Ugo Stornaiolo S., Associate Editor of the Miskatonian, had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Hörcher and covered topics such as prudence and moderation in the conservative mind, Hungarian constitutional history, and the spirit and aesthetic manifestation of Central European culture.

Ugo – Hello and welcome, Professor Hörcher, thanks for joining us today.

Ferenc – Thanks you Ugo, I’m happy to be with you today.

Ugo – My first question is usually to ask our interviewees to introduce themselves a little bit so our audience knows better who you are and why we’re talking today. As a heads up, I can tell them already that you’re an Hungarian professor, and that you’re well known in circles where the work of Roger Scruton, the famous British conservative political philosopher, is appreciated.

Ferenc – Sure, yes: I am a historian of political thought, a political philosopher, an historian of art and I’m also literary critic and a poet, so I’ve have got a number of interests and I have a long experience of teaching in higher education. For quarter of a century I taught at the Department of Aesthetics of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, here in Hungary, where I also established a Doctoral School in Political Theory. I then led for six years the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and right now, I am the head of a relatively small research unit at the University of Public Service, here in Budapest, and since this is a research professor’s position, I have the obligation to publish and to have occasions like this one to give an account of my research.

Ugo – Well, it seems you’re a very busy person, and I happen to know some of your academic contributions because you do publish a lot. I think I was first introduced to your body of work with a book you wrote on on the historical Hungarian constitutions, so from that, I was wondering if you have any legal training or if you are somehow connected to the legal profession.

Ferenc – That’s right: I also taught at the law school of the Catholic University and I got an master’s degree in Legal Theory from the Universities of Brussels and Louvain/Leuven, in Belgium, and I taught for some years legal philosophy and the history of legal thought. I don’t know if you are aware of another book of mine on those subjects, because my master’s thesis got reworked and edited into a book format. The title is Prudentia Iuris: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Natural Law.

Ugo – Well no, I was not aware of it, so thanks for the heads up. I’ll get to check it soon for my own research, and speaking of which, I mean, I have been in Central Europe for around two years by now and when I first arrived I thought about getting in touch with some likeminded people in our common spheres, and I think I first found you through your book on the Hungarian historical constitution, but also because you have kind of an important presence in in social media, such as in Twitter/X, and there’s a lot of followers of the late sir Roger Scruton who are connected with you because of these links you have with, let’s say, the philosophy of conservatism and aesthetics, as many of your contributions have been in these two areas. My first question in that sense is how did you get involved in conservative political philosophy, where does your connection to Sir Roger Scruton comes from, and what’s your link with the philosophy of aesthetics.

Ferenc – Well, these are three independent questions, so I’ll try to answer them one by one:

First, I was born, you know as far as conservatism is concerned, in a communist country, in communist Hungary in the 60s, in 1964 in particular, so my conservatism is rooted into an anti-communist stance.

I guess it’s my family background which prepared me for that, so its was not a question that I was never really satisfied with my country being occupied by Russian communist tanks so, that’s the origins, but I did not prepare to become a conservative political philosopher per se because of that.

That came later, during my stay in Oxford, England, where I was a visiting graduate at Oral College and where I studied what I thought was a Third Way, beyond this duality of Communism and Western capitalism, but which turned out to be an investigation on conservatism, and in particular, on the work of Edmund Burke.

We could say, thus, that was my initiation into conservatism: through anti-communism and my research in Oxford into the work of Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and that’s not far away from Roger Scruton’s own interests, so that leads us to your second question.

Roger Scruton was a Cambridge-educated philosopher of art and political philosopher and he had a special interest in Central Europe, just like you, which is actually very rare, and very appreaciated by us Central Europeans, but basically Scruton was someone like that, and he came over beyond the Iron Curtain already in the late 70s and 80s so that was quite a courageous thing to do and, of course, I could have met him already then but I did not meet him until 1992 when it was already after the fall of the Berlin wall and the Iron Curtain but still decades ago and as I had always found his work relevant, we had a number of occasions to meet and participate in conferences and I even had the chance to respond to one of his lectures, at the University of Warsaw, so there were regular occasions to meet and discuss things.

