but now those people are losing their jobs, the intelligentsia, who won’t swallow the pill [that means that they must] scavenge the dustbins. Nobody likes this package, neither employers nor employees. It didn’t calm down the foreign investors. I think Gyurcsány himself is not calm either. One little spark would be enough for the civil war or a revolution to break out, and we certainly don’t need that.

The torrent of critique stemming from the Fidesz elite’s increasing dissociation from the party’s rank and file was thus channelled into a dormant withdrawal, with predictions of an outburst of frustration and helplessness. The alleged separation of more radical right-wing elements from the party was also criticized on the ground. Ambrus with the runic tattoo weighed in with his two cents’ worth as follows: You have two options. Either push it really strong now and ally with everyone – I do feel sorry for the ‘third way’ [the extreme-right coalition of MIÉP and Jobbik]. We should have allied with them to begin with. How nice would it be to have their 2.5 per cent[of votes]. Or, take to the streets on October 23 and sweep [the government] out. I want to fight.

29. Radical nationalists had already made it into the Hungarian Parliament in 1998 with MIÉP (Party of Hungarian Justice and Life), and when that party failed to repeat the success of passing the 5 per cent threshold in 2002, the newly founded mass movement of Fidesz absorbed a significant part of this constituency. 30. The Bokros Package refers to the very controversial structural adjustment reform package introduced in 1995 by the former finance minister Lajos Bokros who later became one of the directors at the World Bank.

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In line with such sentiments, the autumn 2006 riots in Budapest were preceded by a threatening summer. The announcement of the newest neoliberal structural-adjustment package rang hollow in the politically idle season but the decree-style execution of it soon triggered mobilization among trade and student unions as well as the opposition electorate, always eager to voice its discontent with the ‘communists’. The Civic Circles – albeit independently from Fidesz – once again proved ‘reliable’ participants in the demonstrations that acquired a whole new dimension on 18 September after the leaking of Gyurcsány’s post-election speech. Hungary entered the international headlines with images of riot police and the burning of state television headquarters, while at the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 revolution the next month, tens of thousands of peaceful protesters were tear-gassed and dozens beaten up in an obvious over reaction by the police. The above groups were occasionally taken over by extreme right-wing pockets that used fascist symbolism and vented their frustration in a manner derived from football hooliganism. The media naturally exploited this imagery and – echoing the marginalization of the Civic Circles that had been going on since their formation – added fuel to the government-fed fire to dismissing the demonstrators as an out-of-control ‘mob’. While the political parties (and state authorities) seemed unprepared for this kind of societal eruption, the wide publicity given to the siege of the television building effectively prevented the situation from escalating: those who voted for the Socialists in the spring – and even the newer segments of Fidesz’s supporters – did not want to unite with the violent anti-government rallies. As Fidesz was tentative in committing to these street protests and confined itself to constitutional measures of pressuring the government to step down, much of the extreme right was deeply disappointed and began to organize more vehemently. The extreme-right party Jobbik was the result. Disillusionment with what Fidesz has delivered since 2006 in terms of responding to grassroots calls for action is thus arguably the most important factor in the intensification of radicalism: while for years it managed to contain this ticking bomb, now, with a bolder political formation available, emotions have come to the fore with a vengeance. The following recounts the Újpest mayoral elections in 2006 to shed light on the mechanisms of local silencing. Mobilization since 2002 has altered the balance of political forces locally, and the Civic Circles and consequent massification have seen numbers of Fidesz supporters in Újpest swell, which has put strain on the core leadership by increasing competition for positions. Therefore, the relationship between older party members and newcomers has been tense from the beginning.

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Campaign manager and local Civic Circle chief Balázs lashes out at the old guard of Fidesz: They have consciously suppressed the Civics: they got scared that we would start doing politics and … become a political rival to them. We wanted to gather all the Civic Circles of Újpest together but it didn’t work out because they didn’t give out the necessary information. I think 80 per cent no longer function exactly because of this: a cohesive force would be needed but the old Fidesz members are afraid of the new people. They’re guarding their positions.31

The most explicit slap in the face for the rank-and-file members of the party concerned the decision on the mayoral candidate. The leadership invited everyone who had helped in the campaign for an evaluation, where they announced that they would stop supporting the independent mayor who had been in office since 1990 and have their own candidate. The members’ opinions were ignored and they were told they could not put another name – such as the incumbent mayor’s –on the ballot. It was essentially an ultimatum, with 31. When telling me about their attempt to create a stronger network, Viktória also voiced a very strong critique of the party: As the local elections were coming up I said we should do something with the candidates. They said there were about 150 Civic Circles, so let’s get to know each other. Balázs was out of town so I wrote a letter to the Democracy Centre and they told me to write an e-mail and a text message and they’d send it around. The mayor and the right-wing candidates all came, and we were not too numerous to put it that way … about thirty Civic Circle people and twenty candidates. And I even bought all the snacks and drinks. I felt that I had screwed up. They didn’t make me feel it but I’m sure they were also disappointed. Then I wrote to Hende [head of the Democracy Centre] that I felt cheated, that it didn’t seem to be an objective that the Civics find each other, that it was a top-down controlled something. Then they wrote back, of course not Hende himself, that they didn’t have money to send out text messages, but then why did they make me write up a text template?! For a good time we were still trying to organize something but I think the rest of the group got disillusioned, embarrassed … Civic Circles are behind the back of Fidesz, though. They can provide a check. I’m sure Fidesz was also corrupt [when in government] but the Civics are more sensitive to decency: if someone gets carried away, they can’t afford to let go like the comrades! Her friend Panka openly accused the local party cell of lack of effort: It seems as if they didn’t want to win here. There were no big names visiting Újpest, all the campaign material arrived late, I had to look for flyers in the bins, it should have been distributed better. Also, I never saw the candidates really make an effort. There were no direct confrontations, debates here, locally. I guess Tamás [local Fidesz leader] is actually happy that we lost because this way he made it to Parliament on the compensatory list. Here in Újpest it’s really a small clique (gittegylet). Even Balázs was excluded, although he was the campaign director! I think the critique gets stuck here locally.

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the local leadership blaming the written rules of the party and the directive given by the top leadership. Very tellingly, Tihamér cites his memories of communist authoritarianism as an analogy of his experiences with Fidesz: This is ridiculous. Just like with the departments where you have to join two of them upon entry into the party. Then they have one or two meetings per year where you have to vote for the leaders. It’s really like the democratic centralism [of the Kádár era].32

Nevertheless, the October 2006 municipal elections gave a landslide victory to the nationalist opposition. Although Fidesz has managed to win over a majority of the electorate in the 2009 elections for the European Parliament, it has failed to listen to voices on the ground and also to address pertinent issues brought up by the global economic crisis. Therefore, an increasingly communitarian Fidesz could not stop the resurgence of an extreme right that enjoyed the privilege of an untested, thus uncorrupted, image, and gave much more direct – and, alas, violent and radical – answers to the questions posed by those dispossessed by ‘transition’.

Nationalism Wreaks Havoc After nearly fifty years of a quasi coma, induced by the atomizing and depoliticizing social pacts made between the powerful and the populace that followed the 1956 revolution, Orbán’s 2002 creation of Civic Circles can be considered the return of the popular voice to Hungarian politics. The Civic Circles movement has empowered the crisis-hit and dispossessed population by providing it with a grand narrative of nationalism and spectres of nationalist social security and protection. The vision of grassroots participation and communitarianism that it promoted reinstated dignity and a sense of worth in the atomized post-Kádárist society where the neoliberal ‘transition’ and media politics of the 1990s only strengthened the mighty grip of the ‘communist disease’ of nihilism and individualism. Nevertheless, whereas nationalism at the turn of the millennium was summoned from the top as a populist and inclusive political force of communitarianism, the infamous autumn riots of 2006 proved to be a crucial test of the nationalist elite’s real social embeddedness. As the rerun of the revolutionary spirit of 1956 was quickly crushed by the government’s over-reaching for power, and because of the 2008 global economic crisis, 32. Tihamér’s wife Vali hints at an exit from politics: I didn’t like at all what happened there. I didn’t vote ‘yes’ although I like the guy [the newly proposed candidate], but he just wasn’t meant to be a mayor. I think I will have a low profile for a while, [and I] won’t help with this upcoming campaign … A world will crumble in me if it’s true that this whole complacency comes from Viktor [Orbán].

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no material cushion of a welfarist kind could be doled out to pacify the population, and the Socialist-Liberal coalition lost all political legitimacy. Fidesz, however, has also remained largely silent and has so far subsumed the majority of intimidated protesters. The rest, who felt abandoned by their leaders, turned to a more exclusive type of nationalism. The new party, Jobbik, radically politicizes the vertical polarization of class (Friedman 2003) in Hungarian society, opposing the postcommunist comprador elites and the dispossessed masses. However, by lumping all political leaders under an un-Hungarian label, and using metaphors of ‘the next Palestine’ to describe the alleged international Jewish conspiracy against the country, it also exploits the horizontal polarization of identity. This gains full force as the bulk of social anger and frustration is now targeted at the identified fifth column, the Fremdkörper (‘foreign body’) of excluded Roma masses, seen as social parasites and, with their demographic rise, a threat to the mere survival of the Hungarian nation. Contemporary ‘socialism’ in Hungary, disqualified as an inclusive ideology by its association with neoliberalism and by the lingering menace of corruption and selfishness that is identified with the workings of the Socialist Party, is overwhelmed by a spirit of nationalism which has both captured the popular imagination and degenerated among a small fraction of the population into fascism.

References Burt, R.S. 1992. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Csabai, I., et al. 1977. Újpest története [History of Újpest]. Budapest: Közgazdasági És Jogi Kiadó. Drahokoupil, J. 2009. Globalization and the State in Central and Eastern Europe: The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment. New York: Routledge. Ferguson, J. 1994. The Anti-politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Friedman, J. (ed.) 2003. Globalization, the State, and Violence. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Gledhill, J. 2000. Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London and Boulder, Col.: Pluto Press. Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kornai, J. 1992. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lampland, M. 1995. The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAdam, D., et al. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orbán, V. 2002. ‘Beszéd a Dísz téren’ [Speech in the Dísz Square], May 7. Retrieved 20 March 2004 from: http://www.polgari-kor.hu/hirek/hirek. php?mit=bovebben&kat=4&id=58

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Polgári Körök. 2002. ’Kiskáté’ [FAQ], June 16. Retrieved 20 March 2004 from: http:// www.polgari-kor.hu/hirek/hirek.php?mit=bovebben&kat=2&id=51 Róna-Tas, Á. 1997. The Great Surprise of the Small Transformation: The Demise of Communism and the Rise of the Private Sector in Hungary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Roseberry, W. 1994. ‘Hegemony and the Language of Contention’, in J. Gilbert and D. Nugent (eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 356–66. Smith, G. 2004. ‘Hegemony: Critical Interpretations in Anthropology and Beyond’, Focaal 43: 99–120. Szalai, E. 1998. Az elitek átváltozása [The metamorphosis of the elites]. Budapest: Új Mandátum. ——— 1999. Oroszlánok és globalizáció [Lions and globalization]. Budapest: MTA Politikai Tudományok Intézete.

Chapter 6 A Long March to Oblivion? The Decline of the Italian Left on Its Home Ground and the Rise of the New Right in Their Midst Michael Blim

Introduction ‘Ripe for Restoration’ a recent Financial Times article is entitled. Fermo, a city in Italy’s coastal region of the Marche and unofficial capital of one of Italy’s largest shoe-producing areas, is selling off its cultural patrimony in exchange for urban redevelopment. The city ‘is prepared to negotiate favourable terms’ in the sale of its medieval and Renaissance palazzi nobili for buyers able to restore and find new uses for them. European Union (EU) money may be thrown into the deals. Moreover, the Financial Times also reports that real estate on offer on conventional terms in the surrounding lush countryside is also a steal. ‘A rustic ruin with some land will cost Euro 80,000–150,000 but restoration will cost the same amount again, while a village house with mountain views can be found for Euro 150,000’. The city’s campaign is ‘part of an energetic drive to bring modern business and tourism’ to Fermo. And so another central Italian region, population 1.6 million, aspires to be the next ‘Chianti-shire’, even as many of its core industries lapse into serious decline. ‘An evening stroll through its cobbled streets’, writes the Financial Times correspondent, ‘shows off Italy’s cultural cachet, especially if before you start your promenade you have the foresight to slip into a pair of handmade Marchigiano shoes’.1 Thus the correspondent coins the perfect metaphor for the Marche’s unhappy current economic transformation: the area’s shoes, once one of its top economic activities, are becoming an accessory to a bourgeois tourism had on the cheap. 1. ‘Ripe for Restoration’, Financial Times, 24 April 2010, p X

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Perhaps not all too coincidentally, the politics of Italy’s most industrialized region – which houses no fewer than twenty-seven industrial districts producing goods as diverse as machine tools, kitchen assemblages, white goods, furniture, clothing, and luxury ships, in addition to shoes – has lurched to the right almost as steadily as its industries have declined. In the Marche 2010 regional elections, the xenophobic, right-wing Northern League,with no more organization than a website, a “brand name.” and a candidate list, , took 6 per cent of the vote, as much as the traditional leftist parties in a region that has stood as a reliable – and last – red outpost bordering the Italian South since the zenith of the Italian Communist Party’s ascendancy in 1976. And for the first time since 1995, a regional ruling coalition formed excluding several important remnants of the former Communist Party in exchange for inclusion in a new ‘centre-left’ government those conservatives that opted out of Silvio Berlusconi’s Partito della Liberta (Party of Liberty). Thus, the Democratic Party, the biggest chunk of the former Communist Party, having stumbled through two different reconstitutions and three name changes since 1991, finds itself in unholy alliance with the residues of its historic antagonist, the Christian Democratic Party, now ingloriously renamed the Centre Union. The national leadership of the Democratic Party, a long-trusted and wellplaced party insider tells me, had decided to make the Marche region a test case in their attempt to forge a long-term national alliance with the former Christian Democrats. The price was throwing the rest of the left out of government, this in a region where leftist forces, notwithstanding their increased fragmentation, had governed relatively harmoniously for thirty years. Add the trend of declining voter turnout – from 74 per cent in 2000 to 63 per cent in spring 2010 – and one has a regional vignette quite consonant with the account Don Kalb offers in the Introduction to this volume. One has acute as well as chronic economic distress, and xenophobic discontent expressed at the polls. An entire left-wing political formation from unions to parties is on the run and seeking accommodation with the least right-wing parties that can be found in a nation now captive of what Slavoj Zˇizˇek has labelled ‘Berlusconian barbarism with a human face’ (Zˇizˇek 2009: 7). No region represents Italy. One hundred and forty-four years ago, Italian patriot Massimo D’Azeglio wrote that though ‘Italy has been made; now it remains to make Italians’. Though his aphorism is a useful reminder of the frailties of the Italian nation, one must also add that, the extent to which Italy has become one nation, it has been rightists such as Mussolini and Berlusconi who have been its modern makers. To wit, Berlusconi’s electoral coalition – deep economic recession, scandals, corruption, and criminal indictments notwithstanding – has become the ruler not only of national but also of regional Italy. Centre-right governments as of the March 2010 elections run regions wherein two-thirds of all Italians reside. I devote this chapter to showing how a set of highly correlated factors might be stitched together to form a theory of why Marche regional politics has drifted to the Right instead of the Left in a time of growing economic

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distress. I argue that the corporatist politics that supported the Marche region’s remarkable economic growth since the 1960s gradually ensnared Left forces in a web of cooperation that limited their capacity to combat deindustrialization and the deterioration of living standards among the region’s historical workingclass. It also left them unable to advance the cause of immigrant workers, in effect a goodly chunk of the region’s new proletariat. Thus, the Left, deprived of a new electoral base and bereft of its old one, finds itself chasing votes from centrist voters, historically no friends of communists, transformed or otherwise, who are also drifting toward the right. I grant at the outset that Italian economic decline, the decline of the Left, and the rise of the Right on the national scene are surely powerful explanatory ‘externalities’ for someone presenting a regional analysis. National trends undeniably affect local circumstances, even in a country as regionally fragmented as Italy. Borrowing Tolstoy’s adages about families, however, one might argue as well that each Italian region is unhappy in its own way. What makes the Marche at this point interesting is, first, that it stayed in the centre-left column during the March 2010 regional elections, even as regions that host Napoli, Roma, Torino and Venezia passed to the centre-right. The game in the Marche for the Left is not yet up, though its staying power has been sorely tested since the return of Berlusconi in 2008. Second, because the centre-left was returned to government in the Marche without all of the former communist Left, it is possible analytically to avoid treating an increasingly schism-ridden Left as a homogeneous political force, and easier instead to test the relative strengths of its components in the face of the significant electoral showing in 2010 of the Northern League, here treated as a proxy vote for sentiments not just rightist, but of the xenophobic right. Third, the Marche’s industrial economy, though on the skids, has not yet become irrevocably undone. However, absent an industrial transformation that either increases capital intensity and productivity, or that finds new organizational forms of capital creation and firms that should arrive as much from politics as economics, it is very difficult indeed to foresee a salubrious outcome to economic decline and a drift toward a revanchist politics. The net effect of my analysis insofar as it affects the damaging impact of corporatist politics on the Left does not suggest that corporatism is simply a strategy of rule to which the Left succumbed, nor that it is stable enough as a concept to accurately contain the totality of facts that compose people’s values and beliefs about their society. The Left may have taken the ‘wrong exit’; immigration concerns may be a symptom of worry about waning economic equality in a region proud of its egalitarianism; and whatever staying power some moving corporatist consensus may have had is diminishing in the face of forces external to the context described here. These are among the contradictions that make this chapter more excursive rather than exhaustive of the available facts that undoubtedly contribute to the present complexity of the context.

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The Economics of Politics in Italy and Its Central Regions There is a reason why Italians are consistently the most pro-EU of any of the Union’s initial members. It is because the 1958 Treaty of Rome finally unleashed Italy’s enormous economic potential after the country’s economy had foundered and finally collapsed under fascist autarky and German occupation. The Italian state, historically no stranger to economic intervention, emerged from the fascist period with an enormous industrial patrimony which it administered under the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI). Its ownership and management of basic steel, engineering, shipbuilding, telecommunications, shipping, oil and electricity was coupled with support for all of Italy’s big banking and industrial companies. Starting in 1950, it sought to develop the Italian South by moving its manufacturing stakes there, where the per capita gross domestic product was typically between onehalf and two-thirds that of the national average. Throughout the country’s geographic centre, small firms generated industrial districts that produced low-cost, light-industrial products for export to the EU’s wealthier northern countries (Castronovo 1980; Ginsborg 1990). Central Italy, and most notably the Marche region, which had started the 1960s with a per capita income only 80 per cent of the nation’s as a whole, turned exports into widespread prosperity. By 1980, per capita incomes of the central regions and the Veneto met or exceeded national norms (Mazzoni 1983: 49). Perhaps owing to the small, family-firm productive base, incomes over the past fifty years have been distributed with a degree of equality as measured by the GINI index comparable to those found in social democratic Scandinavia. The Marche region, as is typical for central Italy as a whole, has maintained a GINI index of 0.20 since the mid 1980s, even as income inequality for Italy as a whole has remained stubbornly high at 0.36 during the same period.2 This egalitarian result owes hardly anything at all to the Italian welfare state; in fact, this is perhaps one of the most interesting effects of central Italy’s small-scale industrialization that marks it apart from other development stories since the Second World War. Even as Italy has suffered significant industrial and general economic decline since the 1990s – a decline so significant that Luciano Gallino, Italy’s pre-eminent industrial sociologist, has described his nation as ‘a colony subordinated to the economic, social, and political needs and wants of other nations’ (Gallino 2003: 3) –central Italy’s industrial district-based economy has been fighting the world industrial economy to a draw, albeit just barely. As Italy’s big industries lost productivity and sales, and were acquired by the firms of other nations, the country’s small industrial districts marginally 2. Democratici di Sinistra. 2005. ‘Distribuzione del reditto e poverta: tendenze in atto e politche di intervento,’ Amare l’Italia: conferenza nazionale DS per il Programma. Retrieved 5 October 2006 from: http://www.dsonline.it/speciali/ amarelitalia/programma/economia/documenti/dettaglio.asp.

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improved their productivity, though at rates lower than comparable German firms, and succeeded in holding on to most of their export markets through a combination of stagnant wages and climbing up the value-added ladder in their products. Their export focus shifted from the United States to Eastern Europe and the Italian domestic market as well (Nardozzi 2004). In the first decade of the new century, however, the economy of central Italy, especially those sectors producing ‘traditional’ products such as clothing, shoes and furniture – key industries in central Italy, but especially in the Marche Region – began to decline steadily, though at rates less dramatic than the Italian industrial economy as a whole. Value added per labour hour improved only marginally, if at all, while personal incomes slid along with Italy’s national average relative to all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (Confindustria Marche 2010). By 2009, according to the OECD, Italian average salaries were ranked 23 out of 30 member countries, which means that Italian workers are now making 17 per cent less on a purchasing-power basis than the OECD average.3 In accounting for the political decline of the Left and the rise of the xenophobic Right outside its ‘historic’ home, the Marche region provides some useful, even important insights. It is well to keep in mind that it has economic problems, but they are not of the degree and severity as those encountered in the Italian South or in the moribund heavy industrial centres throughout the peninsula. It remains highly industrialized, albeit in a small-enterprise fashion. Industrial production and exports had been declining slightly year by year since 2007, but 2009 was a crisis year, as it was worldwide, with production and exports falling double digits. Still, the Marche region’s unemployment rate is half that of Italy as a whole, and its labour participation rate (65 per cent in 2009) was substantially higher than the national average (Confindustria Marche 2010). Though no part of Italy could now be said to possess a Goldilocks economy – that is, one not too hot, not too cold, but just right – the Marche region’s might come among the closest to the ideal. At the same time, the Marche has been eminently successful at transferring a new immigrant stream into the workforce. Though resident foreign nationals represent just 5 per cent of the region’s population, they constituted between 16 and 20 per cent of newly hired workers between 2003 and 2008, with men more likely to have found factory work and women domestic service (Regione Marche 2010). The foreign population typically resides where the work is: in cities for women, who tend to the children and elderly of households in service occupations, and in the small towns of the industrial districts, where the men work in factory jobs. In Monte San Giusto, a Marche town (population 7,500) devoted to shoe manufacturing where I have conducted extensive field research since 1981, 3. ‘OCSE: Italia salari sempre piu bassi,’ Corriere della Sera, 10 May 2010. Retrieved 10 May 2010 from:, http://corriere.it/economia/10_maggio_11/salari-ocse.

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10 per cent of the population consists of foreign residents who also comprise one quarter of the shoe manufacturing jobs in the once formidable monoindustrial shoe town. Seventeen different nationalities are represented among the town’s immigrants, including persons from South Asia, sub-Saharan and North Africa, the Middle East and, in particular, the Balkans.4 I have no reason to think that the Monte San Giusto immigrant population varies greatly from those surveyed nationally which suggests that: first, very few – probably less than 10 per cent – are illegal residents; second, immigrants are actually slightly better educated than the resident population; third, half of the adults have been hired permanently by firms and thus have full access to social benefits; but four, wages for the majority are below the average national wage.5 In the March 2010 regional elections, the Northern League received 17 per cent of the vote in Monte San Giusto, up from 2 per cent five years before. At the same time, the Party of Liberty of Berlusconi (PDL), which is in fact a fusion of the traditionally rightist National Alliance (AN) and Berlusconi’s former Forza Italia (FI) electoral vehicle, captured the same proportion (37 per cent) together as they did separately in the regional elections of 2005. Where have the Northern League’s new voters come from? Clearly they have not come from increased voter turnout, the number tumbling just as much in Monte San Giusto as in the Marche region and in Italy generally. The most reasonable inference, given that the centre-right held fast in 2010 while the centre-left lost the percentage equivalent of the Northern League’s gains, is that centre-left voters in Monte San Giusto were more likely to have voted Northern League at least in larger numbers, all things being equal, than voters of other political camps. Another fact supportive of this inference is that the self-identifying, still communist Left received just 3 per cent of the total vote in 2010, down from 10 per cent in the 2005 regional elections.

Changing Regional Politics and the Dilemmas of the Left If a political history of the Marche region since the Second World War were to be written, the account would likely be something like the following: The region by the early 1960s was the sum of its provincial parts: red in its Bologna-bordering Pesaro-Urbino province; red and Republican in its central province of Ancona; solidly white, that is Christian Democratic, in its Macerata province; and a contentious combination of militant Communists, rightists and Christian Democrats in Ascoli Piceno, which along with the 4. The top five immigrant groups in the Marche, in order, are from Albania, Morocco, Romania, Macedonia and the Ukraine. See Regione Marche (2006: 53). 5. Source: Il Manifesto, 18 June 2010, p.8. The data summarized are derived from a national study commissioned by the Ministries of Labour and Social Policy and conducted by CENSIS.

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neighbouring region of the Abruzzo has been legally designated as part of the under-developed and state-assisted Italian South. Monte San Giusto is located 20 kilometres from the provincial capital of Macerata and borders the red hinterland of the province of Ascoli Piceno. It was one of the towns that went from white to red in the national Communist Party electoral surge of 1975/6 and remained red until it fell in1995 to the Berlusconian combination of Christian Democrats and former Socialists then named Forza Italia,. Governance in the Marche before the break-up of the Christian Democratic and Communist parties – in 1994 and 1991 respectively – had consisted largely of battle and the eventual succession of white to red power. Minority parties such as the Republicans and Socialists joined local, provincial and regional giuntas, or ruling coalitions, to make majority rule possible, exacting patronage and favours necessary to keep them in the electoral game. Increasing prosperity seemed to work in the Communist Party’s favour from 1976 onward, and the party overcame its own internal crises to govern the Marche region starting in 1995 because of its reputation for good government, especially in the face of avalanches of scandals that effectively destroyed whatever credit the Christian Democrats and Socialists could claim for governing during the growth years of the 1970s and 1980s. It has been rosé rather than red government from the start of the centreleft succession in 1995, and governance has consisted of high-level corporatist brokerage among governing coalition partners and the by now substantial red bureaucracy that the former Communist Party had built among trade unions, artisan associations, several provincial government bureaucracies, a major university and town halls throughout the region. The Communist Party’s success had owed to its ability to convince workers, artisans and industrial producers in the 27 industrial districts, which employed 73 per cent of the regional labour force and produced 56 per cent of its exports, that it was a better guarantor of industrial progress than its opponents. The first ten years of leftist regional administration starting in 1995 were led by a former magistrate with a reputation for probity and incorruptibility. Though the regional governor was an ‘independent of the left’, that is a leftist without party membership, the key portfolios in his administration were given to current and former communists and left-leaning technical professionals with experience in finance, labour, health care and social welfare. Between 2005 and 2010, , the region was governed by a center-left coalition led by Gian Maria Spacca, former Christian Democrat and head of a foundation established by the Merloni family, international white-goods producers and the Marche’s most prominent industrial clan. The March 2010 elections conferred upon Spacca another five-year term. The programmes of successive governments over the past fifteen years have been dedicated to fostering economic growth, reforming health services and pressing for a politics of inclusion for the socially marginalized – a category that included women and the handicapped, who were under-represented and under-employed in the economy – as well as new immigrants for whom social

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rather than strictly economic marginalization posed the greatest threat. At the same time, successive left-wing administrations sought to support industrial growth by increasing research and development as well as passing on and facilitating access to national and EU funds for young entrepreneurs and small firms. It reformed the supply side of the labour market, implementing with a high degree of efficiency the establishment of regional employment offices and labour exchanges. It took advantage of new Italian regional access to bonding authority, floating a sizeable bond issue ten years ago to refurbish infrastructure and cultural institutions damaged by earthquakes. The Marche region in effect was spruced up, and its tourism offices began advertising nationally and internationally the region as a brand. The Marche was ‘all of Italy in one region’. The new ruling governing coalition, installed on 10 March 2010, set forth its program for the next five years. Its primary objective is to respond to the problems of the citizens, above all by focusing on ‘work, the protection of workers, their families and their incomes’. The new government promises to support small businesses, artisans and industries. Its priority is that the region should play a leading role in job training and supporting new entrepreneurship. Thanks to direct funding for job training and new entrepreneur programs by the EU, these goals can be accomplished even in the face of the growing fiscal crises of the Italian state and its regions. The new centre-left government believes it will also succeed by mobilizing the ‘DNA’ of the Marche, which consists of ‘the stalwart character of Marchigiani’ (people from the Marche), as evidenced by common commitment to the values of work and entrepreneurship, the region’s manufacturing vocation, and its small-scale and solidary social life.6 The heavy-handed fusion of cultural particularism and economic success, long part of the intellectual folklore of the region (see Blim 1990), is highly analogous with Gavin Smith’s discovery and characterization of a ‘culture of productive corporatism’ in the Alicante region of Spain (Smith 2006: 627). In a departure from their first fifteen years in government, the new coalition is silent on the question of immigration. Nowhere is the growing immigrant population that is so important to economic life mentioned. Nor is any guarantee of equal opportunity proffered. ‘Solidarity,’ the term of choice on the centre-left used in lieu of equal opportunity when referring to the needs and wants of new immigrant populations, is used only in the strictly corporatist sense – that is, those who form the community of citizens, ‘the Marchigiani’, presumed to be possessed of stalwart character, a capacity for hard work and entrepreneurship, as well as an appreciation of the everyday satisfactions of provincial life, are entitled to solidarity in protecting their jobs, incomes and family life. For the 5 per cent of the population who are 6. Consiglio di Governo. 2010. ‘Programma di governo della IX Legislatura Regionale 2010–2015’. Retrieved 1 June 2010 from: http://www.regione.marche. it/home.

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foreign nationals, and whose labour output in the regional economy is rising rapidly, there is no accounting given of their needs or abilities, or their role in regional economic and social renewal. The success of the Northern League throughout the formerly red regions of Italy raises more questions than it provides answers. Nationally, the League picked up 13 per cent of the total vote, and scored 14 per cent of the vote in the red heartland region of Emilia-Romagna (capital Bologna). In the Marche region, its 6 per cent overall share underestimates, I believe, its greater significance. The League garnered a little over 9 per cent of the vote in Pesaro-Urbino, the reddest of the Marche’s five provinces, and elected a regional counsellor via direct popular preference. The League drew 7 per cent of the vote in the mixed red and white province of Macerata, and elected a regional counsellor as well. In Monte San Giusto, fully 17 per cent of the voters in this once Communist-majority town voted for the League in March 2010, up from just 2 per cent in 2005. Though I have not canvassed a broad cross-section of the town population, or had a chance yet to talk with informants since the new result, I have noted since 2004, when I conducted a full year of fieldwork in the town, strong and frank resentment of the increased presence of immigrants in the workplace and in the piazza. From twenty Italian national informants and their extended families with whom I am in close touch, whose backgrounds are working-class, whose origins lie in the peasantry, and whose political beliefs range from neo-fascist to old communist to post-communist, comments both disparaging and fearful of new immigrants, especially those of colour, were common. Several middle-aged women professed feeling unease when crossing through the main piazza at night to and from the main church because of the likelihood of encountering immigrants, many of who live there because of the housing availability in the inner city since the suburbanization of Italian households. A young educated accountant told me just before the March elections that he found it troubling that the majority of children in the town elementary school come from foreign-national households. Other complaints are about language use and food habits. The informants with whom I have close contact argue that the immigrants prefer to speak their native tongues, that their Italian is rudimentary and that they rarely initiated conversations with Italians. Bars that became frequented by foreign nationals in the 2000s have lost their Italian clientele, and several have closed. Several informants expressed distaste for the culinary tastes of their immigrant neighbours, curry not being among the favoured flavours of the town. Two informants have moved out of apartment houses and into new dwellings to avoid contact with immigrant families and their cooking smells. Less than full effort to assimilate is met with anger; assimilation is met with acceptance. Foreign-national women and men who marry into local Italian families receive high praise when they speak Italian instead of another or other languages. Conversion to Catholicism is also preferred as this entitles children of the union to the Sacraments and the material benefits that go with

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them. Baptisms have cemented many family alliances; first Communion gifts have financed more than one remodelled kitchen among my informants over the years. Catholic rituals pay off, wishes to avoid ostracism aside. ‘We have stopped the invasion’, the Marche region website of the Northern League advertises, touting the fact that the number of immigrants from North Africa who have succeeded in reaching Italy has dropped significantly over the past year. Under the League’s Roberto Maroni, the Italian Minister of the Interior, immigrants who are rounded up are transferred to ‘centres for identification and expulsion’, as the journalist John Hooper describes current practice.7 The Northern League in the Marche region is seeking to expand its electorate through a broad, good-government appeal. As Luca Paolini, the Marche regional secretary puts it, the establishment centre-left governing coalition expelled the leftist elements of the former Communist Party in order to be able credibly to marginalize and finally eliminate the Northern League from their midst. When League candidates called the centre-left coalition a band of thieves, Paolini says, they were declaring that the current ‘parti-ocracy’ was incapable of honest, transparent government – something that only the League can truly offer the region’s residents. The League promises that it would divide the region’s resources more equitably should it come to power, perhaps a somewhat surprising claim coming from a rightist, xenophobic movement and party.

Long March to Oblivion? Considering the Left’s Options amid Rightist Xenophobic Success Italian historian Paul Ginsborg, commenting on the 2001 national electoral defeat of the Left, argued that, the ‘long-standing tradition which identified left-wing politics with the politics of participation and grass-roots democracy, of learning citizenship through practice, had been left woefully in abeyance’ (Ginsborg 2003: 316). Writing now, he might well add that a leftist party that forsakes workers, especially new immigrant workers who have need of solidarity and unity with Italians in the workplace and in politics, neglects its future while it traduces its past. Attempts to secure local voting privileges for legal foreign residents have sprung up among deputies on the Left as well as the Right, save for the Northern League, but neither side has found a way around the League in successive legislatures since 1998 (Zincone 2008: 10–11). The lineages of a corporatist Italian Left run deep (Ignazi 1992). From Palmiro Togliatti’s ‘Salerno Turn’, whereby the Communist Party in 1944 chose democracy rather than revolution, through Enrico Berlinguer’s 7. ‘Anti-immigrant Support Rises as Italian Far Right Makes Big Gains in Poll,’ Guardian, 30 March 2010. Retrieved 24 April 2010 from: http://www.guardian. co.uk/world/2010/mar/30.

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Eurocommunism and eventual alliance with the Christian Democratic Party beginning in 1976, the communist left had long sought to fashion a governing majority by forming a historic bloc composed of blue-collar workers, enlightened white-collar workers and their unions along with intellectuals and radical Catholics. An especially important theoretical concession deriving from one or more of Stalin’s united front strategies is that ‘those who produce’ – that is, artisans and entrepreneurs who produce value alongside their workers – are worthy allies of the working-class. Even if small entrepreneurs are classically petty bourgeois, they eschew the parasitism of the shopkeepers and commercial mediators; they are redeemed through their labour (Ginsborg 1990). In Monte San Giusto, for instance, roughly a third of the shoe entrepreneurs and shoe artisans voted Communist, and several served as Communist town counsellors during the 1980s (Blim 1990). The party’s regional successes in mid 1970s central Italy had encompassed some of these coalition possibilities and with greater alacrity than in the great northern industrial capitals where its political hold via worker militancy and trade union strength was hegemonic. In a sense, the road to Communist power went through central Italy, gathering the wealth and energies necessary for a ‘reconquest’ of the Italian South.8 This did mean in regions like the Marche, however, that it was out with ‘workerism’ and the class struggle and in with industrial cooperation, especially as the Communist Party began to gain electoral ground by the late 1970s. The small and medium enterprises for which the region was justly famous were treated as the geese that laid the golden eggs. From the Left, politicians in the region’s piazzas to workers sipping Campari sodas in local bars or chilled vodka around kitchen tables, the rhetoric of cross-class collaboration was to be found practically anywhere except the extra-parliamentary Left found among the region’s academics. There is no gainsaying that the Communist Party’s desire to create a progressive Italian majority could have been fulfilled without creating a multi-class political platform and ultimately a multi-class power bloc. But the ‘democratic turn’ did create long-lasting problems. From the beginning of the 1970s onwards, leftwing militants ranging from intellectuals and trade union rank and file to student activists and ultimate the younger generations in great numbers deserted the party at its electoral peak and subsequently as it stumbled from one incoherent iteration and name change to another. In the central Italian regions like the Marche, where the Communist Party openly encouraged membership among the industrial entrepreneurial stratum, a quota of voters in the industrial districts that approached one in four, its leadership never spoke out about the rampant illegalities practised by entrepreneurs as a matter of course. Small firms evaded taxes, paid workers 8. Pierluigi Bersani, currently general secretary of the Democratic Party, along with Enrico Letta, composed a timely little book extolling the genius of small-scale industry and how the state could support its growth just in time to serve as a platform for the 2006 general elections. See Bersani and Letta (2004).

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at lower than legal rates and without paying pension and medical insurance contributions, often deceiving the workers as well as the state. More than one informant in my circle has gone to the pension office to settle up their retirement, only to find that employers tem to fifteen years ago never paid their pension contributions and kept the money for themselves – thus forcing the worker to return to work instead of retiring to make up for the lost pension years. These forms of fiscal evasion and their widespread dispersion throughout central Italy were common knowledge then and are common knowledge now, as many of the same tricks are being pulled on immigrant workers who are more powerless than the Italian workers who preceded them forty years ago. Workers then and now have paid a price for the Left’s pursuit of crossclass cooperation and social solidarity. Thus the case at hand bears some formal similarity to those explored by Smith and Narotzky in the Alicante and Lleida regions of Spain (Smith 2006; Narotzky 2007). There are, however, important ways in which the Marche and Spanish cases differ, but perhaps most importantly I view the facts a bit differently when compared to their conclusions. First, while one can recognize the enormous bureaucratic ambitions embedded in European economic integration, what is one to make of the fact that in a region such as the Marche, so clearly connected to European integration and whose livelihood depends upon its export production, informants at all levels express little or no dissent with its objectives or programs, all of which find their way down to the town and village level via development funds and initiatives? Instead, the EU is recognized as the key financial resource in providing funding for training for first-time entrepreneurs and small-business people of various social backgrounds, and job training and retraining from shop floors to universities. In a society whose laws are still framed by fascistera distinctions between the different corporate entities, meaning in effect that workers in different categories are deeply unequally treated, EU monies support public goods and provide incentives for the Italian state to do so too. Thus, insofar as the Spanish cases as analysed by Smith and Narotzky support or reinforce what could be called a rhetoric of suspicion about the effects, intended or otherwise, of European integration, I would suggest that there may exist cases other than my own that could dilute the strength of this interpretation (see, e.g., Holmes 2000).9 Second, their idea of a ‘culture of productive corporatism’ may conceal more than it reveals. There is the obvious electoral evidence presented here, but demonstrable throughout an Italian society almost obsessively concerned with regional economic growth, that if there were a corporatist consensus, it 9. See also the CA comments (Smith 2006: 633–36) on Smith offered by Douglas Holmes and Thomas Wilson, which suggest something of what I mean by ‘Eurosuspicion,’ even as Chris Shore seeks to recast the vision of the European Union as an international arena of intense economic and political competition, a view I would share.

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must be on the wane now or have become separated over time from politics, a zone where centrist practitioners are incurring determined political resistance from all sides. The exclusion of the still-communist left and the remarkable rise of Northern League-based protest voting are evidence of frailties rather than of strength. Using the culture concept in this sort of context, I believe, thus may be far too stabilizing a characterization, and risks elevating local slogans into a realm of existence where their real presence in politics and economy may in fact be quite fleeting. It remains to be seen what others observe in other regions throughout Europe, but from my limited purview I find that the Marche region of today is a far more unsettled and unsteady place today than at any time in my studies there since 1981. Both the economics and the politics have come unstuck, and I would rue any concept that promised so much clarity and security of vision, or of experience for that matter. But it would seem to me that the Left as a transformational political force has indeed paid a steep price, and has become a ‘social cost’ to the region as well. If the Marche case can be read as a reflection on the Italian Left’s long march since the start of the local versions of the national economic miracle, then it would seem reasonable to draw several important conclusions. Corporatism has been costly and has become increasingly incoherent: the Left did not protect and support workers’ struggles in the workplace in the past, and now finds itself unable to support new immigrants in their struggle to find a decent place first on the shop floor and then in provincial society at large. Progressive unions, including the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), formerly directly aligned with the Communist Party, have little contact with the tens of thousands of workers in the thousands of small workplaces in the region’s industrial districts. The CGIL represents perceived workers’ interests in the political mediations constantly underway among all of the institutional actors with a stake in maintaining the health of the regional economy. The power that workers have to put down tools, to demonstrate and to push for political change through organizing is now only theoretical. It is as if the workers’ energies were like a field laying fallow, the furrows now shadows beneath unruly patches of weeds. Effort over the years might have yield a better, stronger crop today, and made solidarity between Italian and foreign national workers more likely now. It may have helped nip in the bud the working-class and petty-bourgeois slide to the xenophobic right in a town like Monte San Giusto, and to a lesser extent across the Marche region as a whole. Even the potential power of immigrants arising out of their struggles for equal opportunity and a better life is not available to the Left or its organizations. For its pains, the Left has lost political strength to the far Right, thus knocking its position on the power board two or three squares back. It also finds itself promoting what one might call ‘economic provincialism’ in concert with its former adversaries whose international concerns, whether abroad among the world’s poor or at home among the world’s immigrants, are scant. Better more bread in their own mouths than a slice for others.

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Cultural egocentrism, that praise of the genius of a people, fuels some good rhetorical fun in the hundreds of little piazzas in the hundreds of towns that dot central Italy’s beautiful countryside. It appeals to people’s sense that their local ways deliver just a little better pasta and add just the right amount of pepper to their salami and sausages. I have also found that collective selfdeprecation on community occasions is just as present as a motif in local rhetoric as collective self-glorification. The Left throughout the regions and towns of Italy has lost its footing on the long march to a better society. But then for so many reasons beyond the Left’s political powers, so has Italian society.

References Bersani, P., and E. Letta. 2004. Viaggi nell’Economia Italiana. Roma: Donzelli. Blim, M. 1990. Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences. New York: Praeger. Castronovo, V. 1980. L’industria italiana dall’ottocento a oggi. Milano: Arnaldo Mondadori. Confindustria Marche. 2010. ‘Rapporto 2009 sull’industria Marchigiana’. Ancona. Gallino, L. 2003. La scomparsa dell’Italia industriale. Torino: Einaudi. Ginsborg, P. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988. New York: Penguin. ——— 2003. Italy and Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State, 1980–2001. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Holmes, D. 2000. Integral Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ignazi, P. 1992. Dal PCI al PDS. Bologna: Il Mulino. Mazzoni, R. 1983. ‘La ridistribuzione sul territorio delle attivita produttivo: il caso delle Marche’, in S. Anselmi (ed.), L’industria a domicilio: aspetti dell’economia marchigiana negli ultimi decenni. Ancona: CLUA, pp. 37–60. Nardozzi, G. 2004. Miracolo e declino: Italia tra concorrenza e protezione. Bari: Laterza. Narotzky, S. 2007. ‘The Project in the Model: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism’, Current Anthropology 48(3): 403–24. Regione Marche. 2006. ‘Osservatorio Regionale Mercato del Lavoro: Gli immigrati nelle Marche’. Ancona. ——— 2010. ‘Osservatorio Regionale Mercato del Lavoro: Rapporto annuale 2009’. Ancona. Smith, G. 2006. ‘When the Logic of Capital Is the Real Which Lurks in the Background’, Current Anthropology 47(4): 621–39. Zincone, G. 2008. ‘Main Features of Italian Immigration Flows and Stock’, Forum Internazionale ed Europea di Ricerche sull’Immigrazione. Retrieved 15 September 2009 from: http://euro-citizenship.edu/. Zˇizˇek, S. 2009. ‘Berlusconi in Teheran’, London Review of Books 31(4): 3–7.

Chapter 7 Class without Consciousness: Regional Identity in the Italian Alps after 1989 Jaro Stacul

Introduction This chapter seeks to provide an anthropological reading of the recent emergence of populist nationalism in Italy, and particularly to analyse the ways it is interpreted and understood as an ideological framework outside the centres of political and economic power.1 Although it can take on a broad range of forms, in late modernity populist nationalism is expressed chiefly by the emergence of particularistic forms of identification which have altered the ways people constitute themselves as political subjects. This emergence is related to the increase in ‘rooted’ forms of identity that is in turn the outcome of the decline in the unifying force of the nation-state’s mechanisms of identification (Friedman 2003: 7). Thus, populism may be expressed by a renewed emphasis upon cultures as bounded and discrete entities (Stolcke 1995; Wright 1998); it may take on the form of ‘integralism’, which includes all kinds of chauvinistic, territorially based essentialism in Europe in the late twentieth century (Holmes 2000); finally, populism can also have a ‘neo-nationalist’ character when it is advocated by far-right but legitimate parliamentary parties (Gingrich and Banks 2006). In sum, despite the different terms deployed to describe similar (but by no means identical) 1. This chapter is a revised version of papers delivered at the 10th Biennial Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Ljubljana, 26–29 August 2008, and at the 107th Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 19–23 November 2008. I am grateful to Grant MacEwan College (now University) for providing the funds that enabled me to attend these events. I would also like to thank Franca Boag, Gábor Halmai, Don Kalb, Enrico M. Milicˇ and Davide Però for their comments on earlier drafts of this work.

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phenomena, it is clear from anthropological accounts that the social and political context in which populist nationalism finds fertile ground is that of groups that have become alienated from existing mainstream parties and distrustful of representative politics (Pratt 2003: 175; Turner 2003: 49). While the ethnic, cultural and territorial character of populism has been extensively explored by anthropologists, relatively little has been written about its class dimension. The limited attention devoted to this issue partly stems from the fact that many contemporary scholars seem to have mistaken the transformation and decline of the Fordist working-class as the end of class itself. However, studying class in late modernity can be a very challenging task, given the declining theoretical weight accorded to class itself to make sense of the transformations in late modernity.2 The theorists of ‘postindustrial society’ (e.g., Lash and Urry 1987; Harvey 1989), for example, have argued that in a world in which people move with unprecedented speed, race and ethnicity have become the dominant discourses of social difference, with the result that class does not represent a major source of identity and group belonging (Savage 2000: 40). In this context, where material inequality does not necessarily give rise to class solidarity or class consciousness (Bottero and Irwin 2003: 469),3 more and more people explicitly disavow class identities (Savage 2000: 35), and the term ‘class’ has virtually disappeared from the conventional vocabulary of political discussion (Cannadine 1998:13). The absence of class from political discourse does not involve the disappearance of class divisions, as shown by the fact that class itself is still appealed to by workers who set themselves against capitalist systems of production (Lem 2002). In this regard, Balibar (1991: 180) has made the point that the present ‘crisis of class’ is a crisis of the specific forms of representation and practice of class struggle, but does not represent the disappearance of antagonism itself. If anything, the decline of the Fordist working-class has been accompanied by a process of class repolarization that is the outcome of the emergence of corporate and financial elites on the one hand and of the crisis of sovereignty on the other (Turner 2003: 48–50). Thus, while class identification may be on the wane, the salience of class-based experience is not (Kideckel 2008: 11); if anything, ‘history … engenders relationships between people that are class-like and thereby produces people who relate to each other as members of classes’ (Narotzky and Smith 2006: 28). The relationship between class and populism is the issue that concerns us here: the other chapters in this collection have shown that the populist nationalisms that spread in eastern Europe as a reaction to neoliberal rule and globalization exhibit strong subtexts of class, and that class maintains its potency both as a subjective and analytic category (see also Kalb 2009). One problem we encounter, in the study of the aforementioned relationship, is the 2. The literature on class is vast. For a summary of current debates, see especially Bottero and Irwin (2003). 3. For a discussion of the concept of ‘class consciousness’, see Hobsbawm (1984).

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definition of the character of populism itself. As Laclau has argued, central to this definition is the fact that populist discourse draws a clear-cut distinction between ‘the people’ and ‘power’ (Laclau 2005: 98–99); that is to say, ‘the people’ as opposed to the ‘enemy’. Yet Laclau points out that the identity of both ‘the people’ and the ‘enemy’ is difficult to determine. This difficulty stems from the language of populist discourse, which tends to be imprecise and fluctuating (Laclau 2005: 118). If we take on board Laclau’s point, we have to acknowledge the fact that in order to make sense of populist nationalism and of its subtexts of class we also need to attend to the analysis of class as part of the realm of discourse (Ortner 1998: 7), and allow for the ways it is used and interpreted by the people who have chosen to identify with a specific political force. Thus, in an attempt to gain a deeper insight into the relationship between class and populism, I adopt a perspective from below, and examine the ways populist discourse is understood by a wide range of social actors in contemporary Italy in relation to the political transformations that have occurred in the last two decades.

