Coloniality of Power ” in East Central Europe : External Penetration as Internal Force in Post-Socialist Hungarian Politics

Joining a series of analyses of effects of othering, orientalism, or coloniality in East Central Europe, the paper asks how long-term structural-ideological effects of global hierarchies, as reflected in post-colonial contexts by the term “coloniality of power,” can be conceptualized for East Central Europe. In a case study of political polarization in post-socialist Hungary,it examines the effects of global integration,  claiming that two dominant economic-political blocks formed along a division of vertical alliances related to integration with either Western or national capital. From those positions, they developed divergent political ideologies of development: modernization through Western integration, versus the protection of “national” wealth from Western capital and its local allies. While both propagated capitalist integration, they each needed to develop ideologies that appealed to electorates suffering the costs of integration. One framing of developmentalist emancipation promised Western modernity through rejection of popular, backward characteristics of the country, including nationalism. The other promised advancement in the global hierarchy through overcoming internal and external enemies of national development. These two, mutually reinforcing ideological positions, which I call“democratic antipopulism” and “antidemocratic populism,” denied the contradiction between elites’ and workers’ interest and perpetuated existing global hierarchies. Within the wider debate over cross-contextual applications of the notion of “coloniality of power,” and of emancipative efforts born from the “colonial wound,” the paper emphasizes the significance of the structural conditions, positions and alliances within which experiences of global domination are born and mobilized.

In terms of that overarching framework, the paper follows the tradition of dependency and world-systems literature, and understands the space of interaction into which both contexts incadrate into as the historical dynamics of the capitalist world-system. Within that space, relations of domination are not conceived as external to the structure of local societies. As Cardoso and Faletto formulate it, the penetration of external forces reappears as internal force (Cardoso and Faletto 1979:XVI), performed by internal-external coalitions of class fractions formed, themselves, within the process of capitalist integration. From this perspective, to analyze social positions, alliances and political projects in a dependent society means to articulate their wider relations, alliances and conflicts along thelines of that integration (as in relations of hegemony in Gramscian International Political Economy, Cox 1983, Gill 1993. As the worldsystems tradition conceives of global hierarchies as relatively stable (Martin 1990), political claims for national development are understood not necessarilyin terms of real vertical movement within world-system hierarchy, but alsoas a structural characteristic of elites caught in the grip of global competition (as in running to stay in one place, Gereffi and Hempel 1996, or as in "developmentalist illusion", Arrighi 1990).The paper will make use of that framework to analyze the connection between structural and ideological integration into global hierarchies in the case of post-socialist Hungary. Mahutga (2008, 2010), Drahokoupil(2009), Nölke and Vliegenhart(2009), Böröcz (1992Böröcz ( , 1999Böröcz ( , 2006Böröcz ( , 2012, Böröcz and Róna-Tas (1995), Jacoby(2006), Szalai(2005), or Szelényi et al.(2001) analyzed the forms of economic dependence, and the roles of elite groups and institutional actors in new forms of dependent integration. Melegh (2006Melegh ( , 2013, Thorton et al. (2012), Dzenowska (2013), Buchowski (2006), Kideckel (2002), Böröcz (1992Böröcz ( , 2006, Kuus (2004), Klumbyte (2009), Zarycki (2009) or Arfire (2011)looked atthe entanglement of processes of dependent integration with internalizations of symbolic hierarchies. Symbolicframeworks of inferiority imposed in the process of integration in European modernity, and particularly the Eastern enlargement of the European Union, as well asthe question of an imperial character of the European Unionthe target of integration ambitionshave been scrutinized by a variety of authors (Wolff 1994;Bakić-Hayden 1995;Petrović 2008;Todorova 2009;Böröcz and Sarkar 2005;Böröcz 2006; Böröcz and Kovács 2001;Zielonka 2006;or Behr and Stivachtis 2015). Within that field of analysis targeting the implications of otherness, orientalism, or coloniality of power in East Central Europe, this paper stands closest to analyses which focus on specific regional constellations of intersections between structural integrationand symbolic hierarchies -such as"nesting orientalisms" in Bakić-Hayden (1995), "nesting Colonialisms" in Petrović (2008), "European rule of difference" and "moral geopolitics" in Böröcz (2006), the "East-West slope" in Melegh (2006), the empirical demonstration of correspondence between perceptions of national development and global developmental hierarchies in Thornton et al. (2012), the "moral regulation of the Second Europe" in Arfire (2011),or the differentiation between "exotic other" and "stigmatized brother" in Buchowski (2006). It also stands close to works which describe internal political cleavages in relation to external structures of integration (e.g. Zarycki 2000, Zarycki and Nowak 2000, Szalai 2005, or Scheiring 2016).

