Kristóf Nagy | Fung Public Seminar Series: Culture Wars as Imperial Mechanism: Orbán's Hungary and the Contemporary Hegemonic Transformations

How do culture wars fuel new imperialism? This talk builds on a provocative thesis: the contemporary far-right takeover of cultural institutions cannot be understood without grasping the current imperialist transformation of global capitalism. At a moment when the post-WWII US-led order unravels, this lecture examines how cultural institutions have become key battlegrounds for emerging imperial projects. Rather than treating culture wars as domestic ideological conflicts that merely reflect broader geopolitical shifts, Nagy argues that they are themselves central mechanisms through which new forms of imperialism are constructed and legitimized.

Through the ethnography and history of Viktor Orbán's Hungarian Academy of Arts, Nagy demonstrates how global transformation operates not only through trade and military conflicts, but fundamentally through culture wars among artists and intellectuals. This raises a troubling question: why do artists — often imagined as the vanguard of liberal cosmopolitanism — actively participate in neoimperialist projects?

To explain this paradox, Nagy traces how the capitalist globalization of cultural goods since the 1970s destabilized artists' livelihoods, making a broad cohort receptive to far-right politics that promise material security and cultural sovereignty through protection from global art markets and international cultural industries. The talk concludes by arguing that understanding new imperialism requires recognizing that global transformation happens not despite culture wars but through them — and that artists and intellectuals are not passive victims but active agents in constituting these imperial formations. Hungary's experience reveals how neoliberal precarity, authoritarian cultural policy, and new imperialism converge in the cultural sphere, offering not only a framework for understanding how new imperialism mobilizes cultural institutions worldwide, but also a perspective to compare it with the interwar development of far-right cultural politics.

Fung Global Fellows Program, PIIRS | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Anthropology Department

Contact the organizers