I also worked as a journalist for some time in the 2000s and I made interviews with him as well, so we were well acquianted, and the result of that was that when he died in 2020, I decided to to write this book about him, Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, which got published by Palgrave McMillan in 2022/2023, so that’s the connection to Roger and it also leads to your third question: the philosophy of art, which is also an interest I shared with with Roger, whose primary interest was also the philosophy of art, which is, according to the German tradition, aesthetics: the the study of the sensual perception and in particular the study of beauty, the sublime and other aesthetic qualities.

This plays well with my other interests, as I mentioned I am practicing poet, so I was always interested in literature and the arts and that’s why I gave some time to study the theory of it and as a result of that, I published a history of the of the French, English and German uh early modern aesthetic thought from 1650 to 1800, so from the court of Versailles and Louis XIV up to Immanuel Kant and Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) so that’s that’s that’s my my interest it’s partly historical but also theoretical.

I have a a theory that in fact an aesthetic judgment the ability to make decisions about what is beautiful and what is not is connected or has it the same operational pattern as the judgment that we need in politics or for that matter in legal decision-making: a kind of practical wisdom or practical judgment.

Ugo – The way they actually connected was quite interesting and especially because it creates a train of thought which explains how you ended up working in the topics and the spheres you are, and at the same time it really gives a background into into your work.

I also kind of project myself a little bit into you because we have a similar background at least in our professions and in our interests, so I do understand how that goes.

But I mean, in more practical aspects one of my questions would be what exactly you learned and what exactly made you really feel you know inclined about the political philosophy of conservatism instead of any of the other currents.

I mean we have the misconception that conservatism is just pretty much defending free markets capitalism and know the American version of conservatism, but in British and in Central European thought is something way different and closer to traditionalism actually, so my question, maybe for you to add up a little bit to the first part of of your answer, would be what really made you be interested interested in that instead of just anti-communism and the superficial promotion of free markets and democracy.

Ferenc – Anti-communism for me was not only about free market and and free speech, although these are important things, I would say, but my basic problem with communism was that it was, well, if you want to be kind you can say it was “mistaken”, but if you are stronger you would say it was based on a lie and that mistake or lie concerned its view of human nature: it had a false view of human nature.

I myself was brought up as a Christian, a Catholic, in particular, and that was actually something that was forbidden, or maybe, “not advised”, let’s put it this way, in a communist context, to bring your children up in Catholic doctrine, and of course in Catholic moral theology you are introduced to the idea of the sinfulness of human nature, which is the starting point, so to say, and that was what I was brought up in, and so I saw it very obviously, that the perfectionism and the utopian hopes and optimism that is part of the Marxist ideological smoke screen are not true, so that’s why I thought that I should dig deeper.

With Edmund Burke I found an author who could indeed show me that that there is a political tradition which is based on the assumption that if we take into account the real nature of the human being, then you have to be much more cautious in your politics and after the 20th century I think that lecture or that lesson was even more important than in the end of the 18th century. Of course, the French Revolution, which was the cause of Burke’s Reflections was terrible and the bloodshed together with actually some very nice and very optimistic hopes, but the 20th century was even worse: the totalitarian regimes (nazi, fascist and communist) showed us the most brutal face of politics and the killing machines that can come out of that.

Some of those totalitarian regimes were based on these nice utopian illusionary views of the human being, so I always felt that as a responsible person (and we intellectuals need to be responsible because we have got that privilege that we could spend our time in our youth studying instead of just working for survival) that means that we have to take care of what the public opinion is about or about how the public perception of reality turns, and therefore I always felt it my obligation to try to share that sort of wisdom which comes out from the tradition that I trace back to Aristotle and partly even to Plato and then through the Romans, like Cicero, and the others up to Christianity, such as Augustine and of course Aquinas in particular, then the Renaissance humanists and the early modern thinkers like the Spanish Jesuits and their Italian counterparts as well as the British tradition.

These are all important for me because they all trying to call our attention to the fact that the human being is full of uncontrollable passions, aggression, willpower, and therefore you have to be able to control those passions, and in particular, you have to take care of mass psychology because we are living in a mass democracy and within that context it’s even more important to be able to have the balance and to keep the heat low in order to avoid major outbreaks of violence and terror and war.

Ugo – Taking in particular your last point and before my next question, I have something to ask you because, as you may know, conservatism, at least for some authors and for some thinkers, you included, is a philosophy or a doctrine of prudence and moderation, so I would like you to expand a little bit on that statement and to explain to people who might not be very familiar with that what that means, especially what’s prudence, what’s moderation, how are these virtues, and why do they matter to keep a healthy and a stable society.

Ferenc – Mostly yes: you are right. That’s a very strong historical tradition but I also use those concepts and ideas in my own understanding of political conservatism. I published a volume with the title “The Political Philosophy of Conservatism” and the subtitle “Prudence, Moderation and Tradition“, and I found these three concepts important for me for the same reason our liberal friends tend to start out from the cardinal virtue of justice.

Think about John Rawls, for example, perhaps the most influential 20th century liberal thinker, and his most important book is called A Theory of Justice. And in fact, yes, it tries to work out the conditions for a just society.

But I thought that justice might be important, but there might be something before one can turn towards achieving justice in your society. You need to keep order and peace in your society. You have to find the minimum conditions of cooperation and cohabitation. And for that, justice is too far away. What you need is rather, as I mentioned, to keep down the passions and the uncontrollable motivations for violence and brutality and envy and all those things.

And to achieve that, we know from the Christian teaching that the cardinal virtue of prudence or practical wisdom is crucial because it does not give us a key of the metaphysical truth of our conditions or the human phenomenon, but it provides not simply a technique or a skill, but rather a virtue, a habitus, a kind of ingrained and internalized excellence, which is a virtue of a practical nature, which will help us to make decisions in difficult situations. I usually describe this with the following metaphor or allegory:

Imagine that you enter a Saloon somewhere in the American Wild West in the early 19th century as a cowboy. And you are thirsty, you want to have a drink. But this is a pub which you never entered before. And you have to be aware that there are certain risks when you enter a Saloon or a Pub. You have to be careful about who is in, what are the intentions of those in, and what are the possible risks for you to enter.

And that is, I think, the attitude of the one who has got practical wisdom. It’s an attitude of cautious foresight, of an effort to try to be able to get all the necessary information to make good decisions, what to do next. That’s the most important thing: it’s not necessarily to have long-term strategies, but more of a tactical thing. But you always have to keep in mind the telos, the goal of the whole thing, and it’s not simply survival, but the common good of the community, in fact.

You are not only, as the cowboy who enters the Saloon, interested to save your own life, but you want to have a good time for all of those in there. And that’s the sort of thing, what you need, a practical judgment, the ability to see potential dangers, and also the space for maneuver, and the ability to do good, or at least to avoid to do bad things.

Ugo – I’m going to connect this reply about the meaning of prudence, and of wisdom, and of practical knowledge, which is kind of a staple in conservatism. Empiricism somehow became very, very associated with conservatism, despite not being part of the same tradition at first. This links with both your legal training and maybe the idea of natural rights and natural law.

So I want to ask you, how do you see that in the realm of natural law, since there’s the issue that there’s a lot of thinkers of natural law are either only lawyers, and they just think about it on the legal sphere, or only philosophers, and they don’t really apply it to the legal sphere. So maybe you have the right amount of votes as both a legal scholar and as a political philosopher to explain this to a layman.

The modern renaissance of natural law came after the Second World War, for obvious reasons, i.e. that positivism could not help avoiding the most horrible, anti-human, inhuman decisions by decision makers.

But my problem with the tradition of natural law is that it claims to have those universal standards for once and for all. And I never knew how to make sense of it within the historical dimension of the human being. I thought that there is a learning process, perhaps, here.

And even if these standards are universal, I had the feeling that Adam and Eve in paradise surely were not aware of all of them at once. So my assumption is that human history is actually a learning process, a learning process which comes out of repeated trial and error procedures. Human societies try to solve their practical problems, and the better the solutions are, the longer the society can survive. 

This allows us, on the long run, to find out those standards which help the societies to survive for longer. And that means that my idea of natural law is quite close actually to the concept of common law in the British context, i.e. that we need to see the precedence, we see have to see earlier cases, earlier historical states of affairs and decision-making processes and the results.

And through that we can find those principles and standards which crystallized with time and which we can claim belong to what we traditionally call natural law. So that’s my own understanding of natural law: the principles are universal, but they need to be learned through human history.

Ugo – Speaking of common law, well, as an Hungarian jurist, you know that the history of the Hungarian constitution is quite similar to how Britain has retained an unwritten constitution, and if I’m not wrong, Hungary has not had a proper written, “single document” constitution until, I would say, around 10 years ago?

Ferenc – Well, mid-20th century, in 1946 was the first written version and then the communist constitution was introduced and that was already a written paper.

Ugo – Sure, but I mean a constitution that actually follows the Hungarian tradition, not the communist experiment, and you as a jurist, could take the Hungarian cas, and actually you did in your book (A History of the Hungarian Constitution: Law, Government and Political Culture in Central Europe), explaining how that developed from centuries of political experimentation and changes in Hungarian history.

I was wondering if there was some connection in your study about Hungarian legal and constitutional history and some of your conclusions about natural law and about conservatism.

Ferenc – Yes, yes, of course, you are on the right track. One’s historical investigations and one’s theoretical reflections should be in harmony. And indeed, although I call myself an Anglophile, someone who appreciates British culture in general and the English common law in particular, and the British parliamentary system and all that, I am a Hungarian, a loyal Hungarian citizen, and as such, I’m very proud to have this long-standing tradition of unwritten or better said, uncodified laws, because there were certain laws which were put down and they adapt that uncodified constitution which we are talking about.

Now, you are asking me about that tradition, which is a centuries-long tradition: Hungary got its state formation 1,000 years ago, or by now it’s a little bit longer, and those 1,000 years of Hungarian history were based on certain Christian and certain local jurisprudential principles, but the basic one which was usually referred to was a collection of customary laws as well as statutes which tried to bring together about 500 years of legal developments, the so-called Tripartitum, the three-part collection by István Verbőczy from the early 16th century.

That means that we had 500 years without such collections, or at least just smaller ones, and mind you, this is not an official collection, it never got the signature of the king for its authorization, but it was accepted as a correct collection of Hungarian laws, partly customary law, but also partly the laws given by our kings.

And the major idea behind that is a kind of an interaction between the country, between the community of the different orders of society, you have to keep in mind that this is a feudal social system, and both the country and the king are part of a higher unit which is called the crown, as the Hungarian crown is the sacred symbol which unifies the king and his country.

And all the procedures of creating new laws are like a dialogue between the country, between the different orders assembled in the national assembly, and the king. They are the two partners to it, and as a result of the dialogues, the laws are born.

And that is, I think, a very nice and early example of how to formalize procedures in a way to ensure that different interests will be taken into account, but also the general interest, i.e. the interest of the country as represented by the assembly, and also as embodied by the king, so the two parts of the discussion unite and through that dialogue comes these procedures resulting in the right decision. And all that centuries-long history of dialogue resulted in certain principles, like the principle that the king should always take into care the good of the country.

Of course in those days “the good of the country” basically meant the good of the nobility, one should be aware of that, but the interest of the general good was the legitimating force behind the activity of the king, and as soon as there was a recognition that that was not the case, the king lost his position quasi by the force of the law, because he did not take into account the interest of the common good, which was the first and the primary interest of his rule.

Ugo – I’m going to make a connection with the next topic, since there’s a lot of historical coincidences, as well as a lot of differences between the constitutional development in Hungary and the one in Poland, in particular the idea of the crown as separated from the figure of the monarch, and the “enfranchised people”, the nobility, with political power that kind of collaborate or are in tandem with the monarch in order to compose the crown.

However, there’s a key difference, and that is that Poland successfully established an electoral monarchy during the existence of its First Rzeczpospolita/Republic, and they had a wider range of foreign and local monarchs, whereas Hungary became part of the Habsburg realm pretty early on, and it stayed as part of their Danubian monarchy until around a 100 years ago, and had their struggles for independence as well quite a couple of times. I think the two most famous ones are Rákóczi’s War of Independence and the Revolution of 1848 that ended up in the compromise of the 1860s, so I was wondering what do you think made these differences in Hungarian constitutional history and in the Hungarian political tradition?

Ferenc – Well, of course, the geopolitical situation of the two countries is different, and that resulted in different turns of their history. Most importantly, the Turks came up from the east-south and south-southern parts of Europe up to take the middle part of Hungary for 150 years, which resulted in the country divided into three parts, and as a result, the Habsburgs could strengthen their power over one part of it, and that became the foundation of the kingdom later on as well.

But it’s not the right formulation to give an account of the Hungarian constitutional situation in the early modern period, is not that Hungary is part of the Habsburg monarchy, because Hungary was always ruled according to the Hungarian constitution, and so from a Hungarian perspective, it was rather the case that we happened to have the House of Habsburg as our kings, but we, the Hungarian kingdom, the geographic locality called the Hungarian kingdom was not part of any other monarchy like the Habsburg monarchy, because this part of the realm was ruled according to different rules than all the other parts of the realm, and it could not be ruled without the support of the orders, the feudal orders, and that meant that no king could be crowned without taking an oath and without being crowned in presence of certain people, by certain persons who were either from the secular or the religious established order of the country.

That means that for all these hundreds of years, when we had Habsburg kings, it was always the case that they could only rule according to the oath that they made, and with the condition that they were crowned in the right presence, by the right persons, at the right location actually. So a number of criteria had to be met, and in fact that was not the case for any other parts of the Habsburg  realm. And as for the settlement of 1867, that was indeed perhaps the high point of Hungarian political wisdom. 

Why? Because Hungary had to realize that by that time, a mid-sized country within the center of Europe, with the Habsburgs and the Germans on the one side, and the Russians and the Turks on the other side, they had to find a modus vivendi, how to rule themselves, and in this way how to save the basic sovereignty of the country, under whatever construction it can be saved.

And the settlement was a dual monarchy. Once again, Hungary is not part of the Austrian monarchy, it’s a construction of a dual monarchy with the same ruler, the same king, but that king was an emperor in the Austrian part, and a king in the Hungarian part, and the settlement was that Hungary will keep on ruling itself according to its own constitutional tradition, so again this dialogue between the Hungarian people, its elites and the king, but the foreign affairs and the military decisions as well as the treasury were to be held together for both Austria and Hungary.

So these are the areas that were not exclusively controlled by the Hungarian government, but that did not meant they gave up their participation in the decision-making process in those fields. And I think that was a very substantial compromise, or rather settlement, because it provided ample opportunity for development, and also to keep the traditions alive, and it defended Hungary from foreign invasions until the First World War.

Ugo – There are two questions I could make from this. The first will stay on this historical development, and if I may play little devil’s advocate in here, because there’s a certain tradition, legal theory, even jurisprudence going in the development of the historical spirit of the law and so on and so forth, but then you also have a more power-based understanding of law which is fairly associated with the thought of German jurist Carl Schmitt.

And I was going to ask you: do you think this constant state of warfare in which Hungary found itself during half of its existence was what really gave the necessity to have these foreign rulers from the House of Habsburg to be pretty much their main military commanders against every other invasion that could be around?

I might be reading too much in between lines, but there’s a certain idea that if you need these powerful figures, usually military commanders, to take the reins of government because the situation is so overwhelming that you need someone with extraordinary, exceptional powers to rule and restore order. And this also happened with Admiral Miklás Horthy later during the years between both world wars. In both cases, there’s the strongman that takes power because the country is in a situation of exception.

Do you think we could apply Carl Schmitt’s understanding of power politics and of the exception of laws as a situation that explains some of the Hungarian political and constitutional development.

Ferenc – We can, of course, but we should tell our audience that on this issue, we have different positions, for I go for a more Aristotelian understanding of the nature of politics, and you appreciate more Carl Schmitt on this point, but of course, Schmitt says that within a geopolitical context, we would call an international law or international relations. 

