During her Fernand Braudel Fellowship at the EUI, Margit Feischmidt, Research Professor at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences (Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence) and Full Professor at the University of Pécs, examined how solidarity-driven moral emotions influence civic action through the interplay of solidarity practices and counter-politics.
Her work follows activists and volunteers who supported refugees in 2015 and again in 2022, as well as those who served as observers during Hungary’s recent parliamentary election. Through qualitative research using interviews, ethnography, and document analysis, she explores how emotions such as shame, grief, and anger can motivate people to act, shape how they understand their roles in society, and even offer alternative ways of imagining the nation amid democratic backsliding. In this interview, she reflects on what these findings reveal and why they matter for understanding civic life in an illiberal context.
Your research examines how emotions shape civic life in Hungary today. What led you to study emotions as a way of understanding nationalism?
In most of my book-in-progress, I analyse heated forms of nationalism and examine how certain nationalist discourses fuel the emergence of far-right and populist politics and their subsequent entry into the mainstream. In a somewhat different way, during my time at the EUI, I worked on a chapter examining grassroots forms of solidarity and bottom-up politics, their ideological legitimisation, and their connections to participants’ narratives of national identity. I found a strong emphasis on moral emotions in the narratives of activists and volunteers. These moral emotions create a unique way of identifying with the nation and the country — a relationship that researchers of nationalism, and especially those studying nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe, rarely consider.
Although we know that moral emotions, particularly the widely discussed ‘shame’ and ‘pride’, play a significant role in shaping perceptions of the nation in certain countries, with Germany as a notable example, empirical investigations have revealed that each generation has its own relationship to the nation: Ignorance was characteristic of the first generation after the Second World War, rejection of the next generation, and, as Miller-Idriss argues, the nation's reclaiming by the youngest generation. A recent analysis of national identity and related emotions highlighted the salience of shame in Hungary as well. Hungarians were below the European average for a long time, but in 2023 the proportion of those feeling shame about their nation doubled relative to ten years earlier (from 38% to 75%). As part of ongoing research, we recognised that this shame may be linked not only to mistrust and disillusionment with the country's political leadership and current situation, but also to the encouragement of civic activism and solidarity actions.
When volunteers spoke about helping refugees in 2015 and 2022, many positioned their actions in contrast to the government’s ethnonationalist narrative. How did they describe their sense of national belonging or responsibility, and what did this reveal about the space they see for solidarity within Hungary?
Research on the emotional dimension of activism has grown in recent years. Following this line of inquiry, 2015 was identified as an emotionally charged public moment. Studies on solidarity and volunteering examined the role of emotions at both the individual and collective levels. The term ‘affective solidarity’, as used by certain authors, simultaneously captures the complex intersections between politics, ethics, and emotionality.
Our analysis has demonstrated that solidarity with refugees was perceived by activists and volunteers as an act of recovery, constituting an alternative view of the country. Solidarity became a means of creating and legitimising a moral discourse on the nation, restoring national pride and self-esteem in both historical and international contexts.
Elsewhere, we have written about the dynamic relationship between individual actions of solidarity and public responsibility. On the one hand, we found that one of the most important motivations for involvement in solidarity activism was opposition to securitisation and criminalisation present in the government’s narrative. On the other hand, personal experiences and interactions that fostered solidarity directed many activists' and volunteers' attention toward the public, a phenomenon we refer to as the politicisation of solidarity. As one of our interlocutors formulated: “We agreed right from the beginning that we have a double goal: helping refugees as much as we can, but also shaping the Hungarian public discourse.”
Your interviews with election observers in 2022 also shed light on how citizens experience political change from the inside. What did these accounts tell you about how people understand democracy, fairness, and the nation in a system shaped by long-term ethnonationalist rule?
Pain is often described as a private emotion, yet the pain of others is continually invoked in public discourse, demanding both collective and individual responses. Sara Ahmed discusses how pain operates in charity discourses and in the testimonies of Indigenous Australians. She emphasises the transformation of pain into national identities, noting that narratives of collective suffering are increasingly taking on a global dimension.
I was working with narratives of pain from activists mobilised to observe the 2022 parliamentary elections in Hungary, which ended in defeat for the democratic opposition parties. In the context of emotionally charged confessions, the testimonies record observations and seek explanations for questions about Hungary and Hungarian society, which have once again resulted mainly in Fidesz being re-elected.
Volunteers’ participation in the elections was an innovation introduced by the political opposition that proved far more popular and successful than expected, driven by demand for political action among a significant part of society. However, its true significance did not lie in election observation and vote counting, where there was no real effort to rig the election, but in the fact that, for the most part, metropolitan and urban activists experienced firsthand the reality of Hungary, including social differences and the opposition's lack of rural roots. The grief and shock that followed fostered political awareness and gave many people the courage to voice their criticism.
You argue that acts of solidarity can generate alternative visions of the nation. Based on your findings, how do these alternatives take shape, and how far can they challenge the ethnonationalist framework that currently dominates Hungarian politics?
Solidarity activists reported that, as Hungarians, they feel ashamed in an imagined international comparison, or they feel ashamed in connection with refugees. This shared sense of shame does not alienate or distance them; rather, it binds them together as a felt community of Hungarian citizens who feel responsible for their country's fate. Moreover, thinking about the nation does not stop at this critical reflection. The narratives of solidarity, shaped by pride, satisfaction, and a humanistic ethic of hospitality, are also channelled into a moral understanding of the nation.
Margit Feischmidt visited the EUI Department of History from September to November 2025, through the EUI Widening Europe Programme-funded Fernand Braudel Fellowship. She is currently a Professor at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence. She is also an editor of Intersections: East European Journal of Society and Politics and teaches at the Institute for Communication and Media Studies, University of Pécs. Her main research interests include migration, nationalism, ethnicity, and minorities in East-Central Europe and generally.
Fernand Braudel Fellowship special call for applications was launched in the framework of the EUI Widening Europe Programme, which is supported by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States. The programme is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in targeted Widening countries.
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