Sustaining democracy during wartime

Balazs Trencsenyi, co-director of Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), joins us to discuss the university's work to uphold education and democracy in Ukraine amid the country's ongoing war with Russia. IUFU, an initiative of Central European University was founded shortly after the start of the war in 2022. Since then, more than 1,000 students have taken online and in-person courses taught by faculty around the world.

Trencsenyi is a professor of historical studies at CEU and and director of the university's Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a historian of East Central European political and cultural thought. He's witnessed Hungary's democratic erosion firsthand and discusses Viktor Orban's rise to power and how he's slowly dismantled the country's democratic institutions.

IUFU received the 2024 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Trencsenyi and IUFU student assistant Nataliia Shuliakova visited Penn State in October to accept the award. 

Read the 2024 Brown Medal book from IUFU students and faculty

Watch the Brown Medal ceremony and lecture

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Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I'm Chris Beem

Cyanne Loyle
And I'm Cyanne Loyle.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works this week, we are talking with Balazs Trencsenyi, who is a professor at Central European University, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU, and also the co-director of invisible University for Ukraine, which is why he visited Penn State earlier this fall, invisible university received the 2024 Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for the work that they've done to provide educational opportunities for students who have been impacted by the ongoing war in Ukraine, and really much more than that, as you'll hear Balazs talk about in the interview. But you know this, this project is is worthy of recognition in its own right. But I think we also sought them out for the brown medal because we recognized invisible University for Ukraine as part of a much larger tradition of education as resistance and education as a foundation of what it means to sustain a democracy.

Cyanne Loyle
I think that's absolutely right. Jenna, I really love the project of the invisible University as both a space for supporting and assisting students in Ukraine, but also for kind of keeping the movement of education and truth and knowledge ongoing even even in times of war and conflict. It. It is a long tradition, from things like the flying University in the Soviet era, we talk a lot about scholars at risk programs as another mode for supporting education in times of crisis and and the invisible University for Ukraine is really firmly within that tradition. You know, I mean education as a tool of democracy is is so important, but it also is often a primary battleground in culture wars as well. And we see this in the United States as as kind of thought and and university systems being some of the the first places to be attacked, both both physically and metaphorically.

Chris Beem
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a, it's a difficult time for higher education, I mean, as well as and because of the fact that it's a difficult time for democracy, right? But there is a, there's something about these kind of efforts, you know, the the invisible University for Ukraine and the other ones you mentioned that really give us in the in the United States, something to chew on in terms of, you know, what is education for, and how do we orient ourselves as as you know, scholars and professors towards the towards the end that the iufu appropriately identifies as central to to what higher education is for.

Cyanne Loyle
Yeah, and I think that that the work of the invisible University for Ukraine really draws our attention to all of the really good and important things that education can do right. It can help us think through these existential crises. It can help us think through these moral conundrums, and it can also help us develop the skills that parse out the difference between kind of truth and mission misinformation.

Chris Beem
You actually referenced a quote from the book from Hannah Arendt, which, you know, I gotta say, in the last three or four years, she's been my go to because she saw all this coming a long time ago. But anyway, do you have, do you still have that quote? Do you have any?

Cyanne Loyle
I do have the quote. And I want to mention that the quote is actually quoted. The Arendt quote is quoted in the book that Jenna is going to reference, that came out as part of the brown medal. So the quote is, Jenna Arendt stresses that crises, that crises, offer a window of opportunity for posing the right questions, forcing us, and these are Arendt's words, back into the questions themselves, and requiring from us either new or old answers, but in any case, direct judgments. And so this idea that these kind of crises in education challenge us to think about, really, our core values and the core questions that have kind of underpinned us for so long and and I think we certainly are able to read that in the stories from the students in the book, in the Brown Medal book.

Jenna Spinelle
You know, the other part of of this conversation, we certainly do talk about invisible university, but I didn't mention when I introduced Balazs that, you know, he is based in Budapest in in Hungary, and has been there for decades. Um. And is really had a first hand account of the Democratic erosion that has happened there. So we'll hear that come out. 

Chris Beem
I was just going to say the same thing. I think Balazs is a, you know, eminent scholar. He's, he's incredibly observant, and he lived through this and and, you know, it's, it's really interesting, and I think timely for us to think about, you know, what, what happened to Hungary, what were the steps that moved it from a fledgling democracy to a, you know, at least, you know, hybrid regime, if not an authoritarian one, and just think about the similarities with our own experience.