Recent forms of world-systemic integration in East Central Europe have been treated in a variety of literature.Authors like
The following essay joins the row of those analyses with the specific aim to point out linkages between Hungarian post-socialist elites" positionsinglobal integration, and the way they mobilize both global symbolic hierarchies and popular frustration over global hierarchies in their ideologies of development projected from those positions. That analysis does not follow symbolic closures imposed collectively on peoples (as in Bakić-Hayden 1995), or hierarchically across social groups (as in Buchowski 2006). Here, the focus is on the mobilization of the "wound" of global domination (as a parallel to the "colonial wound", Anzaldúa 1999; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2009) across transnational, cross-class vertical alliances, which translate a global system of symbolic hierarchies in the key of local elite projects for integration. It is a case where frustration over global hierarchy, both symbolic and structural, is mobilized to propel systemic integration into the same hierarchy.

Democraticantipopulism vs. populist anti-democratism: structural heterogeneity in postsocialist Hungarian politics
The analysis below investigates effect sof integration in global hierarchies in the case ofpostsocialist Hungarian politics, focusing on one aspect: the relationship between elites" internalexternal coalition structures and ideological polarization in internal politics. Instead of a monographic empirical overview of particular positions within social/political hierarchies across economic, social and political transformations in post-socialist Hungary, the essay proposes a somewhat generalizing summary of ideological political positions, with the aim to point out connections between internal-external elite coalitions and their ideological frameworks. Before going into details, it will shortly present the main changes in Hungary"s world economic integration that contextualize the formation of post-socialist economic-political elite blocks, based on a research conducted together with the Budapest-based Public Sociology Working Group "Helyzet" (Éber et al. 2014), and especially on the findings of Gerőcs and Pinkasz (2015).

From 1973 to 2008: changes in Hungary's integration at moments of global economic crisis
The broadest macro-structural context within which structures of post-socialist politics in Hungary crystallized can be grasped in the overproduction crisis and financialization linked to the "long downturn" of the post-war hegemonic cycle (Brenner 2006), and the consequences of subsequent systemic readjustments on the institutional structures of Hungary"s integration into the mechanisms of uneven development within the capitalist world system. The regional macrostructural context is marked by the related transformation and collapse of the Soviet block and the Comecon. The reorganizations in Hungary"s integration are tied to both, in a form of interaction József Böröcz (1992) called "dual dependency".
In terms of economic integration, during the 1960"s, Hungary occupied a bridge position between Western countries and the Comecon. Western technology imports were compensated through selling Soviet oil and raw materials for hard currency (Vigvári 1990;Lóránt 2001;Gerőcs and Pinkasz 2016). With the 1973 crisis, the terms of that trade became unfavorable for Hungary. Trying to maintain both import substitution industrialization, and export-oriented investments in hard currency, Hungary resulted to cheap credits available on the financial market from petrodollars. Under increasing hard currency pressure, and debt service hiking especially after the Volcker-schock, Hungary restructured its economy from import substitution to exportled specialization, and introduced reforms to attract foreign direct investment (Comisso and Marer, 1986). In a parallel process, levels of investment and consumption began to fall. The legalization of the second economy in 1982 served to compensate the fall in living standards, a tendency to remain stable in the following decades.
After the fall of the Soviet block, Hungary"s reintegration into global markets happened under the unfavorable conditions of high levels of public debt, lost Comecon markets, and a higher need for external finance than capital on offer. Throughout a privatization process characterized by that unfavorable bargaining position, international capital entered the country to create export enclaves producing tradable goods, and to capture strategic positions in banking, utilities, retail, telecom and energy (Böröcz 1992, Drahokoupil 2009, Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009). The downsizing of local production transformed large segments of the previously fullemployed population into a reserve army, a condition for the cheap labor offered to investors. The new labor insecurity did not appear directly as a political force. In the roundtable discussions where Hungary"s peaceful regime change was negotiated, labor issues were not represented. Unemployment, together with a new system of state subsidies divided between multiple types of pensions and unemployment benefits, set members of the affected group in competition against each other, resulting in a strategy Pieter Vanhuysse called "divide and pacify" (2006). Literature on the lack of politization of post-socialist unemployment emphasizes the individualization of systemic risks (Bartha 2011), patience induced by catching-up expectations (Beissinger and Sasse 2014), and the capacity of newly installed infrastructures of political democracy to channel dissent into protest votes (Bohle and Greskovits 2012). Thoma (1998), Bruszt (1995) and Szalai (1995) argue that new structures of representation sidelined the question of labor in favor of political bargaining between parties. FDI through privatization sustained Hungary"s solvency during the 1990"s. As privatization wore out, investments slowed, but profits and dividends continued to leave the country. By the 2000"s, the problem of external imbalances resurfaced again, and the gap was financed from loans. In 2004, when Hungary joined the EU, the country was facing the problem of debt accumulation again. After accession, as Gerőcs and Pinkasz (2016) demonstrate, EU funds helped balance the gap in current account, but the country"s unfavorable position within the European distribution of labor did not change, and its total debt continued to grow. As the financial burden on the state necessitated a high degree of fiscal redistribution, higher-income groups were compensated for higher taxes through favorable distribution of state benefits (Szalai 2007). Lower income groups were compensated with private Keynesian tools (Crouch 2009), including support for household borrowings, which converted some of the state"s liabilities to private debt (Éber et al. 2014). Already by 2006, Hungary"s weak ability to service its debt invited scrutiny by international financial capital. The financial crisis of 2008 reached Hungary in a state of high private and public debt and recessiona state where the former FDI and credit-led path of development, initiated with the 1973 crisis, had already exhausted, together with the legitimacy of liberalizing reforms and their proponents.