A New Political Landscape Italy at the turn of this century seems an appropriate context for a study of populist nationalism and changing meanings of class, for the identities that were built around working-class culture had been partially lost, and nowadays even Italian leftist politicians refrain from placing emphasis upon class consciousness or class conflict. This is in stark contrast with Italy’s political situation from the end of the Second World War until the late 1980s: what attracted socio-cultural anthropologists working in the country at that time was not populist nationalism but the tension between Communists and Catholics. Until then, Italy represented the ideal context for the exploration of the coexistence of strong sub-national political cultures, given that the Christian Democratic Party (DC) occupied the centre ground of the political spectrum and was permanently in government, and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was able to take part in the decision-making processes despite being excluded from governing coalitions (Cento Bull 2000: 4–6). In this political context the Italian state used to be the premier framework for organizing the national economy. By contrast, the early 1990s was a period of significant political and economic transformation as a result of the economic recession on the one hand and of the end of the Cold War on the other. Among such transformations, the demise of the governing DC, the division of the PCI into two political forces (now three), and the decline of the welfare state are the most important. These were accompanied by the end of the national economy as the primary unit of economic structure, and by several privatization initiatives all over the country. I will not go into all the details of this political transformation. Suffice it to say, for the purposes of this chapter, that the dissolution of the political forces

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that had played key roles in the Italian political arena in the past resulted in the waning (and delegitimation) of traditional political ideologies, most notably in the blurring of the boundary between Left and Right. The waning of these political ideologies gave way to what Holmes has defined as ‘integralism’, namely, a form of politics that merges and synthesizes what might appear to be incompatible political doctrines (Holmes 2000: 13). The emergence of this form of politics was marked by the ascendancy of regionalist and centreright parties with an Italian version of Thatcherism on their agenda, which presented themselves as above and beyond the traditional criteria of Left and Right, and quickly adjusted to the demands of a society that had become disillusioned with politics. Among such parties, it was those that emerged out of the ashes of the old DC, namely, the Lega Nord (Northern League) and Forza Italia (Let’s Go Italy) that were the most successful. When it came to the fore, in the early 1990s, the Northern League represented a reaction against the malfunctioning of the Italian state: it contested the idea of national identity and the legitimacy of a nation-state seen as corrupt (see, e.g., Diamanti 1996; Giordano 2000). The party had on its agenda the transformation of Italy into a federal state and, for some time, even the territorial division of the North from the South of the country. Its leader, Umberto Bossi, championed the idea of a ‘northern Italian culture’ because of northerners’ supposed propensity for hard work, as opposed to a ‘Mediterranean’ one of a putatively lazy and state-subsidized South (Cento Bull 1996: 177; Giordano 2000: 458–64), which was described as the main cause of Italy’s economic crisis. His party demanded autonomy of the periphery from the political centre, and promised to recreate a lost ‘authenticity’ against the centralized nation-state, and to maintain a traditional Gemeinschaft. In order to accomplish this, the party promised stern measures to curb illegal immigration from non-European countries. The extent to which the Northern League and its ideology may be considered populist (or ‘integralist’) has been an object of scholarly debate. What unites most political scientists is the view that what makes the party ‘populist’ is the disproportionate power of its leader, who acts as the only mediator between the political and industrial elite on the one hand, and ‘the people’ on the other (Albertazzi 2006: 22). However, as Albertazzi suggests (2006: 22–23), the Northern League’s ‘populist’ character is also derived from a distrust of representative politics, as well as by an ever changing definition of ‘enemies’ ranging from immigrants to politicians accused of threatening and undermining the well being and security of ‘the people’. The party’s rhetoric may also be described as ‘integralist’ because of the combination of elements of rightist and leftist political doctrines. This is the case, for instance, of Umberto Bossi’s description of northern Italians as people who need to be protected from the ‘hordes of immigrants’ who will become beneficiaries of citizenship which Italians themselves are losing. Perhaps the most intriguing transformation in the Italian political arena, following the advent of the Northern League, was the sudden rise

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of businessmen turned into politicians (Revelli 1996: 39). Of these, media magnate Silvio Berlusconi has been the most successful. He founded a political force of his own, Forza Italia, a centre-right party that protects the interests of entrepreneurs and has on its agenda an Italian version of Thatcherism and a residual welfare state. Shortly after its foundation, the party captured most of the vote formerly gained by the Northern League, particularly in the North of the country, and succeeded in appealing to people generally disinterested in politics (Shin and Agnew 2008: 11). It consolidated an alliance with the Northern League itself and other parties with similar leanings, and led a centre-right coalition that won the national elections in 1994 and governed the country for a few months. But in the years that followed, the same coalition gained increasing popularity throughout Italy, and subsequently won the 2001 national elections by a large majority. The rest is contemporary history: the 2006 national elections resulted in a tight victory of the opposing centreleft coalition. However, internal divisions forced the governing coalition to resign in 2008, and the elections that followed resulted in another landslide victory of the coalition led by Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister at the time of writing. Central to Berlusconi’s vision of the Italian state is the imposition of an entrepreneurial ethos on the political system. According to him, Italy has to be run according to an enterprise model, and his discourse is replete with neoliberal overtones. He shares with the Northern League’s leader the view that Italian cities have to be made safer and illegal immigration has to be eliminated. He has also committed himself to reforming the justice system by curbing the power of investigating magistrates who, as he keeps stating, have interfered too much in the liberty of those who want to go about their business in peace (Ginsborg 2001: 321; Shin and Agnew 2008: 12), and the idea of ‘freedom’ (libertà) looms large in his speeches (Ginsborg 2003: 5). More importantly, in his propaganda he does not present himself as a politician but as a person sharing the lifestyle of ordinary people: thus, in his discourse he describes himself as a ‘worker’ (lavoratore) and draws attention to the fact that his political adversaries have never worked (Shin and Agnew 2008: 24). Berlusconi’s ‘populist’ character stems from his appeal to ‘the people’ above and against existing parties and institutions (Pasquino 2007: 50), particularly the parties of the centre-left that he derogatorily labels ‘communist’. The neoliberal policies of these political forces have altered the nature of the interaction between the state and local communities: they have meant greater exposure of the latter to forces associated with global markets, and especially to a politics which prioritizes localism, managerialism and service provision over ideology and national identity, and affected to a significant extent the ways most Italians think and talk about class. The emergence of this type of politics brings us back to the issue of the definition of the character of populist nationalism, and particularly to the wide range of forms it may take on. Populist nationalism represents, among other things, a symbolic repertoire by which populations make sense of their discontents

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of globalizing processes, and in the European countries of the former Soviet bloc support for political forces is tantamount to opposition to the neoliberal agendas of the parties in power. However, populism can also combine with neoliberalism, given that policies designed to rid societies of a bureaucratic state may be conjoined with notions of organic communities and a strand of anti-modernism (Pratt 2003: 175), and the long-standing alliance between the Northern League and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (now Partito della Libertà, or Party of Liberty) is a case in point. Thus, if we were to draw a clear-cut dichotomy between populist discourse and that of neoliberalism, we would end up overlooking the ways these two discourses may converge. As Laclau has argued ‘populism … “simplifies” the political space, replacing a complex set of differences and determinations by a stark dichotomy whose two poles are necessarily imprecise’ (Laclau 2005: 18). The vagueness and imprecision of populist symbols forms the basis of populism’s appeal on a radically heterogeneous social terrain (Laclau 2005: 98) and, I would argue, enables people to reinterpret, reappropriate and recombine apparently incompatible discourses for their own requirements and propensities. In sum, the point I am trying to make is that it is necessary to problematize populism and its relation to class not just through an examination of class formation, but also by analysing the ways its discourse converges with other discourses. That the imposition of economic liberalism, as an ideological framework, has altered the way people constitute themselves as political subjects is a truism; yet at a time when political rhetoric combines elements of apparently incompatible political doctrines, the language of populism may be even more fluctuating and imprecise. As a result, an understanding of populist nationalism calls for an analysis of the ways its discourses are interpreted and understood by different social actors. In the specific case of Italy, it requires an exploration of how discourses derived from a tradition of opposition to the bureaucratic state may be well adapted to the demands of neoliberal globalization (Freeman 2007: 255). Populist nationalism exhibits strong subtexts of class, yet at a time when the latter is seldom referred to explicitly in political discourses, class may be ‘spoken through’ other languages of social difference (Ortner 1998: 8). Phrased differently, it may be implicit in what political leaders and people say. Thus, the implicitness of class in populist discourse opens up the question of how it relates to other discursive fields and languages of social difference, issues to which I turn next.

Class ‘Consciousness’ in an Alpine Valley The Vanoi valley, an Alpine community in the Trentino region of northern Italy, lends itself very well to the exploration of the above issues, for it is a context in which both Bossi’s Northern League and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia have made big inroads. Up until the 1960s, the inhabitants of the area lived by a combination of agriculture, forestry and animal husbandry. All of the characteristics of peasant

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society, culture and economy were there, for all households had access to grazing land that is communally owned by the municipality, and also had private land which they worked until very recently. The absence of a sharecropping system in the area means that although class distinctions do exist, there are no significant class divisions between large and small landowners. However, because locals could hardly make a living from agro-pastoral activities alone, the community extended and reproduced in many other distant and diverse settings. Thus, this seemingly ideal peasant community was heavily subsidized by remittances from relatives working in other Italian regions, as well as in foreign places such as Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Although the vast majority of the people living in the valley engaged in migration, they never developed what we would call a ‘working-class consciousness’, and they identify themselves as ‘peasants’ (contadini) or simply as ‘working people’ (lavoratori) irrespective of their professions. What characterized the economic history of the area until the 1960s, then, was the high degree of adaptability (and ‘flexibility’) of its inhabitants, as well as a capacity to endure the hardships that living in a mountain area entails. With the demise of the agro-pastoral economy in the 1960s, the population of the valley dwindled. However, with the 1960s the valley also experienced broad trends towards prosperity when jobs were created by the Christian Democrats in power in order to prevent locals from emigrating. While job security resulted in rising levels of consumption and educational achievement, it also generated a sharp distinction between those who succeeded in completing high school (who subsequently left the valley in the pursuit of a career in the public administration) and those who kept a foot on the land or engaged in several menial occupations. Yet job security did not result in the rejection of the established moral framework: while the former was certainly preferable to the uncertainties and hardships of rural life, it was also associated with the valley’s incorporation into the political economy of the Italian state, and engendered a sense of dependence on outside agencies (Stacul 2007: 456). The 1990s turned out to be a difficult period for the valley, for the falling price of timber and the subsequent introduction of timber from Austria and Eastern Europe into the national market placed a heavy strain on the local economy. Nowadays the subsidies of the regional council are crucial in keeping people on the land, although they have not been sufficient to stop emigration or prevent the closure of the local sawmill in 2002. The presentday population (scarcely 1,700 inhabitants) includes for the most part people who work in various types of manual trades inside and outside the valley, as well as retired agriculturalists (mainly women) and woodsmen (men) who earn a pension from the state. Sharp class divisions are not present, and the overwhelming majority of the resident population keep a foot on the land and are engaged in a variety of livelihood-seeking activities. Overall, most of the activities carried out by locals are divided between wage labour in the industrial and service sector of the formal economy and work in the informal economy. The majority of the people I know, who work in small

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factories outside the valley or in the construction business, come back home after 5.00 p.m., and before having dinner they do additional manual work to supplement their poor salaries.4 Thus, this society may be described as ‘post-peasant’ or simply as a ‘working peasantry’, for it developed out of the exigencies of a rural livelihood which enhances the integration of a variety of productive activities (Holmes 1989: 56). When I undertook fieldwork in the valley, in the mid 1990s, I found that terms such as Communist and Christian Democrat had virtually disappeared. Thus, I noticed a kind of alienation from public politics among the people I worked with, and this became a major element of the issue I set out to address. This alienation clearly contrasted with the political activism of two decades before, and with the strong Catholic subculture expressed by continuing support for the DC.5 The demise of the DC that followed the waves of corruption that enveloped the party nationally and regionally had the effect of discrediting the national government. As a result, the people of the valley were increasingly distrustful of the intentions of the politicians in Rome and, echoing the discourses of the Northern League’s leader, welcomed the possibility that the North of the country could have more autonomy from the rest of Italy. Locals were aware of the impact that the economic crisis was likely to have; however, it was clear to most of them that this was to be different from the other crises that they had faced before, simply because the state was unlikely to provide help. The period between the early 1990s until very recently found the people of the valley caught between disillusionment with national politics and exposure to a new political rhetoric that centres to a significant extent on the idea of work. The Northern League, as we have seen, had on its agenda the transformation of Italy into a federal state, and even the secession of the wealthy North from the poorer South of the country; its leader, Umberto Bossi, championed the idea of ‘northern Italian culture’ as the culture of hard work. Likewise, central to the rhetoric of the leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi, is the promise to make the Italian bureaucratic machinery efficient and, as mentioned earlier, he presents himself as a ‘worker’.6 Although there is no doubt that locals had been very receptive to these messages, in the valley Italy’s political and economic crisis was not directly associated with global economic changes but was largely described as a moral issue: it was laziness and moral corruption that were believed to be the main causes of this situation, as epitomized by the conviction that ‘politicians are dirty’ (i politici l’e sporchi) or ‘thieves’ (ladri). Locals contrasted politicians’ 4. This is the case of sawmill workers, who are well known for their skills as furniture makers. 5. It must be stressed that the PCI was also very popular in the 1970s, and that Caoria was the village where it received the most votes. 6. The idea of work was also central to a new hegemonic discourse that came to the fore particularly in the 1990s, that of the ‘Europe of the regions’ (Narotzky and Smith 2006: 10).

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moral corruption with their own sense of (chiefly Catholic) morality, expressed by emphasis upon honesty, hard work, and loyalty to one’s family and community as the main moral guidelines for conducting one’s life. They welcomed the possibility that the North of the country could have greater autonomy from Rome itself; on many occasions they voiced their desire to see supposedly inefficient bureaucrats replaced by experienced and hardworking entrepreneurs in public administration, and most of them shared Berlusconi’s view that privatization initiatives were necessary in order to keep the local and national economy afloat in the face of the economic crisis. Thus, the news that the Berlusconi-led coalition had won the 1994 national elections was hailed as the beginning of a new era in Italian politics: as a woman of the village of Caoria said, ‘At last now things are going to change’. The Northern League’s emphasis on the propensity for hard work as a marker of northern Italian identity had considerable impact on the Vanoi valley in that it generated a debate on the nature of local identity and culture. Thus, the question of what distinguishes the people of one village from another suddenly became a topic of discussion. Interestingly, in the course of my fieldwork I noticed that distinctiveness was not deemed to be predicated upon differences in language or dialect but on attitudes towards work. Locals’ emphasis on work is hardly surprising: in the valley, the capacity to sustain hard physical labour is not a myth: it is impressive, and is highly praised. To corroborate this point, a man of Caoria once drew my attention to the fact that one is unlikely to see someone in the village sitting on a bench and doing nothing. In the villages of Caoria and Ronco, for example, the conviction that locals have always worked hard and have never asked for other people’s help looms large in local discourse. This is epitomized by the dictum, ‘We are always working, but we do it for ourselves, not for the others’. It comes as no surprise, then, that locals are keen to draw a distinction between salaried work and that performed in the domestic domain: while they make a livelihood from participation in the industrial and service sector of the formal economy, autonomous work and work in the informal economy are deemed more rewarding, for a worker is not under the surveillance of a manager or landowner, and physical labour allows him to exercise a (largely masculine) sense of autonomy (Herzfeld 2004: 88). This emphasis on autonomous work was echoed by a sawmill worker of Caoria who, in the course of our conversation, seized the opportunity to show me the family’s cobbler shop. The shop was run by his father, but it had to close down in the 1980s because ‘the high taxes made it unprofitable’. The man stated that in the past, when the valley was what he called ‘independent’, the shop had done very well. Then, he added, ‘the Italians came’,7 and it had to cease its activities. Obviously the man’s 7. The ‘arrival of the Italians’ conjures up different meanings, given that the valley was under Austro-Hungarian sovereignty until 1918, and despite the fact that German has never been spoken there. In this case, the ‘arrival of the Italians’ refers to the valley’s incorporation into the political economy of the Italian state. For an analysis of the multiple meanings attached to ‘Italians’, see Stacul (2003: 109–16).

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statement can be interpreted in different ways, but what seems clear is that in his view the valley used to be an efficient and hard-working community until state bureaucracy forced its people to give up their work ethic. This sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency, however idealized it may be, encodes both an ideal of self-reliance and a conceptualization of work as the means of increasing the stock of one’s property under the control of oneself (Stacul 2003: 56), which would be described as a ‘Protestant ethic’ if it were not for the fact that the people of the valley are Catholic, at least nominally. Locals do not hesitate to state that this work ethic is ‘in the blood’, namely, that it has been inherited from the ancestors.8 It is precisely this ethic that is believed to have enabled locals to endure the hardships of rural life in a mountain environment. So, for example, the fact that a person is considered a hard and efficient worker is accounted for by the fact that their parents or grandparents had the same good reputation. In other words, a work ethic is not believed to be acquired but simply passed across the generations. Implicit in this view is also the conviction that the household, as a unit of production and consumption, ideally reproduces itself over time: hardworking individuals reproduce hard-working individuals. That most of the people I worked with identify themselves as ‘peasants’ (contadini), rather than ‘herders’ (pastori), is a case in point: contadini conjures up ideas of autonomy and self-sufficiency, given that locals own the land they work. ‘Peasants’, then, stand in conceptual opposition to ‘herders’ in that the latter have to look after livestock owned by someone else and have to obey the orders of a supervisor, just like factory workers. Most locals associate this work ethic with the fact that, like most people of Trentino, they have had control over landed property since time immemorial, and landownership enables them to claim moral superiority over the farmers of the neighbouring Italian regions who used to work for absentee landlords. In stating this, most of my informants were trying to give historical foundation to their sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency. The above statements would describe a highly autonomous local community, if it were not for the fact that regional and state subsidies are crucial in keeping the local economy afloat. Similarly, the view that farmers in the nearby Italian regions only worked land owned by someone else is largely imagined, for there is no historical evidence for this. What is significant of such views is the fact that they highlight the significance of autonomous work in local discourse, and its role in affecting the ways people construct the social world in which they live: that the people of Caoria and Ronco describe each other as people ‘of the same kind’ (de la stesa sort) – namely, poor, self-sufficient and hard-working people – is a case in point. While defining themselves as ‘working people’ serves to cast the two villages as similar, it also 8. Obviously, I do not take this statement at face value. If anything, I agree with Narotzky and Smith (2006: 213–14) that the idea of ‘natural’ propensity to work may serve ideological purposes.

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positions people of other villages as different on the grounds that they do not work hard. The hard-work ethic that is deemed to be shared by the inhabitants of Caoria and Ronco is contrasted to the supposed inability to sustain hard work that is ascribed to the people of Canal San Bovo, the municipal seat. Likewise, the people of the Vanoi valley I interviewed describe themselves as ‘hard workers’ as opposed to those of the nearby valleys,9 especially to the inhabitants of other Italian regions. The sense of autonomy derived from ownership of landholdings is also associated with the capacity to protect one’s property boundaries and preventing strangers from setting foot across such boundaries, and in the course of my fieldwork I heard of several cases of skirmishes between neighbours over inches of land where their landholdings adjoined. Although landownership enables locals to present themselves as hard, self-reliant workers, to cast work as something that cannot be alienated, and finally to express a notion of personhood constructed through work and possession, it hardly conveys ideas of economic self-sufficiency, given the small size of landholdings in the Alps. If anything, the propensity to hard work and self-reliance that derive from landownership are contrasted to the putative laziness of people with secure jobs in administrative offices. In this sense, physical labour is cast as a virtue that marks class identity, and sets the manual worker off from the mechanical reproduction made possible by the advent of machinery (Herzfeld 2004: 125) and from the ‘non-work’ of those with an office-based job. While it may be contended that such views express the values of a post-peasant society, it must also be stressed that they are widely held in countries, such as Italy, in which the public sector has experienced retrenchment and jobs in the public sector no longer offer the prestige they once did. In this sense, such views also reflect the shift in public ideology toward the private sector as the reservoir of creativity and success. The shift in ideology analysed above mirrors Berlusconi’s and Bossi’s discourse, in which they call for a more efficient and less bureaucratic state machinery. Yet although TV and newspapers play an important role in propagating such messages, locals’ encounters with these discourses and with the ideology of economic liberalism that they embody were not ‘direct’ but mediated by grassroots politicians. One person who mediated such encounters was the mayor, an estate agent who administered the municipality of Canal San Bovo from the early 1990s until his untimely death in June 2009. Formerly the local secretary of the Catholic Association of Italian Workers (ACLI), he then joined the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) at a time when it formed part of the DC-led governing coalition. In the context of the rapidly changing political situation that followed the demise of the DC, he gained considerable power. He presented himself as a ‘mediator’ – namely, 9. Ironically, the people of the nearby Primiero valley to whom I have talked sharply criticized the inhabitants of the Vanoi valley on the grounds that they lack personal initiative and entrepreneurship and ‘only wait to be spoon-fed’ – that is to say, they rely on the subsidies of the regional council.

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a person who ‘gets things done’ – in the corridors and hallways of power in the provincial capital of Trent, and played a crucial role in affecting the ways the inhabitants of the valley made sense of the economic and political transformations that the country was undergoing at that time. He wrote various articles in the local magazine, published by the municipal council, to explain to locals that the privatization initiatives throughout the country involved the reorganization of the national economy. More importantly, his articles served to make locals realize that they could no longer rely on the subsidies from which they had benefited for a long time, and to advise those applying for jobs in the public sector that this sector too is now run according to an enterprise model. Thus, he attempted to put across the message that being offered a permanent job is no longer an entitlement but is conditional on possessing certain skills. While the mayor committed himself to fostering the growth of the local economy by promoting major works in the area (some of which were controversial) and by attempting to attract investors to the valley, he also gained the respect of the people who had become disillusioned with politics by championing local identity. During the 1995 mayoral campaign, which resulted in his re-election by a large majority, he presented himself as the person who takes care of the interests of the local community, and promised to address a problem that was at the forefront of locals’ concerns: the revitalization of the local community in the face of the economic crisis. One way in which this could be accomplished, he stated, was by creating new jobs in the area, and by calling back to the valley the natives who live and work in other places. The other way in which, according to him, the local community could be revitalized was by preventing the alienation of landed property to outsiders. In the 1990s this was described as a very serious issue, for depopulation and emigration to urban centres resulted in a substantial amount of land and a considerable number of buildings being sold to people (mainly urban dwellers and retirees) who do not have kinship ties in the area. In a social context within which the identification of farmers with the landholdings they own is very strong, a perception emerged that the transfer of property rights would entail the loss of community identity. Thus, in one of his electoral speeches, the mayor stated that this issue needed to be addressed by curbing the alienation of property to strangers. While it might be contended that preventing landholdings from being sold to outsiders was against the mayor’s interests as an estate agent, the rhetoric he deployed was very effective at a time when local identity was one of the key points of populist regionalism. Although the mayor was not affiliated to the Northern League or to any other regionalist party, he made use of a rhetoric that casts the community and its territory as ‘property’ of those who were born and raised in the valley. Moreover, in making space a powerful symbol, he defined the community in spatial terms: he drew a sharp distinction between those who belong to the community and those who are not part of it, thereby casting landownership in

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the area as a crucial factor that makes a person a ‘local’. Aside from the slightly populist language of which he availed himself, expressed by his construction of ‘local people’, he succeeded in showing that he was committed to gearing public and private investment toward creating the local infrastructure that was necessary to give the local economy a boost. In this sense, by constructing ‘local people’ as landowners and by casting the growth of the local economy as a priority, he drew his audience’s attention to the key themes that made the Northern League and Berlusconi’s discourses appealing. Despite the emphasis that locals placed on hard work and self-reliance, there was a general feeling that these were on the wane, and the reproduction of the hard-working community of the old days was no longer taken for granted. Several people I worked with shared the idea that state subsidies and job security in the past had inhibited the economic potential of the valley, for they had engendered an ethos and a mindset (mentalità) that did not encourage personal initiative or foster entrepreneurship but simply made the local community dependent on outside agencies. The result, as many conversationalists remarked, is that nowadays nobody is willing to work hard. When the local sawmill, run by the regional council, was shut down in 2002, most locals did not relate its closure to the economic recession and the falling price of timber but to the director’s lack of entrepreneurial acumen; as a sawmill worker of Caoria said, ‘He [the director] is not up to that job’. Thus, if the hard-work ethic had been lost, it had to be recovered.10 The putative loss of the hard-work ethic that is considered central to the definition of local identity was at the forefront of people’s discussions in the period that followed the demise of the DC-led national government. However, it was particularly on the eve of the 2001 national elections that the hard-work ethic and the possibility of its recovery took on a political dimension. At that time, the centre-left coalition was governing the country, but the economy was not growing. It was also clear that the government’s immediate goal was to steer the country into conformity with the norms necessary for continued economic and monetary integration with the European Union (Blim 2002: 141), rather than the development of peripheral economies. However, most locals were not sure whether it was appropriate to vote for Berlusconi, then the leader of the opposing coalition, given his failure to separate clearly economic and political interests. Thus, in the course of a conversation I happened to overhear, someone made the point that perhaps the candidate of the centre-left coalition would be a more suitable candidate for election. At this point his companion promptly interrupted him, and said ‘He? He has never worked’. This ideological essentialization of the propensity to hard work as something that leftist politicians lack was 10. This view echoes the discourse of the spokespersons of the DC and PSI in the early 1990s before the rise of the Northern League and of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. One of the main points of this discourse was that in order to cope with the economic crisis it was necessary to work harder.