Jenna Spinelle
As you said, we'll start the conversation talking about Hungary, and then move into some of the work with invisible University. So let's go to the interview with Balazs Trencsenyi.

Jenna Spinelle
Balazs Trencsenyi, welcome to Democracy Works. Thanks for joining us today. So you are here to talk about your work with invisible University for Ukraine, the project that you co direct. But before we get to that, I want to just talk a little bit about democracy, or perhaps lack thereof. In Hungary, you are a faculty member at Central European University, which several years ago, moved from Budapest to Vienna, and has been tangled up with Viktor Orban in Hungary. We've we talk a lot on this show about the idea of democratic erosion, but you've really seen it firsthand. And you know there's often the frog in boiling water metaphor that comes into play here. But I guess I wonder, when did you and your colleagues at CEU can start to get the sense that, hey, things are not trending in a positive direction here.

Balazs Trensceyni 
Well, I think I would say that in some ways, even before Orban came to power, yes, because, like, I mean, it's a much more complicated story. I mean, like, we I think the transition, of course, like, if you go back to the 1990s was very much about, you know, nothing so Hungary was a relatively easy case on paper. Yes, I mean, in the 1980s Hungary had a quite gradual democratization process. It was, like, not a big shock, like, economically, like, there was a kind of growing, kind of credit problem. So like, that huge deficit, state deficit, but it was kind of ran by kind of international organizations and creditors, and it looked like this. So for the population, it didn't look very traumatic the transition. And like on the short run it, or in the short run, it looked like that. That's actually a success story exactly because, like, it's very traumatic in the long run, it looks much more problematic because, exactly because of the kind of smoothness of the transition, certain things the society didn't have to face, yes, I mean, like, you didn't have to realize that certain things have to be changed. Everybody believed, like, I remember, like, my favorite example about this is a neighbor who was telling us in 1989 that, you know, well, it will take us three, four years, a little bit we have to change the economy and a little bit the social structures. And then Hungary will be, like Sweden. And then this guy was actually, you know, like, very confident about all this. He was actually a military and then five years later, he was a neo Nazi, yeah, so, like, when he realized that it didn't work. So, so, so I think there was this kind of story of expectations of smooth transition, which went against reality, because then in the mid 90s, there was this kind of reality check going together with huge austerity measures, kind of eroding some of the trust of the society in this kind of, you know, transitional leads, because ultimately, compared to late socialist security, they got into insecurity Like we have now, very traumatic statistics about, for example, mortality rates going up like in the 1990s very radically, so like Hungary, fell back to to the global south statistics. And not only Hungary, but almost all Eastern Europe into the global global south statistical levels. But, but at that point, everybody had this expectation that this is temporary. It will kind of change. And then when, when Orban came to power, first in 98 and it, I mean, like it were, there were certain worrying signs about his discourse. It was clear that he's trying to kind of eat and digest the traditional right and integrate them. But it was rather perceived to be a kind of smart strategy of kind of, you know, balancing the very obviously unbalanced power and economic, economic and political advantage of the post communists, who were kind of the technocratic elite, and who commanded most of the, you know, economic position, and who had, like a Western liberal so it looked like that, that, I mean, like there might be, you know, child. Illnesses in democracy. But, like, there is a certain kind of very end, and of course, this was disciplined very heavily by the International axis of European integration. Is that, like everybody expected that things get normal and things are normal because, you know, there is a kind of international consensus of what normal democratic countries look like. And then, of course, there were certain things that were not done. And this was not only not done by the Hungarian elites, but not done also by the international organizations, like especially the European Union, for example, that they didn't really think through what to do with countries, which at some point stopped this democratization because it was so obvious. So there were certain kind of worrying signs. And I think when around 2000 when ordman realized that, basically he needs ideological so he cannot just rely on this kind of, in a way, communitarian democratic mixture that he was originally designing, which was like kind of somehow using this Republican political language, but it was still very much kind of non ethnic. And, I mean, it used national symbolism, but in a kind of relatively mainstream way. So, I mean, you could see that that's kind of within the range of a center right political force, but then, like around 2000 when he actually realized that economically and politically, he doesn't have, actually that kind of civic middle class support that he would normally rely on with a policy like this. Then he started to use much more ethnoculturalist references. So it became much stronger, like this discourse about national memory, and all of a sudden, this anti communist discourse, which was there, of course, and which had a certain legitimacy, obviously, after the transition, was re reframed to be anti post communist rather so actually, the it was not about the communist heritage. It was much more about whom you can delegitimize by claiming that they have some connection with the previous regime. And then, of course, it was shadowing the fact that more members of the Orban government were members of the Communist Party than than in the previous government, which was a post Communist Party. So So it became kind of more complicated,

Jenna Spinelle

And this, this was successful in reaching that civic middle class that you mentioned.

Balazs Trensceyni 
That was that was actually not successful. It actually started to mobilize other groups, in some ways, the people who considered themselves to be losers of the transition. Yeah. So instead of kind of building this kind of center right politics on the kind of new emerging, broad, broadening social groups who are actually, in a way, expanding in this kind of post transitions situation. What he realized is that actually he he has to build a regime, and he started to do it on frustration, on rejection of the transition. So so a political force which was emerging with the transition, and which was actually the face of the transition for many, many people, up to the 2000 10s, if they asked about Hungary, then they were thinking about young Victor Orban as the face of the, you know, young democratic political elite in Hungary. And he was really like in the late, late 80s. I mean, he was really the one of the faces of of the transition. So it became the other way around that he started to actually build a system that already in his first rule, which was actually capitalizing on the frustration against the transition. But then, then, to his surprise, it didn't work like in 2002 he lost the election against the color, less bureaucratic, post communist candidate who was just basically kind of promising normality and not no ideology, but pragmatic politics and whatever. So like Orban was very hit by this, and then he for a very long time, it's it has American parallels. He didn't accept the result of the election. He claimed that it was fake and whatever, he said that even ontologically, it's impossible that he lost this election, that God couldn't allow this, like he had this kind of discourse. And he also became, I think, depressed, and then when he re emerged as a politician, he reemerged with a physical speech that was profoundly questioning the legitimacy of the post transition political configuration. But taking this idea of hegemony, interestingly, actually developed the kind of what he called, like, what he launched was the Civic circles, which was some sort of a kind of counter civil society, so an attempt to actually mobilize civil society to question liberal democratic politics. And it was very successful. Like many people felt that finally, there is some sort of kind of, you know, social movement that they integrates people in a, kind of, in a kind of, you know, from the roots, like from below, I mean, and it was a very strange combination, yes, of like this, from below energies like that were quite genuine, and this kind of top down ideological control, yeah, that's,

Jenna Spinelle
I mean, sounds a lot like the Tea Party. 

Balazs Trensceyni 
Yes, it's very comparable to Yes. And also, I think, like part of the Brexit dynamic in England and and stuff like that. So, I mean, like, it has many parallels. I mean, this is, like early 2000s like 2002 lecture. And then when this was kind of growing, it was making it almost. Impossible for the this post communist liberal Coalition, which had many, many, many mistakes. So, I mean, like it was also, you know, Hungary was expecting to be the quickest economic, kind of, in a way, westernizing drive, exactly because of this 80s, already existing, strong westernization. And that's why they were kind of making, probably also the urban government, but definitely the post communist governments. After that, they were very much pushing for this kind finally, we can invest into welfare. So basically, this whole economic model and transition model was based on the fact that Hungary is, by default, the eminent learner of westernization. So that's why it will retain its structural advantage. Between 2002 like Slovakia or even Ukraine, and all these countries became like safe targets. And then all of a sudden, all the international funding that was going to the region was distributed in a much more even way. And also many of the Western companies that came in the 1990s to Hungary as the first investment basis were expiring with their tax privileges and whatever, and kindly moved operations to the next Eastern European country where they could renegotiate the same so all of a sudden, the Hungarian society perceived itself to be in a privileged position of having gone through the transition. But at the same time, socio economically and politically, it actually started to face an increasing, in a way, lack of resources for it. So what grew was basically people taking bank loans with a very bad national currency. And at some point, what happened is that when the economic crisis came, so economic crisis came actually in the mid 2000s when everywhere else it was good. So basically delegitimized the government. There was no trust, social trust, in any political force but him, and he had a certain kind of support, ironically. And this is again, now ironic retrospectively or paradoxical from the Americans, because the post communists, in order to get some sort of economic leeway from this crisis, they started to have deals with Russian energy companies. So, like, actually the post communist government, which was like pro Western ideologically, was actually sitting down with Gazprom about preferential, you know, treatment and getting some oil and gas deals with Russia. So Orban was actually could go to the American Embassy. And there is a famous case that the Americans were actually watching him making anti semitic statements and stuff like that, and were very worried, but then he made a statement that, you know, you shouldn't worry, because I'm doing this only for the campaign, but I am pro Euro Atlantic, and if I come to power, I will basically restore Hungary as an ally of the states, geopolitically and economically. So when he came to power, he came to power with the kind of complete disaster on the other side, so no political force being able to kind of control him, but also relatively strong, how to say, leverage because of geopolitical

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and so you, you mentioned also this sort of counter civil society that that had had mobilized In support of Orban and all that he stood for. Where does the sort of western, liberally rooted civil society stand today? In in Hungary? How strong is that force?

Balazs Trensceyni 
Yeah, so basically, just, just to to show what happened after so, like when Orban comes to power in 2010 then he uses, to a certain extent, for short term, this kind of counter civil society, I would say it's a sort of civil society, but it's so I wouldn't call it uncivil society, because in some it's structurally similar. But we know perfectly well from history of civil society in other contexts as well that you can have anti democratic civil society or anti liberal civil society as well, like political anti semitism in Germany in the early 20th century was, in a way, a civil society phenomenon. So I mean, like you have these kind of structures. But then, of course, Orban realized that this can be also dangerous. So when he came to power, then he kind of turned this relatively, how to say, spontaneous mobilization, into a routinization. So, in a way, what he did is that he turned it into political theater, including yearly or regular marches, mobilization of all his supporters, and marching to the city center and trying to show that, you know, the majority of the society is on his side. And also making this referenda which have no real decisive power in any way. It's just basically testing the Society of how many people are they can reach with their and also kind of collecting all the data of all the people who send back the stuff. So, so it's basically, it's not a Democratic instrument. It's a kind of like performative instrument. Yes, I mean and, and with this toolkit, he was trying to, to a certain extent, discipline his own base as well, and at the same time, kind of still use these in a way, organizations that emerged from this counter civil society to kind of fill in the positions structurally of the more critical civil society. So like, you know, you need feminist organizations because of European Union, you will get. Women's organization, which will say that we want actually to forbid abortion. Because, like, would, you know, Christian women know how to protect themselves and stuff like that. So, like, basically, that you could kind of generate a system where, on paper, it looks fantastic, like for you know, you have duplication of every function, so creating a parallel, or a para, a civil society, which feels in all the structural needs to kind of represent different social interests. So like, if they are required to have a negotiation with teachers organization, then they create their own teachers organization, and then the ones that are kind of more critical never get to the table. But on paper, it looks perfect. So we had a negotiation with the teachers organization. And they get all the privileges they got all their infrastructure. They get certain kind of distributive power. So for example, like they created also counter Academy of Sciences. Counter. So like, like this. If you can think of any institution of liberal democracy, the urban government in the early 2000 10s created its own clone of that. And at some point, of course, because of the very uneven research distribution of resources, basically these pseudo organizations actually took over most of the people who one who had any chance to have any voice, because, like, through the traditional or more liberal organizations, they didn't have any access to any kind of negotiation. So it basically created this huge para state through these civil organizations. And also, like Orban, realized one more thing, which is also interesting, and maybe we'll have some parallels in the States as well, is that he needs he invented the kind of political arithmetic where he was trying to position himself in the middle, which is very funny, because basically going to the extreme right, it's hard to position yourself into the middle, but he was actually allowing the emergence of a basically fascist political alternative, because then he could tell in the international context that, you know, what is the problem? I am kind of balancing between two extremes, the left and the right, and basically to the left. He put everybody from, you know, moderate liberals to to anarchists and to the right. He put, basically, he allowed the emergence of, really this kind of very paramilitary extreme right and and then he was kind of, you know, telling to the international organizations that, what is the problem? I am protecting the minorities, I am securing rule of law. And of course, there are these extremes, like liberals and fascists, and between whom I have to kind of and what's more, he also realized he kind they designed the political system. I mean, like this is you cannot do it in the states that much, but because it is a multi party system with very fragile electoral system or kind of legal system for elections. Basically, he redesigned the electoral system in a way that there is only chance to beat the government candidates if the all the opposition parties allied. But can you imagine how anarchist, liberal, moderate, conservative and fascist voters will actually candidate, a common candidate against the government? So like previously, a Hungarian system was more, it was two level, and it was less, kind of dual. But then he created a system, like a legal system, which makes it almost imperative to have only one contender, yes, and if you have only one contender, then, then it's impossible to agree. 

Jenna Spinelle
There are certainly some parallels there to the US as well, some of what's happening with the courts here, but as a way to start moving our way toward invisible University for Ukraine. So talk a little bit about so Central European University, as you said, moved from Budapest to Vienna. So talk a little bit about how the university responded to this, and some of the the distributed models of education that you, you move toward, and then that will, I think, take us into Ukraine,

Balazs Trensceyni 
So, so, basically, what, what happened is that the university didn't move fully, yeah. So, I mean, like, it's important to stress that. I mean, it's now being discussed of what exactly the relationship between what remained in Budapest, and what is in Vienna, and what is also part of the other institutional networks around this should be. But I mean, like there were certain elements or certain institutional legacies that were kept. I mean, like one important one is, was a new institution called democracy Institute, which has some structure similarities to to your institution and and there is also the Open Society archives, which was basically the biggest archive of the Cold War, and it holds many materials produced by Western think tanks during the Cold War, including Radio Free Europe, about Eastern Europe. And it's a very, very crucial research place for for doing research about Eastern Europe in general and and the third one is the Institute for Advanced Studies, which is kind of classical Institute for Advanced Studies, but very much focused on scholars at risk, traditionally and now even more so basically this end, we have also some adult education initiatives. We actually went the. We see you degree teaching. Move to Vienna. We try to make a kind of adult education program, also called is Bucha Academy, which is basically targeting Hungarian audience who cannot go to university courses where certain contested topics, from gender studies to to history of political thinking or alternative political traditions, they cannot take it in the official university courses like you probably know the gender studies. I mean, it was not fully kind of it was basically forbidden pro forma in reality, of course, if you claim that you teach it in legal or or literary or cultural studies, then you still can teach completely normal gender studies classes. But like, you cannot have a program called Gender Studies. So if we try to kind of offer courses and alternative intellectual possibilities for people to come for free, so it's a kind of adult education framework, and there are similar other things. So like, basically, it was very much, and that was founded in the moment when we realized that we we might need to talk to the Hungarian all this. It was also in the context of Hungarian support, like the very, I mean, like the biggest demonstration against the urban government until 2024 I think was the, was the demonstration to defend the CEO. So it was like a 80, 90,000 demonstration in Budapest, which is like 1,800,000 cities. It's not small, yes. So it, it was really clear that there is a certain kind of social response to the CU case, which was surprising because, like, CU is a, you know, private university having 1500 students, most of them were not Hungarians. Many of the professors were not Hungarian. So, I mean, like, there was not clear connectivity. I mean, there were certain kind of of course, connections, but it was not that obvious. What makes Hungarian, you know, urban society consider this their own. Yes. I mean, there was even a certain extent of feeling of alienation that, like, you know, since cu was not spending most of its money on Hungarian students and Hungarian research projects or anything like them. For many Hungarian colleagues, it was like, rather this kind of strange, extraterritorial entity. So it was not that obvious why people would feel any kind of sympathy for it. But then it was, I think, part of this feeling of democratic erosion and fighting for everything that represents, somehow a kind of bastion of freedom. So there was a strong social response. And as a result, we had to think quite a lot about how to talk to people who, to whom, usually, university doesn't talk to, yes, I mean, usually you talk to colleagues, mainly and students, but you don't talk to people who would come for a lecture. I mean, you talk to more or less their academic peers and and that that was driving us into this direction as well. And then it was also this kind of regional situation. Yes, that, like, if you think about 2017 and 18 like Hungary, was not the only case. I mean, it's central Europe was full of countries which were moving in one way or another, towers, like, less less less directly and less less probably radically, but still into some sort of hybrid direction, from Slovakia to Poland. And of course, there was Russia Belarus, which were already in a different way affected by this. And then there was also Turkey, which was the repressions after the Gulenist kind of coup. And also the pro Kurdish and pro Armenian statements of many of the academics, was very heavy purge in the academic system. So there was, like, very clearly, kind of transnational academic discussion also about what to do with scholars at risk and how to rethink position of scholars at risk, and not just individuals who are kind of individually targeted by but clusters of the educational system, yes. And I mean, there seem to be a relatively broad consensus that, you know, academic freedom is not in danger in in Ukraine, in contrast to, let's say, Russia. But then, then when the war started, then, of course, things changed and and then it became, I think, quite important for many people to somehow help. But there was very strong disorientation of what exactly help means. And I came across very absurd stories of, you know, institutions who were kind of trying to, you know, for example, offer rooms to people to say that you can come here if you happen to be here, and you can use, you know, your own desktop. And then, of course, at some point it was or laptop. It was extremely humiliating for some of the people who were targeted with this when they were running for their lives, or like, when they left their country basically without any property or anything. And then it became clear that, at the same time, there is this very strong demand from academic networks to try to do something. Like, there was a very strong, I think, moral imperative to help. I mean, it's, after all, the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War, and the most affected people. I mean, like Yugoslav Wars was also big, but I think this, in a way, moves even more people. So, like, there was real commitment to do something, but there was very little. Understanding of what you can do, and and then CU, which had traditionally relatively close contact with Ukrainian colleagues, like we had visiting professors, and also few faculty members and very many students. Like we had a kind of, from the day one, there was a discussion of, what should we do. And then, like, what we started to kind of think is that many of these ideas that we had basically to to deal with anti autocratic, non traditional educational instruments could be actually used for the Ukrainian group, also to because this, this was somehow designed for this kind of multi locational educational engagement. And also because we had idea that that this would only work if we are not basically telling them what they should do, but basically we build the whole program on the demands of the target audience. I mean, we do perfectly where from the very beginning that, and I mean, it became very clear, of course, in the process as well, is that the demands are changing, because the situation is changing quite rapidly. Then basically nobody is sure of how long it will last and what will be the outcome of all this. And that also created a completely different expectation of what people should try to discuss. Yes, because like in the beginning, it was very much about the immediacy of everything, and at the same time, it was very much about cultural identity, about trying to redefine their their selves. I mean, it's important to mention, and I think it's, it's not, probably not very clear for for American audiences, that that, of course, Ukraine being a very complex society, like also multi ethnic, multi regional, all that with very different heritages, social and political and Imperial heritages. I mean, it's a very complex society in terms of identities as well. So for many people, for example, you know, the war was the moment when they shifted identity, even sometimes even linguistic identity, or when for for some, some other people like, you know, two months before the war was the moment when they shifted linguistic identity as a political gesture, yes. And then that also meant that many of the students with whom we dealt with had very, very fresh questions about who I am,

Jenna Spinelle
Yes, or, and, you know, rebuilding civil society,

Balazs Trensceyni 
Yes, exactly. And, and then we brought them there like it was also winter school, I think, or summer school, and and it was a huge disaster, because the terms of the two groups were very different. So like, for example, this post you go scholars were talking about ethnic wars, and then for these Ukrainian students to say that it's an ethnic war was completely inappropriate. Time, like, why it is not an ethnic war, yes, in any way. And in the beginning, it was a kind of huge shock for both sides. And I remember, like, you know, Ukrainian students going out to cry from the session because they just didn't, didn't feel comfortable and whatever. So like, both sides, in the end, ended up in two different pubs, and they were drinking heavily after this session, and then we realized that it's but both sides were extremely, how to say, traumatized by this experience, but also had a certain kind of catharsis that something didn't work. And let's think about what didn't work. And then instead of kind of declaring that it's hopeless and like, go home, both sides actually started to make efforts to think why it didn't work. So the Ukrainian students started to kind of think that, okay, maybe our expectation was to project our framework on the others. And then the Hugo scholars also had the same experience that okay, we have to kind of learn how they are thinking in order to translate our experience. So for our courses, and I think this is probably the last thing I wanted to tell about this pedagogical thing is that that we don't have traditional online classes in the way MOOCs or most of these scholars at risk programs would normally conceive of a class, yes. And a normal understanding of a class is that you know you have it on online, the same thing that you would have offline, yes, and what we try to do is to kind of break completely the this teacher, student dual relationship. And first of all, have not one teacher, but kind of a permanently rotated and renewed group of people who are on every class, basically taught by somebody different, and the course director is more like a curator. So it's like putting together, intellectually the whole thing, but he or she is never put usually we don't even have one, but we originally started dogmatically with two. So it was one Ukrainian, one non Ukrainian. Now we kind of make it possible for even more complicated arrangements, or sometimes one person who is kind of able to mediate it in a meaningful way. But basically the idea is that for every class, you bring a kind of configuration that provokes some sort of discussion. And we also involve the students into designing the course. So summer schools and winter schools always end with the last day, when the students are having a brainstorming of what kind of courses they would like to have in the next semester. And then when we actually start to get these curators of. Courses. We always pair them with more advanced students who already went through some of the invisible university courses, and they negotiate the class together. So by the time it is actually pitched to the students, it is a collective work where at least five, six people were working, including Ukrainian students, some international scholars. So basically, it becomes very responsive to what students very, very democratic way. And it's very much from below. Yes, it's never imposed.  link to

Jenna Spinelle
Well, we'll link to Visible Ukraine and to the book that you and some of your students have written as part of receiving the McCourtney Institute's Brown Democracy medal. But we're gonna have to leave things there. We could keep talking about this all day. I hope listeners will also be thinking about the American election as they reflect on on some of what you've you've talked about, but Balazs, I really appreciate you taking time to be with us today.

Chris Beem
I don't want to spend a lot of time on Hungary because it's the invisible, invisible University for Ukraine. But I really thought, you know, Balazs has this perspective. And Jenna asked a really excellent question, and, and I thought his answer was so interesting. I mean, this idea, and I'm sure it was sincere by this person that Balazs knew, who said that, you know, well, Hungary is going to be like Sweden in three years, and this a country that had just merged from 40 years of Soviet domination and really not much of a democratic culture before that, right? And here it is. Here it is this idea that 1989 it was, it was all going to fall into place, even Russia, right? And I had a friend from college, good friend who went to Bulgaria. He was a, you know, absolutely a free marketer. And he was going to help Bulgaria build a, you know, build a free market so they could become, you know, effectively, Sweden, right? And, and none of this work, you know, we were so confident it was the last, you know, the last stage of history, and, and we were just, you know, really thinking that this was all going to fall into place and, and it just didn't. And there's a lot of reasons for that, and one of them is that, you know, there was something to there was something better about the Soviet model, at least in terms of the lives of your average, you know, Hungarian, and that was that security, right? I mean, the you know, the idea of capitalism being creative destruction is not wrong, and you know, we just kind of accept that. But if you've never had it, never seen it, and suddenly realize that your decisions have incredible risk associated with them, and you don't really know how to navigate or understand that risk, you could, you could become nostalgic for a society that just kind of came and, you know, promised to supply your basic needs, good or bad, you know, that's another question. But anyway.

Cyanne Loyle
I think these promises, Chris, are exactly right. I mean, so we see this in Hungary. We see this with the rise of populism globally, right? This pushback against an international liberal democratic consensus that hasn't been able to fulfill all of its promises, certainly have fulfilled some of them, right, when we think about the rise of the respect for human rights and things like that, but there are others that globally just haven't taken hold. 

Chris Beem
One thing I wanted to ask you, because this is kind of your wheelhouse, he talks about Orban creating these kind of fake civil society institutions, and it allows him to do what he wants and To really reward those who are his cronies, but still look as if he's, you know, sustaining, or at least not undermining democracy. I mean, I just think that's fascinating, because it that's not an unusual card, right, for the authoritarian to play. 

Cyanne Loyle
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's common for authoritarian regimes, but even for hybrid or kind of mixed regimes, and in some ways, I mean, this is the victory of the Democratic liberal consensus, right? Because it's created a model that states know they have to emulate. They have to kind of look like this model with. But we haven't secured the kind of back stops to look deeper than just the kind of initial, kind of coverings. I always think about those zombie insects. You know, when there's like, like an insect that crawls inside the other insect and walks around, I mean, often that's what these democratic looking institutions are all about, right? So you create human rights commissions, you create women's organizations. Decisions, and on paper, it's really easy for the United Nations or the European Union, when they're considering membership, to say, Oh, wow, look at this robust civil society, you know. But as soon as you figure out where the money's coming from, who's running these organizations, what their political platforms are, it starts to fall apart pretty quickly. We've seen this a lot with domestic legal institutions, right? So the passing of laws or new legal structures that allow states to adhere to the rules of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, when in reality, these are just, in many cases, kind of facades for a much more complicated and less democratic political process.

Chris Beem
And you know, it also speaks to this fact that when you're talking about authoritarian or hybrid regimes, you see a very similar and especially if they have a populist grounding or, you know, foundation, you see a lot of the same plays, you know, good and bad, right? You also see this kind of, you know, this is out of Iran, Iran too, where she says that the only criteria for, you know, being given power is that you are beholden to the power at the top. And, you know, so you end up with a regime that's just not very good, because the only criteria is, is loyalty. Anyway, well, that you, you listeners, you can file that away as you wish. But anyway, we, we should probably move on to to Ukraine, because there's, you know, a lot of a lot of good stuff there. And I just wanted to start by by, you know, just telling the story about, you know, how they were selected for the war, for the award, because I think it's really, it speaks to some of the stuff we were talking about in the first part, when, when I found out there was this invisible University, and they were totally not on our radar. But I got in touch with them, and I was like, Well, what kind of classes are you teaching and and what's your objectives? And my thought was, well, we're training future economists, future, you know city planners, future. You know, people who were, you know, NGO leaders, whatever, so that they can rebuild the Ukrainian society, right? And that was, you know, more than a year ago now, right? And, you know, they really said, no, no, we're not doing that at all. And, and initially was like, yes, that's problem. And, and as I kind of began to, you know, reflect, I thought, Well, no, I think they got a case here.

Cyanne Loyle
And, you know, as a political scientist who teaches in the school of the Liberal Arts here at Penn State, I mean, those are, those are deeply liberal arts focused questions, right? Those are humanist questions. And one of the things that I love about the way the Free University or the invisible University has kind of set this up, is that we do actually have theories and methodologies and frameworks for asking those questions. Yeah, right. I mean, you can think about Ukrainian identity through an ethnonational or through a linguistic framework. There's all different ways to kind of think about that. And we and we have, you know, fields of study and traditions for doing that, and the invisible University kind of connects scholars working about and thinking about those questions with students who have those questions in real time. And you know, some of the stories that were told about, you know, these classes going on for four hours so that everybody has an opportunity to kind of weigh in and be part of the conversation. I don't know about many of you who are teaching college classes, but I rarely have students trying to stay an additional two and a half hours after class to continue to engage in the course material. So I was, I was really heartened by the way in which students in an incredibly precarious, dangerous environment, you know, working by candlelight, power outages, you know, bomb scares and things stop because there's an air raid.

Chris Beem
You know, I, I agree with that completely, and I do think you know that it would be a wonderful thing if, if higher education in the United States was open to the to the experience and the lessons that the iufu wanted to is able to teach them. And in that regard, I just want to say one more, one more thing, and that is kind of tying this back to democracy, right? Because I think their model for pedagogy is much more democratic, right, and though this incredibly poised, incredibly impressive young, 19 year old who came to accept the ward the award on behalf of the students she's in her talk, she said that that they reflected democracy in. How they ran their class in terms of, you know, not just you know, everyone having a voice, but also, you know, accepting disagreement and working through it via some you know, via academic rigor, and also the shared commitment to the truth and and, you know, that is also something that I think we can learn from them and, and it also just speaks to the fact that, you know, democracy is hard work, and if you don't practice it, you're not going to do it very well. Yeah, we're absolutely in their debt for coming and for, you know, reminding us and, and, you know, the people that are our colleagues, you know, kind of, you know, what are we doing, and why are we doing it, and, and why is it important? And, yeah, and in the context in which we find ourselves, that's a good thing. That's a good thing for us to have to have their model and their current and their courage to this situation. So thanks to Jenna for terrific interview. I really thought her question of Ukraine was really smart, and it worked out well. So for McCourtney Institute for Democracy, I'm Chris Beem.

Cyanne Loyle
I'm Cyanne Loyle. Thanks for listening.

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