23 Dec 10 | Index Index, minipost
The Hungarian parliament has passed a new law creating a media watchdog with powers to restrict and punish private news agencies. The new body has the power to impose sanctions upon media outlets if it decides that their coverage is unbalanced or breaches the rules on coverage of sex, violence and alcohol. The Hungarian parliament is dominated by the centre right ruling party Fidesz, which will also act as the majority in the media watchdog. Hungary is set to take EU presidency on 1 January 2011.
14 Nov 24 | News and features, United States
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.
08 Nov 24 | Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News and features, Poland
There is a grainy photograph on the first page of the January 1990 edition of Index on Censorship magazine showing a group of twenty or so smiling friends of various ages. They are dressed in the non-descript shabby style favoured by most European intellectuals of the period. They could easily be mistaken for a group of academics on a field trip if it weren’t for the sign in Polish behind them which reads: State Border: Crossing Forbidden.
The picture was taken on 9 July 1988 at a secret location on the Polish-Czech border. This unruly band of comrades has been brought together by the bitter and often lonely struggle against Stalinism, their friendship formed in an underground network of Polish-Czech solidarity. The cause often seemed hopeless and at the time the picture was taken this obscure group of writers and activists could never have imagined that the whole edifice they had spent their lives opposing was about to collapse.
As it turned out, this photograph represented one of the most extraordinary gatherings of dissidents in the whole of the Cold War. Look closely and you can see Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright, who would become President of Czechoslovakia just 20 months after the photo was taken. Ján Čarnogurský, a Catholic anti-communist activist, who became the Prime Minister of Slovakia in 1991 is also there as is Jan Ruml, who went on to become the Czech interior minister from 1992 to 1997. Jan Urban led the Civic Forum campaign in the elections of 1990, but decided not to become Prime Minister in the new government. A year on, Jacek Kuroń, known as the godfather of the Polish opposition, would be the minister for employment in the first Solidarity government.
Mirosław Jasiński, a leading member of Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity became a prominent Polish diplomat. Among them also are opposition journalists Petr Pospíchal and Petr Uhl, who founded the East European Information Agency and Adam Michnik, perhaps Poland’s most celebrated journalist, who became the first editor of the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in May 1989 and later an MP before returning to journalism.
The only woman in the photo is Anna Šabatová who went on to become the ombudsman of the Czech parliament and was the first East European woman to receive the United Nations Human Rights Prize.
No one predicted the events of 1989, the 35th anniversary of which, will be celebrated this year. The first signs came in the spring of that year, when the Polish government and Solidarity reached an agreement to legalise the free trade union and hold elections. In June, the Communists were humiliated at the polls and in August Solidarity’s Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister.
A parallel process in Hungary saw the creation of independent parties in February 1989. By the beginning of May, the authorities had dismantled the barbed wire on the frontier with Austria. The borders of the old Communist bloc started to fray and then come apart at the seams. In September, Budapest announced that East Germans would be given passage through Hungary into Western Europe. Young people across Eastern Europe began to make their way in numbers to Vienna to get their first taste of western consumer goods and freedom. Then, in November, the
movement became irresistible as the Berlin Wall itself crumbled and fell under the weight of sledgehammers. In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution ushered in the peaceful transition to democracy and by Christmas, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was gone. Crucially, unlike in 1956 and 1968, the Soviet army did not intervene.
For young people across Europe, these were life-changing events. As a wide-eyed 23-year-old journalist, I travelled across Eastern Europe in December 1989. In East Berlin, I spoke to students loyal to the regime whose world had been turned upside down, who asked me to reassure them about the key role played by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the fight against racism and the National Front. In Leipzig I saw the thousands of people taking part in candlelit demonstrations around the city. In Prague I grumbled to two journalists who worked for the trade union newspaper that there would soon be a McDonald’s on Wenceslas Square and witnessed their pure delight as they looked me in the eye and said “Yes!” I remember a mixture of emotions among the people I met: hope and optimism about the future of an undivided Europe, certainly, but also a degree of fear and uncertainty about whether the transition would remain peaceful. Common to everyone though was the feeling of pure surprise. Absolutely no one had expected this, even a year earlier.
Index’s co-founder, the poet Stephen Spender, captured this feeling well in his speech to English PEN at a party for his 80th birthday on 6 December 1989, published in the February 1990 edition of Index magazine. He suggested that a motto for his kind of writer, opposed both to Stalinism and McCarthyism, should be “the politics of the unpolitical”, but asked what the role of such writers should be after the end of the Cold War.
