Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud. Zsuzsa Gille

      INTRODUCTION

      HUNGARY AND THE EU IN THE POLITICAL

      AND SCHOLARLY IMAGINATION

      This book is about a truly momentous event: the admission of a former socialist country, Hungary, into its one-time nemesis, the European Union, in 2004. By all accounts, unlike most other former members of the Soviet bloc, Hungary—my home country—at the time was expected not only to be admitted first, but also to make a smooth transition into being a productive and full-fledged citizen of this once exclusively Western club. The promising signs were everywhere. Hungary boasted the most open economy at the time state socialism collapsed, in part due to an extensive second economy and household agricultural sector (Lengyel 2012).¹ Its food and electronics industries were already successfully exporting to the West. As a result of political liberalization in the last decade of the regime, as well as the myriad civic initiatives and movements of the 1980s—and allegedly also the historical pride in the uprising of 1956 (Swain 1989)—its citizenry was poised to effortlessly adopt democracy and its related institutions.

      Despite such expectations and their apparently high chance of success, ten years after the accession Hungary was a laggard in many common social and economic indicators. In terms of gross domestic product per capita, a common metric of abundance, Hungary’s ranking in the world fell from fifty-first place in 2004 to fifty-seventh in 2014. Its poverty rate was higher than during the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and with a poverty rate three times the EU average, it ranked as the second poorest member state.² The government of Viktor Orbán, during its five-year reign, rolled back a number of democratic achievements, and the extreme right-wing, if not fascist, party Jobbik enjoys increasing popularity.³ In 2014, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) ranked Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán second in their contest for “person of the year,” as head of the most corrupt political regime in the world, a runner-up to Russian president Vladimir Putin.⁴

      To be sure, if the 2014 elections (national parliamentary, EU parliamentary, and municipal), in which FIDESZ—the ruling right wing party—won by a landslide, are anything to go by, a large part of the electorate doesn’t agree that there is anything wrong with their economy or political regime. Could it be that they measure success and failure differently from the pundits and social scientists? Do they make sense of the state of their country not so much through abstract metrics, such as GDP per capita, deprivation rates, or transparency and corruption indexes, but rather through thinking and talking over particular events that seem closer and more tangible? If so, what are these incidents? What stories do ordinary people hear and tell about them? How do such stories affect the interpretation of newer occurrences and thus add to people’s repertoire of political narratives?

      This book introduces three such events that deeply resonated with people and captured their political imagination. Because each amounted to and was treated as a scandal, each was particularly revealing of a key expectation that was breached. The first such scandal broke out within half a year of the accession: Hungary’s signature spice, paprika, was banned from stores and restaurants for several days due to a carcinogenic contamination. The second event was the international boycott of Hungarian foie gras by an Austrian animal rights organization, which claimed that since fattened duck and goose liver result from force-feeding, they are unethical and unhealthy products. The third case is the 2010 red mud spill, Hungary’s worst industrial disaster. Seven hundred thousand cubic meters of toxic sludge—red mud—escaped from a reservoir of an alumina factory in the west of Hungary, flooding three villages, killing ten people, injuring hundreds, and rendering the natural environment barren for kilometers.

      I chose these events in part because Hungarians talked about them as though they revealed something about the relationship between Hungary and the EU that had previously been hidden. Each object—paprika, foie gras, and red mud—bears an exceptional significance for the country’s economy and national history. Paprika is probably the best known in this regard; many people who know nothing else about Hungary can identify paprika as the most essential ingredient of Hungarian cuisine. Foie gras, fattened goose or duck liver, is another traditional Hungarian food, initially tied to a religious holiday in November. Red mud is a byproduct of alumina production. Hungary has few mineral resources, so when bauxite was discovered in the first half of the twentieth century, it was duly treasured as a key ingredient of Hungary’s economic modernization. This potential, however, had not been exploited until the Communist Party came into power in 1947, at which point the country became the key source of aluminum for COMECON, the Soviet bloc’s economic alliance. As young Hungarian Pioneers—members of the communist children’s organization—we were instructed to express our patriotism through our pride in and deep knowledge about Hungarian aluminum; after all, socialism needed metals not only for industrialization and the arms race but also for the material symbolism of the regime’s ideology.⁵ A key way this economic significance acquired a material presence was the exceptionally high proportion of red mud, the key byproduct of alumina production, among industrial wastes.⁶

      One additional fact to keep in mind about these three materials is that their economic and symbolic significance changed after Hungarian state socialism collapsed, and especially after the country joined the European Union. Indeed, they become excellent foils for examining that relationship for lay people and scholars alike. Understanding this liaison has both social and scholarly merit. The social importance resides in the fact that both FIDESZ, the governing party, and Jobbik see the country’s association with the EU as one of profound inequality and exploitation, going so far as to call the West a colonizing power. The growing or at least steady popularity of the two right-wing parties would suggest that the Hungarian electorate agrees with this negative view of the West and the EU in particular. My hope is that by better understanding the Hungary-EU relationship we can not only understand why the colonization view resonates so much with people, but we can also provide an alternative understanding of that relationship, one whose expression in political terms is less exclusivist and harder to manipulate for invidious purposes.

      The scholarly merit is not entirely unrelated to the social one. To understand Hungary’s relationship with the EU is in part to understand what the EU is. Many earlier scholars have sought to provide an apt description of the EU’s power, or at least an understanding of its efficacy and deepening integration, by categorizing it as a federation, as a confederation, as a quasi-state formation, as a new kind of nation-state,⁷ or even as an empire or a new type of colonizing power. What the analysis of the three stories could in theory provide is what case studies have always delivered: validity tests for theories or a particular case of something universal. But my goal is neither, because each episode provides enough discomfort or exhibits sufficient unruliness to thwart such methodological objectives. In fact, they reveal something that would be, or at least previously has been, difficult to discover in abstract theoretical categorization of the European Union. They illuminate a

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