After a change from socialist to conservative government in 2010, the lines of Hungarian integration were reorganized under the above circumstances by a conservative government, allied with national capitalists. As Gerőcs and Pinkasz (2016) argue, struggling to broaden their space of maneuver within the constraints of the situation, the new power block strived to alleviate external imbalances and debt, and to centralize economic power in its own hand. Monetary tools for that strategy included a heavy reliance on the inflow of EU transfers, and reserve accumulation via the central bank. Industrial tools were two-faced. On the one hand, they included a domestic concentration of property in non-tradable goods in the domestic market (banking, utilities, media, retail, telecommunication). On the other hand they included means to attract some of the new wave of industrial relocation (mainly from Germany) due to market pressure under the crisis. Such means included the reorganization of the education system, and a new labor code to create a flexible, cheap labor force. Unemployment benefits were tied to a new system of public work, with its entry points controlled by local governments.

Strategies and ideologies of elites within reorganizations of integration
In the years after the regime change, two main political-economic blocks were crystallized from earlier elites and intellectuals (Róna-Tas 1994, Szalai 1995, Böröcz and Róna-Tas 1995, Szelényi and Szelényi 1996, Kolosi and Sági 1996, Vedres and Stark 2012). The first block was based politically on a coalition of late socialist technocrats, connected to the reformed Socialist Party, and liberal intellectuals and technocrats, connected to the Liberal Party. In terms of alliances among economic actors, this block had the strongconnections to the managers of earlier state companies, and to various international organizations. Due to the significance of earlier company managers in privatization, and the essential role of lack of capital and pressing debt, this block had the upper hand on the country"s FDI and credit-led development. The second block, featuring the interests of a would-be national bourgeoisie, relied ideologically on the symbolic nationalism of anti-communist interwar bourgeoisie, but in terms of constituency it reached out to socialism-produced middle classes throughout the country, the interests of which were curtailed by the nomenklatura and FDI based privatization (Körösényi 1999). In terms of political parties, in the first period of the transition this block was represented dominantly by the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), while from 1998 on (since its turn from liberalism to national conservatism), by the Federation of Young Democrats (FIDESZ). The small Christian Democratic People"s Party has been closely associated with FIDESZ since 1998, and is presently its coalition partner in government.
While both blocks struggled for a mediating position in Hungary"s new mode of integration, their different positions bred some difference in their ideologies. Both accepted the post-Cold War symbolic global hierarchy, with Western countries at the top, and East European countries struggling in competition with each other to catch up with those superior positions (Melegh 2006). Yet, while the first block propagated, in line with its alliances, an uncritical embracement of Euro-Atlantic integration,the second block pushed for a nationalist critique of Euro-Atlantic power, connected to the requirement of a strong state to resist international capital and further "Hungarian" interests.
In their struggle for a mediating position in Hungary"s world market integration, both groups" interests conflicted with the interests of the previously fully proletarianized population. Democratization of the political system was a requirement posed by Western partners, and also new parties" own claim during the regime change, and legitimation base afterwards. The tension between political democratization and the conflict of interest with large sections of the population needed to be handled. In their ideologies, the two elite blocks forged different techniques to bridge that gap, in line with their ideological differences coming from their positions and alliances. The Liberals, due to their moral legitimacy as former dissidents, as well as to their erudition in liberal philosophy and economics, could claim a strong authorship on defining what "democracy" is. That definition was tied to formal, intellectual and moral requirements of democracy, bearing the authenticating stamp of superior Western examples. It was less tied to the requirement of participation and control from below by the local population (Körösényi 1999).That characteristic of the liberal idea of democracy was in part connected to earlier conditions of dissident activism, where political coalitions with workers met strict state control, and dissident activism was bound to ideological work in intellectual circles. It was also connected to a transformation of liberal dissidents" thought along with their movement towards power positions within the regime change. Throughout that period, liberal dissidents abandoned earlier claims for workers" rights and struggle, and accepted marketization as a solution that requires sacrifice (Szalai 1995). In their ideological claim for "democracy", the Socialists were initially in an uncomfortable position. It was their rapprochement to Liberals that was to extricate them from the symbolic position of personifying the socialist past.
