A nacionalizmus jelensége különböző módon nyilvánul meg a különböző államok közszférájában. A diszkurzív megközelítés fogalmi eszközkészlettel szolgál a nacionalizmus empirikus szintű tanulmányozásához és annak megértéséhez, hogy a nacionalizmus hogyan működik az adott esetben. A nacionalista diskurzus összehasonlító tanulmányai lehetőséget kínálnak mind az egyedi, mind az univerzális értékelésére. Mindezeket figyelembe véve, a disszertáció összehasonlító keretek között elemzi a Fidesz és az Ak Párt nacionalista diskurzusait, és ily módon kíván hozzájárulni a nacionalizmus meglévő irodalmához azáltal, hogy az uralkodó pártok többségi nacionalizmusainak összehasonlító tanulmányozására összpontosít, amely viszonylag elhanyagolt terület.
On 28th April 2019 parliamentary elections were held in Spain, which won the left-wing Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. As a result of the elections the party system, which was characterised by the dominance of two main political forces (the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the People's Party) continued to transform significantly. The People's Party suffered one of the worst election results during the three decades of its history, which could be explained by the strengthening of Ciudadanos and the emergence of the radical political force, Vox.It must be noted that neither the left-wing, nor the right-wing political parties succeeded gaining absolute majority (176 mandates) in the Congress of Deputies. Taking into account of the division of political sphere and the ideological differences among the parties, it will probably take a long time until the main political forces can strike a compromise to form a coalition government in the Iberian country. This requires mutual concessions by the Spanish political elite.Besides the evaluation of the antecedents of parliamentary elections the objective my paper is to analyse the peculiarities of election campaign, but I will also highlight which factors played crucial role in the transformation of the party system in Spain. In my essay emphasis will be given to the different scenarios as regards negotiations for constructing a stable government. Because of length constraints, I will not deal with the foreign affairs- and economic policy of the socialist government.
One striking aspect of the coronavirus crisis was the poor response of the right-wing populist leaders to the pandemic in countries such as the US, Britain, and Brazil. Despite this fact, the continuing voter support right-wing populist leaders attract across countries with different socio-economic traits is puzzling. In this paper, we argue in favour of a cognitive anthropological view of populism scholarship. Cognitive and evolutionary anthropology shows that mental systems common to all humans shape the way we understand the world, making some ideas more plausible than others regardless of their levels of accuracy. Even though the action of 'building a wall' to keep illegal migrants away can prove ultimately unfeasible and does not address real immigration issues, due to our cognitive evolution, it makes intuitive sense as a plausible option to reducing immigration. Populist leaders exploit our cognitive intuitions by providing such intractable but oftentimes intuitively-plausible ideas in order to get elected or to promote preferred policies. Furthermore, we intuitively admire powerful individuals and tend to defer to authoritative and charismatic figures as an evolutionary strategy for acquiring valued skills and negotiating hierarchies. As a result, by committing to the intuitively-plausible policies populist leaders promote, such as 'building a wall', they give additional credence to the political beliefs that are based on our cognitive intuitions, effectively increasing their plausibility for the "common folk".
Programs of the Spanish Left Wing Parties on the Eve of the 1936 Parliamentary Elections In the months before the elections this parties prepared programs presenting their inmediate, and some of their long-term goals, reacting to one another in the process. The worker and the bourgeois-democratic republican parties tried to overcome their disagreements in order to form a wide common block facing the similarly fragmented right parties. While the programs of the worker parties featured more radical ideas, the bourgeois-democratic document focused primarily on the reconstruction of the constitutional achievments of the 1931-1933 socialist–republican government. In the end, the common program backed by numerous organizations contained overhelming the goals of the buorgeois democratic parties, referring to the differences between the parties. This proved to be sufficient for winning by a wide margin. ; Programs of the Spanish Left Wing Parties on the Eve of the 1936 Parliamentary Elections In the months before the elections this parties prepared programs presenting their inmediate, and some of their long-term goals, reacting to one another in the process. The worker and the bourgeois-democratic republican parties tried to overcome their disagreements in order to form a wide common block facing the similarly fragmented right parties. While the programs of the worker parties featured more radical ideas, the bourgeois-democratic document focused primarily on the reconstruction of the constitutional achievments of the 1931-1933 socialist–republican government. In the end, the common program backed by numerous organizations contained overhelming the goals of the buorgeois democratic parties, referring to the differences between the parties. This proved to be sufficient for winning by a wide margin.
This study is a natural continuation of the author's earlier book on privatization in Hungary, covering the developments between 1989 and 2009 on 1700 pages. As it is well-known, the right wing FIDESZ government, which came to power with a 2/3 supermajority in Parliament, has embarked upon a totally new economic policy as from mid-2010. Within this setting, illiberal constitutional changes and unortodox economic policies were implemented. Renationalization was a significant (but not the most important) building block of this. As we analysed the individual transactions, it turned out that actually many of them were initiated by the previous, Socialist led government. In other words, there are interesting elements of continuity here, especially in the energy sector. Another interesting finding is, that almost without exceptions, the renationalization deals were not implemented by force, the Hungarian state paid quite generously to the sellers. In the case of the largest deals, there is even reason to speak of sweetheart deals through which the Hungarian government tried to make favour to German and US businesses. So far, the renationalization affected more than 200 firms (including banks) for which some HUF 1600 bn (≈ 5bn €) state money was used. This figure, just as the sums involved in the individual transactions are somewhat misleading, if compared to the privatization revenues generated by previous governments prior to 2010. However, if all transactions – i.e. asset sales and asset purchases – are expressed as a percentage of Hungary's annual GDP, it becomes clear that the post 2010 nationalization deals were much smaller than the 1990-2000 privatization deals.