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also expressed by the fact that factory workers who go on strike hardly elicit admiration or respect on the grounds that they are deemed slack workers. What is clear from the above is that the populist rhetoric that both Bossi and Berlusconi deployed became appealing because it simplified the political space by constructing ‘the people’ as a community of workers. Yet any populist construction of a community involves the definition of an antagonistic frontier between ‘the people’ and an enemy (Laclau 2005: 74). As has been seen, Bossi and Berlusconi point to the bureaucratic state (negatively phrased as the ‘Soviet state’) as the ‘enemy’ on the grounds that it prevents entrepreneurs from working efficiently, and interferes too much in the liberty of those who wanted to go about their business in peace; by contrast, locals blame the bureaucratic state on the grounds that it had deprived them of the hard-work ethic. After all, at the forefront of locals’ concerns was not so much the lack of jobs, as the fact that nowadays nobody wants to work hard. In sum, if we were to explore in depth the large discursive field from which locals draw their social categories, we would not find ‘class’ in its pure form, let alone ‘working-class’. However, discourses about local identity and culture embody a class referent. Casting a propensity to hard work as a marker of local identity serves to distinguish the people of Caoria and Ronco from those of nearby villages, just as it enables the inhabitants of the Vanoi valley to claim moral superiority over the people of other valleys and Italian regions, and state bureaucrats. Thus, the ‘class’ that is implicit in local discourses does not belong to the realm of working-class politics: as has been seen, locals’ indifference to the plight of post-Fordist workers implies that a class of autonomous workers does not include individuals who have to alienate their labour. In this sense, ‘class’ does not represent a social category or a subjectivity that cross-cuts localities; rather, it is inextricably tied to a sense of territorial, local identity. Phrased differently, at the local level class discourse is in important respects fused with locality, and is affected by a locally recognized history.

Conclusion When I revisited the Vanoi valley in the summer of 2008, depopulation and the economic recession still loomed very large in local discourse. There were some signs of economic revitalization, as shown by the development of an industrial area around the village of Canal San Bovo, but such revitalization is largely the result of the subsidies of the regional council, and the question of how far the recovery of a lost hard-work ethic will enable locals to cope with the economic recession still awaits an answer. The exploration of the relationship between meanings of class and populist nationalism in the Alps brings us back to the questions asked at the outset; namely, to the issue of how populist discourse was understood by the people who have chosen to identify with certain political forces, and how it relates to other discourses

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and cultural practices. It seems arguable that the ideology of economic liberalism that the discourses of Berlusconi and Bossi encode embodies a class referent, and meanings of class were reformulated and redefined by different social actors. It was the vagueness of the boundary of the ‘class of workers’ championed by the two party leaders, then, that enabled social actors to reinterpret a political message for their own requirements. In this sense, the ‘class of workers’ was seen as more appealing and inclusive than the ‘working-class’ that used to be championed by the Left in the past. Ironically, this rhetoric was believed to value those capacities, like that of sustaining hard manual work, which globalized free markets devalue. Thus, the ideology of economic liberalism was not imposed but rather accommodated itself to local-level discourse, and ultimately mobilized themes already existent in local culture, among which a notion of class predicated on the possession of work is one of the most powerful. This mobilization had the effect of generating a sense of common culture among the people living in the same locality. Yet a sense of common culture did not translate into a local form of collectivism or into political action. It engendered a sense of a ‘class of workers’ but not a ‘working-class’. Despite its associations with neoliberal politics and its disastrous effects at the local level, the construction of ‘the working people’ that is central to centre-right populism was interpreted as a moral guideline for relying on one’s labour power and personal initiative in an age of uncertainty and in the face of forces described as irrational or corrupt. What came to the fore at the local level, then, was a notion of class fused and entwined with other forms of cultural identity, most notably with a sense of local identity. Class did not take on an explicit political dimension as a subjective category but was instead depoliticized. Its depoliticization was not the result of repressive actions by hegemonic forces (Narotzky and Smith 2006: 176–77); rather, it was largely the outcome of the imposition of neoliberal interpretations of economic change (Dunk 2002: 878–79) and of the ways these were accommodated to local-level discourses. Thus, it was a subjectivity based on class, rather than class consciousness, which formed the basis of locals’ interpretations of hegemonic discourses. I call it ‘subjectivity’ because it defines the antagonisms and conflicts of interests typical of economic systems based on the production of goods by one class and by the appropriation of surplus by another (Lem 2002: 288–89). In this case, ‘appropriation’ was described by locals as dispossession of their hardwork ethic as a result of the valley’s incorporation into the political economy of the Italian state (and now of the European Union). This subjectivity based on class is obviously fraught with contradictions: on the one hand, a sense of being in control of one’s labour may form the basis of workers’ claims against the bureaucratic state; on the other hand, it is precisely by casting labour power as an individual, rather than collective, possession that locals endorse the neoliberal state’s endeavours to make public politics collapse completely. Thus, because it encodes ideals of autonomy and efficiency, the construction of ‘the working people’ may be well adapted to a wide range of demands and

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ideologies: it fits into the Northern League’s regionalist project as well as Berlusconi’s vision of a country led by hard-working entrepreneurs in place of politicians. In this sense, a discourse derived from a tradition of opposition to the structural constraints of the state turned out to be well adapted to the demands and ideology of neoliberal globalization. This is the point: it is largely the hegemony of local power – namely, the value systems that endows ‘class’ and ‘the people’ with meaning – that legitimates the authority of the neoliberal state.

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Herzfeld, M. 2004. The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hobsbawm, E. 1984. ‘Notes on Class Consciousness’, in E. Hobsbawm (ed.), Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 15–32. Holmes, D.R. 1989. Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neo-fascism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kalb, D. 2009. ‘Conversation with a Polish Populist: Tracing Hidden Histories of Globalization, Class, and Dispossession in Postsocialism (and Beyond)’, American Ethnologist 36(2): 207–23. Kideckel, D.A. 2008. Getting by in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-class Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Laclau, E. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Lash, S., and J. Urry. 1987. The End of Organized Capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lem, W. 2002. ‘Articulating Class in Post-Fordist France’, American Ethnologist 29(2): 287–306. Narotzky, S., and G. Smith. 2006. Immediate Struggles: People, Power and Place in Rural Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ortner, S.B. 1998. ‘Identities: The Hidden Life of Class’, Journal of Anthropological Research 54(1): 1–17. Pasquino, G. 2007. ‘The Five Faces of Silvio Berlusconi: The Knight of Anti-politics’, Modern Italy 12(1): 39–54. Pratt, J. 2003. Class, Nation and Identity: The Anthropology of Political Movements. London: Pluto Press. Revelli, M. 1996. Le due destre: Le derive politiche del postfordismo. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Savage, M. 2000. Class Analysis and Social Transformation. Buckingham: Open University Press. Shin, M.E., and J.A. Agnew. 2008. Berlusconi’s Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Stacul, J. 2003. The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ——— 2007. ‘Understanding Neoliberalism: Reflections on the “End of Politics” in Northern Italy’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12(4): 450–59. Stolcke, V. 1995. ‘Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in Europe’, Current Anthropology 36(1): 1–24. Turner, T. 2003. ‘Class Projects, Social Consciousness, and the Contradictions of “Globalization”’, in J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, the State, and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, pp. 35–66. Wright, S. 1998. ‘The Politicization of “Culture”’, Anthropology Today 14(1): 7–15.

Chapter 8 Working-Class Nationalism in a Scottish Village Paul Gilfillan

Introduction The case study presented here is based upon fieldwork on the relationship between class and the politicization of national identity during the restoration of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 in the former coalmining village of Cardenden, Fife.1 While the relationship between class and nation is a central problematic in the literature on Scottish nationalism (Nairn 1981, 1997; Gellner 1983; McCrone 1998), I will draw upon the insights of A.P. Cohen, who has argued that, ‘Local experience mediates national identity and, therefore, an anthropological understanding of the latter cannot proceed without knowledge of the former’ (Cohen 1982: 13). I will also draw upon the work of Michael Herzfeld, who calls upon ethnographers to study nationalism in terms of the social intimacy that local communities are able to generate (Herzfeld 1997). I will argue that villagers constitute and perform locality and nationality through the idioms of kinship, length of residence and a class-based idiom of manual work and ‘life as a physical existence’ (Connerton 1989: 101). A consequence of my argument that the local mediates the national is that framing Scottish nationalism via the prism of ‘social contract theory’ (Hearn 1998) or ‘liberal nationalism’ (Tamir 1993; MacCormick 1996) offers little ethnographic ‘purchase’ in post-industrial locations throughout Scotland. Another consequence is that the account which follows contradicts Nairn’s characterization of nationalism as the bourgeoisie inviting ‘the masses into history’ (Nairn 1981: 340) because the Scottish nationalism presented here 1. Fieldwork in Cardenden, my natal village, was conducted from June 1998 to August 2001, and was supplementary to an earlier period of fieldwork in 1997 into the miners’ strike of 1984/5.

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is more accurately described as the working-class inviting a reluctant and predominantly unionist bourgeoisie into playing its part in the creation of an independent state. As Brown, McCrone and Paterson found in their own research into class and nationalism, ‘Support for a Scottish parliament has been higher in working-class than in middle class groups in every survey that has ever asked the question’ (Brown, McCrone and Paterson 1996: 153).

Ethnography from ‘Nothing’ In giving a first impression of Cardenden I recall the beginning of fieldwork ten months after the referendum to establish a democratic mandate for the Scottish Parliament and a year before the opening of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999.2 I remember the numerous instances of locals expressing an unguarded puzzlement as to why I would want to research their village. Whereas I could elicit supportive recognition when I mentioned ‘workingclass nationalism’, I invited bemused incredulity when I simply replied ‘I’m studying Cardenden’. This apparent ‘inferiority complex’ with respect to locality or natal village is further evidenced by the best-selling crime-fiction writer Ian Rankin.3 Beginning with his first novel, The Flood (1986), which takes place in ‘Carsden’ and takes as its subject-matter ‘a period of twenty years in the life and slow death of a Fife mining community’, the literary representation of Cardenden throughout his substantial body of literature (twenty novels) is uniformly bleak: He drove quietly, hating to be back here in Fife [i.e. in Cardenden], back where the old days had never been ‘good old days’, where ghosts rustled in the shells of empty houses and the shutters went up every evening on a handful of desultory shops, those metal shutters that gave the vandals somewhere to write their names. How Rebus hated it all, this singular lack of environment. It stank the way it had always done: of misuse, of disuse, of the sheer wastage of life. (Rankin 1987: 3)

The accuracy of Rankin’s depiction of his natal village was confirmed by my own experience when living in the main street for over a year during fieldwork. Living here allowed me to record many instances of what might be euphemistically described as the ‘decline’ of local space. I recall on one occasion at 4 o’clock in the morning watching two locals from my study in the attic as they methodically set about smashing the glass panels of a bus shelter. I noted how, being drunk, each kick that was aimed at the glass panels required some concentration, and any particular effort that failed to produce the required effect meant each assailant had to take the time to steady himself 2. The referendum was held on 11 September 1997, with 75 per cent voting in favour of the creation of a Scottish Parliament. 3. Rankin’s now-famous Edinburgh-based detective Rebus is a native of Cardenden.

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in preparation for the next attempt. These were grown men. And once the ‘job’ was finished to their satisfaction, they did not flee the scene of the crime but resumed their drunken stagger homeward with no change in pace. From personal experience, such an event was not untypical at the end of the working week. However, rather than listing more of such incidents I quote from an article that appeared in a local newspaper: Cardenden residents say that they are living in fear after an upsurge in violence and vandalism on their streets. The village’s active tenants and residents’ association says that over the last six months groups of teenagers and young adults have been making lives a misery for others, particularly the elderly. And they claim it is only a matter of time before someone is killed in a drunken brawl.4

Following this in the article is an interview with a local resident quoted as saying, ‘I have lived in Cardenden all my sixty-odd years and, in that time, things have never been so bad’. When interviewing older locals it was clear that there is a firmly established perception of the disintegration of locality, family life, crime and the fracturing of kinship structures during their lifetime. This sense of decline has reached a level of despair among some locals: Wilma Anderson: Things are definitely changing. People just don’t, you know … When I look about I think we need a change – you know? Look at the trouble that’s going on, trouble that was never there before! P.G.: What trouble do you mean? Wilma: Everything! It sounds silly, wee things – like families! I don’t know … Something has went wrong some place, something’s happening to our country and I don’t know what.

Similar comments came from another resident: Imagine getting to my age and everything’s worse! You know? Everywhere you look about you. At my age, every value, everything I ever thought about, the way to go about things, every idea I ever had, every value that I ever had, every way of doing things, everything I’ve got in my head, just turn that around, totally roundabout, reverse everything I’ve ever believed in and I might just get it right for 1999. (Rose Beattie)

With the decline of local work, the ethnographer of this de-industrialized space is faced with an obvious yet intangible ‘nothingness’ so that fieldwork can feel like a treadmill of chasing a passed ‘something’.5 If local post-industrial space is represented as something of a dystopia, it is the industrial period from 1895 to 1965 that is remembered by older residents when Cardenden was an ‘occupational community’. It was the advent of new technologies which 4. ‘Villagers Seek Action to Halt Hooligans’, Fife Free Press, 12 October 2001, p. 7 5. For further discussion of the issues surrounding the representation of class and the theoretical horizon that is opening to a new generation of ‘producers of knowledge’ see Gilfillan (2009, 2011).

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enabled the industrialization of coal production on an unprecedented scale, with the sinking of the first deep mineshaft in 1895 and the transformation of an agrarian locality into a pit village with a population of 10,000 thanks to the migration of workers from all over Scotland to the Fife coalfields at the turn of the twentieth century. One such migrant was Dr David Rorie (1867–1946) who arrived in Cardenden as medical officer for the local coal company in 1894. As well as a medical doctor, Rorie ‘was an ethnographer … the first folklorist in Scotland, and one of the first anywhere, to record the culture of an industrial community: that of the Fife miners’ (Buchan 1994: 5, 11). In his writings, Rorie collected and explained the many traditional practices and beliefs he found among the miners and peasants of Cardenden, referring to the ethnographies of the Torres Straits Islands expedition (1898) and the theories of magic articulated by George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890). Rorie was interested in preserving a form of knowledge and a premodern outlook among the Fife peasantry that was about to be lost forever: ‘It is not pretended that all the customs, etc., mentioned were universal. Many of them were dying out … But everything I have set down I have tested as having been at one time or other common in the district’ (Buchan 1994: 12). Despite our research being separated by over a century, there is a continuity between Rorie’s fieldwork and my own insofar as, where Rorie conducted fieldwork at the point of the sudden and overwhelming transition of locality to industrialization in 1895, my fieldwork was conducted in the aftermath of the village’s transition to its present post-industrial era; where Rorie sought the survivals of a pre-industrial folklore, I often found myself trying to piece together ‘survivals’ of the industrial period 1895–1965.6

Remembering Locality as ‘Occupational Community’ I’ll tell ye how bad it was, I went and joined the navy when the war broke out. I was Cardenden’s second volunteer. Johnny Fairgreaves, well he was a conscript, I was the first volunteer. And I was the first man ever to be released from [Cardenden] pit … I was out in the Mediterranean in 1942 on HMS Brocklesbury during the war and I was still spitting black. —Bien Bernard, 1997

6. Local history group members have so far been unable to locate the dates of Cardenden pit which closed around 1920. Bowhill Colliery officially closed in 1966 with a peak employment figure of 1,544 in 1962; the Minto pit closed in 1967 with a peak employment figure of 757 in 1957; the Lady Helen pit closed in 1960 with a peak employment figure of 474; the Number 1 Dundonald pit closed in 1961 with a peak employment figure of 260 in 1952. Bowhill (Cardenden) Power Station had a peak employment figure of 36 in 1974

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For over two years I attended the local history group, and from listening to many conversations and stories it is clear that for those socialized in the era when Cardenden was a ‘pit village’ the experience of locality involves a sharp caesura due to the deindustrialization of the village in the 1980s.7 A locality which was once an ‘occupational community’ struggles with a lack of identity or definition in light of its sense of itself having been ‘liberated’ from old industrial narratives. As a result of the decline of manufacturing and heavy industry during the 1980s,8 public sector employment (public administration, health and education) accounts for over 30 per cent of employment in Fife today. In the private sector, the post-industrial occupational landscape is dominated by electronics, telecommunications service providers, light engineering and tourism. More locally, thanks to high-quality rail and road transport links, local workers commute to Edinburgh and Glasgow, or even further afield. While some local tradesmen have secured contracts to work oversees for extended periods, more locally based tradesmen who rely upon the construction and related industries have been hardest hit by the current global economic crisis.9 Due to the obvious significance of the advent of post-industrial locality, I conducted research into the miners’ strike of 1984/5 thirteen years after the event and found that, among older locals generally and former miners in particular, the strike had come to mark the end of a way of life. As one informant, who had been a National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) official at the time of the strike, told me: They sat around the table in 197410 and said, ‘The working-class will never do this to us again’. They brought out all the golden carrots. Sell their house, give them that. There’ll be no more one-third deposit for a car. Give them the money. Got our houses, car … That was us beat. Give them a taste, make wee capitalists out of us. There’s only two people bought their house in this street. And they’ve changed. Some of the attitude in the community has changed. You know, at one time we 7. The history group has met weekly since 1989 despite having been originally set up as a one-off course to run for ten weeks. This course was organized by the Workers Educational Association as a result of the interest in local history generated by the Corrie Festival held in the village in 1986 to commemorate the opening of the Corrie Centre the previous year. Joe Corrie (1896–1968) was a local coalminer, poet and playwright (see Mackenney 1985). 8. In 1985 unemployment peaked in Scotland at 15.6 per cent. 9. The early 2000s saw an influx of Eastern European workers into Fife, with the result that the local parish priest, himself from Poland, celebrates weekly Mass in Polish in the local church for migrants in the surrounding area every Friday evening. Finally, the local presence of illegal economic migrants may be assumed in light of the local police having arrested a number of migrant workers from outwith the EU at a local fast-food outlet (26 August 2009). 10. The reference here is to the widespread belief that the defeat of the Conservative government in 1974 was a result of the miners’ strike of that year.

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were a close-knit community. We all helped each other out. Now that doesn’t happen. We’ve not got the same neighbourly love, friendship that we used to have. You have to cast your mind back. Well before the [1984/5] strike, you had all your local village pits. It was a close-knit community at that time. That’s not here now. There’s something missing in the community, the companionship, the camaraderie. The pits are all shut, there’s something missing. (Alex Howie)

When the local pit closed in 1965, many miners were able to obtain work through the National Coal Board in other pits, some as far away as England or in the larger Seafield Colliery in nearby Kirckaldy, which when it closed in 1987 effectively brought coalmining to an end in Fife.11 As one miner recalled: I worked until the last day of 1985. Right up until the 31st of December. That was my last shift. For a lot of Cardenden miners that was their last day. (John Gilfillan)

Much of the significance of the 1984/5 strike is that it has come to symbolize the beginning of the post-industrial present. Unsurprisingly, older informants identified the high watermark of locality with that of the coalmining industry, and listening to their stories I was to form the impression that the highly homogeneous reality of the single-occupational community produced a level of community which, remembered up to seventy years later among some members, reproduces again this sense of communitas among them as they perform their ‘memory work’: The first blast of the day was at 5.25 a.m. and lasted for five minutes. Shorter blasts were then emitted at 6 a.m., 9.30 a.m., 9.50 a.m., 1.30 p.m., 2.00 p.m., 5.30 p.m., 5.50 p.m., 9.30 p.m. and finally at 10.00 p.m. There was, too, the sound of silence. I can recall five: learning the deaf and dumb alphabet at the Cubs; watching the funeral procession of Johnny Thomson, the Celtic goalkeeper in September 1931, and eight weeks later the funerals of nine of the ten men killed in the Bowhill Colliery disaster; looking at the first pictures of Belsen concentration camp in the Pathé news at the Goth;12 and finally the two-minutes silence at 11.00 a.m. on November 11th every year in remembrance of those who died in the service of their country in two World Wars. (Adam Ingram, retired miner)

This evocation of communal living through major events of the twentieth century is repeated in descriptions of more mundane local events which characterised village life: 11. One of the charge hands to whom I often acted as ‘second man’ when working with East of Scotland Water during fieldwork had a tattoo commemorating the strike with the inscription, ‘I Never Scabbed’. 12. There was once a Goth picture house adjacent to the No.1 Goth pub which has long since been demolished; the site has recently been made into a car park. All that remains of the cinema is a rusted rectangular metal frame where the cinema programme was displayed, still attached to the wall of the pub.

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All the children made their way to their school about lunch time on the Saturday in July. The local bands, pipes and drums and brass, turned out to lead the procession. The children from Denend School waited patiently at the sweet shop at the foot of Station Road and joined in the procession as it passed by, then on to the Goth to collect St Ninian’s School and Auchterderran School pupils … The streets were lined with mums and dads, brothers and sisters, and aunties and uncles, all cheering as the children marched past waving wee flags and balloons.

In this quote there is an evocation of abundance, a spectacle in which nothing is lacking; a belonging to locality with crowds of children in their own way ensuring the future of the village. Along with local pipe bands, schools and generations coming together in annual rituals, there is an evocation of the lived reality of local community as a physical, inter-corporeal event; of generations of families with aunts and uncles and the extended family living locally; streets filled with families and friends and neighbours and traditional aestival festivals participated in by the whole village. In light of this richness, the present post-industrial experience of locality is inevitably seen in terms of decline: Hugh: But then the pit and Co-op shut, all the wee things. All the pictures [i.e. cinemas] shut. You go up Bowhill now and it’s always like it’s half- shut. You had movement of people all the time. Nan: When you had the pictures, when the pictures come out and you were driving, you had to go like a snail because they never walked on the pavement, they were on the road.

Today it is hard to appreciate the Cardenden of a peak population more than double its current size and the dozens of local clubs and societies which characterized village life. When Buchan (1994) cites Rorie’s resignation from the twenty-two positions he held on various local committees upon leaving Cardenden, we catch a glimpse of a conspicuous local civic culture, a ‘thick’ production of locality in contrast to the present-day where children’s play groups and mother and toddlers groups have to close because of a lack of volunteers and children. However, a clear sense of decline is only half of the story informants tell. It is clear from the photographic record which the local history group has gathered together that the years of industrialization, the ‘golden age’ of locality, was also the heyday of material want, class struggle and class distinction. The preponderance of photographs of scenes of colliery managers, businessmen and their wives and local professionals in the photographic record of locality is also reflected in the architecture of the village where, as a rule, simply walking through the village and noting large detached houses is to identify the former residence of pit managers, doctors and other professionals. As one former miner told me: See, when you were a boy, if you saw the minister coming you crossed the street. If you seen the doctor coming you crossed the street. If you saw the police coming

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you crossed the street. See, that was the elite, the literati, you didn’t … you just never mixed. Never. Never the twain shall meet. Right? The minister was a friend of the coal owners. He was in the manager’s pocket. They were all in the manager’s pockets; all the business men. Oh no, you never mixed with nobody, never mixed with nobody. (Bien Bernard)

While older informants reminisced about ‘the good old days’ they would sometimes, as a conclusion, tell me they would not want to go back to the ‘society of scarcity’. In terms of better housing conditions, for example, local shopkeeper Tom Henderson told me: The best thing that ever happened was selling the council houses. The improvements they made. Inside and outside. New doors, central heating, double glazing. The improvements are unbelievable. It certainly improved the schemes. The improvement is terrific. (Tom Henderson)13

Tom was referring to the programme of renovation of local-authority housing that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At this time something of a revolution in living conditions occurred as the vast majority of local houses were significantly improved. Shortly after this period of renovation, most local authority tenants exercised the ‘right to buy’ their houses introduced by the Thatcher government; this presented tenants with the financial incentive of acquiring their homes at prices considerably below their market value in light of their length of tenancy. In addition to this refurbishment and privatization of local authority housing stock, between 2003 and 2008 private property developers have built approximately two hundred new houses in Cardenden.14 In stark contrast to these present-day developments, it was only in 1946/7 that the original miners’ dwellings which had been built by the local coal companies to attract miners were demolished and replaced by the current houses. It was also during the postwar period that streets were given the ‘proper’ names they retain to this day as, prior to this, they had simply been referred to as First Street, Second Street and so on.15 As well as a dramatic improvement in housing conditions, having been born into a ‘society of scarcity’, older retired informants are enjoying the ‘society of affluence’ and the fruits of long working lives of continuous paid employment thanks to a postwar economy that saw full employment for over a generation. These are members of a working-class generation that, when 13. Tom, born in the Fife coastal village of Buckhaven, opened his shop in Cardenden in 1953, ‘just after the coronation’, having lived most of his life until then in the coastal village of Dysart. He retired in 1989. 14. While Fife Council has given planning permission for many more houses to be built locally, the current global credit crisis has meant all local large-scale housing developments are on hold. 15. When I asked why the streets had originally been numbered this way, I was told a Mr Muir, the manager of Bowhill Colliery in 1895, had returned from honeymoon in America and borrowed the American system of naming streets. As Adam Ingram told me, ‘Once we discovered there was a Sixth Street in New York we felt better’.

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they gather at funerals, talk about their holiday plans with each other; where they have been and which Mediterranean or Baltic or Caribbean cruise they are about to go on or have recently returned from. Self-conscious about their new affluent lifestyles, they say among themselves: ‘And to think we are off on cruises. When we were growing up, who would have thought, eh?’

The 1945 and 1979 Generations In the light of data gathered during door-to-door interviews after the restoration of the Scottish Parliament, I propose two ideal types: on the one hand there is the 1945 generation, which I define as those born before 1950. On the other, there is the 1979 generation, which designates those born from 1960 onwards and who came to political consciousness anytime between 1979 and 1997. While this classification leaves those born in the 1950s somewhat ‘lost in the middle’, I introduce this distinction only as a heuristic device to locate two poles of a continuum; what decides whether someone is a member of either generation is the degree to which they tend to identify with the industrial past or the post-industrial present. I intend this distinction as a heuristic device in mapping the major ruptures and continuities in the experiences of locality, society, culture and nation across the industrial and post-industrial divide and my argument that working-class nationalism is a generational politics of the first post-industrial generation. From my first few field interviews it was clear there exists a generation that is antithetical to any meaningful engagement with current political developments, so that the ethnographer of Cardenden would seriously misrepresent reality if he were to write ‘we are all nationalists now, more or less’ (McCrone 1998: 33). From my fieldwork experience, a majority of the 1945 generation sincerely identify with Britain at a personal and cultural level to the extent that they prefer to speak contemptuously of politics and politicians and present themselves as indifferent to politics, rather than face the challenge of ‘reflexivity’ and rethink their cultural and personal loyalties to ‘being British’. This British identity runs sufficiently deep to politically nullify events such as eighteen years of Tory minority rule, deindustrialization and the miners’ strike of 1984/5.16 These findings were confirmed by what I heard amongst local-history-group members among whom it seemed that, so accustomed had they become to the ‘absence’ of Scottish history, they were unable to reconcile themselves to the events of 1999. As the Workers’ Educational Association tutor told me when I announced that my research was concerned with present-day Cardenden and politics, as opposed to the history of Cardenden: 16. A number of elderly would-be informants (especially women) were clearly angry at the success of Scottish nationalism and would not bring themselves to talk to me about their views on the new Parliament but preferred to slam their door shut.

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Oh, we’re not interested in politics and religion. Two things. And that goes back to 1986. And we were all retired then. We didn’t talk about that as that was too much trouble and division. (Ann Mead)17

More evidence that the return of Scottish history was unwelcome came at a meeting on 19 April 1999, a few days prior to the inaugural Holyrood general election, when, to try to take advantage of the media coverage of this event and stimulate discussion, I informed the group of my intention to conduct doorto-door interviews to ask locals their views on the new parliament. In the discussion that followed, Hugh emphatically announced, ‘Ah’ll no be votin’’. At this, Annie said she too would not be voting in what was being represented in the media as the first ‘democratic’ election to a Scottish Parliament. Many of my informants refused point blank to see the new Scottish Parliament as anything other than what Thomas McLanders termed, ‘A lot of rubbish from what I’ve seen of it’, so that at this stage of fieldwork I felt compelled to abandon my search for a working-class nationalism, feeling that I had made a blunder to have imagined such a thing existed in light of what seemed like a boycott of Scottish history by a local history group. It seems clear that the experience of the high-point of locality as occupational community is highly integrated with the idea and practice of a convincing and even triumphant ‘Britishness’. Something of this ‘integralism’ is glimpsed in the following quote from the local history-group tutor, Anne Mead: Auchterderran was my primary school in the thirties … The school had no wireless. I especially remember that. On the day of the launching of the Queen Mary, a pupil was dispatched to the lodging of Miss Mackay in Woodend Road, near the school to await the naming of the liner. Her landlady listened to the launching on the wireless, then the pupil was sent back to school with the name written down and sealed in an envelope. The message went round the classrooms and the pupils were able to pass the news on to their families at home, for few people had wirelesses at home either. (WEA 1991: n.p.)

For the 1945 generation, the high point in class-based politics is seen as the creation of the Welfare State, and this is congruent with the high point of being British: the Second World War. This conjunction remains deeply defining of their identity and politics. In direct contrast, I argue that the period of the right-of-centre Conservative Party government, led by prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major between 1979 and 1997, greatly motivated the resort to nationalism among a younger generation due to the dismantling of what remained of a fides implicita in all things British they may have inherited from their parents’ generation. The ‘generational gap’ I am proposing then is not confined to the shift from an economy of heavy industry to a post-industrial service-sector economy, or the inevitable discontinuity in historical experience between the generations. The gap is as much cultural as economic and historic.

17. Anne is a 1945 St Andrews University graduate in history.

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I recall a New Year party at the turn of the millennium hosted by a former miner who, shortly after midnight, asked for some Scottish country dancing to be put on the television. When this request was refused, the host complained, ‘But that’s our culture!’ – only to be laughed at by his sons and their friends. ‘It might be your culture bit it’s not ours!’ explained his youngest son. Similarly, when attending the funeral of a retired miner, at which some of his fellow Burns’ Club members were present, one of his sons, an Oxford-educated Dominican friar, remarked how ‘dated’ was the genuflection to Burns in the oration earlier in the day.18 These incidents I interpret as indicative of how a longue durée understanding of what it is to be Scottish and working-class is at an end among the 1979 generation. Paradoxically, among this younger generation – which in the next section I will describe as the ‘social carriers’ of nationalism – a particular cultural patrimony as represented by the eighteenth-century Scots language used by Burns is a dead language for today’s younger generations, and is therefore a metaphor for the death of the uptake of a certain idea of Scottish culture held by a previous working-class generation. All of the local institutions of working-class Scotland – including the local Burns’ Club, the local masonic lodge, the British Legion and war-memorial clubs – are of a certain time and culture which the younger generation will not reproduce. Looking at old photographs from past local events hanging on the walls in what was, until 1992, the Miners’ Welfare Institute, in every scene of any communal celebration such as an annual dance, the ubiquitous Union-flag bunting strikes one as belonging to another era as all such decoration has long gone. In proportion to the disappearance of the acceptability of the Union flag, the Scottish saltire flag of St Andrew has grown in popularity and legitimacy as a decorative feature at all such social occasions. This difference between the two generations is also clear from the way in which they talk about the politics of education and Scottish history. At the local history group, members often expressed what they felt was the systematic absence of Scottish history from their educational experiences. I found unanimous agreement that the history they were taught at school contained ‘nothing about Scotland’. The following exchange between old-age pensioners was typical: Adam: It’s one thing I regret when I was at school, I never learned a thing about this village.

18. Clubs celebrating and commemorating the life, work and politics of the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) remain familiar throughout Scotland and the Scottish diaspora. One of the earliest local clubs was The Auchterderran Jolly Beggars’ Club, founded in 1912. The Bowhill People’s Burns Club, founded in 1940, drew its membership from the Bowhill Communist Party – including the local writer Joe Corrie and my paternal grandfather Harry Gilfillan. For more information go to www.bowhillpeoplesburnsclub.co.uk.

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Anne: We never learned a thing about Scotland when we were at school. Even at school we never ever done anything but English history. Adam: It’s something that didn’t bother me then but it does now. We were taught about England but never Scotland. And never the history of Fife.

Among the younger 1979 generation, however, a politics and ‘politics of knowledge’ is increasingly constituted via Scottish nationality and the rejection of ‘Britain’ as an organizing category of experience, identity, politics and geography. The following quote from Peter, a 39-year-old plumber, is typical of the far-more politicized views of the younger generation: It’s all more or less persecution. I think we’ve been kept at that level [lowers palm towards ground] all the time. You weren’t told anything about Scottish history because it could have caused trouble. And all those football matches with Scotland and England in the 1970s, it would have been even bigger bloodbaths because it would just be like the English coming up to Culloden or Stirling Bridge and all that f—ing carry on all rolled into one. That’s a lot of the reason why they never told you f— all about it. I mean, that thing in the paper today about teaching children Scottish history.19 When we were at the school, that would be 1972, one of the teachers we got, he was Scottish National Party. He used to turn round to you and say, ‘Right then, when was the battle of Hastings?’ An every c— says ‘1066’. ‘Right then, when was the battle of Culloden?’ No c— knew. So he’d tell you. So for a whole week when we got Modern Studies he was telling us about Scottish history until one day he come in and says, ‘Eh, right, I have been given a warning’. He’d been pulled up by the headmaster who said. ‘You’re not here to teach children, you’re here to teach them what the O level is about, not what’s happening round about them’. And this is all coming to light now, twenty year down the f—ing line. But I mean, really, we should know more about what’s happening. What sticks in your mind when you were at the school? It’s 1066, King Harold getting the f—ing arrow in his eye, that big tapestry f—ing thing, Guy Fawkes f—ing setting fire to … Trying to think of something that happened in Scotland at that same f—ing time and you wouldn’t know.

If one were to change a few details, it would be hard to distinguish the above from the discourse of colonized peoples reflecting upon the education system put in place by their colonial masters. We might therefore interpret the above as a lucid critique of Scottish education as the central institution in the reproduction of domination and a disabling ignorance of the past. What I would like to highlight, however, is the sheer availability of Peter’s analysis to himself. The above quote is the last three minutes of a ninety-minute interview and I propose that the key to Peter’s interpretive lucidity lies in the fact that he reads recent Scottish (educational) history from his class position. Leaving aside the question of ‘empirical’ accuracy, if he is lucid in his critique of an enforced historical amnesia it is because he is doing class analysis, drawing upon his internalization of social structure which not only structures his 19. This was a front-page Sunday Mail newspaper article (24 October 1999) highlighting the lack of historical knowledge among Scots.

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perception but structures his field of perception – that is, structures that which counts as significant knowledge. We may say that Peter can read so much history using one basic interpretive key because so much of history is indeed taken up by the reproduction of the social structure. He is lucid because his mental structures of perception are structured by the structure of history which is itself structured by the reproduction of the hierarchical social structure. This allows him to narrate historic events and incidents ad libitum because, whatever particular field is under consideration, the same structure or pattern is reproduced and the same interpretive horizon is able to read it as a matter of habitus. Finally, because his ‘psyche’ is conformed to this structuration, there is a characteristic ‘libidinal’ investment in expression that emerges from this habitual reading and explains why this is often a characteristic of working-class men, something which the next section will attempt to illuminate a little further.

Nationalism as Performing Embodied (Social) Being My ethnographic point of entry into the reality of local nationalism is a game of football played between Scotland and England on 13 November 1999 to decide which team would qualify for the Euro 2000 tournament. As the game was played four months after the restoration of the new Parliament, an institution which had been absent for nearly three hundred years, it seemed a good opportunity to witness how informants ‘performed’ national identity. An hour before the start of the game I made the short walk to the Railway Tavern on what was a warm sunny day. As I entered the interior of the pub I stood in the doorway to the lounge bar, allowing my eyes time to adjust to the dark smoke-filled interior as the curtains had been drawn to block direct sunlight. I was immediately struck by a noisy, colourful, crowded scene: national regalia and bunting were displayed everywhere; flags, saltires and lion rampants hung on walls and the ceiling, faces painted white and blue, and most of the crowd waving football scarves and wearing hats and replica football shirts. Along with this visual spectacle came a constant noise from a large group of local men (and a few women) assembled inside. There was an incessant exchange of banter and anecdotes going on; shouted greetings and conversations, orders for rounds of drinks being arranged in loud voices and a relentless cacophony of conversations and news, stories and anecdotes and one-liners being told and enjoyed by anyone within earshot. After a few moments I was able to make out my hosts sitting along the wall on the right-hand side who motioned to me to join them. As I squeezed into the gap opened for me, Dauve asked what I wanted to drink and then shouted to one of our company being served at the small lounge bar halfway along the left-hand side: ‘Billy! Two more pints!’ while pointing at me in explanation. Perhaps to anticipate my asking why he ordered more than I asked for, he explained: ‘You need to order two rounds at once. It’s f—ing

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mental getting a round in’. Buying multiple rounds of drinks seemed to be common practice to avoid having to waste time queuing at the bar. Most of the small tables were rapidly, if not already, full of pints of beer and lager and spirits, and there was a constant stream of individuals carrying trays of drinks, carefully picking their way to and from the bar to their table. On the far wall was what was soon to be the centre of attention: a giant television screen on which football pundits were already airing their views. Amid the noise and movement, an individual would stand and begin to sing. Being instantly recognized, the song would be taken up by one and all. Anecdotes being told were put on hold mid sentence until the chant ended and the story could resume. After saluting everyone in the company, I listened to Vickie, a 35-year-old mother of three describing how earlier in the day she had telephoned her English brother-in-law and played the national anthem of Scotland down the telephone. After pulling this ‘stunt’, she told us her brother-in-law had matter-of-factly asked if Vickie wanted to speak with her sister, before she concluded: ‘He never even mentioned it. Imagine doing that over the phone and he never even mentioned it. Of course, he’s English’. Next, I chatted with Drew, a joiner with Fife Council, who was speculating as to the probable identity of a local who had appeared in one of Ian Rankin’s novels. Drew informed me the fictional character had sung REM’s song ‘Losing My Religion’ in the same lounge we were sitting in, and he felt confident it had to be Stevie King. Next, Drew absent-mindedly remarked to the company: ‘I see Leena Zavaroni left millions when she died there’. Thinking the conversation had taken a serious tone, I asked ‘Is that right? I never heard that’. This allowed Drew to deliver his punch line: ‘Aye, apparently she left a few million in dinner vouchers’.20 Inevitably, given that the focus of the day was a longstanding contest between Scotland and the ‘auld enemy’ (England), it was only a matter of time before the conversation turned to politics. After Drew came Dave, a local father of two in his mid thirties, who informed the company he had been working in England the previous week and, affecting an upper-class English accent for the company, informed us how he had ‘been getting it all week … Oh, the Jocks this and the Jocks that’.21 Dave then described how he had established common Labour-voting ground with his English colleagues as a means of minimizing the difference of national identity in the run-up to the play-off, before adding: ‘Aye, we’ll see how they f—ing like it when we all vote SNP’.22 Dave’s final comment sparked more comments from the company which were brought to a conclusion by a 36-year-old warehouse worker: ‘The English are not happy unless they’re oppressing somebody’– a 20. The joke referred to a once-popular singer who suffered from anorexia nervosa and had recently died. 21. The expression ‘Jock’ is a colloquial term for a Scotsman. 22. The Scottish National Party (SNP) is the main nationalist political party in Scotland and, up to the time of writing (2011), heads a minority government in Holyrood (Edinburgh).

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comment said without fear of contradiction. As the two teams prepared to walk onto the pitch, all attention was directed to the television screen and the events being transmitted live from Glasgow. An already excited atmosphere began to reach fever pitch, and when the Scottish anthem was being sung by the players and spectators in Glasgow, it was being sung to the rafters by everyone present in the Railway Tavern. If I had hoped to observe national identity, I was not disappointed as the whole day acted as a shibboleth of identity and belonging. What I found remarkable was the relentless energy and emotion; the availability and intensity of emotional responses which produced a total immersion in each and every moment of the game. From the gestures and language, it was plain that locals are Scottish via their embodiment, and they relished these occasions for practising communitas. As a first step in an analysis of the day’s events then, if we take the view that ‘[t]he nation is primarily a psychological or symbolic concept; in Mackenzie’s words “it is not merely a statement of fact; it is a state of feeling”’ (McCrone 1992: 204), it seems that uncovering the heart of working-class nationalism lies in answering the following question: What are the social conditions of this passion, or what is the idiom or the means of acquisition of this passion? It is clear that there is a ‘structure of feeling’ present, as the passion I witnessed on this particular day is something I have witnessed many times before. While the nation is being ‘imagined’ and ‘constructed’, membership of the national group seems to be a matter of ‘feeling’ via a class-based habitus and the performing, in all of their sensual, visceral and bawdy idiom, practices of identification. Locals came alive to a preferred experience of themselves triggered by a symbolic confrontation with an ‘other’. The day’s events revealed what, following Chatterjee, might be termed the deep ‘hinterland of being’ (Chatterjee 1993: 132), or working-class dasein, to use Heidegger’s term (Heidegger 1962). It seems clear that such set-piece occasions are enjoyable because they are occasions to release and express fully localized, class-based, gendered and nationalized selves via their ‘structure of feeling’, something that the earlier quote from Alex suggests is routinely denied them in the posttrade union workplace, in post-Thatcherite New Labour politics and in the middle-class public sphere. In the Railway Tavern, then, individuals can be themselves in spaces where their Scots language, gestures and mannerisms are not ‘out of place’. It is clear that the day triggered an intense performance of solidarity, sociality and locality. If my interpretation of the structuration of emotion on display when watching a football match is not entirely incorrect, we can argue that the social function of working-class nationalism and its signature embodied practices is to restore the imagined caesura between self and a stratified society, and, when deployed as a politics, its function is to restore the imagined caesura between the nation and the state. Throughout the afternoon, what was on display was a repertoire of nonverbal embodied gestures and paralinguistic communication and expression along with the use of vernacular Scots which made for a community of

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embodiment characterized by all manner of spontaneity and exuberance, including one individual jumping onto a table and exposing himself all the better to perform his shouted insult at a virtual ‘other’ on a television screen. In light of such empirical data, what is required of anthropological theory is an emphasis upon the body as a locus of meaning. In this regard, Connerton’s view on how bodily practices bear meaning is useful: [I]ncorporating practices depend for their particular mnemonic effect on two distinctive features: their mode of existence and their mode of acquisition. They do not exist ‘objectively’, independently of their being performed. And they are acquired in such a way as not to require explicit reflection on their performance. (Connerton 1989: 102)

I propose working-class nationalism be viewed as a form of embodied meaning whose medium of acquisition is that of physical work or labour, so that we may view Scottish nationalism as the politicization of (working-class) being; as a performance of embodied (social) being.

Scottish Nationalism: Politics without England It seems to have been our generation that started it and they’re going to finish it off. My mum and that, she thinks we should get it [independence] now, but when I was growing up she just voted Labour. Whereas now they see us, me an all my mates vote SNP so we’re starting it. We’ve got the parliament, and the ones that are growing up, they’ll hear it more from us than we did from our mum and dad, so they’re going to pick up on it. —Steven Haggart, 1999

In May 2007 the Scottish people elected their first government committed to an independent Scotland. Ten years previously, during the British general election of May 1997, the right-of-centre Conservative Party, the only major political party opposed to reforming the Union with England, failed to have a single candidate elected in all seventy-two Scottish constituencies.23 I propose that this rise in Scottish nationalism be historicized from the viewpoint of a particular generation to be understood ‘idiomatically’, as A.P. Cohen recommends. After 1992, then, in light of four consecutive general election defeats – in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 – for the political Left, it became clear to a generation coming to political consciousness during this period that democratic politics and voting along class lines was a naive political strategy.24 23. Of the 651 seats in the Westminster Parliament, 72 (or 11 per cent) were allocated to Scotland. Since the 2005 general election this number has been reduced to 59. 24. Having won a record fifty seats at the 1992 general election, one wit summed up his feelings in large red paint on a gable end in the Craigmillar area of Edinburgh after the election: ‘Vote Labour for Fifty Useless Bastards’.

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In the immediate aftermath of the election in 1992, even convinced unionist politicians openly admitted the unreformed Union with England was deeply problematic for the majority of Scottish voters. For a younger generation subject to new opportunities and responsibilities for exercising reflexivity, the question after 1992 was whether they would reconstitute the political playing field on a purely national basis; that is, constitute a politics without England. In my first interview during fieldwork one informant advised me: I mean if you can’t stand up for your own country … I mean, OK, I’ll give you an instance of what I felt. I was talking to a guy one night, I was at a party, and there was a Dutchman there. And I’ve worked in Holland, I know how they think, how they work, how they behave and all the rest of it … And this Dutchman was making a fool of himself, he was enjoying himself, having a good time. And somebody was sitting – they were all Scotch people – and he turns an’ says, ‘You’re nothing but a f—ing arsehole’. And he says, ‘Aye, maybe I am’, he says’, ‘but I govern maself. There’s a difference’. That summed it up. That summed it right up.

Throughout fieldwork I spoke and listened to members of an older generation who had resolved to remain Labour Party supporters. However, when I interviewed Roberta Catherine, the chairwoman of the local Labour Party, in 1999, she freely admitted to a deep malaise among Labour activists in light of what was viewed as New Labour’s desertion of socialism. Roberta: I’ve got a photo taken with Cherie [Blair] and they’re nice people, but they’re Tories. P.G.: You can say that? Roberta: I can say there’s a bit of Tory in them. Aye. Come on now! They’re rotten with money. Where’s an Old Labour like my dad, who went down the pit on his hands and knees and voted Labour and a [trade] union member all his life; what does he have in common with Tony Blair? P.G.: You’re talking heresy! Roberta: I know! [laughs]. I know it’s not right but we’ve all I suppose got those kind of feelings … I think he’s got Tory values! Three year ago, I stood out on the streets in all the villages in Fife … and especially in Cardenden itself, at that particular time, I could have got a 100 per cent Labour vote. Today I’ll only guarantee you 20 per cent of a Labour vote. P.G.: I thought Cardenden was quite solidly Labour? Roberta: Aye, but they’re Old Labour. And they’re Left. I could name you a few people of this village who’ve been Labour voters and members of the Labour Party all their lives but are weary! I shouldn’t really be saying this to you, I’ll get shot by Gordon!25 Let’s be honest, a lot of the Labour voters, they’ll only vote, they’re no politically minded. I hate to say this, but if you were putting a monkey in this village, the village of Bowhill [the central area of Cardenden] would vote Labour. Because it’s part of a tradition. They don’t know any better. 25. Roberta is referring to Gordon Brown, MP in Westminster for the Fife constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and UK Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010.

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If there is a crisis among Old Labour supporters who cannot reconcile themselves to a post-socialist Labour Party, there is a younger generation who, while sharing the disaffection of their parents, are pursuing a politics of identity via nationalism having seen from their fathers and mothers that voting Labour was an ineffective working-class politics. The quote which opens this section nicely domesticates the contention of Anthony Smith that, ‘the main battle of the nationalists is so often fought out within its chosen ethnie against the older self-definitions’ (quoted in Eley and Suny 1996: 124), and it helps situate Scottish nationalism within an intimate inter-generational, familial context. The force of this particular nationalism emerges not from any prolonged meditation upon the Union or events in a reified public or political sphere but from the mundane realities of class and culture as they are inter-generationally lived and discussed in countless inter-generational family conversations that occurred throughout Scotland over the past thirty years in thousands of working-class homes and localities. With the advent of post-industrial capitalism and neoliberal globalization came the end of the occupational landscape characteristic of the industrial era as well as the end of the postwar ‘consensus politics’ of the 1945 generation during the period of office of Margaret Thatcher. If we consider the year-long miners’ strike of 1984/5, there occurred something approaching the contestation of the state at the everyday level where miners, their families and neighbours and friends, were all drawn into this struggle. Practices of picketing, monitoring movements of coal, monitoring miners’ observance of the strike, organizing food kitchens, rallies and so on formed part of an everyday resistance to the anti-trade union and anti-miner government of the day as well as the forces of law and order deployed to enforce government policy. When we add the introduction of the Poll Tax in Scotland in 1989 (one year before implementation in England), a third of Scots from the outset were set to refuse to pay what was viewed as a tax introduced to appease middle-class home owners faced with increased rates set by local authorities to pay for local government services. Especially among young single working-class people still living with their parents, this civil disobedience was the psychological continuation of 1984/5 on another front, and a form of politicization that again reached the everyday level of young people’s lives thanks in part to the widespread campaign of non-payment and civil disobedience.26 This was perceived as another attack on localities and livelihoods that fuelled politicization, the response of nationalism, the end of politics on an all-British basis, and the pooling of resistance with the English working-class, which was viewed as having failed to resist Thatcher at the ballot box in 1979.27 26. The refusal to pay the Poll Tax was led by opposition politicians such as Kenny MacAskill, Minister for Justice in the Scottish government up to the time of writing (2011), and recently at the centre of a political storm over his decision to release the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on 20 August 2009. 27. At the 1979 general election: ‘It is calculated that [in England] skilled workers swung 11½ [per cent] to the Conservatives, unskilled workers 9 per cent, and that as a result the Labour Party attracted only … 45 per cent of the working-class vote … In Scotland the swing to the Tories was 0.7 per cent’ (Gamble 1983: 131 n.1).