The conservative block emphasized the need to save "national wealth" from ex-communist nomenklatura and foreign capital. In the quest to save "national wealth", it made symbolic gestures of inclusion towards those social groups who, in fact, were hurt by its economic project to establish a national bourgeoisie (e.g. embracing workers" councils, Thoma 1998, or organizing weekly fairs for small agricultural producers, MTI 1989). In government after 1989, this block made efforts to divert accumulation towards national bourgeois groups through state measures. Its success was limited due to lack of capital, high public debt, and the economic power of large company managers (Szelényi et al. 1995). Against the government"s efforts to save "national wealth" from socialist nomenklatura and foreign capital, Socialists and Liberals took the same side, accusing conservatives of a tendency to return to socialist centralization. Battles over economic and media control helped to crystallize the debate as that over "centralization" vs. "democracy".
An important element in the crystallization of ideological positions was a moment that brought the issue of anti-Semitism at the center of the "democracy" debate. In 1992, an MP of the governing right wing party, István Csurka produced a controversial diagnosis of post-socialist problems (Csurka 2002). He noted that the nationalist government cannot raise the living standards of Hungarians because its hands are tied by international treaties and mounting public debt, while the socialist economic elite continues to dominate the privatization process. He connected those facts to the strong Western support for the Liberal party, and the presence of eminent intellectuals of Jewish origin in the rows of the Liberal party. The connecting link he named was a communist-liberal Jewish conspiracy against the Hungarian nation. In response to that argument, Socialists and Liberals formed a single front against anti-Semitism, which they named as the main enemy of the "democracy" they represented (Bozóki 1996). That conflict helped to crystallize a dual ideological field where the Socialist-Liberal block stigmatized any mentioning of international dependence or economic plight connected to Hungary"s capitalist integration as anti-Semitic "Csurkism" (see Szalai 1995).
The polarization of post-socialist Hungarian elites resulted in two, mutually reinforcing constellations of symbolic bridging between elite blocks and their constituencies. The postsocialist right wing claimed to defend "national" interest against the coalition of old socialist power and foreign capital, invoking sentiments of national identity to bridge the gap between the interests of national capital and proletarianized groups. The coalition of Socialists and Liberals relied heavily on conservatives" definition of "national interest", and built its legitimacy on defending democracy from "national interest" as an anti-Semitic, nationalist, populist claim. It identified "democracy" with the introduction of Western-type institutions of market and democracy, if necessaryand in spite of local resistance -, with the help of Western hegemonic actors. Expressions of economic discontent came to be stigmatized in liberal discourse not only as irrational, socialist-communist-statist, irresponsible, or childish (Eyal 2000), but also in terms based on the conservative block's bridging technique: as yet another proof of popular nationalism, itself a threat to democratic progress. The formal, ascetic notion of democracy the "democratic side" stood for was reinforced by their introduction of the first major austerity package in 1995, followed by two decades of reform talk putting progressive reforms against irresponsibility, nationalism and populism. The bridging efforts of the national bourgeoisie, on their turn, could rely on the Socialist-Liberal coalition's denial of the significance of economic grievances and symbolic downgrading of local population, and name them as a problem of downgrading Hungarians in the face of socialist and Western interests.
The dual ideological scheme of post-socialist Hungarian elites was reinforced along the lines of their geopolitical alliances and conflicts. In their gestures of "hegemonic tutelage" (Janos 2000:412) during the process of post-socialist transformation and EU accession, Western actors often implied, directly or indirectly, a civilizational inferiority of Hungarians, to be overcome by the introduction of formal guarantees of democracy and trade liberalization (Böröcz 2000(Böröcz , 2006. Along the closer alliance with the elite block politically represented by the Socialist-Liberal coalition, such gestures of Western superiority worked to strengthen locally the rhetoric of the Socialist-Liberal block as the ally of Western civilization. Against local realities of disillusionment, lack of support, or protest from the part of the population, the Socialist-Liberal block could always refer to its Western alliance as the stronger base for its truth. On the other hand, as Zsuzsa Gille argued, the "dialectic of the neoliberal politics of (re)distribution and this new type of global politics of recognition" in the international diplomacy easily gave credits to the nationalist argument that "the nation is under attack" (Gille 2010:28). Ideological efforts to cover the gap between national capital"s and popular interests were recurrently supported by reactions of Western actors to gestures of the nationalist block in defence of "Hungarian" interests (e.g. Gille 2016). Western formal requirements tied to the idea of "democracy" (and to the "democratic side" in internal politics) reinforced the idea that formal democracy is alien to the interests of the Hungarian nation, and helped sustain the idea of a non-formal, organic type of national representation, undisturbed by formal institutions. In internal politics, Western reactions were used by both blocks to strengthen their own ideological positionsby the Socialist-Liberal block, through alliance, by the nationalist block, through conflict. Meanwhile, both sides were integrated in EU factions of Social Democrats, and, respectively, Christian Conservatives.