“It is essential to ask this question because we are now entering what less than even a year ago was an almost unthinkable period,” he said. “How unthinkable is to me made vivid by recalling that at the beginning of 1989 I remarked to Isaiah Berlin, who, like me, has in 1989 reached his 80th year – he and I each other’s oldest living friend – that the one thing I wished to see was the collapse of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He agreed but said that this would not happen in our lifetimes. Well, now it has happened, and the results are completely bewildering.”
How bewildered might Stephen Spender be 35 years later. No one talks about “the politics of the unpolitical” anymore. But those of us who were there in 1989 still remember the sense of surprise that everyone who thought they could predict the future was wrong and that feeling, for a short while, that everything was possible.
09 Aug 24 | Africa, Algeria, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, Taiwan
Boxer Imane Khelif broke down in tears last week following her victory over Hungary’s Luca Anna Hamori in the welterweight quarter final at the 2024 Paris Olympics guaranteed her a medal. It was an emotional moment for the Algerian not just in terms of her sporting achievement but because she had spent the past week embroiled in a misinformation storm.
Khelif – who is now guaranteed at least a silver medal after her victory over Thailand’s Janjaem Suwannapheng – was labelled as transgender in several viral social media posts, an inaccuracy which was then parroted by some news organisations and politicians. Khelif is neither transgender nor identifies as intersex.
Much of the recent viral outrage at Khelif’s Olympic success stemmed from a claim by the Russian-led International Boxing Association in 2023 that she and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan had failed certain gender tests. These tests have never been published and are, as of today, unverified. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) revoked the IBA ruling, stating the decision was “arbitrary”, “sudden” and “taken without any proper procedure”.
The disqualification resulting from the IBA tests also apparently came after Khelif beat a Russian prospect at an IBA event.
There have been mixed reports over the content of the apparently secret gender testing, with IBA president Umar Kremlev claiming in a chaotic press conference that the pair had high levels of testosterone while the organisation’s chief executive alleged these were actually chromosome tests. Even beyond the lack of cohesion and clarity, the issue with sex testing itself is that every version invites criticism when scrutinised because most sports are organised according to a strict male-female binary, while nature does not follow such a binary – sex is more complex than that.
The IBA does not oversee Olympic boxing. Their credibility was seriously damaged in recent years following longstanding accusations of a lack of transparency and poor governance. They were finally suspended as boxing’s governing body and stripped of involvement in the Olympic games. Neither the IOC nor World Boxing endorse the ruling made by the IBA.
The IBA has close links to Vladimir Putin and Russia, a country which has been involved in massive misinformation campaigns around the Olympic games because their athletes were not allowed to compete under the Russian flag.
According to AP, Russian bots have been responsible for amplifying the Khelif controversy. The story was soon picked up by voices with huge followings, including billionaire X owner Elon Musk. It travelled beyond social media, with several news organisations and politicians wrongfully asserting that Khelif is transgender. US-based newspaper The Boston Globe were forced to issue an apology for labelling Khelif as transgender in one of their headlines. Fox News also labelled her as a transgender boxer live on air, while host Ainsley Earhardt wrongly described her as someone who identifies as a trans woman. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated these false claims.
The dangers of misinformation have been well-documented in the age of social media but are as relevant as ever in sewing division. Fake news spreading on social media sites is currently fuelling a number of political agendas and was cited as one of the catalysts for the far-right Islamophobic and anti-immigration riots in the UK.
BBC disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring, who deals with such viral mistruths on a daily basis, told Index in February that the unregulated spread of misinformation can cause real-world harm, so it’s crucial in a free society to call it out.
“If you are being repeatedly hounded or abused online, your freedom of expression is compromised,” she explained. “What I’m doing is exposing the harm these extremist truths can cause rather than policing what people can say.”
Khelif herself has been subjected to hate and abuse on a huge scale, as has Yu-ting, who is also competing at the games and is guaranteed a medal. IOC president Thomas Bach condemned the narrative surrounding the two athletes, calling it “politically motivated”.
“All this hate speech, with this aggression and abuse, and fuelled by this agenda, is totally unacceptable,” he said during a news briefing.
Even more worryingly, these allegations could have had serious consequences when you consider that in Algeria – Khelif’s home country – being transgender is illegal.
There are legitimate questions in a free society to be raised around gender in sport and the IOC’s Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations was criticised by some international sports medicine bodies in 2022. No one should be silenced for asking these questions or having the conversation.
But the heat around Khelif has not been about asking questions. Instead the issue here is one of jumping to conclusions. What could have been a heartwarming story of a woman finding sporting success against all odds became a cautionary tale of the dangers of misinformation and the speed at which unchecked information or false claims can be spread on social media platforms, endangering people’s lives and distorting reality. Who wins the gold medal here? Russia.