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Conclusion: Neoliberalism and the Question of Being The process of post-industrialization destroyed the industrial strongholds of imagining and practising the idea of ‘Britain’ among a younger working-class generation, such as all-British industries and all-British trade unions. As a direct result, the British state lost much of its legitimacy among a younger generation in the 1980s, and after 1992 in particular it was derided by nationalists as a ‘failed state’ and a consensus was established which identified the multi-national United Kingdom as the fundamental barrier to political and national freedom. In her determination to pursue a neoliberal agenda throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher tore up the postwar politics of consensus in favour of governance from a position of strength, and eventually engendered a retaliatory ‘politics of weakness’ in which a younger generation followed suit and broke with the postwar consensus politics of their parents, mobilizing outwith the parameters set by the workers’ movement since the late nineteenth century.28 If working-class Scots saw in Thatcher their nemesis, they seem to have borrowed the same unapologetic integralist approach to advancing the interests of class and nation and achieved something no previous generation achieved: a politically significant integration of class and nation. If Ulrich Beck is correct to maintain that class biographies ‘become transformed into reflexive biographies which depend on the decisions of the actor’ (Beck 1992: 88), then it seems the rise of nationalism is one of the more direct political consequences of ‘reflexive modernization’ among the 1979 generation. This is so insofar as a process of detraditionalization has meant the political, religious, national and cultural allegiances of previous industrial generations – an all-British identity and Labour Party electoral allegiance, and a particular modernist and dominated working-class sub-culture – are at an end. In light of the 1997 general-election result, where every Conservative Party candidate who stood for election in Scotland failed to get elected, Scotland is a clear example of Friedman’s thesis regarding the contemporary widespread crisis of legitimacy among traditional state and political elites, where the pursuit of economic globalization and post-industrialization results in a crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of national electorates (Friedman 2003). Insofar as Thatcherism represented an elitist denationalization of economics, it engendered an unprecedented nationalization of politics among the Scottish working-class. Scottish nationalism must thus be understood in the context of a working-class electorate which had previously rejected mobilization via national identity. Thanks to four consecutive victories for the neoliberal Conservative Party due to its electoral popularity in England, I contend that, ultimately, there occurred a politicization of being, and included in this ‘question of being’ was a sharp awareness of the Scottish working-class’s 28. As early as 1894 the Scottish Labour Party, founded six years earlier, merged with the English-based Independent Labour Party.

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complicity in reproducing its own domination. Seen in this light, Scottish nationalism is a politics of class which rejects the previous 1945 generation’s complicity in reproducing a ‘dominated’ relationship to its own being (working-class and Scottish).

References Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Brown, A., D. McCrone and L. Paterson. 1996. Politics and Society in Scotland. London: Macmillan. Buchan, D. 1994. Folk Tradition and Folk Medicine in Scotland: The Writings of David Rorie. Edinburgh: Canongate Academic. Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohen, A.P. (ed.) 1982. Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eley, G., and R.G. Suny (eds). 1996. Becoming National: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedman, J. (ed.) 2003. Globalization, the State and Violence. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press. Gamble, A. 1983. ‘Thatcherism and Conservative Politics’, in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 109–31. Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gilfillan, P. 2009. ‘Fundamental Ontology Versus Esse est percipi: Theorizing (Working-Class) Being and Liberation’, Space and Culture 12(2): 250–62. ——— 2011. ‘Scottish Nationalism and a New Generation’s Answer to the Question of Being-in-the-World’, Concept 1(1): 8–13. GRS. 2008. ‘Mid-2006 Population Estimates for Localities in Scotland’, General Registrar for Scotland. Retrieved 24 September 2009 from: http://www.groscotland.gov.uk. Hearn, J. 1998. ‘The Social Contract: Re-framing Scottish Nationalism’, Scottish Affairs 23: 14–26. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell. Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State. London: Routledge. MacCormick, N. 1996. ‘Liberalism, Nationalism and the Post-sovereign State’, Political Studies 44(3): 533–67. McCrone, D. 1992. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. London: Routledge. ——— 1998. The Sociology of Nationalism: Tomorrow’s Ancestors. London: Routledge. Mackenney, L. (ed.) 1985. Joe Corrie: Plays, Poems and Theatre Writings. Edinburgh: 7:84 Publications. Nairn, T. 1981. The Break-up of Britain, 2nd edn. London: Verso. ——— 1997. Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited. London: Verso. Rankin, I. 1986. The Flood. Toronto: PD Meany.

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——— 1987. Knots and Crosses. London: Orion Press. Tamir, Y. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. WEA. 1991 . ‘Auchterderran of Yesteryear, Vol. 2’. Edinburgh: Workers’ Educational Association, South-east Scotland District.

Epilogue From the Ashes of a Counter-Revolution George Baca

Given that, as I write, the countries of the European Union (EU) are currently being convulsed by the economic crises in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, the publication of Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class is indeed timely. This volume forcefully turns anthropological debates to class conflict and working-class culture at a time when the global economy seems to be in serious trouble. These essays provide vivid descriptions of how working-class Europeans have come to understand and respond to the disastrous consequences that have followed the implementation of neoliberal policies. Collectively this volume sheds light on the nature of neoliberalism by describing how working-class Europeans have variously coped with their increasingly precarious lives amid the ashes of what could be called a counter revolution: the simultaneous dismantling of the welfare state in the West and the destruction of the socialist state in the East. Most notably, we see the ways in which an evasive politics of fear and nostalgia has emerged and contributed to the refashioning of nationalist imaginaries in a Europe without either socialism or a viable workers’ movement. This volume is especially appealing because the authors do not hitch their theoretical wagon to theories of neoliberalism and globalization. While taking these issues very seriously, the authors illustrate how governing elites have used ideas of neoliberalism to restructure the social landscape in terms defined by capital as a world system. From this perspective it becomes clear that ideas of globalization form part of the world-view that finds its political expression in the neoliberal policies that continually seek to break down barriers to multinational capital (Trouillot 2003; Cooper 2009), reduce the state’s responsibility for public goods, and greatly expand the global proletariat (Kalb, this volume). The decline of the welfare state in Western Europe and the collapse of state-socialist governments in Central and Eastern Europe have helped

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produce a political context in which multinational capital aggressively pursues its short term goals in a reckless and destabilizing manner that undermines the legitimacy of the nation-state (Friedman 2003). As Michael Blim points out in his contribution to this volume, neoliberal policies have ripped apart an older political structure and rebuilt a new one whereby leftists in Italy and elsewhere have cooperated with xenophobic conservative forces. These developing relations between capital, labour and political parties cannot be adequately described with the conventional categories of Left and Right. Though party politics continue to use these labels to mobilize voters, beneath the surface we see a messy process whereby political leaders stitch together alliances between various strata of the governing elite and working-classes. Such scepticism of political categories conceived in abstract terms of class is not new. As Antonio Gramsci has taught us (Gramsci 1957, 1971), the building of political movements requires the forging of alliances that are based in local struggles over land, labour and capital. With a Gramscian sensibility these essays describe how political alliances and historic blocs have been configured in ways that are counter-intuitive to conventional political analysis. These reformulated relationships between parties of the Right and Left have been shaped by racial reforms. Since decolonization and the civil rights movement, neoliberal elites have often connected their policies and programmes to liberal policies of anti-racism and multiculturalism as they seek to present their world-view as a form of cosmopolitanism (Trouillot 2000; Povinelli 2002; Baca 2010). Meanwhile, many sectors of workingclasses have interpreted these reforms and the greater inclusion of minorities as the cause of their increasing vulnerability. As such, disaffected workingclasses have become coveted by right-wing political entrepreneurs who have partially filled the vacuum left by the evaporation of labour movements with a politics of fear that appeals to racial ideas to vilify the poor and outsiders (Gingrich and Banks 2005; Ost 2005). In describing these complex relations between social, political and economic discourses, the essays take us beneath the surface and show how right-wing political entrepreneurs have developed a political discourse that resonates with the experiences of working-classes. These essays, in fine anthropological fashion, make sense of the ways that populist rhetoric and nationalist images have resonated with working-classes as they struggle to make sense of their increasingly precarious social position. Yet the ultimate futility is clear: neo-nationalist populism represents a politics of evasion that steers away from the powerful interests of global capital and focuses on the politically weak and equally disenfranchised workers of different colours and nationalities. The proliferation of populist movements in Europe has a direct relationship to the type of political changes that resulted from neoliberal social policies that gained force during the 1970s. These policies implemented an economic theory that sought to resuscitate the ideals of the right-wing of the liberal Enlightenment by proposing that the regulatory regime of the welfare state was an obstacle to the freedoms and liberties that create prosperity. Neoliberal

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theories prophesied that the slashing of government spending, the cutback of workers’ benefits, and reducing regulations on finance capital would reignite the European economy. Central to this political philosophy was the belief that the highest stages of human civilization can be achieved by limiting the control of the state in the provision of social goods, which would unshackle humans to exercise individual liberty and freedom to achieve their needs and wants (Harvey 2005). By forcefully implementing these policies, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher inaugurated what many now call the ‘age of neoliberalism’, with its austere social and economic policies. In many ways Thatcher’s administration set the bar as it – in concert with Ronald Reagan’s administration in the United States – used the abstract ideas neoliberalism to reorganize the state by dismantling important features of welfarism and many agencies associated with capitalist development since the Great Depression, associated with economics of John Maynard Keynes (see Blyth 2002). This is a story we are all familiar with. Yet it is merely the beginning point in the longer drama – which is still unfolding – to which anthropology has the most to contribute. Taking us beyond the overly simplistic idea that neoliberalism represents the restoration of elite power (e.g., Harvey 2005), we can see that the neoliberal order in Europe is neither a restoration of an old elite nor an inevitable and all-powerful force. Instead, with the help of Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class, we can see a shaky structure with many fissures – a point made clear by the fall of the euro amid economic crises in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland. In this regard, the essays pick up the shattered pieces of European society that have followed the past three decades of economic restructuring. With vivid ethnographic descriptions the contributors describe the jarring disconnection between what neoliberal policies promised and what working-classes have experienced. In each case we see an emerging split between working-class representatives who successfully bargain with global capital and those who are left to bargain with governing state elites. Nowhere in Europe has this disjuncture been more dramatic than in the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, multinational capital from Western Europe and the United States gradually moved in to buy up state-owned industries and introduce multinational companies into this new market. A newly emergent governing class in Eastern European countries obliged multinational capital by gradually liquidating state resources and providing excellent opportunities for capital investment. With much fanfare, economic liberals and social conservatives held Eastern Europe up as the testing ground where it would be proved that capitalist markets were best suited to develop democracy and create prosperity (Kalb 2005). Privatization – vaguely conceived and poorly planned – became the main vehicle that would unshackle the creative powers of society and usher in an age of progress and bring Central and Eastern Europe closer to its Western European counterparts.

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As was the case with neoliberal policies in the United States and Western Europe, the results were frightening for many sectors of the working-class. With an astounding amount of arrogance and short-sightedness, proponents of privatization took aim at the bedrock of political stability of socialist societies: the working-class. Workers of Central and Eastern Europe found themselves having gone from romanticized heroes of the ‘socialist miracle’ to the stubborn obstacle to liberal democracy and prosperity. Over the next decade, workers would gradually realize that privatization and the opening of national markets would dispossess them of their livelihoods and many privileges (Ost 2005). These processes are nicely detailed by Eszter Bartha’s analysis of this decline at the Rába wagon factory, once the model of Hungarian socialism. Using life histories, she describes how, even as the restructuring of this industry failed to meet its promises, that the workers evaded direct struggle with management. As outside capital introduced many cutbacks in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility’, workers faced layoffs and wage cuts as the factory became a shadow of its former heyday during the Socialist period, which have resulted in ‘narratives of decline’ that present privatization and the postsocialist period as a massive failure – a noxious combination of corruption and incompetence. It is from this context that we can build a less sensationalist and selfrighteous understanding of working-class populism. By focusing on the maddening dispossession that occurred throughout Europe, as privatizations ate away the rights and privileges of workers, we understand the context from which this form of populism emerged. In a context without a viable left-wing political force, xenophobic fears resonated with the vulnerabilities of European working-classes. The essays on Eastern Europe have connected this proliferation of nationalism to the crumbling of socialist neighbourhoods. Once the central force of society and the reproduction of the working-class, ‘red’ neighbourhoods – much like American ghettoes – have become warehouses for the poor, underemployed and jobless. Living amid crumbling infrastructure and neighbourhoods, the members of these communities have become humiliated and disillusioned. This rising tide of anger and disappointment underlies how neoliberal policies operate at such an abstract level that neoliberal politicians cannot deal with practical issues of governance. As is nicely described in several articles of this volume, the grand wizards of neoliberal thought never predict, and therefore do not have suitable strategies to deal with, the political pressures that are created by the type of dispossession that currently envelopes the entirety of Europe and the United States. A common theme that connects the essays from both sides of Europe is the way that the past two decades of accumulating capital by dispossessing citizens of public goods has led to the simultaneous implosion of social services and the rise of a form of politics that actively disenfranchises larger numbers of the public. This confluence of dispossession and disenfranchisement has encouraged working-classes to reimagine the past in ways that ignore class

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conflict. As Paul Gilfillan points out in his chapter, the sense of decline that resonates with the experiences of many Scots has shut out the bitter class conflict that riveted the period of industrial growth. As the IMF, World Bank and EU put new demands on states, nostalgia for the state and its myth of self-sufficiency has emerged (Özyürek 2006), cunningly exploited and cultivated by aspiring political entrepreneurs. Nationalist imaginaries in Europe have been inspired by interconnected narratives of decline and nostalgia for an idealized society in the form of a working-class dream: accessible urban housing, decent wages and meaningful lives. Gabor Halmai makes this connection in what he calls Hungary’s ‘politics of dispossession’, which he traces to the conservative politician Viktor Orbán. Orbán came onto the scene to initiate what would become a provocation to neoliberalism in Hungary as political discontent grew following the disastrous effects of the 1995 IMF austerity package. Taking aim at the failures of postsocialist politics and seeking to co-opt the working-classes, Orbán led Fidesz, a Hungarian rightist conservative party, to include the masses in what he envisioned as the Polgári Körök (Civic Circles). Originally a middle-class anti-communist group, Fidesz found that the only way it could challenge the status quo – and its failed policies – was by reaching out to the ‘red’ neighbourhoods and people who looked nostalgically to the era of socialism, which now is read in purely nationalist terms in a world without socialism. However, the inclusion of great numbers of ‘ordinary people’ transformed Fidesz in ways that its leadership certainly could not have imagined. As the Fidesz-backed alliance gained force, its political agenda drifted further to the right and took on an increasingly populist stance as the movement weaved together a viable and powerful alliance of the type that Antonio Gramsci calls a ‘historic bloc’ (Gramsci 1971). If we use Gramsci’s concept of historic bloc we get a better sense of how populism has become such a powerful political force in Europe. France and Italy serve as reminders that populists have succeeded precisely because they have rhetorically unmasked the politics of globalization that centrist elites embraced in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union (Kalb 2005). This is powerfully illustrated in Dora Vetta’s essay about populist nationalism in Kikinda, Serbia – in many ways the most unlikely followers of right-wing populism. Kikinda was long held as a dynamic industrial city with a multiethnic population. Indeed its electorate contrasted with the stereotype of bloodthirsty nationalist Serbs as they firmly rejected Slobodan Miloševi´c’s belligerence during the 1990s. However, by the early 2000s the economy foundered as its industrial base frayed, unemployment levels soared and social services collapsed. In the midst of these economic tragedies, the majority of Kikinda’s electorate turned to the Radical Party, headed by Vojislav Šešelj’s – a man whom Miloševi´c thought too extreme. Vetta shows the ways a diverse cross section of citizens gravitated toward his nationalist populism because his Radical Party was the only group that was actively criticizing the social and economic policies that had created so much suffering among the workingclasses, presenting the economic crisis as a ‘theft’ of the nation.

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These changes in Eastern Europe had corollary changes in a politics of fear that emerged in Western Europe. In Italy, Michael Blim describes the ways that the move toward the Right has coincided with the decline of industry. Importantly, he connects the parties and unions of the Left to this rightward shift. In evading direct struggles with capital, forces of the Left have accommodated themselves to right-wing xenophobia. If anything, the alliance of leftist forces have helped legitimize these policies by putting a human face on what Blim calls, following Slavoj Zizek, ‘Berlusconian barbarism’. Jaro Stacul develops this theme by describing how rural working-classes and former peasants in Trentino draw on these naturalizing categories to constitute themselves. In this case, Lega Nord and Forza Italia have rearticulated class, showing how conservative forces are perceptive about the insecurities and problems faced by working-classes, and they have used them to rhetorically wage a cultural war against the liberal Left without dealing with the material conditions that underlie class struggle. Stacul uses ethnographic material to describe these processes without romanticizing the so-called Fordist state. Instead, he points out the way class-based projects in Italy have pulled apart certain aspects of the state. While it has decreased its role in the livelihood of its subjects, important factions within the state have used naturalizing categories to rearticulate working-classes in the northern region of Italy to produce the conservative-right alliances between Lega Nord and Forza Italia. Despite the primacy of nationalism and its racial logic, he shows how the reconfiguration of Italian nationalism over the past two decades has been shaped by class. Avoiding a simplistic analysis that would dismiss workingclass Italians as simply racist, he shows how naturalizing categories draw on the struggles of the agrarian-pastoral economy of Trentino. Here we can see the changing meaning of class. He shows that cultural analysis of right-wing movements in Europe must focus on the class referent that they engage with as much as they reflect. This way he discloses the structural basis for new class divisions and cultural understandings of them. Norbert Petrovici’s contribution draws out the way ethnic nationalism became central to local politics in Cluj, Romania, after 1989. In a sensitive account of Gheorghe Funar’s mayorship in Cluj, he uses class analysis to describe the forces that produced a vibrant populist movement and a return of ethnic nationalism. Rather than merely fuelling ethnic conflict, we see how Funar used older forms of ethnic chauvinism to transform class struggles as if ethnicity represented a deeper cultural conflict and a threat to the Romanian nation. Petrovici examines the ways elites in Cluj drew semantic boundaries that incorporated working-classes in order to fortify bureaucratic class projects in terms of Romanian nationalism. By emphasizing the experiences – and influence – of working-classes, he shows how Funar was able to displace the pain of all-round dispossession onto public space and the symbolic politics of the nation. Florin Faje’s discussion of soccer fans in Cluj adds an important dimension to the other chapters. While most of these discuss the processes

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of class formation and the role of nationalism in produce historic blocs in Eastern and Western Europe, Faje deals with the experiences of the poor and marginalized who have turned to the very violence and vandalism that Paul Gilfillan describes for Scotland. He shows that political correctness and what we may call progressive politics in the West actually functions as a class marker that is used to draw class boundaries and further marginalize the working poor. His examination of these class contours in terms of conflicts between working-class and middle-class football fans resembles the type of scapegoating that occurs in the U.S., where poor whites, with their overt use of racial terms, become stigmatized as the source of racial strife – a perspective that conveniently ignores the processes that give middle-class whites class privilege and the moral high ground. Here, Faje shows that the racist rhetoric and violent behaviour of working-class youths has to be viewed in relationship to their struggle with coping with under-employment and marginalization. In the face of increased poverty and marginality, nationalist chauvinism became a language to present their experiences of class conflict and dispossession. In this way, we can see that the politics of fear emerged in ways that resonated with the failures and anxieties of many ordinary citizens; however, it did so in ways that mobilized these energies for an increasingly xenophobic and chauvinistic state. Ethnic discourse provided workers with a way to not only express their anxieties but also to make claims on the nation. Class analysis provides important insights into understanding these political changes and the resurgence of nationalist language. Internally, these political changes were based on struggles that had historical origins that preceded socialism – let alone the fall of socialism. In both the eastern and western parts of Europe, similar types of political brokers have emerged in ways that have brought the non-cosmopolitan segment of the bourgeoisie into an alliance with the downwardly mobile segment of the erstwhile Fordist working-class. Architects of new nationalist mobilizations have found ways to organize across class lines. In this way, nationalist discourse resonated with the experiences of working-classes as well as the middle class, who sought to become the managers, while evading any substantial confrontation with the dispossessive logic of capitalism as such. Rather than diminishing the importance of the state and its myths of the nation, the selling of state-owned resources and decreased role of government in providing public welfare has lead to mass dispossessions and dislocations over the past thirty years, which in their turn have helped to reinflate the myth of the organic nation, now in the form of a vernacular demand for attention from globalizing elites. In telling this story with ethnographically rich case studies, these chapters show us something new about neoliberalism; they describe the ways working-classes have come to understand their declining circumstances and the ways in which they have formed a politics based on evading struggles with capital while building on a nationalist politics of communitarian nostalgia. This confluence of forces has contributed to the rise of a populist nationalism that has questioned the legitimacy of authorities who

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hold liberalization and deregulation as the keys to prosperity. Collectively, the chapters show how the lives of both Eastern and Western Europeans have been damaged, leaving many humiliated and disillusioned. One of the great unintended consequences of neoliberal governance has thus been the proliferation of populist nationalism as a vehicle for organizing and mobilizing working-classes. In the vacuum left by the discrediting of leftist or socialist ideologies of class, populist politicians have succeeded in using the anxieties and fears produced by these policies to mobilize working-classes. From rich ethnographic detail the authors provide nuanced and historically sensitive explanations about how and why nationalist populism has proliferated in Europe. We come to see why xenophobic and nationalist interpretations of experiences under neoliberalism resonate powerfully with many Europeans; and crucially, how right-wing populism continues to mobilize working-classes in ways that have become a threat to ‘governance as usual’.

References Baca, G. 2010. Conjuring Crisis: Struggling for Civil Rights in a Southern Military City. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Blyth, M. 2002. Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cooper, F. 2009. ‘Space, Time, and History: The Conceptual Limits of Globalization’, in G. Baca, A. Khan and S. Palmie (eds), Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Critically Engage the Work of Sidney Mintz. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp.31–57. Friedman, J. 2003. ‘Globalization, Dis-integration, Re-organization: The Transformation of Violence’, J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, the State, and Violence. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, pp.1–34. Gingrich, A., and M. Banks. 2005. Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Gramsci, A. 1957. The Modern Prince, and Other Writings. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ——— 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kalb, D. 2005. ‘From Flows to Violence: Politics and Knowledge in the Debates on Globalization and Empire’, Anthropological Theory 5(2): 176–204. Ost, D. 2005. The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Post-Communist Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Özyürek, E. 2006. Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Povinelli, E.A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trouillot, M.R. 2000. ‘Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era’, Interventions 2(2): 171–86. ——— 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Notes on Contributors George Baca is a research scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and director of the Global Studies Program at Dong-A University, Busan, South Korea. He is the author of Conjuring Crisis: Racism and Civil Rights in a Southern Military Town (2010), editor of Nationalism’s Bloody Terrain (2006) and associate editor of the journal Dialectical Anthropology. Currently he has moved his interest in the study of militarization from the southern United States to the Korean peninsula where he is conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Eszter Bartha holds a Ph.D. in History from the Central European University, Budapest, and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Eastern European Studies at Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences, Budapest. Her main research interest is labor history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is currently writing a book on the relation between political power and the working-class in Honecker’s GDR and Kádár’s Hungary. Michael Blim is the author of Made in Italy: Small-Scale Industrialization and Its Consequences (1990) and Equality and Economy: The Global Challenge (2005); he is also co-editor of Anthropology and the Global Factory (1992). He is currently writing books about narratives of economic decline in central Italy and about equality and global justice. Florin Faje is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest. His research interests include the dynamics of nationalism in East and Central Europe, processes of state formation, the social history of sport and physical education, and anthropology and history. Paul Gilfillan is Lecturer in Sociology and Programme Leader (Psychology and Sociology) at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, prior to which he was a Research Fellow in the Department of Religious Education at Glasgow University. His research interests include nationalism, religion and the sociology of contemporary Scotland. He is currently writing a book with the provisional title A Phenomenological Sociology of Redemption.

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Gábor Halmai is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest, where he is carrying out a comparative investigation into two collective struggles against semi-peripheral ‘transitions’, namely the nationalist movement in Hungary and the socialist MST in Brazil. Don Kalb is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest, and Senior Researcher at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His is the author of Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850– 1950 (1997) and editor of The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In (2000), Globalization and Development: Key Issues and Debates (2004) and Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn (2005). He is also founding editor of Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Norbert Petrovici is Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania, and a visiting fellow at New Europe College, Bucharest. His research interests concern the way different postsocialist economic forces in Romania are assembled in the frame of various fields of power so as to create relatively coherent urban spaces over particular time spans. Jaro Stacul teaches at Grant MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada. He has conducted research on localism and political identities in northern Italy, and has recently started a new research project on changing political subjectivities in postsocialist Poland. He is author of The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley (2003). Theodora Vetta is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of social anthropology and ethnology at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Marie Curie visiting fellow at Central European University, Budapest. Her research interests include nationalism, privatization, NGOs, the promotion of democracy, and welfare reform in the Balkans.

