Legal Culture and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction

Áron Fábián and Márton Matyasovszky-Németh

We are very happy to present the next volume of the long-running Central and Eastern European Forum for Legal, Political, and Social Theory Yearbook series. This collection of chapters, presented at the 14th Central and Eastern European Forum of Young Legal, Political, and Social Theorists held in Budapest, Hungary, between October 6 and 7, 2022, at the Bibó István College for Advanced Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, explores the theme of “Legal Culture and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe.”

Legal culture has become a focal point for socio-legal scholars, generating lively discourse through both theoretical attempts to conceptualize and categorize legal cultures and empirical research efforts to measure them. This heightened interest has brought with it a multiplicity of debates warranting further discussion, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. The region’s historical, geological, sociological, and political ties make it an excellent case study of legal cultures. The countries in the region share deep historical ties, both through the empires of old with their Austrian and German influence on the legal systems, as well as the shared experience of a socialist past. Since the regime changes of 1989, the countries in the region have all been influenced by the emerging body of EU law and the vision of a Ius Commune Europaeum.

The experience of life on the periphery, both a curse and a blessing, has given rise to influential theoretical contributions such as Eugen Ehrlich’s living law, fueled by the reception of imperial law. This experience of periphery is key to understanding and conceptualizing a Central European Legal Family. At the same time, we are seeing a resurgence of national legal and constitutional identities, increasingly used as argumentative tools for emphasizing national characteristics and interests in the face of ever-closer integration. Scholarly discourse from multiple countries in the region might illuminate what we mean by constitutional identity, what the constitutional identities of different countries entail, and how they might influence each other.

For this volume, the editors invited scholars to think about what binds Central and Eastern European legal systems together and what divides them. How does the experience of periphery influence our legal systems and legal theory? How should we characterize our legal cultures? What implications does this have on comparative analysis? What do we make of the increasingly popular notion of national constitutional identity?

We welcomed contributions that engage these topics from a complex socio-legal perspective, including theories of legal culture in Central and Eastern Europe, characteristics of Central and Eastern European legal cultures, experiences of periphery and its impact on social theory, the Central and Eastern Legal Family: myth or reality, experiences of Empire and Socialist law in Central and Eastern Europe, and Central and Eastern European constitutional identities.

This first chapter by Chris Hann explores the socioeconomic conditions and intellectual production of populist ideologies in Hungary from the 1930s to the 2020s. Hann begins by acknowledging his outsider perspective as an anthropologist and his focus on rural Hungary. He discusses the populist (népi) writers’ movement of the 1930s, highlighting figures like Gyula Illyés and Ferenc Erdei, who documented rural poverty and socioeconomic backwardness. Hann examines the populist values of the pre-socialist era and their evolution during the socialist decades, noting the impact of socialist policies on rural communities. He concludes by discussing the post-socialist period, the rise of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, and the ongoing polarization in Hungarian society.

Hann delves into the inter-war period, generally considered the principal Hungarian flowering of a movement with analogies elsewhere in Eastern Europe dating back to the nineteenth century. He traces the origins of Hungarian populism to Romanticism and Herderian impulses of the counter-Enlightenment. The defeat of the 1848–9 revolution and the consolidation of the dual monarchy after 1867 left no political space for populist politics, dominated by Christian conservative nationalism. Hann highlights the Golden Age for falukutatás (village research) following the March Front of 1937, exemplified by the trilogy of books published under the title Magyarország felfedezése [The Discovery of Hungary]. Hann then explores the vicissitudes of the socialist era, characterized by failed revolution and repression. He argues that the symbiotic relationship between communism and populism led to the transcendence of the népi-urbánus opposition by new forms of citizenship. He highlights the revival of the monograph series Magyarország felfedezése in 1970 and the influence of populist imaginaries in urban spheres, such as the táncház movement.

Hann examines the tensions between town and countryside in the campaigning ahead of the democratic elections of 1990. He ends by discussing the rise of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party and the ideological initiative seized by Orbán after his defeat in 2002. Hann theorizes the new populism in the context of accelerating globalization and neoliberal decades, arguing that populista currents become dangerous, undermining the rule of law both at home and in the EU context. He concludes by connecting the three phases of Hungarian populism: an emancipatory literary movement, a symbiotic relationship with socialist modernity, and an anti-pluralist reaction to neoliberal capitalist globalization.

Next, Balázs Fekete’s contribution introduces Pierre Legrand’s approach to comparative legal studies, which challenges the orthodox, positivist methodology. He argues that Central European legal studies often neglect the cultural and social contexts of legal phenomena. Fekete critiques two volumes, “Comparative Constitutionalism in Central Europe” and “European Legal Cultures in Transition,” for their positivist approach and lack of contextual sensitivity. He advocates for a more nuanced understanding of legal transplants and the role of local culture in shaping legal norms.