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ANDREA PETŐ
situation of social democracy are all connected to changes in social imaginary:
the emerging cult of the individual is undermining the collective responsibility
for social cohesion, communitarian units (Gemeinschaft) are replacing society
(Gesellschaft). Social democrats in Europe tried to regulate global free market
capitalism with social democratic values by a strong state such as solidarity witha
mixed success. We cannot identify one or two factors which caused the declining
popularity of today but rather the story of social democracy and progressive
politics need to be retold and re-narrativised for a new start.
In this paper I would like to answer to the question how social democracy is
shaping social imaginary in Hungary and I would like to do so with analyzing
how gender differences are conceptualized in social imaginary. My starting
point is Tony Judt, who in his analyses on future of social democracy pointed
out that nobody ever forecasted the end of the roaming 1920s era, and it still
ended among horrible circumstances.* Therefore he concludes, the only factor
which can save social democracy in Europe, where by now the original social
democratic values were mainstreamed largely without their home parties, is
“a social democracy of fear”. This fear for him means: “Rather than seeing to
restore a language of optimistic progress we should begin by reacquainting
ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to
remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with
the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them”.° So let me
start this difficult endeavor to get to know more about our “recent past” with
including another factor, namely gender into the analysis, trying to explain why
social democracy is losing attraction as social imaginary today. I would like to
expand the analyses of the “recent past” where Tony Judt stopped: to the post
WWII period and I would like to focus on Hungary. I am claiming that the
unresolved conflict of women’s participation in social democratic movement is
one of the reasons why social democracy is losing its popular support today. Is
social democracy on its way to become a simulacrum in Hungary? Will social
democratic imaginary disappear from Hungary? In the case of Baudrillard the
empire vanished, and the simulacrum remained. In the case of Hungary, and the
countries who felt at the wrong side of the Iron Curtain in 1945, the simulacrum
is disappearing and the reality, namely the problems are remaining. And the
responses to the structural crises (strong state, redistributive welfare policy,
transforming unpaid care work to paid care work etc) are given by illiberal actors
who consciously position themselves outside liberal value system.
* Tony Judt, What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?, The New York Review
of Books 56 (2009), No. 20.
5 Judt: What is Living.
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