As an emotion in the abstract, nostalgia can seem benign, even  syrupy. Yet when paired with nationalist, conservative politics, it can  be anything but sentimental or harmless. The Hungarian government’s  response to the refugees that have been arriving within its borders over  the past year has made clear just how ugly the marriage of nostalgia  and far-right ideology can be.  During the second half of 2015,  Hungary’s nationalist, conservative Fidesz government effectively  criminalized refugees seeking passage through the country and spent more  than three times its annual budget for receiving asylum-seekers on  militarizing its borders. The government has justified such extreme  measures in the name of protecting and restoring an original  “Hungarianess” that is being threatened by the arrival of outsiders. In a  speech he made last July, Hungarian president Viktor Orban framed the so-called refugee “crisis” in stark, if not outright xenophobic, terms:

“What we have at stake today is Europe, the European way  of life, the survival or disappearance of European values and nations,  or their transformation beyond recognition … We would like Europe to be  preserved for the Europeans…we want to preserve a Hungarian Hungary.” [i]

In times of uncertainty and perceived insecurity, the appeal of such a  politics of preservation and restoration lies within the promise of  returning to an imagined golden age of cultural purity and stability.  Nostalgia for this past can easily seduce us into relinquishing critical  thinking and compassion in favour of upholding the paranoid myths of  national unity and security.

The role of nostalgia in the refugee crisis has been little discussed  in the outpouring of commentary about the refugee situation in Europe.  As problematic as nostalgia can be when employed by the far right, I  believe there is something to be salvaged from the nostalgic impulse. In  his analyses of fascism, Ernst Bloch thought it incorrect to  characterize the essence of fascist ideology as the incorporation of  only the morbid components of all past cultural phases.[ii]  Rather, within the regressive leanings of reactionary politics, he  discerned a subversive yearning for a mode of being less alienating than  that of the present—a utopian desire for the attainment of a sense of  community and belonging which had never quite been fulfilled; a utopian  desire that, for Bloch, stood to be redeemed and set towards more  progressive, revolutionary ends. I think something similar might be said  of the nostalgia that underpins much of the conservative backlash  against those currently seeking refuge in Europe.  In neglecting to  seriously analyse and redeem the role that nostalgia is playing in the  so-called “refugee crisis”, we miss an opportunity to move beyond  discussions of crisis to discussions of community building.

‘A Hungarian Hungary’?

It was a visit last summer to the Hungarian National Museum in  Budapest that initiated my thinking about the intersection of nostalgia,  nationalism, and what the mainstream media had then only recently  started calling ‘the refugee crisis’. Were the narrative presented by  the museum to have been my only contact with Hungarian history, Victor  Orban’s exhortations to preserve “a Hungarian Hungary”, might not have  struck me as particularly egregious. As I made my way through the lofty  galleries of the museum’s permanent exhibit, I was presented a  teleological tale of a timeless Magyar nation that had weathered the  vicissitudes of an endless series of occupations from the dawn of time  until it emerged as a proud nation-state of its own at the end of the  twentieth century. The current permanent exhibit at the Hungarian  National Museum was opened to the public in 1996 as part of the national celebrations of the 1100th  anniversary of the Hungarian Conquest, a series of heavily mythologized  battles that are taken to mark the original settlement of ‘the  Hungarian people’ in central Europe. The timing of the inauguration of  the permanent exhibit makes clear the museum’s continued commitment to  the anachronistic project of establishing continuity between the  contemporary Hungarian nation-state and its imagined, ancient origins.

The museum’s presentation of Hungary’s Ottoman period, for example,  framed over 150 years of Ottoman rule as a monolithic period of invasion  and occupation. Likewise, the eventual expulsion of the Ottomans at the  end of the seventeenth century was implicitly framed as the restoration  of an original, rightful Christian “Hungarianess” to the land. The  museum’s implausible rendering of the multi-ethnic, multi-faith body  politic that was Ottoman Hungary

suggests that the curators overlooked the past thirty odd years of  historical scholarship on the Ottoman’s in Europe. Nowhere was there any  discussion of the formative role that the Ottomans played in the birth  of modern Europe.[iii]  Neither was there any discussion of the ways in which the Ottoman  conquest played a decisive role in shaking the confidence of the  Hungarian political and cultural elites of the time and cementing the  martyrological narratives that continue to animate conceptions of  Hungarian identity to this day.[iv]  Even the more superficial legacy of Ottoman influence on Hungarian  culture—the enriching influence of Turkish carpet weaving and ornamental  art on of Hungarian embroidery, for example, or the Ottoman’s  introduction of coffee, egg-barley, pie, stuffed cabbage and apricots to  the Hungarian diet—was overlooked. Instead, the incredibly fraught yet  equally productive relationship between the Hungarians and the Ottomans  over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century was presented  as a sharp conflict between a mutually exclusive East and West.[v]

