A tanulmány egy civil szolidaritási kezdeményezéseket vizsgáló kutatássorozat eredményeit használja fel, amely a társadalmi szolidaritás vízióit, formáit és átalakító hatásait vizsgálja. A civil szervezetek hatásait vizsgáló szociológiai vizsgálatok és a mozgalom kutatás megközelítéseit összekapcsolva egy település két eltérő karakterű és tevékenységi körű civil szervezetét vizsgáljuk három elemzési szinten: (1) a szervezet tagjaira és önkénteseire, (2) a célcsoportra és a település lakóira, (3) az intézményi szereplőkre, elsősorban a települési és országos civil szervezetekre, a helyi és országos politikára. A hatások természetét, tartalmát tekintve pedig a politizáció-depolitizálás és a az integráció-megosztottság kettősre fektetjük a hangsúlyt. Mindezekkel arra is törekszünk, hogy a transzformatív szoliditás fogalmának empirikusan megalapozott értelmezést adjunk.

Abstract The chapter explores how civic and municipal actors reassembled material, human, and institutional resources to respond to a situation of urgency generated by the full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent arrival to Hungary of people displaced from Ukraine. We examine local actor coalitions that built different degrees of resilience to an authoritarian state and its social policy regime or capitalised on these conditions without resilience. Harvesting our layered qualitative research, we propose a scheme of modalities of municipalism, as enacted in the observed refugee solidarity operations. Variations are explained by the intersections of vertical and horizontal institutional conditions of solidarity practices, the nexus of main actors and their resources, experiences in inclusion-spirited social policy governance, and the composition of local society. While enduring practices of solidarity for the Ukrainian refugees have largely remained an urban phenomenon in Hungary, small-town and village initiatives played a more salient role in addressing the 2022 asylum event than in 2015. Beyond the urban responses, the discussion of rural forms of municipal refugee solidarity will play an important part in our contribution.

The paper examines how collaborations and alliance-building among civic and municipal actors supporting displaced Ukrainians in Hungary contributed to the emergence of localism as an alternative approach to the central state's hostile migration policy and curtailment of the rights of civic and municipal actors. The qualitative research, which forms the basis of this study, explored the solidarity acts of civic and municipal actors and considered how the Hungarian state and international humanitarian organizations contributed to localizing refugee-support responsibilities. Applying the notion of constrained localism, we seek to indicate how localism unfolds through alliances between civic and municipal solidarity actors, sometimes transforming longer-term refugee reception and diversity governance, while in other cases, remaining fragile, limited in scope, and contended.

Civic actors working with marginalized and disadvantaged groups in society face various dilemmas associated with defining and, if needed, ranking human needs and vulnerabilities. Our article examines the reasonings for intervention in civic solidarity operations that emerged in response to the arrivals of displaced Ukrainians in Hungary in 2022–2023. Solidarians have strived to find spaces of action in an authoritarian regime that normalizes policy rationales of deservingness and social hierarchy in contrast to equality and inclusion‐based diversity. We engaged with those solidarity actors who showed some degree of reflexivity to the wider social, political, governance, and charity activism landscapes considering their position and operational ethos. The mixed research methods generated ethnographic and discursive data that allow us to offer a practice‐centered interpretation of civic actors’ reasoning. This article explores the dilemmas that civic actors face when judging and prioritizing needs, responsibilities, and resources in comparing and contrasting the conditions of their own society and the situation of people with migratory trajectories. We identified three perspectives through which civic solidarity actors articulated their normative and strategic dilemmas: the origin and nature of the needs of the displaced people, the refugee assistance responsibilities thereby assigned, and the broader social care system in the host society. We offer insights into how solidarity actors discernibly departed from pure humanitarianism and deployed concepts of horizontal interdependence, anti‐discrimination, and layered human rights, applying their own vocabularies.

While the Hungarian education authorities enforced a strict and compulsory school enrolment policy for students fleeing Russia's war on Ukraine, it did not provide sufficient professional support and guidance to the schools about the inclusion of displaced students. This rigid and unstable integration policy led to moral and political dilemmas for civil and grassroots solidarity mobilizations operating non-formal education spaces concerning the purpose and systemic effects of the educational activities. We explore how solidarity mobilizations navigate illiberal political contexts, interrogate the goals and meanings of refugees' educational integration as experienced on the ground, and enact alternative visions of societal futures. Based on interviews with civil and grassroots actors, we identify four institutional visions: (1) rejecting state policy, (2) supplementing state provision by offering mental, emotional, and learning support, (3) creating non-formal learning spaces with transformative potential, and (4) developing new advocacy tactics using the infrastructures of transnational humanitarian organizations.

