To Travel or Not to Nationalist Hungary
I lived in Budapest for a summer in the late-nineties. When I think back on my summer of interning at the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe, the palachinka and porkolt aren’t what first comes to mind but rather a punch, bruised eye, broken glasses and me attempting to sprint while wearing sandals. I left a dinner party at a colleague’s house one Saturday evening then caught a bus around eleven thirty in a central part of the city. The bus was packed with locals and probably half way into my journey, two males in their late teens sat behind me. They first tugged on my hair then pulled my shirt collar and eventually punched me in the face after I swore at them aggressively in English. Despite the shouting and laughter from the two seated behind me and their friends standing near them, not a single person on the bus came to my aid. I still clearly recall a middle-aged Hungarian man standing next to me turn his back to the situation. This probably shouldn’t have surprised me, all summer, staring and racist comments and gestures were a common occurrence on public transportation.
Now in the present day, not a day seems to go by without an article or newscast about another right-wing extremist in Europe who peddles in racism and the elimination of the other. The rhetoric is attributable to multiple individuals and groups in multiple countries, but Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Jobbik Party relish the message on the soapbox his position affords him. There is no shortage of newspaper and magazine articles highlighting how Budapest has become haven for right-wing extremists from throughout Europe and the US; home base for numerous hate groups and its media arm.
The question I ask myself then and now is what happened that night? Or rather why did it happen and specifically to me? It was years ago but in light of the political diatribe from Hungary, I’m finally deciding to stop saying I dislike the country and the Magyars, and to instead unpack the context of my experience.
Just bad luck? Is it social psychology, their culture or history or sense of identity or long-term political climate to blame?
One hypothesis is that it was a case of wrong place at the wrong time. I was an obvious foreigner of Asian descent, didn’t speak Hungarian, petite, female, alone and a potential target for harassment and battery from any run of the mill group of assholes. Predators of any motivation seek out the vulnerable seeming and attack for amusement or ideological beliefs or to rob. Assholes are in every culture and country, and I try to imagine a solo female foreigner on a bus late in the evening in say New York City. The bus is crowded with weekend revelers due to it being a warm summer weekend evening. Would four young punks start harassing then physically assaulting the woman? If they did so, would anyone on the bus have inserted themselves to contain the situation? Even if only to shout at the culprits or inform the bus driver? In NYC, I happen to believe so, not because Americans are angels but rather because having lived all over the United States from the Midwest to both Coasts, people don’t express their worst tendencies especially in public and with a large audience. (Things have changed since 2016 but I still standby this generalization.) Most people won’t tolerate such behavior especially in more diverse and cosmopolitan urban centers. Those punks in Budapest on that bus that night knew they could behave as they liked. They knew no one cared enough about the foreigner to even give the punks a dirty look.
I remember from my Social Psychology class in college, the concept of the Bystander Effect and the Diffusion of Responsibility. There is the story of Kitty Genovese who was murdered in Queens (New York City, USA) in the early 1960s. A minimum of 38 people heard her screams and ran to the window of their apartments to view the attack occurring in a parking lot. Not a single person intervened and not a single person even bothered to call the police during the forty-five minute attack. According to the theory of the Diffusion of Responsibility, everyone assumed someone else would help. But the desire and actual helping depend on many factors and not just the context. If a person didn’t grow up observing helpful behavior or is in a bad mood, these factors can affect helpfulness. Another important factor is the characteristic of the person in need; people are more likely to help people they know, people they like, people like them. Maybe I shouldn’t judge the crowd in the bus so harshly based on social psychology, but it’s not exculpatory for why no one on that bus bothered to say or do anything. Especially since no one needed to run down a flight of stairs. They just needed to not turn their backs to the situation. Maybe my experience says more about that society than about those particular assholes.