When it came to covering the nineteenth century, the exhibition was  similarly biased. The nineteenth century is arguably the age in which  the very idea of a Hungarian national community took hold as part of a  more general rise of nationalism across Europe. Prior to the 1800s,  Hungary had been a poly-lingual, multi-ethnic feudal society comprised  of Magyars, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs and Transylvanians among others. In  1848, ethnic Magyars constituted only 40 per cent of the population of  the Kingdom of Hungary and not all ethnic Magyars were, in fact,  Hungarian-speaking.[vi]  It was only through the very concerted efforts of nineteenth-century  Hungarian nationalists that non-Magyar- and non-Hungarian-speaking  groups came to be either forcibly assimilated into or excluded from a  newly imagined, Hungarian-speaking, culturally-Magyar nation. The scale –  and some might argue, “success” – of these campaigns of enforced  Magyarization becomes evident when one considers that Budapest’s  population went from being 80 per cent German-speaking to 80 per cent  Hungarian-speaking over the course of roughly 50 years.

The museum was oddly silent about these remarkable transformations  however. In general, the permanent exhibit avoided any serious  engagement with Hungary’s culturally complex past, privileging instead a  narrative of cultural homogeneity and continuity. Considering this, one  begins to see, at least in part, where the nostalgic notion of an  original “Hungarian Hungary” stems from. Projecting overly simplistic,  homogenizing narratives upon the past makes possible the belief in the  existence of an idealized original community that Hungarians have a  right—if not a duty—to reclaim and restore. Framing this imagined  original “Hungarian Hungary” as being under constant attack by outsiders  facilitates the paranoid politics of xenophobia and exclusion that fuel  Hungary’s right wing government and its callous response to refugees.  Such nationalist narratives are the fertile ground from which nostalgic  dreams of restoring national unity spring and around which razor wire  fences come to be erected.

Imagining a Hungarian nation

The Hungarian National Museum was founded in 1802 by Count Ferenc  Széchényi, a leader in the nascent Hungarian nationalist movement. The  establishment of the institution was part of a larger initiative taken  by a small group of liberal, elite Hungarians, inspired by the legacy of  the Enlightenment and interested in effecting reforms to improve the  economic, social and spiritual state of their region. Effecting such  changes under the government of a stagnant and reactionary Habsburg  court, however, proved difficult for these reformers. Accordingly, their  project increasingly became one that sought distance and independence  from Austrian rule.  Limited in their opportunities to gain political  power within the Habsburg court, these aristocrats set about carving out  a power of their own by turning to the cultural sphere.[vii]  Their program became one of establishing cultural and educational  institutions, and patronizing artists and writers who could manifest the  national particularities of a Hungarian identity as distinct from that  of the Austrian court. Over the first half of the nineteenth century,  the institutions and artists that they patronized played an important  role in consolidating a sense of a distinct national, Hungarian  community. The Hungarian National Museum played a critical role in this  project by projecting the newly imagined sense of community back upon  history and curating a material record of the Hungarian nation’s ancient  claim to the land it inhabited. By midcentury, nationalist sentiments  were high enough to mobilize a revolution that seriously threatened the  Habsburg’s rule and lead to the creation of the first Hungarian  parliament. In fact, it was from the front steps of the Hungarian  National Museum that the poet Sándor Petőfi read out a list of  revolutionary demands at a rally that is often upheld as the launching  point for the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.