Konstantinos Katsoudas, "A Dictatorship that is not a Dictatorship". Spanish Nationalists and the 4th of August The Spanish Civil War convulsed the international public opinion and prompted most foreign governments to take measures or even intervene in the conflict. Greek entanglement either in the form of smuggling war materiel or the participation of Greek volunteers in the International Brigades has already been investigated. However, little is known about a second dimension of this internationalization of the war: the peculiar forms that the antagonism between the two belligerent camps in foreign countries took. This paper, based mainly on Spanish archival sources, discusses some aspects of the activity developed in Greece by Franco's nationalists and the way Francoist diplomats and emissaries perceived the nature of an apparently similar regime, such as the dictatorship led by general Metaxas. The main objectives of the Francoist foreign policy were to avoid any escalation of the Spanish civil war into a world conflict, to secure international assistance for the right-wing forces and to undermine the legitimacy of the legal Republican government. In Greece, an informal diplomatic civil war broke out since Francoists occupied the Spanish Legation in Athens and Republicans took over the Consulate in Thessaloniki. The Francoists combined public and undercover activity: they worked hard to achieve an official recognition of their Estado Nuevo, while at the same time created rings of espionage and channels of anticommunist propaganda. The reason of their partial breakthroughs was that, contrary to their Republican enemies, the Nationalists enjoyed support by a significant part of the Greek political world, which was ideologically identified with their struggle. Francoist anti-communism had some interesting implications for Greek politics. An important issue was the Francoist effort to reveal a supposed Moscow-based conspiracy against Spain and Greece, both considered as hotbeds of revolution in the Mediterranean, in order to justify both Franco's extermination campaign and Metaxas' coup. Although this effort was based on fraudulent documents, forged by an anti-Bolshevik international organization, it became the cornerstone of Francoist and Metaxist propaganda. General Metaxas was the only European dictator to invoke the Spanish Civil War as a raison d'etre of his regime and often warned against the repetition of Spanish-like drama on Greek soil. Nevertheless he did not approve of Franco's methods and preferred Dr. Salazar's Portugal as an institutional model closer to his vision. For Spanish nationalist observers this was a sign of weakness. They interpreted events in Greece through the disfiguring mirror of their own historic experience: thus, although they never called in question Metaxas' authoritarian motives, the 4th of August regime was considered too mild and soft compared to Francoism (whose combativeness and fanaticism, as they suggested, the Greek General should have imitated); it reminded them the dictatorship founded in Spain by General Primo de Rivera in 1920s, whose inadequacy paved the way for the advent of the Republic and the emergence of sociopolitical radicalism. Incidents of the following years, as Greece moved towards a civil confrontation, seemed to strengthen their views. ; Konstantinos Katsoudas, "A Dictatorship that is not a Dictatorship". Spanish Nationalists and the 4th of AugustThe Spanish Civil War convulsed the international public opinion and prompted most foreign governments to take measures or even intervene in the conflict. Greek entanglement either in the form of smuggling war materiel or the participation of Greek volunteers in the International Brigades has already been investigated. However, little is known about a second dimension of this internationalization of the war: the peculiar forms that the antagonism between the two belligerent camps in foreign countries took. This paper, based mainly on Spanish archival sources, discusses some aspects of the activity developed in Greece by Franco's nationalists and the way Francoist diplomats and emissaries perceived the nature of an apparently similar regime, such as the dictatorship led by general Metaxas. The main objectives of the Francoist foreign policy were to avoid any escalation of the Spanish civil war into a world conflict, to secure international assistance for the right-wing forces and to undermine the legitimacy of the legal Republican government. In Greece, an informal diplomatic civil war broke out since Francoists occupied the Spanish Legation in Athens and Republicans took over the Consulate in Thessaloniki. The Francoists combined public and undercover activity: they worked hard to achieve an official recognition of their Estado Nuevo, while at the same time created rings of espionage and channels of anticommunist propaganda. The reason of their partial breakthroughs was that, contrary to their Republican enemies, the Nationalists enjoyed support by a significant part of the Greek political world, which was ideologically identified with their struggle. Francoist anti-communism had some interesting implications for Greek politics. An important issue was the Francoist effort to reveal a supposed Moscow-based conspiracy against Spain and Greece, both considered as hotbeds of revolution in the Mediterranean, in order to justify both Franco's extermination campaign and Metaxas' coup. Although this effort was based on fraudulent documents, forged by an anti-Bolshevik international organization, it became the cornerstone of Francoist and Metaxist propaganda. General Metaxas was the only European dictator to invoke the Spanish Civil War as a raison d'etre of his regime and often warned against the repetition of Spanish-like drama on Greek soil. Nevertheless he did not approve of Franco's methods and preferred Dr. Salazar's Portugal as an institutional model closer to his vision. For Spanish nationalist observers this was a sign of weakness. They interpreted events in Greece through the disfiguring mirror of their own historic experience: thus, although they never called in question Metaxas' authoritarian motives, the 4th of August regime was considered too mild and soft compared to Francoism (whose combativeness and fanaticism, as they suggested, the Greek General should have imitated); it reminded them the dictatorship founded in Spain by General Primo de Rivera in 1920s, whose inadequacy paved the way for the advent of the Republic and the emergence of sociopolitical radicalism. Incidents of the following years, as Greece moved towards a civil confrontation, seemed to strengthen their views.