Nonetheless, my understanding of politics is more about internal affairs, because it’s the Aristotelian starting point where you have a political community and you have to organize the life of that community.That’s my basic assumption, and for that, you might have occasions when you have, you are in need of a strong military leader. These are, for example, the Roman dictators, but otherwise, what you need is practical wisdom and and just a good sense, a sensus comunis, the right understanding of what’s at stake. 

And in that respect, my example of a good ruler in Hungary is not Horthy, who was actually quite successful, I do not want to deny that, but my example is from his period, it’s István Bethlen from 1920 to 1930 roughly, and Gábor Bethlen, who was a prince of Transylvania in the 17th century. 

These two, both named Bethlen, so it’s easy to remember their names, illustrate the idea that to rule, in fact, you need to make compromises, and you sometimes even have to give up certain powers of sovereignty. For example, Gábor Bethlen had to make deals with the Ottoman Empire, as well as with the Habsburgs. But if you make those external compromises, then you can rule your own country within your own borders, according to your standards and your values. I think that’s something very important.

Both Bethlens were regarded quite highly by the European powers in those days because it’s always important for foreign powers, for the great powers, that there is peace in the smaller areas, which they don’t want to deal with.

In this sense, I think you can find a modus vivendi between the requirements or the demands of the great powers around you and your own people. These are the two sides that you have to keep in balance, and in that respect, I think it’s not enough to have powerful military leaders. You also nned t have men of practical wisdom.

Ugo – In the end, it all comes to the distinction between the politics of community and friendship, which would be more in the Aristotelian sense, and a certain politics of friend-enemy distinction and of conflict, which is more of the Schmittian understanding. We somewhat understand who were the historical enemies of the Hungarian polity in history, and there might be some remnants of that, at least in the way how Hungary deals in its affairs now.

Ferenc – Well, there is always a division line within, I guess, most of the countries, but in Hungary especially, and the division line can be drawn along religious or political values. For example, we talked about the Habsburg influence in Hungary, and there were groups who were pro-Habsburg and anti-Habsburgs, and that was a very powerful division line within Hungarian politics for centuries, whether you could accept the Habsburgs or whether you would never accept them as legitimate rulers.

Another division line is the Catholic-Protestant division line, which divided Hungary along the line of the Danube. That was basically the most important geographic division line within the Hungarian kingdom, traditionally, and even today.

And the western part belonged earlier to the Roman Empire and it became early Christianized, and then it became also Catholic and remained Catholic when Protestantism got its time, and the eastern part became Protestant and the Protestants were usually anti-Habsburg as well, so the religious division and your position about a foreign ruler went hand in hand.

Interestingly, I would say that the best parts of our history was when the two sides could play out their roles in a balance.

For example, we had the Rákóczi’s War of Independence in the early first decade of the 18th century, and they failed. They were anti-Habsburg, and in that sense, the revolutionary ones. But then a very good peace treaty was drawn, and as a result, the 18th century is actually quite peaceful and quite dynamically developing in Hungary, which is not something that you learn in school, because in the school you learn your great struggles for liberty and your tragic falls. You don’t learn about the ordinary normal decades of human or national history when things went well, because there are no news in it.

You need to fight for liberty in order to get the settlement, but also you have to get the settlement to get out the best what that fight was for. So the successful periods are when the two things can go hand in hand. And I think that after 1990 with the newly born freedom again, there is a need for balance.

There is a need for those who fight and there’s a need for those who can make the compromises and the settlements. That also points to international relations, and there has always been this link with other countries around.

Ugo – Talking about Austria would be self-explanatory in the Hungarian historical context with the relationship with the Habsburgs, but what about other countries? Hungary has very brotherly relationships with other countries close by, Poland, in particular, or Croatia, maybe.

But I think that there is here also a kind of inferiority complex. Hungary used to be at least a mid-sized country and the country which had very powerful kings for centuries, and at some moment, our kingdom was as big as it was bordered by three seas, so it was quite a huge one. Sometimes Poland and Hungary were even under the same king as well.

But it has a good influence on a public mentality if a country was big and then it becomes small but it has some bad aspects as well. And that bad aspect of this Hungarian historical tradition is that we always complain. We complain that the world is conspiring against us, that we are the underdogs and we are not taken as equal or we are not dealt with in a fair manner. These are the complaints that I think can add up to a kind of an inferiority complex if it’s done without kind of moderation and tact.