Democratic antipopulism and antidemocratic populism: ideological elements of integration into global symbolic hierarchies
The ideological poles in post-socialist Hungarian politics described above I will address by the symmetric terms "democratic antipopulism" and "antidemocratic populism". The terms are not descriptive or normative in the sense of referring to "democracy" or "populism".They are a symmetric pair of ideological terms which summarizes the ideological mirror effect within political polarization. In the perspective of this paper, the meaning of "democracy" and "populism" are defined by the mechanisms of that ideological space and its broader context. I look at that constellation of political polarization as an aspect of structural heterogeneity, an internal aspect of structural and symbolic integration into global hierarchies.
Structurally, that constellation is tied to the struggle between two political-economic elite blocks competing for the position to mediate Hungary's new dependent integration into a global system of unequal development. In line with their own positions and alliances, the two blocks proposed two different versions of developmentalist illusion featuring the right path for Hungary"s postsocialist catching up with Western Europe: through liberalization and direct penetration by Western capital (proposed by the Socialist-Liberal coalition) and through the creation of a strong national bourgeoisie (proposed by the nationalist block). Based on elite groups" present interests, the two versions projected rewards of catching-up trajectories for the wider population into the future. The fact that Hungary was already set on the liberalizing path by the major changes in its integration signaled by the crisis year 1973 set the structural background for the Socialist-Liberal coalition to appear as having the leading role in Hungary"s post-socialist development until the exhaustion of FDI-and credit-led development in the first decade of transition. The nationalist block could ideologically benefit from the position of dominated contender during that first period, identifying failures as the responsibility of the Socialist-Liberal coalition.
The ideological duet of post-socialist elites was connected to global hierarchies not only through objective structural conditions of elite positions. Their symbolic formulation reflected the symbolic recognition structures of global hierarchy after the fall of the Communist block (Melegh 2006). Probably the most important characteristic of those structures to emphasize here was the recurrence of the modernizationist logic that attributes a country"s position in global hierarchy to the internal quality of its people. Within that framework, to accept the framework of modernizationist ideology meant not only to identify with a position inferior to Western societies. It also meant to occupy a position of being-in-the-middle compared to Third World countries and their people, defined as even more inferior. In more heated debates, let them happen in pubs or in intellectual journals, the question of post-socialist inferiority often hypertrophied to the question of closeness to "Africa". Nesting orientalism, as described by Bakić-Hayden (1995), is the way in which that mechanism is transposed to regional relationships between national identities, a struggle over shifting borders between West and East, civilization and barbarism. Within that scheme, the moral claim of self-emancipation through moving upwards in the hierarchy of symbolic recognition always implies raising above others' inferior position. In terms of global hierarchies tied to symbolic hierarchies of human value, the project of post-socialist transition as catching up with the West was a full-fledged racist project, part and parcel of the historical constellation of the global economic, political and symbolic hierarchy the decolonial tradition calls the "coloniality of power matrix" (Grosfoguel 2006:171).
The nationalist block's antidemocratic populism mobilized hierarchies of global symbolic value for its own version of developmentalist illusion through compensatory strategies defending the value of national identity in face of global subordination. It did that either by enumerating cultural achievements that would put Hungarians on the same level of civilization and worthiness as core countries, enumerating historical events that would explain the unfair rollback of Hungarian power despite Hungarians' qualities equal to core societies, or arguing, increasingly in the context of recent crisis, that the Western core is in decline, and Hungary is the real guardian of European (superior) values.
While conservative discourse merged the interests of local proletariat and national bourgeoisie through the symbolic value of the nation, democratic antipopulism applied another strategy. Its own version of solidarity or charity targeted groups outside that national unity, typically referred as minorities (Roma, Jews, women, LGBTQ). This practice split social grievances into illegitimate nationalist claims, and legitimate minority claims. The conservative block could easily rely on that split in its own symbolic compensation techniques, to argue that the nation is under attack by alien interests both from above and below. One stinging implication of that argument was that the aid Liberals, Soros and their Western partners offer to the Roma contributes to the demographic threat they represent to Hungarians. That argument, on its turn, worked to solidify democratic antipopulists' claim to defend democracy and minorities from Hungarians' racism.