There were, of course, many complex factors that catapulted Hungary  into revolt. My hasty reconstruction of the birth of Hungarian  nationalism is meant only to shed light upon three interesting features  of the movement. First, of course, is the paradoxical nature of the  nostalgia underlying the nationalist project. It was by postulating the  existence of an ancient, pure community with a rightful claim to the  Kingdom of Hungary, that the nationalists managed to reorganize a number  of quite disparate linguistic and ethnic groups into a new form of  community. Second, is the fact that the creation of this new sense of  community was in large part the result of a concerted cultural  project. Third, is that while nostalgic nationalism is presently viewed  as an expression of a reactionary conservatism, in its original form it  was in some ways a politically progressive and subversive force that was  mobilized against an oppressive monarchical regime.

Yet, whereas nationalism might have served as a rallying call for  emancipation from a backwards monarchy some 200 years ago, the current  refugee crisis demonstrates that nationalist narratives play a very  different role in the twenty-first century. We cannot afford to allow  the kind of history perpetuated by institutions like the Hungarian  National Museum to remain exempt from critical questioning. Rather, we  need to learn how to contextualize the narratives they present as  historically situated attempts to foster a particular sense of community  for particular political ends at a particular time in the past.

Confronted with the inhumane actions Hungary has taken against its  refugees, it is tempting to reject wholesale, the nationalistic  nostalgia underpinning much of this belligerent, xenophobic behaviour.  Many critiques of nostalgia have sought to do just that, stressing its  delusory, naive nature. According to historian Michael Kammen, nostalgia  is “essentially history without guilt.” “Heritage,” he writes, “is  something that suffuses us with pride rather than shame.” [viii]  Nostalgia is to be rejected on the grounds that it entails a  relinquishment of responsibility and a foolish desire for an all too  innocent return to an imagined homeland. Such a rejection, however, is  too easy and does little to curb the very real and powerful feelings of  nostalgia in circulation today. Rather than simply rejecting nationalism  and nostalgia on the pretence that they are false or disingenuous,  perhaps there is something of these emotions that can be salvaged.

Imagination

On my way out of the Hungarian National Museum, I paused under the  magnificent, frescoed ceilings of the main staircase. A plaque  explaining the significance of each of the allegorical figures pictured  above me, noted that the most prominent and central amongst them was  that of “Imagination”. I could think of no better crowning symbol for  the museum. That nationalism is a product of the imagination is a cliché  worth rehearsing yet again. In his canonical study of nationalism, Imagined Communities,  Benedict Anderson uncovered both the material conditions and the great  amount of imaginative labour that went into and continues to go into  fostering a sense of community amidst people who have little in common  other than living within the bounds of an arbitrarily drawn national  border.[ix]  In focusing on the imagined and constructed nature of nationalism,  Anderson’s intent was not to show that nationalism is artificial and  therefore false. Rather, he approached the invented nature of  nationalism as a fundamentally creative project. ‘I must be the only one  writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly’, Anderson once  said. ‘I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I  like its Utopian elements’.[x]  Could something similar be said of the nostalgic nationalism that is  currently bolstering the far-right in Europe and feeding much of the  backlash against refugees in Hungary and across Europe more broadly?

Anything but a reversion

It is difficult to discern any trace of utopianism within Hungary’s  treatment of its refugees over the past year. The images of the crisis  are at once shocking and eerily familiar: long chains of refugees forced  to march along the sides of roads; packed trains manned by armed guards  leaving from crowded and frantic station platforms; desperate people  hemmed in by barbed wire or having numbers written on their arms; the  callous, impersonal bureaucratic handling of human suffering. Many  commentators sympathetic to the plight of the refugees in Europe have  been quick to liken the refugee crisis to the state of affairs in Europe  during the Second World War.[xi]  One wonders, though, if the readiness of progressive commentators to  jump to such comparisons in their analyses belies a certain nostalgia of  their own. Framing the current crisis as a regression to the past gives  the reassuring impression that we have been here before, that we still  belong to the more clearly delineated world-order of the past century,  and that getting ourselves out of this predicament is then simply a  matter of recalling the lessons of the past and restoring the status  quo. While there are certainly important lessons to be learned from  World War II with regard to the current refugee crisis,[xii]  it is equally important to recognize the ways in which the situation is  unprecedented and unique to the present. Too strong a reliance on the  past to make sense of the present, too retrospective a search for the  answers and lessons that Old Europe supposedly taught us, is arguably as  naive as the nostalgia of the far-right.