The article explores civic solidarity acts during the first lockdown associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on qualitative research conducted in Hungary largely online, we explore how solidarity work initiated civic collaborations that reconfigured human effort, time, and labor to mitigate crisis conditions in multiple ways and shaped the political potentials of solidarity practices. The inquiry captures different reasonings and practices associated with managing the division, valuation, and responsibilities in solidarity work. It also examines how the sense of duty to care became an essential component in the pandemic operation of solidarity. We identify three different modes of articulating and organizing the duty to care in response to crisis conditions, which embraced various engagements with the principles of commoning in solidarity spaces and beyond: reparative, sheltered, and transformative modes of commoning. Our inquiry also contributes to the discussions on the transformative potentials of civic experiments in collective solidarity actions in societies governed by an authoritarian regime, such as Hungary.

Tanulmányunkban azt vizsgáljuk, hogy az ukrajnai háború elől Magyarországra menekültek támogatásában a civil és önkormányzati szereplők közötti együttműködés és szövetségépítés hogyan járult hozzá a szolidaritási kapcsolatok létrejöttéhez és megerősödéséhez. Bemutatjuk, hogy a háború miatt menekülő emberek iránti szolidaritás hogyan szerveződött meg és maradt fenn. Továbbá azt vizsgáljuk, hogy milyen strukturális tényezők, kapcsolatok, erőforrások és diskurzusok járultak hozzá a – sok külföldi esetben korábban azonosított – lokális fordulat korlátozott magyarországi megvalósulásához. Bár vizsgálatunk elsősorban a helyi civil szereplőkre fókuszált, figyelembe vettük azt is, hogy a magyar állam és a nemzetközi segélyszervezetek hogyan vettek részt a menekültek iránti felelősség átruházásban. Elemzésünk azt is feltárja, hogy a magyarországi önkormányzatok milyen szerepet vállaltak az ukrajnai menekültek befogadásában, és hogy ez a tevékenység hogyan járult hozzá az önkormányzatok felelősségének újraértelmezéséhez.

This paper contributes to the literature on solidarity mobilizations and the framings of social and political change in the context of the shrinking welfare state, de-democratization, and repressive state policies towards civil society. These issues are explored through the lens of interview-based research on Hungarian solidarity initiatives that emerged in response to the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic between March and June 2020. We specifically look at the ways in which volunteers and activists engaged in solidarity activities associated with healthcare, care-work, and education; accounted for their aspirations; conceptualized social responsibility; and reflected on the crisis management of the state. We found that newly emerging grassroots actors reinforced the documented trend of depoliticization in civil society. Although most respondents formulated a depoliticizing narrative, they did offer interpretations of their public role and collective action, values, and responsibilities, and pronounced a desire for social change. Nevertheless, to account for these framings, we need to move beyond the binary understanding of politics in solidarity and civil society research.

In February 2022 Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sending millions to seek safety internally or in other countries.To date, European countries responded in a supportive way to the arrival of displaced people from Ukraine, mobilising wide-ranging legal and infrastructural frameworks.This relatively unanimous solidarity sharply contrasts with the ambivalent attitudes towards people from Africa and the Middle East arriving to Europe during the 2015 'refugee crisis'.Our research explores the civic and voluntary engagements helping Ukrainian displaced people in Hungary and aims to understand civilian expressions of solidarity by comparing and historically contextualising it with processes implied by 'the long summer of migration' of 2015.With this research we aim to contribute to the study of actors or 'makers' of solidarity in the current civic mobilisation: the socio-demographic and socioeconomic positions of helpers as well as their attitudes to various displaced groups.Differential degrees of vulnerability and the capacities to preserve dignified human life, as two poles of the human condition, tailor propositions, visions, and justifications on deservingness.