The specific form of antiracism developed in the democratic antipopulist discourse is an illustrative example of diversions from hegemonic ideologies by hegemons" local allies. Democratic antipopulism, as a discoursive technique formed within elites" struggle for mediating postsocialist integration, acknowledged and supported global hierarchy. The antiracism of the Social-Democratic bloc did not mean that it would criticize the legitimation of global hierarchy through essentialized internal qualities of respective societies. In contrary, it applied the symbolic system of global hierarchy to other societies and to its own society as well. It measured Hungary's position vis-à-vis other societies in terms of superiority/inferiority of internal qualities of their people (speaking of "proper European ways", "Balkanic reflexes", "Asian" or "African mentalities"). While it maintained high consciousness on the structural conditions that determine phenomena like deviance or low levels of education in the rows of oppressed minorities, social groups that could be integrated in the "national unity" discourse were addressed in the sharpest language of essentialized inferiority and moral blame. The terminology of human inferiority that the "democratic side" developed in addressing "Hungarians" throughout the post-socialist period would provide an excellentcase study on the applications of racism and anti-racism in competitive struggles in global hierarchy.

Democratic antipopulism and antidemocratic populism after 2010
By the end of the 2000"s, the exhaustion of FDIand credit-led development, together with the effect of decades of austerity politics, the consequent legitimation crisis of the Socialist-Liberal block, and shifts in the global economy offering new pressures and opportunities, contributed to a power shift between political-economic elite blocks. The conservative government which seized power and rules with supermajority since 2010, makes use of the delegitimation of the Socialist-Liberal block, and steps up as the organic representative of national interest (Éber et al. 2014;Scheiring 2016). It framed its steps for broadening the maneuver space for national capital as a national freedom fight against Western powers served by the Socialist-Liberal coalition. As its economic strategy of "national" development further marginalizes social expenditures, introducing new measures of discipline and penalization together with measures of redistribution that favor the upper middle class and national capital, the legitimation of that bridging technique is eroding. Some measures, such as the reduction of the price of energy bills, the nationalization and political redistribution of licences for tobacco shops, and lately, the campaign over saving Hungarians" jobs from economic migrants, served to compensate for that problem. However, the gap between ideological inclusion and economic exclusion is increasingly thematized by the extreme right wing party Jobbik. Within the same discourse of national freedom fight against Western supremacy, Jobbik can speak about economic subordination without being in the manager"s seat of integration at the same time.
In that context, Western critiques to Viktor Orbán"s policies helped sustain the idea of national freedom fight. In reaction to the Orbán government"s changes of the constitution, economic deals with Putin"s Russia in the time of the Ukraine crisis, Orbán"s ideological proposal of an illiberal democracy, or Hungary"s treatment of the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, the Hungarian government received strong condemnations of its nationalism (e.g. Krugman 2012;Kelemen 2015). In internal politics, such reactions fed into the democratic antipopulistantidemocratic populist divide. During the summer of 2015, for example, internal controversies of European handling of the refugee crisis were split into two moral-ideological roles in the case of Hungarythat of protection of national borders, and that of humanitarian help. The first role was taken on by the government, in its role of protector of national interests benefiting from both popular feelings of insecurity and fear, fed by its own anti-migrants campaign, and Brussels" pressure to accept refugee quotas. The second role was taken by civil society humanitarian helpers, opposition politicians like ex-Socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, and the symbolic role of Western media attention. The symbolic drama of Hungary"s role in the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015 developed along the lines of earlier symbolic structures built on external-internal alliances. It reinforced a division between humanitarian help targeting non-national suffering in an anti-nationalist framework, and the nationalist discourse according to which humanitarian help with Western support for non-nationals goes against the nation.
Arguably, systemic contradictions of the nationalist block"s development model folding out with time, and the context of a larger economic and humanitarian crisis transform the double ideological space described above. The paper"s claim is not that the ideological division described above ever covered all fields of social identifications. Its aim was to demonstrate the logic of a case where the emotional power of everyday identifications could be channeled in a double ideological space forged from elite positions.

Self-colonizing emancipation vs. colonial self-love
Nesting orientalism effects of hierarchical integration play out in the whole social field, not only in elite"s own strategies. For local subjects generally, the task of positioning oneself in a dominated position within a global hierarchy tied to naturalized qualities of superiority/inferiority translates into emotional struggles of identification. Similar to W.E.B. DuBois" definition of the problem of "double consciousness", or Frantz Fanon's classic description of the structural source of shame of inferiority (and compensatory pride) in a colonial situation (Fanon 1952), the Bulgarian sociologist Alexander Kiossev grasped the shifting dialectics in which such emotional struggles of identification are turned against both self and others, in the bon-mot Bulgaria is the country where no single Bulgarian belongs to (Kiossev 1999). The statement refers to a twist of identification through which Bulgarians would individually consider themselves as proper Western subjects, individual exceptions from the uncivilized Balkanic majority. In another example, he points out the other side of the same situation: Bulgarians traveling to a foreign country, when seeing other Bulgarians with their unmistakable Balkanic characteristics, would feel ashamedas if being unveiled -, for belonging to the same group. To accept the idea that one's society is inferior in quality conflicts the possibility for local subjects to consider themselves as valuable in their actual circumstances. Everyday identification becomes a struggle with an insolvable contradiction, and results in emotional discharges in the relationship to self and others.
