Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union

By Zsuzsa Gille

In this original and provocative study, Zsuzsa Gille examines three scandals that have shaken Hungary since it joined the European Union: the 2004 ban on paprika due to contamination, the 2008 boycott of Hungarian foie gras by Austrian animal rights activists, and the "red mud" spill of 2010, Hungary's worst environmental disaster. In each case, Gille analyzes how practices of production and consumption were affected by the proliferation of new standards and regulations that came with entry into the EU. She identifies a new modality of power—the materialization of politics, or achieving political goals with the seemingly apolitical tools of tinkering with technology and infrastructure—and elucidates a new approach to understanding globalization, materiality, and transnational politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780253019509

Book preview

PAPRIKA,

FOIE GRAS,

and RED MUD

Global Research Studies is part of the Framing the Global

project, an initiative of Indiana University Press and the

Indiana University Center for the Study of Global Change,

funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Alfred C. Aman Jr.

Eduardo Brondizio

Maria Bucur

Bruce L. Jaffee

Patrick O’Meara

Radhika Parameswaran

Heidi Ross

Richard R. Wilk

PAPRIKA,

FOIE GRAS,

and RED MUD

THE POLITICS OF MATERIALITY

IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

ZSUZSA GILLE

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2016 by Zsuzsa Gille

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress

978-0-253-01938-7 (cloth)

978-0-253-01946-2 (paperback)

978-0-253-01950-9 (ebook)

1  2  3  4  521  20  19  18  17  16

To my children, Shara and Ábel,

and to the victims of the 2010 red mud disaster.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I THOUGHT THIS BOOK would be easy to write. I certainly had written about the three case studies and I certainly had an argument, and yet the intricacies of connecting empirical findings to theory demanded that I let this book ferment, as one would a barrel of good wine. Over the years I was sustained in many ways—intellectually, financially, and emotionally—by many people and organizations. Without them the book would not have matured as I now see it has. For intellectual sustenance, inspiration, and constructive comments on the cases and the thesis, I owe the most gratitude to colleagues and mentors: Martha Lampland, Rachel Schurman, Nicky Gregson, Michael Burawoy, Michael Goldman, Saskia Sassen, Elizabeth Dunn, Katherine Verdery, Michael Kennedy, Yuson Jung, Melissa Caldwell, Gyula Kasza, Jacob Klein, Harry West, Neringa Klumbyte, Krisztina Fehérváry, Andrew Szasz, Michael Bell, Peter Jackson, Dace Dzenovska, and the Unit for Criticism collective at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—especially Lauren Goodlad, Michael Rothberg, and Jesse Ribot. Over the past few years, I benefited greatly from conversations and passionate debates with, as I affectionately refer to them, my fellow fellows of the Framing the Global endeavor at Indiana University, Bloomington, especially Rachel Harvey, Hilary Kahn, Michael Mascarenhas, Prakash Kumar, and Faranak Miraftab. I learned the most, however, from exchanges with my former student who has now, in a role reversal, become a mentor of sorts to me: Diana Mincyte. In addition, my arguments gained more precision from constructive criticism by anonymous reviewers at Eastern European Politics and Societies, Environment and Planning A, Global Society, and Indiana University Press.

I received generous support for conducting research over the years from the Mellon Foundation through its funding of the Framing the Global project; the Social Science Research Council; the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council; the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany; International Research and Exchanges Board; Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany; the Institute for Sociological Studies at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic; and the following entities at the University of Illinois: the Social Dimensions of Environmental Policy working group at the Beckman Center, the Research Board’s Arnold O. Beckman Award, the Graduate College’s Focal Point Fellowship, the Center for Global Studies, the European Union Center, and the Faculty Exchange Program between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. My research not only benefited greatly from the conscientious assistance of many of my advisees—Jose Peralta, Taka Ono, Becky Gresh, Grant Shoffstall, and Jeremiah Bohr—but I also learned a lot from them.

I thank the many Hungarians who helped me understand the everyday complexities of food policies—farmers, salespersons, integrators, marketing experts, government officials, and activists. I owe the most gratitude to the many victims of the 2010 red mud disaster from Devecser, Kolontár, and Somlójenő. I especially thank Zsuzsa Halmay, Anita Soós, Mari Márton, and other members of the Vörös-Iszap Károsultakért Kiemelten Közhasznú Egyesület (Union for the Victims of Red Mud Disaster) for opening their homes and hearts at an especially difficult time in their lives. I am grateful to Dr. Ágota Lénárt for introducing me to officials and charity organizations active in the red mud aid programs and for teaching me about the psychological effects of disasters. I am grateful to the Sociological Institute at Charles University in Prague for providing me with space and time to complete the manuscript; the loneliness of the writing was much mitigated by the friendship of colleagues there and by the beauty of the Czech Republic.