Index abstract ideas of neoliberalism 199 abstract liberalism 5 accumulation capitalist logic of 82 by dispossession 15 regimes of neoliberalism 57 transnationalization of local accumulation 72–3 affluence, memories of society of 180–81 Africa 8, 9, 10, 20, 23, 24, 51, 116, 147, 151 agency, dramatic transformations and frustration of 85 agro-pastoral demise in Italy 162 Albertazzi, D. 159 Ali, Tariq 8 alien influences, proliferation in Hungary of 105 All Budapest Workers’ Council 122 altruistic/selfish axis 130–31 Amariei, R. 73 Amin, Samir 21 Anderson, P. 3 anthropology diffusionist approaches in 9–10 elite approaches, problems with 11 ethnicity, approach to 22 focus in Europe of 3–4 Friedman’s perspective on capital decentralization 2–3 global assemblage, studies of 10–12 hidden histories, importance for 7, 14, 15 local outcomes, global processes and ‘critical junctions’ between 12–13 methods in, dilemmas in global era for 9–13 multi-level mechanisms, need for clarification on 11–12 nationalist populism, studies of fear and 7–9

neo-nationalism, recent work on 17 neoliberal globalization, studies of 7–9 ‘otherness’ classical explanations of 9–10 popular resentment, radical nationalism and 6–7 populist politics of fear, production of 12, 13 social insecurity, studies of 7 unease with globalization 9–11 Anti-Bucharesti 89 anti-capitalism 105–6 anti-communist consensus 2 anti-globalization movement 2 anti-reformers in Hungary, victory of 135 anti-Semitism 105 Appadurai, A. 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 57 Arditti, Banjamin 14 Arendt, Hannah 15 Armstrong, G. 84 Arrighi, G. 4 Asia 8, 15n12, 147 assimilation in Italy, problems of 150–51 Associated Labour Act (1974), Serbia 45–6 Austria, populist nationalism in 30 autonomous work, rewards of 164–5 autonomy, ideal of 170–71 Baca, George 194–201, 202 Balibar, E. 157 ‘banker government’ 130 Barbu, D. 62 Barsani, P. and Lerra, E. 152n8 Barth, F. 21 Bartha, Eszter 17, 20, 24, 25–7, 92–110, 197, 202 Beck, Ulrich 57, 191

206 ◆ Index

Belgium, populism in, spread of 5–6, 30 Belkis, D. et al. 64, 64n4 Berezin, M. 5, 16n13 Berlinguer, Enrico 151–2 Berlusconi, Silvio 6, 143, 144, 147, 160, 163–4, 166, 168, 170 Bernard, Bien 176, 179–80 Bersani, Pierluigi 152n8 Betz, H.G. 5 Blim, Michael 6, 20, 28–9, 142–55, 168, 195, 199, 202 Boag, Franca 156n1 Bokros, Lajos 136n30 Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. 93n5 Bossányi, K. 97 Bossi, Umberto 159, 166, 170 Bottero, W. and Irwin, S. 157, 157n2 Bourdieu, Pierre 8, 22, 30, 58–9 Brazil, Via Campesina in 15 Brenner, R. 4 British identity, Scottish history and 181–2 Brown, A., McCrone, D. and Paterson, L. 173 Brown, Gordon 189n25 Brown, J., Earle, J.S. and Telegdy, A. 69 Brubaker, R. and Cooper, F. 22, 58, 59 Brubaker, R. et al. 58, 59–60, 71, 73, 79, 80, 81, 85, 89 Brubaker, Rogers 21–2, 40n6, 58 Brudascu, D. 71 Buchan, D. 176, 179 Buchowski, Michal 24, 44 Bunce, V. 40 Burawoy, M. 13, 92n2, 92n4, 99 Burawoy, M. and Krotov, P. 61 Burawoy, M. and Lukács, J. 92n4 Burawoy, M. and Verdery, K. 94 Burawoy, M. et al. 13 burlesque nationalism 72 Burns, Robert 183n18 cultural Scotland and 183 Buruma, I. 6 businessmen-politicians 159–60 Caciagli, M. and Kertzer, D. 3 Ceaus¸escu, Nikolai 61, 65 Calhoun, C. 59 Cannadine, D. 157 Canovan, M. 5, 6 capitalism capitalist globalization 9, 31, 116

capitalist penetration in Hungary 116 CEE as testing ground for 196 collective action against 113 comprador capitalism 8 consolidation in Serbia of 46 contradictions of world capitalism, analytic reluctance in CEE 16 ‘democratic’ transformation in Hungary to 116–17, 118 disappointment in Hungary with 107–9 globalization and financialization of capital 4 predations in CEE of 29–30 sovereignty of capital 8 world system, expansion of proletariat and 2 Cârjan, S. 85 Carrier, James 4, 4n4 CASCA, Vancouver 11n8 Castronovo, V. 145 Catherine, Roberta 189 Catholic Association of Italian Workers (ACLI) 166–7 Cento Bull, A. 158 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) anti-communist consensus in 2 capitalist predations in 29–30 class and nation in 19 class and neo-nationalism in 94–5 class divisions in, urban-rural divide and 83 closing down of local plants in 20 comprador capitalisms in 8 contradictions of world capitalism, analytic reluctance in 16 damaged lives in 201 economic hardship, postsocialist era and 89–90 fear in, emergence of politics of 199 industrial decline and erosion of communal life in 25–6 industrial investment, transnational flows in 25 nationalist populism in 17 privatization in 196 public property sales in 126 repression and dispossession in 15–16 social gains of socialism in 67 socialist neighbourhoods, nationalism and decline in 197

Index ◆ 207

state-owned industries, foreign purchases in 196 state-socialism in, collapse of 15–16, 194–5 as testing ground for capitalism 196 urbanisation of peasantry in, socialism and 23 workers from, influx into Fife, Scotland 177n9 workers in, dispossession of 197 Centre for Free Elections and Democracy, Serbia 41–2 Cetnik movement in Serbia 52 CFR (Caile Ferate Romane), Romania 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90 Chakrabarty, D. 19n16 Chatterjee, P. 187 Chevalier, L. 18 China 3n3 Chirot, D. 60 Christian Democratic Party (Centre Union) decline of Left, rise on new Right and 143, 148, 152, 152n8 regional identity in Italian Alps (post 1989) 158, 163, 166–7 Ciupagea, C., Ilie, S. and Neef, R. 70 Civic Circles (Polgári Körök) initiation into 132–3 nationalist mobilization in ‘transitional’ Hungary 27, 114, 117–18, 118n11, 119, 122, 123–4, 125, 127n20, 129, 131, 135–6, 137, 138n31, 139, 201 Clarke, J. 2n1, 3 class boundaries and experiences, remaking of 89–90 class ‘consciousness’ 161–9, 170 composition of Cluj, Romania 79 crisis in Italy of 157 cultural identity and 170 divisions in CEE, urban-rural divide and 83 growth of neoliberalism and 14 issues of, academic attitudes to 94–5 nation and 18–31 nation and the question of being under conditions of 191–2 nation in CEE and 19

nationalism and ‘transition’ in Serbia 39, 40–41 neo-nationalism in CEE and 94–5 new formations of 15 perspectival shift towards 17–18 populism and 157–8 relations of, ethnicization of 78–9 relationship between populism and 157–8 restructuring of, neoliberal globalization and 19–20 Cohen, A.P. 173, 188 Collier, R.B. and Collier, D. 12n9 Comaroff, J. 57 Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. 9, 57 Comecon organization, collapse of 96 Commando Gruia 87–8 communal living, evocation of 178–9 Communist Party of Italy (CPI) decline of Left, rise on new Right and 143, 148, 151–2, 154 regional identity in Italian Alps (post 1989) and 158, 163 communist regimes in Hungary, workers’ resistance against 93 communitarian imagery 118–19 community autonomy 165–6 community life, recreation of 131–3 community revitalization 167–8 competition for jobs 101 competition states, transformation to 4 competitiveness 116–17 comprador capitalism 8 Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) 154 Confindustria Marche 146 Conner, W. 60 Connerton, P. 173, 188 conspiracy theories 105 Constantinescu, Ioan 71 contested loyalties 82–9 Cooper, F. 5, 194 Coreper Committees 3 corporatist Left in Italy, lineages of 151–2 corporatist politics, impact on Left of 144 Corrie, Joe 177n7, 183n18 Corriere della Sera 146n3 corruption allegations of 70–71 narratives of 97, 106

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cosmopolitanism 1, 89–90 liberal cosmopolitanism and globalization 15 critical junctures 12n9 Crouch, C. 3 Csabai, I. et al. 121n15 Csedö, K. et al. 63, 67n6 Csepel anti-Stalinism in 113–14 building Civic Circles in 123–4 iron and metalworking in 119–23 socialist development in 120–21 Csurka, Istvan 106n18 Culic, I. 61 cultural egocentrism 155 cultural globalization, contradictions of 9–11 cultural patrimony of Fermo, urban development and 142 culture of productive corporatism, idea of 153–4 D’Azelglio, Massimo 143 de-democratization 14 decline personal life histories and narratives in Hungary of 99–100, 109–10 post-industrial experience in Scotland of 179 Dekleva, J. and Simmie, J. 46 democratic leadership in Serbia 37 democratic prosperity, disillusionment at 50–51 democratization in Hungary, celebration of 117 Denmark, populism in, spread of 5–6 Derluguian, G. 8n6, 16, 21 Devic, A. 40 Di Tella, T. 5 Diamanti, I. 159 Đilas, Milovan 45 Dinki´c, Mladen 37, 48 dispossession dispossessed industrial workingclass, nationalist influence on 71–2 lost security and 130 nationalist mobilization in ‘transitional’ Hungary 123–33 politics of 114–17 privatization and 127–8 Djindji´c, Zoran 38 Drahokoupil, J. 8, 116

Dunk, T. 170 Đuric, D. 43 Dusza, A. 96n13 Earle, J.S. and Telegdy, A. 69 East Germany 94n8, 95, 108–9 economic change, neoliberal interpretations of 170 economic crisis, Yugoslav disintegration and 46 economic effects of liberalization in Serbia 50 economic globalization, postindustrialization and 191 economic hardship football fandom in Cluj, Romania and 80, 89–90 postsocialist era CEE and 89–90 economic liberalism, ideology of 161, 166, 170 economic liberalism of elites in Serbia 52 economic protectionism 69 economic provincialism, Left’s promotion of 154 economic straitjacketing 115–19 efficiency, ideal of 170–71 Eley, G. and Suny, R.G. 190 entrepreneurialism entrepreneurial ethos in Italian Alps 160 nationalist mobilization in ‘transitional’ Hungary and 116–17 Epstein, A.L. 21 Eriksen, T.H. 9, 21 ethnic composition of Cluj, Romania 79 ethnic groups, ‘groupism’ and 58 ethnic identities, competition between 86 ethnic nationalism and social contracts 62 ethnicization of class-based experiences 104–5 ethno-nationalism divisions in Cluj, Romania 79–80, 85–6, 87, 89–90 working-class neo-nationalism and 57, 58, 59, 69, 73–4 Eurasia 9n7

Index ◆ 209

European Association of Social Anthropologists 4n4, 156n1 European Parliament 110, 115, 135, 139 European Union (EU) 3, 30, 90, 142, 153n9, 168, 170, 194 as financial resource in Marche 153 see also Central and Eastern Europe (CEE); Western Europe factory leaderships, development of 65 failures in management, workers’ criticisms of working-class nationalism in Hungary (post 1989) 102–3, 104 Faje, Florin 6, 21, 23–4, 70, 78–90, 199–200, 202 fan clubs see football fandom in Cluj, Romania Farcas, Alexandru 70 Ferguson, J. 9n7, 20, 115 Ferguson, J. and Gupta, A. 3 Fidesz, bourgeois nationalism of 6, 113, 117–19, 120–21, 122n16, 123–4, 127, 128, 129–30, 131–3, 133n26, 134–9, 201 disillusionment with 137–9 Fife Free Press 175n4 financial collapse (2008) 2, 3 financial speculation, deleterious effects of 52 Financial Times 142 fiscal evasion 152–3 The Flood (Rankin, I.) 174 Focaal 2n1 Földes, G. 93n6 football fandom in Cluj, Romania 23–4, 78–90 accumulation, capitalist logic of 82 agency, dramatic transformations and frustration of 85 Anti-Bucharesti 89 CFR (Caile Ferate Romane) 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90 class boundaries and experiences, remaking of 89–90 class composition of Cluj 79 class relations, ethnicization of 78–9 Commando Gruia 87–8 commonality of fandom 84 contested loyalties 82–9 cosmopolitan identifications 89–90 economic hardship 80, 89–90

ethnic composition of Cluj 79 ethnic identities, competition between 86 ethno-national divisions 79–80, 85–6, 87, 89–90 fan clubs, control potential of 87–8 football, hierarchical logic of 81 football, strong local affiliations with 84–5 football clubs and town, perceptions of transformations of 83–4 historical background 80–82 ‘hooliganism’ public discourse on 82, 86 investment in (and takeover of) CFR 82–3 joking, strategy of 89 KVSC (Kolozsvari Vasutas Sport Club) 79, 83, 88–9 migration of football players 82 modernity, European Union (EU) and 90 multiculturalism 80, 89–90 nationalism, politics of 82–3 nationalism, public manifestations of 85 networks of friendship, ethnicallybased 88–9 social structure, ethnic divide in 80–81 socialist developmentalism 81 socialist industrialization, patterns of 82 solidarity, class-structures forms of 89–90 transition in Romanian football 81–2 ultras 88–9 Universitatea 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 90, 95, 96, 97 Vienna Diktat 85 work and leisure patterns 82 Fordism 7, 93, 104–5, 109, 157, 199 post-Fordism 93, 104–5, 109, 110, 169 foreign ownership, personal recollections of consequences 48–9 Fortuijn, Pim 6 Forza Italia (Let’s Go Italy) 159, 161 France National Front in 5 populism in, spread of 5–6, 30 Frank, T. 8n6 Frazer, George 176

210 ◆ Index

Freeman, C. 161 Fremdkörper (‘foreign body’), target for frustration 140 Friedman, Jonathan 2–3, 4, 5, 7, 8n6, 9, 10, 11, 11n8, 18, 23, 27, 45, 57, 140, 156, 191, 195 Friedman, K.E. and Friedman, J. 2–3, 4, 9, 11 Fuller, L. 94n8 Funar, Gheorghe 59–60, 70, 70n9, 80, 85, 199 nationalism of 67–8, 71–2, 73–4 Fung, Ho 3n3 Gagnon, V.P. 40 Gallino, L. 145 Gamble, A. 190n27 Gaspard, F. 6, 19n15 Geertz, C. 11 Gellner, E. 11, 173 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 44 Germany 3n3 populist nationalism in 30 Geschiere, P. 10, 11 Giddens, A. 3 Gilfillan, Harry 183n18 Gilfillan, John 178 Gilfillan, Paul 15, 20, 27–8, 29, 173–92, 198, 200, 202 Gingrich, A. and Banks, M. 7, 8n6, 17, 18–19, 41, 57, 70, 156, 195 Ginsborg, Paul 145, 151, 160, 162 Giordano, B. 159 Giulianotti, R. 84 Gledhill, J. 115 globalization anthropology’s unease with 9–11 anti-globalization movement 2 capitalist globalization 9, 31, 116 class, populism and 157–8 critics of, nationalist labelling of 114 cultural globalization, contradictions of 9–11 economic globalization, postindustrialization and 191 and financialization of capital 4 Hungarian nationalism and interpretation of 105–6 ideas of, multinational capitalism and 194–5 liberal cosmopolitanism and 15

neoliberal globalization 1, 3, 6–7, 7–9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 23, 57, 161, 171, 190 parameters of 2 polarizations caused by 7 politics of 198 populist nationalism and 11 social relations of 11–12 village economies, collapse in face of 28 Goina, C. 68n8 The Golden Bough (Frazer, G.) 176 Golubovic´, Z., Spasic´, I. and Pavicevic´, D. 41n7 Gramsci, Antonio 195, 198 Greater Serbia, nationalism and idea of 41–4 Greenberg, J. 38 ‘groupism,’ Brubaker’s critique of 58, 59 Guardian 151n7 Gudeman, S. 4 Guyresány, Ferenc 130, 135, 137 Haggart, Steven 188 Hall, Stuart 78–9, 85, 90, 95 Halmai, Gábor 6, 17, 20, 24, 27, 113– 40, 156n1, 203 Halpern, J. and Kideckel, D. 21 Handelman, D. 13 Hann, C. and Hart, K. 4 Hann, Chris 4, 9n7 Hannerz, Ulf 9, 10 Harvey, David 3, 4, 14–15, 21, 85, 115, 157, 196 Hayden, R.M. 40 health-care privatization in Hungary 134–5 Hearn, J 173 Heidegger, Martin 19n16, 187 Helsinki Committee for Human Rights (HCHR) 42, 54 Henderson, Tom 180, 180n13 Herzfeld, Michael 164, 166, 173 Héthy, L. and Makó, C. 95n11 Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. 11 Hobsbawm, E.J. 11, 94–5, 157n3 Holmes, Douglas R. 17, 153, 153n9, 156, 159, 163 ‘hooliganism’ public discourse on 82, 86 Hooper, John 151

Index ◆ 211

Horváth, Ede 96, 96n13, 101, 103n17 Howie, Alex 177–8 Humphrey, C. 82 Hungary Civic Circles (Polgári Körök) 27, 114, 117–18, 118n11, 119, 122, 123–4, 125, 127n20, 129, 131, 132–3, 135–6, 137, 138n31, 139, 201 Hungarian Republic, proclamation of birth of 113 as laboratory for ‘wild capitalism’ 126 see also nationalist mobilization in ‘transitional’ Hungary; workingclass nationalism in Hungary (post 1989) 126 hyperinflation in Serbia 48 identity British identity, Scottish history and 181–2 cultural identity and class 170 national identity in Scotland, perspectives on 186–7 and socio-economic dispossession in Serbia 43, 44–5 vernacular Scots, identity and 187–8 working-class neo-nationalism in Cluj, Romania 59 see also regional identity in Italian Alps (post 1989) Ignazi, P. 151 Ili´c, Velimir 38 industrial decline and erosion of communal life in CEE 25–6 in Italy 142 industrial investment, transnational flows in 25 industrial networks 64–5 industrialization of coal production in Scotland 176, 179–80 inequality of opportunity 126–8 information deficit, privatization and 127–8 Ingram, Adam 178, 180n15 Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) 145 integralism 156, 159 International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) 38, 52 Ionicaˇ, E. 73

Italy, decline of left and rise on new right in 28–9, 142–55 assimilation, problems of 150–51 Christian Democratic Party (Centre Union) 143, 148, 152, 152n8 Communist Party of Italy (CPI) 143, 148, 151–2, 154 Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) 154 Confindustria Marche 146 corporatist left, lineages of 151–2 corporatist politics, impact on Left of 144 cultural egocentrism 155 cultural patrimony of Fermo, urban development and 142 culture of productive corporatism, idea of 153–4 economic provincialism, Left’s promotion of 154 economics of politics in Italy 145–7 equality of incomes 145 European Union (EU) as financial resource in Marche 153 fiscal evasion 152–3 governance of Marche region 148–9 illegalities of entrepreneurs 152–3 immigrant streams, transfer to workforce of 146–7 immigrants, complaints about 150 industrial and economic decline of Italy 145–6 industrial decline 142 Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) 145 left, dilemmas in regional politics for 147–51 left, options for in face of rightist xenophobic success 151–5 Marche, economic transformation in 142 Monte San Giusto, shoe manufacture in 146–7, 152 national trends, local circumstances and 144 Northern League 143, 144, 147, 150, 151, 154 Party of Liberty (PDL) 143, 147 politics in Italy, economics of 145–7 regional elections (2010) 144, 147, 150 regional politics, changes in 147–51

212 ◆ Index

regional politics, drift to Right of 143–4 social cost of Left’s transformational politics 154 solidarity of centre-left 149–50 traditional industries, decline in 146 voter turnout, decline in 143 workerism 152 xenophobic success of right 151–5 Italy, populism in, spread of 5–6, 30 Izetbegovic´, Alija 40 Jessop, Bob 3, 4 job security, loss of 101–2 Jobbik Party (For a Better Hungary) 136, 137 joking, strategy of 89 Kádár, János (and regime of) 31–2, 93, 106, 107, 116–17, 117n6, 119, 124, 125–6, 127, 129–30, 133 ‘goulash communism’ of 113–14 Kalb, D. and Tak, H. 12, 13, 22n18 Kalb, D. et al. 3, 4 Kalb, Don 1–31, 60, 79, 81, 83, 85, 92n2, 94, 94n8, 95, 115, 143, 156n1, 194, 196, 198, 203 Kaplan, R. 20 Kardelj, Edvard 45 Katznelson, Ira 8 Keynes, John Maynard 196 Kideckel, D.A. 44, 62, 67n6, 85, 157 Kidric´, Boris 45 Kikinda, Vojvodina 42, 44, 46, 47, 49–50 Kirilin, V.A. 93n6 Klandermans, B. and Mayer, N. 16n13 Kóka, János 120n12 Konrád, G. and Szelényi, I. 94n8 Kornai, János 61, 116, 116n5 Kosovo independence for, social unrest and 38 passion on nationalist attitude towards 43 Koštunica, Vojislav 39n5, 43, 53 Kövér, László 123 Közalapítvány, Magyary Zoltán Flso˘ktatási 92n1 Krastev, Ivan 45 Krausz, T. 92n3, 92n4 Krausz, T. and Márkus, P. 92n4

KVSC (Kolozsvari Vasutas Sport Club) 79, 83, 88–9 Laba, R. 93 Laclau, E. 158, 161, 169 Lampland, M. 126n19 landholdings, ownership of 166 Lash, S. and Urrey, J. 157 Latin America 8–9, 23, 116 lay-offs working-class neo-nationalism in Cluj, Romania 66, 70 workplace tensions and 101 Lazaˇr, M. 60, 61, 64, 83, 85 Lazic´, M. and Sekelj, I. 48 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 6, 30 Lem, W. 157, 170 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 11n8 liberal cosmopolitanism and globalization 15 liberalization agenda of neoliberalism 118 social and economic effects of 50 Little, P. 2n1 living standards, degradation of 50 local authority housing, renovation of 180 local economy, promotion of growth in 166–7 local space, decline of 174–5 locality inferiority complex with respect to 174 as ‘occupational community,’ memories of 176–81 Lõwy, Izsák 121 Luxemburg, Rosa 15 Lydall, H. 46 McAdam, D. et al. 130n23, 132 MacAskill, Kenny 190n26 MacCormick, N. 173 McCrone, D. 173, 181, 187 MacEwan, Grant 156n1 Mackenney, L. 177n7 McLanders, Thomas 182 Madjad, Karim 48 Major, John 182 management deficiencies, allegations of 69–71 management relations, perceptions of 98–9

Index ◆ 213

managerial independence, politics of 65 Maˇnaˇs¸tur, Romania construction project in, ‘fabulous’ nature of 63 working-class neo-nationalism in 63–4 Mann, Michael 8 Maˇraˇs¸ti, Romania 63 Markovic´, Ante 46, 47 Marx, Karl 14–15, 19n16, 45 Marxism-Leninism 92, 92n3 Mazzoni, R. 145 Mead, Ann 181–2, 182n17 Medgyessy, Péter 130 media politics and ‘transition’ through 139 Mencinger, J. 45 Merkel, Angela 30 Michnik, A. 41 Middle East 8, 147 MIÉP (Party of Hungarian Justice and Life) 136n29 migration (and immigration) 4, 16, 44–5, 57, 58, 84, 122, 144, 149, 159–60, 162, 176 class restructuring, neoliberal globalization and 19–20 immigration and integration in Western Europe 2 migration of football players from Romania 81–2 Mihailovic´, S. 42 Mikola, István 135n27 Milic´, Enrico M. 156n1 Miloševic´, Slobodan (and regime of) 20, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 52, 198 miners’ strike (1984/5) in Scotland 178 Miners’ Welfare Institute 183 minority populations in Serbia, assaults on 38 Monte San Giusto, shoe manufacture in 146–7, 152 Moore Jr., Barrington 8 moral corruption of politicians 163–4 Mouffe, C. 3, 9, 14 Mudde, C. 5 multi-nationalism as barrier to freedom in Scotland 191 multiculturalism 80, 89–90 Musante, P. 12 Mussolini, Benito 143

Nairn, T. 173 Nardozzi, G. 146 Narotzky, S. 153 Narotzky, S. and Smith, G. 4, 13, 13n10, 14n11, 157, 163n6, 165n8, 170 narratives of decline 97–107, 109–10 nation class and 18–31 and ethnicity, reframing of discourses of 57–8 National Coal Board (NCB) 178 national consultation in Hungary 134–5 national identity, perspectives on 186–7 national trends, local circumstances and 144 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) 177–8 nationalism democracy and 24, 30, 157–8 intrusion, populism and sense of 30 in literature on Serbia 39–41 performativity and social aspects of 185–8 politics of 82–3 public manifestations of 85 in Serbia, resurgence of 37, 42–3, 53–4 social conditions for virulence in 59–60 nationalist alliance in Hungary 129, 134 nationalist anti-neoliberalism 133–9 nationalist language, anger framed in 66–7 nationalist mobilization in ‘transitional’ Hungary 27–8, 113–40 All Budapest Workers’ Council 122 altruistic/selfish axis, definition on 130–31 anti-reformers, victory of 135 ‘banker government’ 130 capitalism, collective action against 113 capitalism, ‘democratic’ transformation to 116–17, 118 capitalist penetration 116 Civic Circles, initiation into 132–3 Civic Circles (Polgári Körök) 27, 114, 117–18, 118n11, 119, 122, 123–4, 125, 127n20, 129, 131, 132– 3, 135–6, 137, 138n31, 139, 201