Post-socialist expectations of mobility through catching-up were widely connected to ideas of people"s own personal value in the popular imagination, as reflected in anthropological descriptions of the perception of global catching-up accomplishments as "normality" in everyday life (Fehervary 2002;Jansen 2009). The present paper does not take on to describe a full variety of constellations of interpersonal situations charged with localized stakes of global hierarchies in the Hungarian context. For the present argument's sake it will only emphasize that everyday struggles of identification within a hierarchical global context provide a rich base for statusbased distinctions to be mobilized along elites" strategies within the same context. In postsocialist Hungary, two types of identification strategies that fed into the above elite strategies could be named, in the logic of Kiossev"s (1999) argument on self-colonization, self-colonizing emancipation and colonial self-love. The first strategy builds on vindicating markers of superiority within the dominant hierarchy, and pushing markers of inferiority on others (for an illustration, see Böröcz 2006 on intellectuals" strategy of vindicating closeness to superior Western values). The second strategy rebrands the existing hierarchy of qualities in such a way that it makes possible identification in the inferior position with a positive sense (as, for example, in right wing subcultures" focus on Hungarians" oppression as a sign of their strength and importance). The first strategy had been dominantly used by the Socialist-Liberal block"s variant of developmentalist illusion (development through direct Western influence), the latter by the nationalist block"s variant (development through national resistance against direct Western influence). Expectants of supposed future rewards of the two development paths could perceive each other as enemies, blocking each others" routes towards development: traitors of the country, or nationalist historical residues withholding modern development.
As personal value was connected to developmentalist stakes defined by elites, elements of developmentalist illusions projected into the future could become burning questions of present identification. While external beholders might have been surprised to see Hungarians desolated over small details of development while they might be as well happy about living above the global average, those details gained enormous significance as symbols of future development tracks that provide the present with worth and self-esteem.
Self-colonizing emancipation offered to solve the problem of identification in a dominated position through coming as close as possible to the qualities of the dominant societies. Since that rapprochement was considered as the basic requirement to be a valuable human being or a "normal" society, differences from core traits were perceived as an ontological threat to one"s human value. In face of the prevalence of such differences, this strategy tended to use the defense mechanism to shift the ontological level of perceived differences to another scale of reality. For example, it would identify elements of contemporary nationalist politics as surviving elements of 19 th century, socialism, or the 1930's, manifesting for some unexplainable reason in present time. Onthological negation also manifests in phrases of everyday vocabulary like "this country doesn't exist", or using the nickname "Absurdistan" for Hungary. For self-colonizing emancipation, gestures of colonial self-love which strove to rebrand inferior qualities as positive appeared as burning signs of inferiority, inviting an even stronger denial. That denial, on the side of colonial self-love, could, again, feature as proof of the ontological threat against the nation by a Socialist-Liberal-Western alliance, inviting the necessity to appreciate national qualities in front of that attack. Fear of losing the nation as one"s ontological space of existence are deeply rooted in the nationalist tradition. Symbolically, that fear is anchored in the historical image of the Trianon treaty when Hungary lost two thirds of its territory, and hypertrophied in contemporary nationalist thought in theories of world historical conspiracies against the Hungarian nation.
In its most radical versions, colonial self-love could be exemplified by the rebranding of global hierarchy by the new extreme right. Frantz Fanon (1952) criticized black fundamentalist movements for accepting the essentialized qualities distributed to them by colonial racism (intuition vs. rationality, wilderness vs. civilization, etc.), and struggling merely to rebrand those qualities as positive. In a similar fashion, the Hungarian new extreme right emphasizes "Asian" national traits over Europeans, contrasts the appreciation of Hungarian feudal and tribal past to the progressist-modernizationist dictate of European integration, values "traditional" collective discipline and mutual help contrary to "modern" individual freedom etc.
Far from a curious pastime or emotional distortion specific to Hungarians, the emotional energy deployed into the mutually reinforcing struggle of the two strategies of post-socialist political identification was part and parcel of global power relations, as they asserted themselves within the struggles of their local elements. Bridging between elites" projections of developmentalist illusions, and popular strategies of status struggle, it served to translate the experience of global hierarchy into struggles of subjective superiority/inferiority wrought according to the logic of symbolic global hierarchy.
Frantz Fanon (1952) gives a similar description of the dynamics of black identification in a colonial situation. He sees the ideology of white supremacy as an internalized force in the colonial black consciousness, which transforms the experience of injustice into the experience of racial inferiority. Fanon's famous conclusion is that in order to fight for justice, the black man first needs to transcend "the dilemma, to turn white or disappear", and become able to recognize his own existence (Fanon 1952:184). The question is, where such a recognition could be produced, if not in further struggles within the same global hierarchy.
