Decolonisation as a progressive force? In eastern Europe, think again

Decolonisation has taken Western academia by storm in the past few years. Across disciplines and pedagogical practices, calls for decolonising higher education have marked progressive desires to diversify curricula, destabilise canons and rethink the politics of knowledge production. Under autocracies, however, decolonising discourse is being used to restrict academic freedom and serve illiberal goals.

Formulated by various authors as a larger project to counter Eurocentric and transatlantic exclusivism in knowledge production, decolonisation has quickly become a vehicle to evoke notions of neocolonialism and victimhood in central eastern Europe.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, openly anti-Western ideas have entered the politics of higher education across Eurasia. And while, in the Western context, Edward Said’s Orientalism is a foundational text for postcolonial critique, in Russia it is embraced by nationalists to shape their conservative agenda and xenophobic identity politics.

For instance, the effective closure in 2023 of Smolny College, the first liberal arts programme at St Petersburg State University, followed the Russian government’s condemnation of Bard College, Smolny’s long-time partner, as an “undesirable Western organisation”.

In Hungary, to give another example, Viktor Orbán has condemned the European Union’s involvement in Ukraine by using anti-Western “liberation” tropes. “If Brussels whistles,” Orbán stated in a speech last October, “we will dance as we want, and in case we do not want, we won’t dance.” Thousands of posters bearing this quote subsequently appeared on billboards across the country, from highways and supermarkets to universities and school buildings.

One of the most visible decolonial tropes in central eastern Europe is the attack on gender studies. In Russia, the 2013 federal ban on the distribution of what is often called “gay propaganda” was officially framed as serving the traditional and moral values of Russians, portrayed as threatened by the “activities of the US and its allies”.

In softer autocracies like Hungary, the politics of Orbán’s far-right Fidesz government led to the closure of gender studies departments in 2018. Similarly, in Poland, gender studies is framed as “Western propaganda” that should be banned by the Confederation, a grouping of parties to the right of the populist Law and Justice party, which was recently voted out of government.

Gender studies is just one among many academic fields in which autocrats and populists have mobilised an anti-Western take on decolonisation to serve illiberal goals. According to Fidesz, “Western education is decaying” and the Hungarian government must mobilise its resources to secure national(ist) education. In practice, this often entails shaping canons of required readings for school students to promote the lesser-known traditionalist Hungarian history and literature and disfavouring foreign authors and contemporary cultural studies.

It is a similar story in Poland, where the Law and Justice government forced high schools to teach the “glorious past of the Polish nation” shaped by Catholic values.

Such political manipulation of history by illiberal regimes is evident in higher education, too. Law and Justice’s establishment of several historical institutes, such as the Pilecki Institute, aimed to counter alleged Western propaganda about Polish involvement in Jewish atrocities, for instance.

Meanwhile, Putin’s invocations of the Great Patriotic War, as the Second World War is called in Russia, serves his regime by mobilising the nation around myths of Russian greatness that the West has largely ignored. The 2021 closure of Memorial International, the country’s oldest human rights organisation, under Putin’s anti-“foreign agent” law not only blocked any critical study of the Stalinist past but also cemented a legal basis to persecute independent scholars considered a threat to the regime.

While in Latin American and South African contexts, opening archives is an essential step towards transitional justice, in eastern Europe, archives have often been used to pathologise the past and maintain the nationalist narratives of mourning, victimhood and martyrdom.

The expulsion of the Central European University from Budapest in 2018 shocked the academic community worldwide because few recognised it merely as the culmination of Orbán’s decade-long attempt to demonise the institution’s main funder, George Soros, as a Western agent and monopolise the regime’s version of Hungarian history and culture.

Of course, some of that same rhetoric is now being adopted by the right in the US. Donald Trump’s plans to create a free, online American Academy as an alternative to “woke” universities and the recent waves of book banning, attacks on gender studies and critical race theory are all part of the struggle to control, manipulate and subjugate higher education that has been visible in eastern Europe for decades.

The teaching of decolonisation needs to come to critical terms with the co-opting of its rhetoric by anti-liberal actors. It needs to recognise that perceptions of who dominates and who is dominated, who poses a threat and who should be protected, have shifted as the concept has travelled across geographical and political boundaries.

Decolonisation is not simply a fashionable metaphor that can be applied universally, without asking whose interests it might serve. Without careful critical examination, implementing it in curricula will not emancipate students from the politics of knowledge production. Instead, it will submit them to dogma in the name of it.

Karolina Koziurai s a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute. Daniel Palm is a postdoctoral researcher at the Democracy Institue in Budapest, Central European University. Adrian Matus is an editor at the Review of Democracy. This article is an outcome of a research project at the decolonisation working group at the CEU’s Democracy Institute.