214 ◆ Index

collective claim-making, neoliberal transition and 115 communitarian imagery 118–19 community life, recreation of 131–3 competitiveness 116–17 Csepel, anti-Stalinism in 113–14 Csepel, building Civic Circles in 123–4 Csepel, iron and metalworking in 119–23 Csepel, socialist development in 120–21 democratization, celebration of 117 dispossession 123–33 dispossession, lost security and 130 dispossession, politics of 114–17 dispossession, privatization and 127–8 economic straitjacketing 115–19 entrepreneurialism 116–17 Fidesz, bourgeois nationalism of 6, 113, 117–19, 120–21, 122n16, 123– 4, 127, 128, 129–30, 131–3, 133n26, 134–9, 201 Fidesz, bourgeois nationalism of, disillusionment with 137–9 Fremdkörper (“foreign body”), target for frustration 140 global capitalism and neoliberal policies 114 health-care privatization 134–5 Hungarian Republic, proclamation of birth of 113 IMF austerity package 117 inequality of opportunity 126–8 information deficit, privatization and 127–8 Jobbik Party (For a Better Hungary) 136, 137 Kádár’s ‘goulash communism’ 113–14 MIÉP (Party of Hungarian Justice and Life) 136n29 national consultation 134–5 national debt 134–5 nationalist alliance 129, 134 nationalist anti-neoliberalism 133–9 nationalist riots (2006) 114, 137, 139–40 political turncoats 115–19 politics, shaping of attitudes to 124–33 popular nostalgia for ‘goulash communism’ 119

populist nationalism 118–19 privatization, process of 126–8 privileges, distribution of 127 selfish/altruistic axis, definition on 130–31 socalist voters, right-wing perceptions of 129–30 soft dictatorship of Kádár 124–6 solidarity, symbolism of 132 SZDSZ (Democratic Opposition Party) 121, 122 transnational capitalism, integration into 128–9 Újpest, building Civic Circles in 123–4 Újpest, communist heritage of 114, 119–20, 121–2 Újpest, panelprolik (‘plebs in concrete blocks’) 123 Újpest, privatization of factories in 122–3 welfare, languishing levels of 116 nationalist populism in CEE 17 Serbia 20–21, 37–54 nationalist riots (2006) in Hungary 114, 137, 139–40 Naumovic´, S. 38–9, 40, 40n6 neo-nationalist performativity 70–71 neo-nationalist populism 156–7 neo-Stalinism 61 neoliberal globalization 1, 3, 6–7, 7–9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 23, 57, 161, 171, 190 neoliberal policies 51, 114–15, 116 state, local communities and 160–61 neoliberal postsocialism 60 working-class neo-nationalism in Cluj, Romania 60 neoliberalism 2, 2n1, 29–30, 140, 160, 170, 197–8 abstract ideas of 199 accumulation regimes of 57 class, nation and the question of being under conditions of 191–2 class and growth of 14 development through privatization and, chimera of 96–7 economic change, neoliberal interpretations of 170 epoch or age of 1–2, 199 Eurasia and ideological claims of 9n7

Index ◆ 215

geographies of, contradictory landscapes in 58 of governance 3 human rights and 15 Hungary as laboratory for ‘wild capitalism’ and 126 liberalization agenda of 118 media politics and ‘transition’ through 139 nationalism, democracy and 24, 30, 157–8 negative experiences of 110 neoliberal globalization 1, 3, 6–7, 7–9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 23, 57, 161, 171, 190 neoliberal policies 51, 114–15, 116, 117n8, 118–19, 123, 135, 137, 160–61, 197, 198, 199–200 neoliberal postsocialism 60 neoliberal transnationalization 7 neoliberalizing elites 4–5, 94, 198 and politicization of being in Scotland 191–2 populist nationalism and legitimacy of 200–201 postcommunist 117 power restructuring under conditions of 58 pressures towards, differentials in 4–5 privatization agenda of 118 shock therapy 122 of social democracy in Europe 3, 199 social policies of 195–6 social power under conditions of 58–9 socialism, democracy and 24 theories of 195–6 welfare reductions under conditions of 2n2 working-class resistance against, lack of 94–5, 94n8 xenophobic 28 Netherlands, populism in, spread of 5–6, 30 networks of friendship, ethnicallybased 88–9 Nikoli´c, Tomislav 37 ‘non-work’ of office jobs 166 Nononi, Don 2n1, 8n6, 11n8 Northern League decline of Left, rise on new Right and 143, 144, 147, 150, 151, 154

regional identity in Italian Alps (post 1989) 159–60, 161, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171 NRC Handelsblad 7n5 occidentalist imagery 17 Ong, A. 3 Ong, A. and Collier, S. 10 Orbán, Viktor 27, 114, 117–18, 120n12, 123, 131, 131n24, 131n25, 139, 198 organic development and inorganic, distinction between 104–5 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 20, 42 Ortner, S.B. 158, 161 Ossewaarde, M. 57 Ost, David 8n6, 16, 53, 93, 94, 197 Özyürek, E. 198 Paolini, Luca 151 Paraschiv, Vasile 61n1 parliamentary elections (2000–2008) in Serbia 51 Party of Liberty (PDL) decline of Left, rise on new Right and 143, 147 regional identity in Italian Alps (post 1989) 161 Pasic´, Nikola 52 Pasquino, G. 160 Pászkány, Árpád 70, 82 Pásztor, G. 64 Pavlovic´, V. 41 Peck, J. 3 Peck, J. and Tickel, A. 3 Perelman, Michael 14–15 Però, Davide 156n1 personhood 166 Petrovici, Norbert 6, 21–3, 57–74, 81, 83, 85, 199, 203 Piccone, Paul 5 Pittaway, M. 61, 93 planned economies, unintended effects of 61 Podaliri, C. and Balestri, C. 80n1 Poenaru, F. and Pulay, G. 59 Polanyi, M. 4 political brokers 8, 200 political entrepreneurship 68

216 ◆ Index

politics decline of 4 economics of politics in Italy 145–7 education and Scottish history, politics of 183–4 of fear 8–9, 12, 13, 194, 195, 199, 200 of globalization 198 in Italy, economics of 145–7 marginalization of industrial working class 100, 106 media politics and ‘transition’ through 139 political divide, emergence in ‘One World’ of 5 political landscape in Italian Alps, populist nationalism and 158–61 political turncoats in Hungary 115–19 post-politics 15 ‘post-politics,’ transition to 3–5 shaping of attitudes to 124–33 of weakness in Scotland 191 Poll Tax in Scotland (1989) 190 popular nationalism in Serbia 40–41 populism 13–14 character of 158 class dimension of 157–8 dispossession and 14 in Europe, proliferation of 195–6 populist construction of community 169 problematization of 161 rise in Serbia of 45 populist mobilization 30–31 populist nationalism 118–19 emergence in Italian Alps of 156 globalization and 11 legitimacy of neoliberalism and 200–201 post-industrial capitalism, advent of 190 post-industrial locality, advent of 156–7, 177–8 post-politics 15 postcommunist neoliberalism 117 postsocialist disaccumulation 73 postsocialist ethno-national discourses, contextualization of 58–9 Povinelli, E.A. 195 power restructuring under conditions of neoliberalism 58 social spaces and 73–4

Pratt, J. 157, 161 primitive accumulation 14–15 privatization agenda of neoliberalism 118 annulments in Serbia of 48 in CEE 196 first wave in Serbia, recollections of 47–8 Privatization Act (1994) in Serbia 47 Privatization Agency (FPS) in Romania 69–70 process of 126–8 recollections of effects of 94, 96, 97–8, 103, 104, 108–9 in Serbia 37–54 Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and privatization in Serbia 37–54 ‘success story’ of 103 privileges, distribution of 127 productive corporatism, idea of culture of 153–4 public property sales in CEE 126 public sector employment in Scotland 177 Rába model factory, life histories in 95–110 Rankin, Ian 174, 186 Rasanayagam, J. 82 Reagan, Ronald 196 Rebel, H. 22n18 regional elections (2010) in Italy 144, 147, 150 regional identity in Italian Alps (post 1989) 156–71 agro-pastoral demise 162 autonomous work, rewards of 164–5 autonomy, ideal of 170–71 businessmen-politicians 159–60 Catholic Association of Italian Workers (ACLI) 166–7 Christian Democratic Party (Centre Union) 158, 163, 166–7 class, crisis of 157 class, relationship between populism and 157–8 class and cultural identity 170 class ‘consciousness’ 161–9, 170 Communist Party of Italy (CPI) 158, 163 community autonomy 165–6 community revitalization 167–8

Index ◆ 217

disillusion with national politics 163 economic liberalism, ideology of 161, 166, 170 efficiency, ideal of 170–71 entrepreneurial ethos 160 Forza Italia (Let’s Go Italy) 159, 161 hard work, Northern League and propensity for 164 integralism 156, 159 landholdings, ownership of 166 local economy, promotion of growth in 166–7 moral corruption of politicians 163–4 neo-nationalist populism 156–7 neoliberal policies, state, local communities and 160–61 ‘non-work’ of office jobs 166 Northern League 159–60, 161, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171 Party of Liberty (PDL) 161 personhood 166 political landscape, populist nationalism and 158–61 populism, character of 158 populism, class dimension of 157–8 populism, problematization of 161 populist construction of community 169 populist nationalism, emergence of 156 Socialist party (PSI) 166–7 timber prices, falls in 162–3 traditional political ideologies, waning of 158–9 Vanoi valley 161–2, 164, 166, 169–70 work ethic 164–5, 168 religious fundamentalism 8 repression and dispossession in CEE 15–16 Revelli, M. 160 Reyna, Steve 11n8 Richards, P. 21, 22n17 Robertson, Roland 10 Robotham, D. 4 Rogers, A. and Vertovec, S. 21 Roma 17–18, 28 Romanianian peripheries 63–4 Róna-Tas, Á 93, 117, 117n7, 126n19 Rorie, Dr David 176 Rose, N. 3 Roseberry, W. 115

Sahlins, M.D. 11n8 Sarkozy, Nikolas 30 Sassen, S. 4 Sassoon, D. 3 Savage, M. 157 Schiller, N.G. and Caglar, A. 57 Schiller, N.G., Basch, L. and Blanc, C. 57 Schneider, J. and Rapp, R. 9 Scotland, working class nationalism in Fife 15, 173–92 affluence, memories of society of 180–81 British identity, Scottish history and 181–2 Burns and cultural Scotland 183 communal living, evocation of 178–9 decline, post-industrial experience of 179 education and Scottish history, politics of 183–4 generations, differences between perceptions of political developments 181–5 industrialization of coal production 176, 179–80 local authority housing, renovation of 180 local space, decline of 174–5 locality, inferiority complex with respect to 174 locality as ‘occupational community,’ memories of 176–81 miners’ strike (1984/5) 178 Miners’ Welfare Institute 183 multi-nationalism as barrier to freedom 191 National Coal Board (NCB) 178 national identity, perspectives on 186–7 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) 177–8 nationalism, performativity and social aspects of 185–8 neoliberalism and politicization of being 191–2 politics of weakness 191 Poll Tax in Scotland (1989) 190 post-industrial capitalism, advent of 190 post-industrial locality, advent of 177–8

218 ◆ Index

post-industrial space 175–6 public sector employment 177 Scotland and England, longstanding contest between 186–7 Scottish Nationalism 188–90 Scottish nationalism, intergenerational context of 189–90 Scottish Parliament 28, 173, 174, 181, 182 social decline, perceptions of 175 social structure, internalization of 184–5 socialism, New Labour desertion of 189 vandalism and violence, fear of 175 vernacular Scots, identity and 187–8 village life 174–5, 178–9 workers from CEE, influx into Fife 177n9 working-class nationalism, social function of 187–8 Sekelj, L. 40 self-management in Serbia 45–50 selfish/altruistic axis 130–31 Serban, Cristina 70 Serbia Associated Labour Act (1974) 45–6 capitalism, consolidation of 46 Centre for Free Elections and Democracy 41–2 Cetnik movement 52 class, nationalism and ‘transition’ in 39, 40–41 democratic leadership in 37 democratic prosperity, disillusionment at 50–51 depressive illness, personal recollections of 49–50 disunity in, narratives of 38–9 economic crisis, Yugoslav disintegration and 46 economic effects of liberalization 50 economic liberalism of elites 52 electoral base of SRS 41–2 elite-centred nature of literature on nationalism in 40–41 financial speculation, dileterious effects of 52 foreign ownership, personal recollections of consequences 48–9 global capitalism, SRS critique of 52 global integration of 44–5

global market integration, personal recollections of consequences 49 government, fall over Kosovo issue 38 government turnover 51 Greater Serbia, nationalism and idea of 41–4 Helsinki Committee for Human Rights 42, 54 hyperinflation 48 identification with ordinary people, SRS and 53, 54 identity and socio-economic dispossession in 43, 44–5 injustice, widespread feelings of 43–4 Kikinda, Vojvodina 42, 44, 46, 47, 49–50 Kosovo, passion on nationalist attitude towards 43 Kosovo’s independence, social unrest and 38 labour, division of productive and unproductive 45 liberalization, social and economic effects of 50 living standards, degradation of 50 minority populations, assaults on 38 nationalism in, literature on 39–41 nationalism in, resurgence of 37, 53–4 nationalism of SRS supporters 42–3 nationalist populism in 20–21, 37–54 ownership, feelings among workers of 47 parliamentary elections (2000-2008) in 51 popular nationalism in 40–41 populism, rise of 45 privatization, recollections of first wave of 47–8 Privatization Act (1994) 47 privatization in 37–54 privatizations, annulments of 48 radicalism of SRS 52–3 redistribution and ownership, change in regulatory system of 44–5 reforms of early 1990s, recollection of 47 rise of SRS in 53 self-management in 45–50 Serbian Radical Party (SRS) and privatization in 37–54

Index ◆ 219

significance of SRS as political force 51–2 social effects of liberalization 50 social realities in, complex nature of 42–4 Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) 43 victimhood, discourse of 43 Serbian Radical Party (SRS) electoral base of 41–2 privatization in Serbia and 37–54 radicalism of 52–3 rise of SRS 53 significance as political force 51–2 Šešelj, Vojislav 20–21, 43, 52, 198 Shin, M.E. and Agnew, J.A. 160 shock therapy 122 Shore, Chris 153n9 Silver, B. 4 situated subjectivity 59 Šmidovnik, J. 46 Smith, Anthony 11, 190 Smith, Gavin 4, 11n8, 115, 149, 153, 153n9 Smith, N. 2n1 socalist voters, right-wing perceptions of 129–30 social change, neoliberal globalization and 15 social contract with working families 93 social cost of Left’s transformational politics 154 social decline, perceptions of 175 social dumping 3 social effects of liberalization 50 social gains of socialism in CEE 67 social importance of industrial working-class in Hungary 93 social policies of neoliberalism 195–6 social power under conditions of neoliberalism 58–9 social relations of globalization 11–12 social rights, downward pressures on 4–5 social structure ethnic divide in 80–81 internalization of 184–5 socialism to capitalism, transition of 104 collapse of 23 democracy and 24

neighbourhoods in CEE, nationalism and decline in 197 New Labour desertion of 189 socialist communities, destruction in Romania of 67 socialist developmentalism 81 socialist hierarchies, dismantling of 65 socialist industrialization, patterns of 82 socialist infrastructure in Romania 64 state-socialism in CEE, collapse of 15–16, 194–5 Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) 43 Socialist Party (PSI) in Italy 166–7 sociology 5, 8, 10, 14, 16, 21, 60, 95n11, 145 solidarity of centre-left in Italy 149–50 class-structures forms of 89–90 symbolism of 132 Soweto, left-wing ogranising in 15 Spacca, Gian Maria 148 Spasi´c, I. 41n7 Stacul, Jaro 6, 20, 27, 29, 156–71, 199, 203 Stalin, Joseph 45 state-owned industries, foreign purchases in CEE 196 State Property Agency (SPA) in Hungary 96 Stavrakakis, Yannis 14 Steiner, A. 93 Steur, L. et al. 15n12 Stolcke, V. 5, 156 Sunday Mail 184n19 Sweden, populism in, spread of 5–6 Switzerland, populism in, spread of 5–6 Sz. Bíró, Z. 93n6 Szalai, E. 16, 92n4, 94, 97n14, 116n4, 117n8 SZDSZ (Democratic Opposition Party) in Hungary 121, 122 Szelényi, I. 94n8 Szu˝rös, Mátyáa 113, 119, 131 Tabiczky, Z. 96n12 Tadi´c, Boris 37 Tamir, Y. 173 Tarrow, Sid 12, 13–14 technological industrialization 72 technological unemployment 70

220 ◆ Index

Tér-Kép 96n13 Thatcher, Margaret 182, 190, 191, 196 theft, narratives of 97, 102 theories of neoliberalism 195–6 Thoma, L. 92n4 Thompson, M. 40 Tilly, Charles 8, 14, 18, 24n19 Time magazine 38n3 Tismaneanu, V. 16, 61, 64n4 Tito, Josip Broz 40 Togliatti, Palmiro 151 traditional political ideologies in Italy, waning of 158–9 transition in Romanian football 81–2 transnational capitalism, integration into 128–9 transnationalization of local accumulation 72–3 Trehan, N. and Sigona, N. 18n14 Tripon, M. 68 Troc, G. 63 Trouillot, M.R. 194, 195 trust, indigenous networks of 60–65 Tudjman, Franjo 40 Turner, B.S. 57 Turner, T. 8n6, 157 Újpest building Civic Circles in 123–4 communist heritage of 114, 119–20, 121–2 panelprolik (‘plebs in concrete blocks’) 123 privatization of factories in 122–3 ultras 88–9 unemployment fears of 99–100, 108 and political marginalization of industrial working-class 94, 96–7, 99–100, 106 postsocialist waves of 66–7, 70 United Kingdom, populism in, spread of 5–6 United States 8, 146, 196, 197 Universitatea 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 90, 95, 96, 97 Uvali´c, M. 46, 47, 48 vandalism and violence, fear of 175 Vanoi valley 161–2, 164, 166, 169–70 Verdery, K. 61, 62, 62n2, 64n5, 81

vernacular Scots, identity and 187–8 Vetta, Theodora 20–21, 26, 37–54, 198, 203 victimhood, discourse of 43 Vienna Diktat 85 village economies, collapse in face of globalization 28 village life in Scotland 174–5, 178–9 voter turnout in Italy, decline in 143 Wachtel, A.B. 41 Wacquant, Loic 24 Walbrzych, Poland 26n20 Wallerstein, Immanuel 2, 21, 93 Weber, Max 11n8, 93n5 Wedel, J. 9n7 welfare languishing levels in Hungary of 116 neoliberal reductions of 2n2 of working people, new attitudes to 102 welfarism, downward pressures on 4–5 Welskopp, T. 92n2 West Bengal, left-wing ogranising in 15 Western Europe class and nation in 18–31, 203 damaged lives in 201 ethno-nationalist resurgence in 57 fear in, emergence of politics of 199 hegemony of rightist discourse in 19 Hungary, subjugation to 115–16 immigration and integration in 2 locations in, differences between Central European settings and 29 neo-nationalism in 17 neoliberal policies in 197 non-metropolitan perspectives, focus on 19–20 populisms in 30 Serbian objective of ‘catching up’ with 51–2 state-owned industries, purchase by 196 welfare state, decline in 194–5 workers in, feelings of 30 Westlind, D. 5 Wieviorka, M. 8n6 Wilders, Geert 6 Wilk, R. and Cligget, L. 4 Wilson, Thomas 153n9 Wimmer, A. and Schiller, N.G. 57

Index ◆ 221

Wolf, Eric 7n5, 9, 12–13 Woodward, S.L. 40, 46 work ethic 164–5, 168 workerism 152 workers from CEE, influx into Fife, Scotland 177n9 in CEE, dispossession of 197 changes in status of 60 as ‘hangers-on’ in urban periphery 67 working-class collectivities 62 working-class nationalism in Hungary (post 1989) 25–7, 92–110 alien influences, proliferation of 105 anti-capitalism critique 105–6 anti-Semitism 105 capitalism, disappointment with 107–9 class issues, academic attitudes to 94–5 Comecon organization, collapse of 96 communist regimes, workers’ resistance against 93 competition for jobs 101 conspiracy theories 105 corruption, narratives of 97, 106 decline, personal life histories and narratives of 99–100, 109–10 disintegration of communities 100–101, 108 ethnicization of class-based experiences 104–5 failures in management, workers’ criticisms of 102–3, 104 financial difficulties of workers 96 financial security, loss of 101–2 job security, loss of 101–2 lay-offs, workplace tensions and 101 management relations, perceptions of 98–9 Marxist-Leninist narrative 92 narratives of decline 97–107, 109–10 national development planning, failures in 104 organic development and inorganic, distinction between 104–5 political marginalization of industrial working class 100, 106 privatization, recollections of effects of 94, 96, 97–8, 103, 104, 108–9 privatization, ‘success story’ of 103

Rába model factory, life histories in 95–110 reality of today, contrasts with ‘good old times’ 97–8 social contract with working families 93 social importance of industrial working-class 93 socialism to capitalism, transition to 104 standard of living, decline in 107 State Property Agency (SPA) 96 state weaknesses, workers’ criticisms of 103, 104 theft, narratives of 97, 102 unemployment, fears of 99–100, 108 unemployment and political marginalization of industrial working-class 94, 96–7, 99–100, 106 welfare of working people, new attitudes to 102 working-class resistance to neoliberal project, lack of 94 Zeiss 26, 95, 107, 109 working-class nationalism in Scotland, social function of 187–8 working-class neo-nationalism in Cluj, Romania 21–3, 57–74 apartments, distribution of 63 burlesque nationalism 72 construction project in Maˇnaˇs¸tur, ‘fabulous’ nature of 63 corruption, allegations of 70–71 discontent 65, 66–7 disinvestment 66–7 dispossessed industrial workingclass, nationalist influence on 71–2 dissatisfaction, social prejudice against voicing of 61–2 economic protectionism 69 ethnic groups, ‘groupism’ and 58 ethnic nationalism and social contracts 62 ethno-nationalism 57, 58, 59, 69, 3–4 factory leaderships, development of 65 financial burden of socialist workforces 66 Funar nationalism 67–8, 71–2, 73–4 geography of power 68–9

222 ◆ Index

‘groupism,’ Brubaker’s critique of 58, 59 Hungarian influence 63–4 identity 59 indigenist nationalism, language of 68–9 indigenist self-understanding 64 individualization of industrial opportunities 72 industrial autonomy 66 industrial networks 64–5 insecurity 66–7, 69 labour, commodity of 61 lay-offs 66, 70 legitimacy of postsocialist elites 66 management deficiencies, allegations of 69–71 managerial independence, politics of 65 Maˇnaˇs¸tur 63–4 Maˇraˇs¸ti 63 nation and ethnicity, reframing of discourses of 57–8 nationalism, social conditions for virulence in 59–60 nationalist language, anger framed in 66–7 neighbourhood focus 64 neo-nationalist performativity 70–71 neo-Stalinism 61 neoliberal postsocialism 60 planned economies, unintended effects of 61 political entrepreneurship 68 populist nationalism, neoliberal power and 58 postsocialism 65–71, 71–3 postsocialist disaccumulation 73 postsocialist dispossession 58, 66, 68

postsocialist ethno-national discourses, contextualization of 58–9 power, social spaces and 73–4 Privatization Agency (FPS) 69–70 production process, ruptures in 61 productivity, impact on 65 Romanianian peripheries 63–4 situated subjectivity 59 socialist communities, destruction of 67 socialist hierarchies, dismantling of 65 socialist infrastructure 64 state support, factories’ independence of 65–6 technological industrialization 72 technological unemployment 70 transnationalization of local accumulation 72–3 trust, indigenous networks of 62–3 trust networks 60–65 unemployment, postsocialist waves of 66–7, 70 workers, changes in status of 60 workers as ‘hangers-on’ in urban periphery 67 working-class collectivities 62 Worsley, Peter 18 Wright, S. 156 xenophobic neoliberalism 28 xenophobic success of Right in Italy 151–5 Zalán, Barnabás 96 Zeiss 26, 95, 107, 109 Zincone, G. 151 Žižek, Slavoj 4, 14, 31, 93n5, 143, 199