The paper explores the attitudes of Hungarian civil society in the context of the war against Ukraine, the active agents of solidarity, and the general social atmosphere associated with welcoming displaced people. Based on a population survey from the summer of 2022, the paper draws an ambivalent picture. First, it highlights the exceptional momentum and mobilising power of civil solidarity both in terms of practical involvement and expressed attitudes. At the same time, the results also reveal the limits and vulnerabilities of civil solidarity—namely, its exposure to populist political discourses which cherish or condemn moral economies of assistance according to vested interests, as well as its embeddedness in a neoliberal reliance on citizens’ individual resources (disposable time and material means), and the salient inequalities in sharing the burdens of humanitarian support. All this reflects that the consensus and relative evenness of solidarity attitudes at the time of our survey were unevenly translated into practical help, burdening those already heavily charged with care responsibilities. With this finding, we underline the importance of exploring solidarity as a complex relationship of attitudes and practices; also, we highlight the need to include the perspectives of care in inquiries of the population’s attitude towards immigrant groups and categories. Our results are drawn from the application of multi-dimensional logistic regression models based on data from a statistical survey involving 1000 respondents representative of Hungary’s adult population.

The pursuit of cultural authenticity, environmental purity, and meaningful social rela tions has become the global hallmark of the ‘postmaterialist’ middle class (Inglehart, 2018). Beck and Nyíri’s (2022) Chinese interlocutors were attracted specifically to a Euro pean rather than an Anglo-American version of modernity, which they perceive as more capitalistic and therefore more similar to China’s (‘pastoral Occidentalism’ in Fran Mar tin’s term). It stands for a wholesomeness they see as gone from Chinese society. Since the 2010s, the pursuit of authenticity has become increasingly intertwined with the na tivist backlash against liberal democracy. But while the authenticity nativists wish to re claim usually lies in one’s own imagined past, in this case, the nostalgia is projected onto someone else’s imagined past. In this optic, lifestyle migrations may intersect in unex pected ways with currents of ideologies of environmental, cultural, and racial purity. How does a destination country’s symbolic meaning for immigrants relate to ideology? What do we know about the scale of this phenomenon? Is the quest for authenticity/puri ty (both in physical and spiritual terms) an important driver of migration? How should we understand the interplay between economy and ideology, particularly when destina tion countries are on lower rungs of the global development hierarchy? Should we rein -terpret/revise the notion of flexible citizenship as a tool for maximising economic accu mulation (Ong, 1999) in order to accommodate these developments?

A 2020-as koronavírus-járvány világszerte az utóbbi évtizedek egyik legnagyobb krízisét hozta magával. Az egészségügyi válság kétségtelenül a legnagyobb súlypontja a pandémiának. A kialakult krízis viszonylag hamar bizonyította, hogy melyek azok az intézmények és viszonyok, amelyek nélkül nem, vagy csak nagyon nehezen képzelhető el a modern társadalmak működése: felértékelődött az egészségügy és a szociális ellátórendszer és az ezekhez kapcsolódó fizetett és reproduktív munkák jelentősége. Nem meglepő, hogy a válság legelső jelei ezeken a területeken jelentkeztek. Magyarországon a gondozás, az ápolás és a szociális ellátás társadalmi megszervezése a koronavírus-járvány első hulláma előtt is rendszerszintű strukturális problémákkal küszködött, olyannyira, hogy azok nem csupán az ellátás színvonalát, hanem a fenntarthatóságát is veszélyeztették. A járvány hatására a gondoskodási válság tovább nőtt, a strukturális problémák jelei minden eddiginél nagyobb mértékben jelentkeztek. A járvány miatti fokozott terhelés ugyanis újradimenzionálta a rendszer fennálló strukturális problémáit – még inkább láthatóvá tette a szektor hiányosságait. A válsághelyzetek akut problémáinak kezelésében az állami döntések monopóliuma megkérdőjeleződhet, főként akkor, ha arra egy sürgősségi (lásd a rendkívüli jogrend bevezetését), de „fragmentált” válságkezelő szerepvállalás jellemző. Ilyen esetekben az állampolgárok kollektív fellépése erősödhet, ami megvalósulhat a régi

The article elaborates on the role of deservingness discourses in regulating membership of non-citizen groups in Germany. Specifically, it focuses on Hungarians working or volunteering in institutions of refugee accommodation in Germany. It asks how personal migration experience and migrant statuses and identities of Hungarian workers are mobilised when recreating discourses of refugee-deservingness. Performance expectations on refugees related to education and employment evoked references to similarities of migration experience, strengthening an empathetic perspective towards refugee clients and students. Deservingness frameworks related to culture were more ambiguous. A 'mission civilisatrice', that is educating Muslim Others to European, non-Muslim ways of behaving and thinking, often tied to gender relations, was paralleled by a continuous attempt to challenge and dismantle such discourses of difference and disciplining. These ambivalences of empathetic identification and disciplinary racialisation draw the contours of a characteristic place of (Hungarian) migrant workers in the governance of refugee accommodation in Germany.

