Adopting the European Model versus National Egoism: The Task of Surpassing Political Hysteria

Abstract

Analysing the images of the self and the enemy of the two main kinds of political language in the post-communist countries of East Central European, this Hungarian case study shows the shift from personal liberty to social protection, from liberal democracy to a mixture of oligarchic and ochlocratic phenomena, from constitutional revolution to a search for forging collective identity, from individual universal human-rights discourse to collectivist, including ethnicist, public speech, and from establishing the constitutional bases of the new democratic political system to different political hysterias. Its ultimate question is how to surpass political hysteria through research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas.