The Taming of Civil Society
The Taming of Civil Society

Author(s): Ádám Nagy
Subject(s): Civil Society, Present Times (2010 - today)
Published by: Central European University Press
Keywords: civil society;Hungarian government;Orbán regime;civil organizations;Nonprofit organizationsgime;
Summary/Abstract: The mafia state employs a multistep domestication methodology. Its first step is the centralization of funding and its control by a procurator. This move is “successful” with the majority of civil groups since they are primarily invested in realizing a given organizational goal rather taking a political stand. Therefore, in accepting the procurator’s response—funding or the promise of it in case of wait lists—they would not voice their discontent with this operational system. If the constrained funding does not suffice to reach its goal, the state deploys the media by, for instance, subjecting the oppositionally oriented civil society actors to communicational pressure. On this level all but those organizations would persist which, of the threefold task of civil society (participation, service, and control) would advocate the ethos of curbing the state’s dominance. Should the communicational pressure prove ineffective, the state will employ coercive means in order to enforce the government’s will, as exemplified by the intervention of the government’s Control Office and the police in the conflict with the NCTA. While the first method has been used more than a few times in the context of the Hungary’s incompletely realized democratic model, the second method’s application has been almost unprecedented. Finally, the deployment of central authority reveals how the octopus, an unequivocally nondemocratic system, works.

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