What causes liberalization troubles?

pp. 57-79

in: Umut Korkut, Liberalization challenges in Hungary, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

In the first chapter, I debated that the problems that the CEE states face in their processes of democratization and Europeanization, despite being consolidated democracies and EU members, are related to their liberalization troubles. In the second one, I demonstrated that the issue of liberalization fosters the main cleavage in Hungarian politics by serving elitism. In this chapter, I propose that the relationship between liberalization and democratization is not a cumulatively progressive one, but one that disaggregates due to, first, the morally-justified-yet-elitist liberalization and, second, the lopsided nature of the simultaneous liberalization of economy and politics that speeds up the former and brings disrepute to the latter. As general as it sounds, if economic and political advances of liberalization do not relate to the public, then such transformation does not assist progressive democratization, even if transformation to a liberal order can be morally justified. In the light of these factors, I suggest that we can debate about what troubles liberalization and elaborate on how Hungary became a case for liberalization challenges, or to use a clichéd term "what went wrong in Hungary". The first part of this chapter offers a discussion on the processes of the emergence of the elite, process of morally justified transformation to a liberal order in Hungary and its consequences.