Even the most cursory analysis of the crises that connect Europe,  Syria, and the broader turmoil wracking the Middle East, makes clear  that the influx of refugees seeking to enter Europe is anything but a  reversion to a dark past. These are crises distinct to the twenty-first  century that portend the future. The factors that have contributed to  the civil war in Syria are multifaceted and complex. Three in  particular, though, make it unique to the moment we are living in:  global warming, concern about the unprecedented level of global income  inequality, and the effects of Western foreign policy in the Middle  East. Between 2006 and 2011, Syria suffered its worst drought on record,  an occurrence, which scientists have attributed to global warming.[xiii]  Nearly 85 per cent of Syrian livestock died, and nearly 1 million rural  villagers lost their farms to the drought. Prior to the outbreak of  civil war, some 1.5 million people were forced to move from rural areas  into urban areas where they faced chronic unemployment and growing  discontent. According to a 2011 report compiled by the International  Crisis Group, a key source of discontent that contributed to the  outbreak of war in Syria was the ‘widespread perception that the state  had been hijacked by a small circle of individuals chiefly focused on  self-enrichment’.[xiv]  And finally, a recently leaked US Defense Intelligence Agency report,  written in August of 2012, outlines the plans of the West, Gulf  Countries, and Turkey to destabilize Syria by supporting the main  insurgent groups, which include the Salafists, the Muslim brotherhood  and al-Qaeda in Iraq (now ISIS).[xv]  Global warming, unprecedented rates of global inequality, and foreign  policy based on proxy warfare through volatile partnerships with rebel  groups are all phenomena distinct from the world of the Second World  War. It is therefore important to acknowledge the ways in which the  crises we are witnessing today are different in important ways from  1940s Europe.

Barring an immediate and radical change to the present global order,  we seem well on track to an intensification of global warming, income  inequality, and foreign policy based on covert proxy warfare in the  century to come. Already these forces are sparking and exacerbating  conflicts around the world. Mass migrations of those fleeing conflict  and environmental devastation are likely to become the norm rather than  the exception. Stable, prosperous states can only expect an increased  influx of newcomers seeking refuge and membership in communities where  they hope to create new lives. More than one million refugees crossed  into Europe in 2015.[xvi]  This figure can sound alarming, but when considered on a per capita,  the numbers of refugees claiming asylum in Europe fall into perspective.  The average rate of asylum applications across the EU in 2015 was 255  per 100,000 of the local population—approximately 0.25% of Europe’s  population.[xvii]  Even in Hungary, the country in which the most asylum claims per capita  were made, this figure climbs to 1.8% of its population.[xviii] If 1.8% sounds like a high number, it is worth remembering that in Lebanon, currently 1 in 4 people is a refugee.[xix]  If the present numbers of refugees entering Europe is causing the moral  panic that has been exhibited thus far, this does not bode well for a  future in which far greater numbers will be on the move.

Reclaiming nostalgia, re-membering Europe

Mourning the loss and alienation caused by displacement is at the  very core of the modern condition; nostalgia is inherent to living in  the twenty-first century. The desire to recover some sense of grounding  or belonging by looking backwards is difficult, if not impossible, for  even the most progressive and cynical to resist. In her  thought-provoking reflections on nostalgia, Svetlana Boym reminds us  that nostalgia can be as prospective as it can be retrospective: ‘consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales’, she writes.[xx]  To simply dismiss or discredit nostalgia as naive or illegitimate is to  shirk the necessary task of taking responsibility for the nostalgia in  circulation today. Moreover, it is to miss an opportunity to recapture  what was creative and imaginative in the nationalist projects of the  nineteenth century and to redirect these forces towards more progressive  ends.

‘Modern nostalgia’, writes Boym, ‘is paradoxical in the sense that  the universality of its longing can make us more empathetic towards  fellow humans, and yet the moment we try to repair that longing with a  particular belonging…we often part ways with others and put an end to  mutual understanding’.[xxi]  The optimistic, forward looking nationalistic dreams of the nineteenth  century turned into the twentieth century’s nightmares. Given the  horrors of the last century and the ugly xenophobic face of contemporary  nationalist politics, we are right to be wary of nationalism and  nostalgia. But in our wariness I believe that we may have lost sight of  the utopian glimmer at the heart of both nostalgia and nationalism, of  the commonality of loss and longing on the one hand, and of the creative  impulse that seeks to imagine new forms of community and empowerment in  the face of such displacement and disenfranchisement.