My family in Hungary—especially my two aunts and two cousins—have made the hardships of fieldwork bearable by providing me with warmth, understanding, logistical help, humor, lots of home-cooked meals, and sometimes just with plain listening. My husband, Richard S. Esbenshade, not only accompanied me, initially with our children Shara and Ábel, to many of the research sites, but he also helped sustain our home and hearth in two continents, supported me not only emotionally and intellectually, but also by being a ruthless though patient editor of my writing. I thank the whole Esbenshade family for putting up with our crazy travel schedules and providing practical and emotional support.

My friends in Champaign-Urbana have kept up my spirits and self-confidence in more ways and more times than I can count: thank you, Behrooz, David W., Faranak, Anghy, Lisa R., Lisa C., Angelina, Manisha, and Dede. I also thank the Hochschilds for graciously opening their homes for a productive writing retreat in the summer of 2013, during which time Faranak offered companionship and motivation. To all of you and others I may have missed: thank you with all my heart.

PAPRIKA,

FOIE GRAS,

and RED MUD

INTRODUCTION

HUNGARY AND THE EU IN THE POLITICAL

AND SCHOLARLY IMAGINATION

This book is about a truly momentous event: the admission of a former socialist country, Hungary, into its one-time nemesis, the European Union, in 2004. By all accounts, unlike most other former members of the Soviet bloc, Hungary—my home country—at the time was expected not only to be admitted first, but also to make a smooth transition into being a productive and full-fledged citizen of this once exclusively Western club. The promising signs were everywhere. Hungary boasted the most open economy at the time state socialism collapsed, in part due to an extensive second economy and household agricultural sector (Lengyel 2012).¹ Its food and electronics industries were already successfully exporting to the West. As a result of political liberalization in the last decade of the regime, as well as the myriad civic initiatives and movements of the 1980s—and allegedly also the historical pride in the uprising of 1956 (Swain 1989)—its citizenry was poised to effortlessly adopt democracy and its related institutions.

Despite such expectations and their apparently high chance of success, ten years after the accession Hungary was a laggard in many common social and economic indicators. In terms of gross domestic product per capita, a common metric of abundance, Hungary’s ranking in the world fell from fifty-first place in 2004 to fifty-seventh in 2014. Its poverty rate was higher than during the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and with a poverty rate three times the EU average, it ranked as the second poorest member state.² The government of Viktor Orbán, during its five-year reign, rolled back a number of democratic achievements, and the extreme right-wing, if not fascist, party Jobbik enjoys increasing popularity.³ In 2014, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) ranked Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán second in their contest for person of the year, as head of the most corrupt political regime in the world, a runner-up to Russian president Vladimir Putin.⁴

To be sure, if the 2014 elections (national parliamentary, EU parliamentary, and municipal), in which FIDESZ—the ruling right wing party—won by a landslide, are anything to go by, a large part of the electorate doesn’t agree that there is anything wrong with their economy or political regime. Could it be that they measure success and failure differently from the pundits and social scientists? Do they make sense of the state of their country not so much through abstract metrics, such as GDP per capita, deprivation rates, or transparency and corruption indexes, but rather through thinking and talking over particular events that seem closer and more tangible? If so, what are these incidents? What stories do ordinary people hear and tell about them? How do such stories affect the interpretation of newer occurrences and thus add to people’s repertoire of political narratives?

This book introduces three such events that deeply resonated with people and captured their political imagination. Because each amounted to and was treated as a scandal, each was particularly revealing of a key expectation that was breached. The first such scandal broke out within half a year of the accession: Hungary’s signature spice, paprika, was banned from stores and restaurants for several days due to a carcinogenic contamination. The second event was the international boycott of Hungarian foie gras by an Austrian animal rights organization, which claimed that since fattened duck and goose liver result from force-feeding, they are unethical and unhealthy products. The third case is the 2010 red mud spill, Hungary’s worst industrial disaster. Seven hundred thousand cubic meters of toxic sludge—red mud—escaped from a reservoir of an alumina factory in the west of Hungary, flooding three villages, killing ten people, injuring hundreds, and rendering the natural environment barren for kilometers.

I chose these events in part because Hungarians talked about them as though they revealed something about the relationship between Hungary and the EU that had previously been hidden. Each object—paprika, foie gras, and red mud—bears an exceptional significance for the country’s economy and national history. Paprika is probably the best known in this regard; many people who know nothing else about Hungary can identify paprika as the most essential ingredient of Hungarian cuisine. Foie gras, fattened goose or duck liver, is another traditional Hungarian food, initially tied to a religious holiday in November. Red mud is a byproduct of alumina production. Hungary has few mineral resources, so when bauxite was discovered in the first half of the twentieth century, it was duly treasured as a key ingredient of Hungary’s economic modernization. This potential, however, had not been exploited until the Communist Party came into power in 1947, at which point the country became the key source of aluminum for COMECON, the Soviet bloc’s economic alliance. As young Hungarian Pioneers—members of the communist children’s organization—we were instructed to express our patriotism through our pride in and deep knowledge about Hungarian aluminum; after all, socialism needed metals not only for industrialization and the arms race but also for the material symbolism of the regime’s ideology.⁵ A key way this economic significance acquired a material presence was the exceptionally high proportion of red mud, the key byproduct of alumina production, among industrial wastes.⁶