There is a long history of discomfort and intolerance of foreigners, non-ethnic Hungarians, and non-Christians. According to The European Commission’s Special Eurobarometer 469 Report on the Integration of Immigrants in the European Union published in April 2018, compared to the other twenty-seven current EU countries, Hungarians have the lowest percentage, 10%, of survey respondents who have indicated that they would be “totally comfortable” with having an immigrant as a “friend”. This in contrast to to Sweden at 87%, EU’s highest, and the EU average at 48%. For a less intimate relationship, such as for that of a neighbor, Hungarians again score at the lowest percentage, 9%, of being “totally comfortable” of having an immigrant as a “neighbour.” This in contrast to to Sweden at 82%, EU’s highest, and the EU average at 43%. I am using immigrant as a proxy for foreigner or those viewed as “others.” This is not a perfect proxy especially since the refugee migration crisis and the ensuing anti-migration rhetoric since 2015 affect the emotional climate. As an EU outsider, I am amazed by the wide spectrum of scores in the survey’s results. In general, Western EU countries seem more tolerant while the Eastern and more recently admitted members are far less tolerant. The discord in the European Union shouldn’t be a surprise, and it’s difficult to fathom how countries with vastly diverging public sentiments can agree on general economic and political policies, and specifically the current hot button refugee and migration policy for the entire Union.
The Roma and Jewish populations have long histories within Hungary and their experiences are overall extremely negative. The Romas are the largest minority group in Hungary. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) Thematic Situation Report in 2013 cited a report from Budapest based TARKI Social Research Institute, “A 2011 survey of attitudes towards Roma in Hungary found, for example, that 60 % of a representative general population sample shared the view that “the inclination to criminality is in the blood of Gypsies”. Another 42 % agreeing that “it is only right that there are still pubs, clubs and discos where Gypsies are not let in”. In FRA’s 2013 online survey of self-identified Jewish people, amongst Hungary’s respondents, “48 % said that they had considered emigrating from the country because they did not feel safe there as Jews in the past five years.”
My research illuminates my experience that summer as not extraordinary. Hungarians as a group of don’t much care for people who are not like them or simply not them. It’s easy for me to judge since I’ve lived in a heterogeneous country for most of my life and generally prefer cosmopolitan urban centers. But what if I had grown up under a different context; if I was never the outsider and had seldom been exposed to people who were “different” however defined. Would I have that mindset and have answered the survey like a Hungarian? One question in the survey highlights a context, “On average, how often do you interact with immigrants? Interaction can mean anything from exchanging a few words to doing an activity together.” Hungary scored the second highest in the EU at 80% for having “Less frequent interactions with immigrants”. Other response options were daily interactions in one setting, multiple settings, weekly interactions or the option of less frequent. Maybe Hungarians just don’t encounter the “other” often or avoid it at all costs; so that is a cause and effect of the discomfort.
Scrolling through “Hungarian Spectrum” – a website reflecting on Hungarian politics, economics and culture – the articles often mention Hungarian’s historical fragile sense of identity, and fear and blame of outsiders due to a history of having been conquered. I’ve thought about this perspective, and I imagine that a country of about ten million and with less than a robust economy needs to protect its national psyche through fact or fiction.
All of this doesn’t justify what happened that night, but it seems I was located in the complicated eye of a tornado sucking in assholes, the bystander effect and their history and culture. I wouldn’t have been left alone then or now.
I haven’t forgotten the two Hungarian graduate students at the Budapest University of Economic Sciences who were my “social sponsors,” trips to Lake Baloton or the massages and baths at Hotel Gellert. It was a summer where I learned to love the generic meat pastes that were ubiquitous in the grocery stores and smeared daily on my bread; the tubes of porkolt, goulash and garlic pastes; and the patient ladies staffing the stalls at Nagyvásárcsarnok Market. Oh and the exquisite Viennese style cafes that set a benchmark for what coffeeshops can and should be. And I got there riding the now defunct East German plastic Travants used as taxis then.
As an obsessive traveler, people ask me about my favorite and least favorite countries and of course my mind veers to countries where I’ve had extremely negative experiences. Your experiences will vary depending on gender, age, race, attractiveness, whether you look rich or poor, nationality and luck. With the exception of luck all the rest is about others’ assumptions about you. So will you like or dislike Hungary or have a negative experience?
Victor Orban is just as much a symptom of the fear and intolerance within the culture as he is a cultivator of it. He just happens to be the loudest mouthpiece at this time, but the xenophobic public sentiment or receptivity to ethno-nationalism was already present then and now. The current right-wing nationalist rhetoric is just louder but more of the same; any implications for travel is whether you want to contribute to their economy rather than a judgment of travel danger per se.
One pro tip, especially when traveling, wear shoes you can run or kick with.