This paper explores interconnections between nationhood and philanthropy, namely, how philanthropy works as a domain of meaningful social practice framed by national ideologies and how interpretations born in the institutional contexts of philanthropy may play a central role in making sense of the nation. We observe how various divisions inherent in philanthropic practices-between helpers and the helped and between those who take part in helping as opposed to those who do not-become reflected in concepts of nationhood shaped by these activities. The study of two cases-first, the philanthropic actions of Hungarian citizens towards Hungarian minority communities in Ukraine and Romania, and second, humanitarian volunteer initiatives aimed at supporting refugees during the summer of 2015 in Hungary-makes it possible to understand how philanthropic practices become a site for reproducing competing definitions of nationhood.

Analyzing the newly emerged Trianon cult, this article argues that the current wave of memory politics became the engine of new forms of nationalism in Hungary constituted by extremist and moderate right-wing civic and political actors. Following social anthropologists Gingrich and Banks, the term neonationalism will be applied and linked with the concept "mythomoteur" of John Armstrong and Anthony D. Smith, emphasizing the role of preexisting ethno-symbolic resources or mythomoteurs in the resurgence of nationalism. Special attention will be given to elites who play a major role in constructing new discourses of the nation and seek to control collective memories, taking their diverse intentions, agendas, and strategies specifically into consideration. This "view from above" will be complemented with a "view from below" by investigating the meanings that audiences give to and the uses they make of these memories. Thus, the analysis has three dimensions: it starts with the analysis of symbols, topics, and arguments applied by public Trianon discourses; it continues with the analysis of everyday perceptions, memory, and identity concerns; and finally ends with an anthropological interpretation of memory politics regarding a new form of nationalism arising in the context of propelling and mainstreaming populist right-wing politics. The main argument of this article is that although the Hungarian Trianon cult, identified as national mythomoteur, invokes a historical trauma, it rather speaks to current feelings of loss and disenfranchisement, offering symbolic compensation through the transference of historical glory, pride, and self-esteem within a mythological framework. This article is part of a larger effort to understand the cultural logic and social support of new forms of nationalism in Hungary propelled by the populist far right.

This paper points to an important turn in youth culture which underpins increasing radical-right political sympathies and a propensity to national belonging and dignity-seeking among the youth. Qualitative analysis of 14 focus group interviews conducted in Hungary proves that the desire for political engagement of a significant segment of youth who have positioned themselves in opposition to a globalized youth culture and the apolitical stance of their generation. Inspired by cultural theories in political sociology that are also applied in the study of youth, and working with qualitative methods, this paper investigates the cultural dimension of radical-right politics and youth culture. The paper states that new forms of nationalism play a major role in the radical right turn among the youth by emphasizing the role of a general sense of disempowerment and disillusionment and claims for collective dignity which are framed in a hierarchical and mythical discourse about the nation. The major claim of this paper in this regard is that the renewal of nationalism and the commitment to the far-right in Hungary are closely connected.

The aim of the paper is to understand the reasons for the spread of fear, the suspension of solidarity, and the securitizing national and local context along the European migratory route. A settlement located on the Hungarian side of the Serbian-Hungarian border, heavily affected by international migration in 2015, is the focus of inquiry. The mayor of the village is a major figure in the Hungarian far-right who mobilized not only the political scene but also various segments of the media to create and legitimize a discourse involving threatened villagers (and more generally, threatened Hungarians and Europeans) and a migrant menace (perceived as non-European, non-white, and non-human). Based on an ethnographic inquiry, the paper reveals the variety of discourses and attitudes which emerged as immediate reactions to people on the move appearing in large numbers in the village. These initial reactions included empathy and a willingness to help which rapidly disappeared. The paper analyses how welcoming acts and voices were silenced and eliminated, and a hegemony of fear was constructed. It contributes to the special issue by showing how fragile solidarity with refugees can be, and how its elimination can occur if social precarity and far-right politics are combined.