Living to Ourselves: Localising Global Hierarchies in State-Socialist Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

Living to Ourselves. Localising Global Hierarchies in State-Socialist Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s

This paper analyses how globally framed social changes were intertwined with the history of «local» symbolic and discursive practices during the 1970s and early 1980s, when the economic crisis of the 1970s transformed state socialism and its perspectives in Hungary. This is certainly a very complex history with a very complex set of institutional and social actors. On the basis of statistics, policy documents and public debates in the media I focus on some major economic and demographic changes and related political and discursive developments mainly concerning population policy and related welfare measures. Without assuming any determinant relationship, a key point of the analysis is that problems emerging from long term unequal global social and economic relations and the economic crisis in the 1970s are reflected uniquely: In the midst of the local economic difficulties, they were translated into, or as we call it here, localised (fixed and adapted) to internal hierarchies and class projects. These originated from historically crystallised and partially autonomous local discourses, which themselves were partially linked to global social and economic relations, thus forming a dynamic and historic interplay.