This article highlights the challenges of external reactions to authoritarian higher
education governance in certain Central and Eastern European countries, especially
Hungary and Poland. It interprets the political change in these countries as an authoritarian
cultural backlash, which is not just a legal or political problem, but a kind of post-fascist
cultural revolution contesting the liberal script. First, the article explains the
framework of authoritarian policing in academia based on the more general works of
Bob Altemeyer and Zeev Sternhell. Second, it tries to answer the question: What tools
could counter these tendencies from the perspective of the European Union? As the
article interprets the rise of authoritarianism as a phenomenon rooted in the cultural
deficit of the countries concerned, it argues that a programme for a democratic and
pluralist cultural counter-revolution should be implemented. However, no nation can
be democratized solely by external actors, and the basics of democratic thinking should
be developed from the grassroots level. If the crisis in academia is rooted in a value-crisis
within the societies concerned, then measures countering this phenomenon should also
include promoting Enlightened pluralism at all levels of these societies.