One additional fact to keep in mind about these three materials is that their economic and symbolic significance changed after Hungarian state socialism collapsed, and especially after the country joined the European Union. Indeed, they become excellent foils for examining that relationship for lay people and scholars alike. Understanding this liaison has both social and scholarly merit. The social importance resides in the fact that both FIDESZ, the governing party, and Jobbik see the country’s association with the EU as one of profound inequality and exploitation, going so far as to call the West a colonizing power. The growing or at least steady popularity of the two right-wing parties would suggest that the Hungarian electorate agrees with this negative view of the West and the EU in particular. My hope is that by better understanding the Hungary-EU relationship we can not only understand why the colonization view resonates so much with people, but we can also provide an alternative understanding of that relationship, one whose expression in political terms is less exclusivist and harder to manipulate for invidious purposes.

The scholarly merit is not entirely unrelated to the social one. To understand Hungary’s relationship with the EU is in part to understand what the EU is. Many earlier scholars have sought to provide an apt description of the EU’s power, or at least an understanding of its efficacy and deepening integration, by categorizing it as a federation, as a confederation, as a quasi-state formation, as a new kind of nation-state,⁷ or even as an empire or a new type of colonizing power. What the analysis of the three stories could in theory provide is what case studies have always delivered: validity tests for theories or a particular case of something universal. But my goal is neither, because each episode provides enough discomfort or exhibits sufficient unruliness to thwart such methodological objectives. In fact, they reveal something that would be, or at least previously has been, difficult to discover in abstract theoretical categorization of the European Union. They illuminate a new modality of power.

PICTURES OF AN ACCESSION

I was first nudged in this direction of inquiry when I noticed a curious contradiction. Take a look at the iconography of the European Union. On the Euro banknotes, what dominates are images of architectural apertures: gates, windows, bridges.⁸ The front side of the Euro coins display stylized cartographic images of Europe and in some cases other parts of the globe next to Europe.⁹ Above the map of Europe float the twelve stars arranged in a circle—the EU’s symbol—creating a halo effect that also expresses an idea of unity: all these once belligerent nations joined under one (starry) sky. The European Union’s self-representation shows a strong resemblance to the pictures associated with globalization. Google’s image search for the term globalization yields a predominance of pictures of the globe itself, with various icons of flows, networks, and brands superimposed on them. Such cartographic images juxtaposed with symbols of connectedness express a certain desire, if not promise, of a particular type of freedom. This is the freedom that results from transcending time and place, mostly the latter: a metaphorical liftoff from the ground, specifically the gritty, bumpy terrain of localities and nation-states and the physical constraints of the particular—altogether a freedom from matter.

Will pig slaughter conform to EU laws? Yes. A poster encouraging Hungarians to vote in favor of Hungary’s accession to the European Union in the 2003 referendum.

Can we keep eating poppy seed dumplings? Yes. A poster encouraging Hungarians to vote in favor of Hungary’s accession to the EU.

Can I open a pastry shop in Vienna? Yes. A poster encouraging Hungarians to vote in favor of Hungary’s accession to the EU.

Yet when Hungary and Romania were about to join the European Union—in 2004 and 2007, respectively—the images that accompanied these momentous events were of a strikingly different type. One set was presented on the posters encouraging Hungarians to vote affirmatively on their country’s EU accession in the 2003 referendum.

What is the message of these posters? At the very least we can say that there was an intention of humor or at least levity, as was the case in the other official pro-EU campaign materials, pamphlets, TV shows, and ads. The humor in the official materials, however, was interpreted as poking fun at, if not ridiculing as trivial, certain concerns about EU membership. Worries about foreign land ownership, labor mobility, or the future of national culture were certainly legitimate and were often raised, but officials rarely if ever responded to them in public with factual arguments. From my observations of the campaign and of the debates on various Internet fora prior to the referendum, it became clear that rational discussion or deliberation was never the intention of elected officials and the experts working on the accession. Nor could this have happened, since the information on which to base arguments was unavailable even to the most engaged citizens. The text of the agreement between Hungary and the EU that contained the conditionalities of the country’s membership, several hundred pages of legalese, was not even publicized—if by that one means posted online—until a few days before the referendum.

Another aspect of these posters, however, is more significant: the overwhelming food imagery and concerns about various EU regulations concerning the safety, quality, and ethics of commodities (yes, including that of condoms).¹⁰ This was certainly contradictory to my expectations. The European Union, and before it the European Community, has always argued that its main objectives are to prevent another war in Europe and to promote democracy and human rights. That is, the EU is supposed to be about big and lofty things, not little and mundane ones like sausage or poppy seed dumplings. The benevolent