The decolonial tradition, in its rightful mistrust against gestures that essentialize perspectives from peculiar knowledge positions into generally binding constructs of objective truth, proposes us to inhabit the continuity between the subject and object of the congnition process, to dwell in the colonial wound, and speak from there (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2008). In this perspective, giving voice to the diversity of experiences silenced by the Eurocentric narrative appears as a solution to the problem Aníbal Quijano formulated as the "tragic disassociation between our reality and our knowledge perspective" (Quijano 2000:229).
However, from the position of this paper, it remains a question what voices from in-between global positions would speak for. In the above example of political polarization as structural heterogeneity in Hungary, local experiences of global hierarchies are translated into projects of local emancipation that perpetuate the same global hierarchies. Completing the decolonial traditions" focus on non-core experience, and due mistrust in objectified perspectives, a focus on Hungary as a semi-peripheral case drives us back to the necessity of a structural analysis of where and how such experiences are built, and mobilized.

Conclusion
The paper addressed the question how the idea of "coloniality of power", coined to grasp longterm effects of integration into global hierarchies in post-colonial contexts, may be applied to an East Central European context. To bridge between colonial and non-colonial historical contexts, it proposed a focus on structural positions within global hierarchies in which experiences of global hierarchy are lived and mobilized. To conceive of such positions, it followed worldsystems and Latin-American structuralist approaches, where internal differentiation of societies is analyzed in relation to positions occupied in societies" integration in the dynamics of global capitalism.
Along those lines, the paper analyzed political polarization in post-socialist Hungary as an effect of external integration, focusing on elites" positions and internal-external coalitions in the process of Hungary"s post-socialist capitalist integration. It argued that after the regime change, two economic-political blocks competed for the role of mediator in Hungary"s capitalist integration: a group allied primarily with the interests of Western capital, represented politically by the Socialist-Liberal block, and a group allied primarily with interests of national capital, represented by political conservatives. According to their positions, the two groups projected two versions of developmentalist illusion, promising Hungary"s catching-up with Western Europeeither through Western FDI, or national capitalist development.
To bridge the gap between elites" and popular interest in integration, both groups elaborated ideological bridging techniques in which they identified popular interest with their own version of developmentalist illusion. The Socialist-Liberal coalition spoke about the necessity of Westernization, accusing conservatives of withholding the country"s development by spreading nationalism. Conservatives spoke about protecting Hungarian interests from the coalition of Socialists, Liberals and Western capital. The paper argued that those two, mutually supporting political ideologies managed to mobilize popular emotional stakes of self-identification in a globally dominated position to the use of developmentalist illusions defined according to elite groups" interests for capitalist integration. In this paper"s view, it is this systemic reintegration of adverse reactions to a dominated global position how coloniality of power manifests on the level of post-socialist Hungarian politics.
When putting forward a criticism of "the colonial power matrix" (Grosfoguel 2006:171), the tradition of decolonial thought offers the alternative to "delink" from that matrix (Mignolo 2011: xxvii) through empowering the speech and creativity of those located on the exploited and silenced side of global polarization. This empowerment is expected to produce a counterhegemonic project against Eurocentric capitalist globalization, building on the diversality of various subaltern experiences. That line of thought emphasizes the capacity ofdominated positions within global hierarchies to breed perspectives that are not inherent to the hierarchical logic of global polarization. Consequently, the decolonial approach emphasizes the importance of letting the subaltern speak from the "colonial wound" (Anzaldúa 1999; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2009).
Regarding that alternative, the paper emphasizes the opposite aspect of the same relation: that the element of global domination in itself does not guarantee anti-systemic ambitions. It describes a case of ideological bridging across social hierarchies, where the "wound" of global subordination fuels efforts of self-emancipation from the experience of domination which work for, and not against, global hierarchies. Regarding the issue of emancipation from under the effects of global hierarchies, that case highlights the question whether epistemic-political projects of emancipation from under global domination can also work as allies of global subordination. It is a problematic that is addressed by the decolonial tradition in its criticism of developmentalism (Grosfoguel 2000). The same question has stood at the heart of cross-contextual debates over the anti-systemic coalition potential between self-emancipative projects born from different global positionsas it appeared in historical splits between social democracy, communism and national liberation movements (Arrighi 1990b), in debates over whether working classes of the center have anti-systemic potential (Brenner 1977), or criticisms of Marxism as an Eurocentric project (Mignolo 2002). It is also inherent to the conceptualization of the systemic position of the semiperipheries, traditionally associated in world-systems research with both stabilizing and evolutionary functions within the long-term process of global polarization (Wallerstein 1976:229-233;Chase-Dunn 1988). In the perspective of this paper, it is a question that calls for investigating how projects of emancipation from globally dominated positions are intertwined with the structural embeddedness of actors within the global system. Within the wider debate over cross-contextual applications of the notion of "coloniality of power", the paper sought to emphasize the significance of the structural conditions, positions and alliances within which experiences of global domination are born and mobilized.