The Middle Kingdom
Representing Egypt in Hungary and Hungary in Egypt, and the colonial system
I step off the train at Budapest’s Keleti train station, returning late in the evening from a long day trip to northeastern Hungary. The train has stopped a bit before the station. With the other arriving passengers, I walk back towards the main hall, absentmindedly texting and thinking about what I’ll eat at home. Now, I’m back in the main hall; time to find the way to the metro. I put my phone in my pocket, lift my head, and find myself suddenly transported to somewhere I know well. I’m surrounded by a crowd of men dressed in gallabiyahs, the traditional attire of Upper Egypt. Confused, I look up at the signs, only to find directions to Cairo’s Bab El Hadid Square instead of Budapest’s Baross Square.
This post is about the connections between Hungary and Egypt. But more than that, it’s about how colonialism functioned and continues to function. It’s about how Hungary, on the very edges of the imperialist core of Western Europe, fits into the colonial system. It’s about how at the same time, Hungary can celebrate its anti-colonial resistance while building its relative prosperity and its own national identity through power over places like Egypt.
It turns out of course that Budapest has not suddenly transformed into Cairo, at least not permanently. Rather, Keleti train station has been selected as the location for production of a major film set in Egypt. The men in gallabiyahs are extras, the signs temporary paste-ups, and the train blocking mine from fully entering the station an antique model used only for movies.
There is a power inherent to being able to represent another place. Hungarian film companies get to choose how Egypt is depicted in this film. They decide whether the men on the platform wear traditional gallabiyahs or suits and ties, whether any Egyptians in the scene get into the first-class car as passengers instead of baggage porters, and whether the scene is shot with mysterious steam and dark filters or in natural light. And as the obviously Google-translated Arabic signs indicate, fair representation of Egypt was not their first concern. These are small exercises of power, but they matter nonetheless for how the rest of the world sees Egypt.
In his book, Colonising Egypt, British scholar Timothy Mitchell analyzed the power to exhibit through the example of the 1889 Paris Exposition. There,
“The Egyptian exhibit had also been made carefully chaotic. In contrast to the orderliness of the rest of the exhibition, the imitation street was arranged in the haphazard manner of the bazaar. The way was crowded with shops and stalls where Frenchmen, dressed as Orientals, sold perfumes, pastries, and tarboushes. To complete the effect of the Orient, the French organizers had imported from Cairo fifty Egyptian donkeys, together with their drivers and the requisite number of grooms, farriers, and saddlemakers.”
But the exhibit was a façade, a representation of how the French expected Cairo to be. A delegation of Egyptian scholars in fact stopped by the Exposition on their way to a conference of Orientalist scholars in Sweden, but were disgusted by the exhibit of their country. They were even more disgusted when, upon their arrival in Sweden, they were treated not as scholarly participants but as another live exhibit of Egypt. The colonial imagination divided the world into a global center and a global periphery, and the former had exclusive power to represent the latter.
Where does Hungary fit in this classification? Truthfully, it is and was somewhere in between, a semi-periphery neither fully able to act as colonizer nor fully subjugated to another. Hungarian geographers struggled with colonialism around the turn of the 20th century. Slowly, their criticism of Western European colonialism shifted to analyses of the Balkans as a potential colonial subject of their own, coinciding with Hungary’s growth. However, defeat in the first World War resigned Hungary to its role in the global power structure, mostly independent, yet stuck in Europe’s backwaters without colonies of its own.
These days, a century since the heated debates over Hungary’s role in the then-ongoing colonization of Africa, the country’s place remains contested. Simultaneously, resistance against subjugation remains central to Hungarian identity, but the products of its tangential role in global colonialism are a constant reminder that Hungary isn’t like those colonized nations.
Yesterday was October 23rd, a national holiday in Hungary and commemoration of the 1956 revolution against the communist regime and resistance against the Soviet army. “Ruszkik Haza” is the reminiscent-of-anti-colonial-slogans rallying cry of the commemorations, “Russians go home.”
For the holiday, museums are free, so I choose to visit the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts. To my surprise, the first exhibit after the cloakroom is a sizable display of ancient Egyptian artifacts, complete with mummies, sarcophagi, and funerary masks. The majority of the material was uncovered by a Hungarian archaeological expedition, then transferred to the museum in 1934, no compensation to Egypt mentioned. In Egypt, art museums display almost exclusively Egyptian art, but Hungary has had the power to acquire and display works from around the world.
The same year those mummies were shipped to Hungary, another cargo made the opposite journey. In 1934, the Egyptian railway authority made its first purchase of Hungarian rolling stock. That relationship has continued, culminating in one of Hungary’s largest-ever individual export deals, more than one billion euros from the cash-starved Egyptian economy for 1,350 train cars. And while the two governments extol the deal as a leap forward, everyday Egyptians complain that train ticket prices have skyrocketed and that the new cars are even less comfortable than their aged predecessors.
The power to represent societies was crucial to the intellectual justifications for colonialism at the turn of the century. But even though formal colonialism is over, the structures that allowed it to function persist. The varied relationship between Hungary and Egypt shows that power over representation remains essential to defining who belongs where in the global system, who sells what, and to whom.
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