Fake and Dishonest: Pathologies of Differentiation of the Civil and the Political Sphere in Hungary

Gerő, Márton and Kopper, Ákos (2013) Fake and Dishonest: Pathologies of Differentiation of the Civil and the Political Sphere in Hungary. JOURNAL OF CIVIL SOCIETY , 4. pp. 361-374. ISSN 1744-8689, ESSN: 1744-8697

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Abstract

Almost 25 years has passed since transition, and Hungarian democracy is in a deplorable state. Party politics pervades every aspect of political life, undermining the autonomy of civil actors, treating them as a potential ‘fan club’ of parties rather than cooperating and consultative partners. In order to capture what went wrong in Hungarian civil society, we propose a structural analysis that highlights pathologies of the differentiation between the political and the civil spheres. We elucidate how the political sphere usurps the autonomy of the civil sphere; thereby not only does it undermine trust in civil actors, but also undercuts their capacity to perform their control function over the political sphere. In the analysis, we concentrate on what we identify as the ‘fake-civil/pseudo-civil’ phenomenon and related discourses, relying on the conceptual and theoretical apparatus developed by Arato and Cohen.

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