So that’s my answer to it: sometimes Hungarians have this feeling that they only have friends in the Poles and perhaps sometimes the Croatians but that’s all. With Italy as well, there were good relations, but that’s it.

And you also have to take into account culture: the Hungarian language is not belonging to the Slavic or the Romance language families, so in that sense, it’s something very exceptional. Nobody else connects to it. The same way, Hungarian culture, in which literature has a very powerful position, is not understood by others, because they don’t speak the language. This means that a lot of things that are important in the Hungarian public mentality are not available for our Western friends, and therefore, they cannot make sense what is actually happening here with these strange guys, these Hungarians.

Ugo – Since you mentioned culture at last, my last question might be about it, and especially coming back to aesthetics, because Central Europe has a very defined identity when it comes to aesthetics. When you come to Central Europe, you feel everything is different, but at the same time, every major city, like Kraków, Budapest, even Zagreb, Prague, Vienna, in some extent as well, they’re very similar. They have like the same vibe. 

It also extends a little bit to the people, and you mentioned that there’s a certain way that Hungarians are, that they complain about a lot and they don’t feel they belong that much to the West. My experience in Poland has been quite similar. And mind you, those are two very different nations, but they’re still, they’re very close and they have always been close and they have very friendly relations in history.

So maybe my last question is about that, about the spirit and the aesthetic expression of that Central European identity.

Ferenc – Yes, that’s crucial for Hungary that we don’t regard ourselves as part of Eastern Europe, but rather Central Europe. And of course, Central Europe is a concept which is much discussed in historical literature. 

I tend to go with those who claim that it’s basically the Central European Habsburg powers, the Habsburg realm in this part of the world that defined this culture. But I also would call attention to this Hungarian historian named Jenő Szűcs, who had this not very novel idea that there are three historical regions in Europe: Western, Central and Eastern, but also claimed that there were different historical trajectories for these regions.

The Eastern model is a kind of monopoly of power or even a tyranny, the Western model is democratization even to the extremes like a mass democracy, and Central Europe is somehow a compromise between the two, like a constitutional monarchy or something like that.

Of course, there is an idealization in this scheme, but there is truth to it as well, that Central Europe could learn from both sides and could appreciate both sides. And in that sense, it has got a certain function in Europe even today, I would say. That’s why the Visegrad Group is an important political initiative.

Ugo – This also shows the aesthetics of the region. Whereas in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, you have like these grandiose monuments to both mass democracy, like if you go to Brussels or if you go to any other big city in Western Europe, you will see how they try to say “oh, we are the people and this is how the people hold power.” And then in Eastern Europe, you have these monuments to the power of the state, and usually, to the power of the ruler as well. But in Central Europe, you have something that goes in between. You still have big buildings, big churches, big palaces, but they are not massive.

Do you feel the connection between the people and the ruler, between community and those who belong to it and those who run it? This is something that doesn’t happen too much in both East and West, so maybe the aesthetic expression of that idea is something that we could take as a giveaway of how Central Europe really feels and thinks about itself and about its governance.

Ferenc – Yes, I would put it this way, because I’m not in favor of powerful rulers or very strong states because they need their control. That’s the idea of the rule of law. But I think that you have a point if you say that mass democracy, as Tocqueville teaches us, destroys hierarchy and destroys differences. It creates homogeneity and it creates gray areas. Grayness or dullness or a sort of flat and undistinguished landscape.

And in this respect, this is indeed a region of transitions, a region of meeting places, it has got its aesthetic, and by aesthetics, we also mean a certain ethos and a certain way of life, which is so important for conservatives like us.

Ugo – All right. Thank you very much for that, it’s been a pleasure sharing with you. Would you like to say one final message or one final comment to our readers?

Ferenc – I would really like that, and I hope it was not too far-fetched and not something without major interest, but my point is that indeed we Hungarians, we have a long history, have a lot of faults and mistakes, but we are quite friendly people, and all the visitors who come to Hungary usually say that they like to stay here. And we are happy if people are interested in our country and in our region, so Ugo, I’m really grateful for your interest as well.

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