Making a Cardinal Point: The Conceptualization of EAST and WEST in Hungarian Public Discourse

In political discourse, cardinal points are more than reference points; they represent different cultural-political regions through conceptual metonymy. Cardinal points are often portrayed in opposition to each other; regions in the North are compared to the South, while the East is contrasted with the West. One peculiarity of these dichotomies is that regimes routinely shape them in a way that fits their political goals (cf. Rac, 2014). This is also true for Hungarian political communication, as the country’s belonging to the East or West has been debated throughout history. Thus, what exactly East and West stand for in public discourse appears flexible. To recover their various meanings, this paper identifies alternative conceptualizations of East and West and hypothesizes that 1) multiple metonymic target concepts of East and West exist in Hungarian news media and 2) the target concepts profile alternative (historical-cultural and political-economic) interpretations. In line with Brdar and Brdar-Szabó (2022), this study considers metonymy as a conceptual elaboration; therefore, it is one of the first empirical tests of this metonymy interpretation. The results corroborate the hypotheses as multiple metonymic target concepts are identified motivated by history and geopolitics.