Decolonization has been sweeping Western academia for the past few years. Across disciplines and teaching practices, calls for the decolonization of higher education represent progressive aspirations to diversify curricula, destabilize norms, and rethink the politics of knowledge production. However, under authoritarian regimes, discourses of decolonization have been used to restrict academic freedom and serve illiberal ends.
Decolonization was formulated by various authors as a larger project aimed at countering Eurocentrism and transatlantic exclusivism in knowledge production, and quickly became a means of evoking notions of neocolonialism and victimhood in Central-Eastern Europe.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, openly anti-Western ideologies have infiltrated higher education policies across Eurasia. In the Western context, Edward Said’s Orientalism is a foundational text of postcolonial critique, but in Russia it has been embraced by nationalists to shape conservative policies and xenophobic identity politics.
For example, Smolny College, St. Petersburg State University's first liberal arts college, is set to effectively close in 2023 after the Russian government accused Smolny's longtime partner, Bard College, of being an “undesirable Western institution.”
In another example, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used an anti-Western “liberation” metaphor to denounce European Union involvement in Ukraine: “When Brussels whistles, we dance how we want, and if we don't want to dance, we don't,” Orbán said in a speech last October. Thousands of posters bearing the quote were then plastered on billboards across the country, from highways and supermarkets to universities and school buildings.
One of the most visible postcolonial tropes in Central Eastern Europe is the attack on gender studies. In Russia, the 2013 federal ban on the distribution of so-called “gay propaganda” was officially positioned as in keeping with the traditional and moral values of Russians, and portrayed as being threatened by the activities of the United States and its allies.
In more moderate authoritarian countries like Hungary, the policies of Prime Minister Orbán’s far-right Fidesz government led to the closure of gender studies departments in 2018. Similarly, in Poland, gender studies is considered “Western propaganda” and should be banned by the right-wing coalition of populist Law and Justice parties recently ousted from power.
Gender studies is just one of many academic fields in which autocrats and populists have mobilized anti-Western, decolonizing views for illiberal ends. According to Fidesz, because “Western education is in decline,” the Hungarian government needs to mobilize its resources to ensure national(ist) education. In practice, this often entails shaping the reading canon for school students to promote lesser known traditional Hungarian history and literature and marginalize foreign authors and contemporary cultural studies.
In a similar situation in Poland, the Law and Justice government forced high schools to teach the “glorious past of the Polish nation” as shaped by Catholic values.
The political manipulation of history by illiberal regimes is also evident in higher education: Law and Justice founded several historical institutes, such as the Pilecki Institute, for example, to counter Western propaganda about Polish involvement in atrocities against the Jews.
Meanwhile, Putin's invocation of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia, serves his regime by mobilizing the public around a myth of Russian greatness that the West has largely ignored. The 2021 closure of Memorial International, the country's oldest human rights organization, under Putin's “foreign agents” law not only thwarted critical research into the Stalinist past, but also solidified the legal basis for persecuting independent scholars perceived as a threat to the regime.
While in Latin American and South African contexts, the opening of archives is an important step towards transitional justice, in Eastern Europe archives have frequently been used to pathologize the past and maintain nationalist narratives of mourning, victimhood and martyrdom.
The expulsion of the Central European University from Budapest in 2018 shocked academic circles around the world, as few perceived it as simply the culmination of Prime Minister Orbán’s decade-long attempt to demonize the university’s main donor, George Soros, as a Western agent and to monopolize the regime’s view 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 set up a free, online American Academy to replace “woke” universities, the recent wave of book bans and attacks on gender studies and critical race theory are all part of the struggle to control, manipulate and subjugate higher education that we have seen for decades in Eastern Europe.
Decolonial teachings need to be critical of the co-optation of their rhetoric by anti-liberal actors and recognize that as the concept of decolonization spreads across geographic and political boundaries, it has shifted perceptions of who rules and who is ruled, who poses a threat and who should be protected.
Decolonization is not just a fashionable trope that can be universally applied regardless of whose interests it serves: introducing it into the curriculum without careful critical examination will not liberate students from the politics of knowledge production, but rather subordinate them to dogma in the name of decolonization.
Karolina Kožiula is Max Weber Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the European University Institute. Daniel Palm is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Democracy, Central European University, Budapest. Adrian Matus is the editor of Review of Democracy. This article is the result of a research project of the Decolonization Working Group of CEU's Institute for Democracy.