It is easy to point out what is problematic with institutions like  the Hungarian National Museum and the nationalist narratives they  propagate. With the popularity of far-right parties across Europe and  the US on the rise, critiques that undermine the nationalist rhetoric of  such parties are necessary and important.[xxii]  Despite the many problems of the Hungarian National Museum, I think  there are still important lessons to be learned and inspiration to be  found in the audaciousness of such an institution. Its imposing facade,  its frescoed ceilings and its lofty, sumptuous interiors evince the vast  amount of creative and material investment that went into imagining the  new communities and political orders that emerged during the nineteenth  century. Rising to the challenges of the present century and imagining  the communities that might permit us to face the future with dignity and  humanity will require no less of an effort on our part.

The so-called European refugee ‘crisis’ is as much a crisis of  bureaucracy and infrastructure as it is a crisis of the imagination.   While the current situation certainly demands pragmatic shifts in  policies that would make more EU countries more accommodating of those  seeking refuge, so too does it demand a concerted cultural effort to  prime and open the European imagination to the idea of expanding and  updating its understanding of citizenship and community. If the forces  that are driving millions of people in search of new homes cannot be  immediately reigned in, those of us fortunate enough to live in more  stable parts of the world can at least begin taking seriously the  imaginative labour that will be required if we are to truly reconfigure  our collective understandings of membership and belonging.

In suggesting that we find inspiration for this process by looking  back at the creative roots of nineteenth-century nationalism, I plead  guilty to the charge of nostalgia. But I’d like to think of it as  responsible and prospective nostalgia, directed as much toward the past  as it is toward the future. This is not a yearning for the restoration  of a fictionalized past or for the replication of the narrow  identitarian communities that grew out of the original nationalist  movements. Neither is it a desire to romanticize or forget the violent  and coercive methods that went into forging the nation-states we know  today. Nor yet is it to ignore the important differences that separate  the political and social realities of the 19th century from those of the  present. It is simply a desire that we might retrieve and reclaim what  was subversive, audacious and creative within the nationalist movements  of the nineteenth century. If it was possible to unite disparate groups  under the banners of newly imagined communities that came to challenge  the ruling powers of their day in the past, it stands to reason that a  similar rearrangement of imaginations, desires and borders could be  possible today.

Looking backwards, mine is a yearning that we suspend cynicism and  take seriously the possibility of engaging the public in imagining new  forms of community just as our forebears once did. It is a yearning for  the creation of new mythologies and institutions that might render  intelligible and relevant the historical fluidity and contingency of the  national communities whose stability and inevitability we take for  granted at present. Looking forward, mine is a desire that we might  allow our nostalgia to forge a politics of longing rather than  belonging. With the number of migrants in the world at an unprecedented  high, we are poised, now more than ever, to find solidarity and  community through shared experiences of displacement, loss and yearning  for a sense of home.[xxiii] Instead of merely criticizing those who support the far-right, we need to

find ways of recognizing within their paranoid, regressive  narratives, the common ground that is the basic human longing for  stability and community. In turn, we need to find ways to render  intelligible to those on the right that, on some level, it is the same  longing and sense of loss that is propelling refugees to seek better  lives elsewhere. Mine is a longing that the continued influx of  newcomers displaced by violence, environmental disaster and economic  exploitation might serve as an opportunity to band together into new  communities that might begin to challenge the geopolitical order that  has led to their displacement in the first instance.

If there was anything in Victor Orban’s speech last July that I could  possibly agree with, it was his admonition that, “in thinking about the  future we are not competing to look far ahead of us, but rather  competing to understand the past. The winners will be those who can  better understand the past, and who can come to the right conclusions  more swiftly and more courageously.”[xxiv]

No doubt, Orban’s understanding of the past is similar to that of the  National Hungarian Museum’s. I believe we can, and must, arrive at a  better understanding than this. It is time we move beyond viewing  history as mere remembrance, or worse, as a template for regressive and  restorative projects. Let’s think instead in terms of a prospective  ‘re-membering’—an active and critical engagement with the past as a  resource that can call into question the stability and exclusivity of  nationalist narratives, and inspire new, more inclusive, more ambitious  imaginings of community and membership. It is time to re-member Europe.