Challenging Enlightenment Universalism: Memory Laws and Propaganda in Hungary

Abstract What is the relationship between law, memory, and propaganda? I approach this question by examining how the illiberal regime in Hungary (2010–) manipulates coexisting memory traditions to enact domestic propaganda legislation and challenge European Union (EU) values. I trace how the illiberal regime instrumentalises an antagonism between cosmopolitanism and nationalism that becomes discernible in propaganda legislation and the political struggle over the rule of law in the EU. By examining two legislative acts on George Soros and LGBTQ rights whose intellectual foundations lie in the nationalistic canon of memory, I show that such laws should be understood as memory laws which draw on a re-emerging European intellectual tradition which questions Enlightenment universalism. In part, the illiberal regime’s manipulation of Counter-Enlightenment thought is enabled by the fact that the EU itself promotes a supranational and universalist memory tradition at the expense of others. Thus, by reversing the EU’s mnemonic exclusion and by promoting a reductionist reading of the Counter-Enlightenment, illiberal memory politics places these coexisting traditions of memory into a zero-sum competition. Finally, I argue that illiberal memory laws departing from the narrow sense of the term are a global phenomenon deserving of comparative study.