Episode 138: Milada Vachudova on Political Change in Europe and Importance of Interdisciplinary Connections
December 11, 2024 | Ruby Wang
Political science professor Milada Vachudova (FFP ’05, ’15) discusses her research on political change in Europe. In this episode, Vachudova provides context for recent democratic backsliding in countries like Hungary and Poland, and its impact on civic participation and engagement. Vachudova, who joined the IAH as the Faculty Director for Strategic Initiatives in July 2024, also shares about her work in connecting with other faculty and units across the university and beyond.
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Transcript
Ruby Wang: Welcome to the Institute, a podcast on the lives and works by Fellows and Friends of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m your host, Ruby Wang.
Milada Vachudova is the Faculty Director for Strategic Initiatives at the Institute. She is a professor of political science who specializes in political change in Europe and the impact of international actors on domestic politics. Her current projects include protest and defense of liberal democracy across Europe, the revival of EU enlargement, and Ukraine’s path to EU membership amidst the transformation of European politics and institutions owing to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Vachudova has completed two Faculty Fellowships: in 2005 as a Fletcher/Whitten Peeler fellow, and again in 2015 as a Borden Fellow. She also received a Chapman Family Teaching award for excellence in teaching undergraduate students. Vachudova served as the chair of the curriculum in Global Studies from 2014 to 2019.
Milada, welcome to the podcast.
Milada Vachudova: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
RW: You’re a longtime friend and fellow of the Institute. Can you talk a little bit about your involvement and connections to the institute over the years?
MV: Yes. So first and foremost, when you come to UNC as a faculty member, you have to learn to balance all of the different demands, and it’s hard for faculty, especially for me, it was to balance between research and publications along with teaching and service. And I love teaching, and teaching undergraduates at UNC has been the privilege of my lifetime professionally. So the IAH fellowship for me was just integral to having the space to do my research and writing so that I could continue to, you know, publish and move forward and be promoted. And the work that I did while I was at IAH, both of those semesters, I’m really proud of.
One was a project that was I had done the field work for it, funded by the US State Department on political change in the Western Balkans and why the paths of these Western Balkan countries towards the EU had been much more difficult and continue to be much more difficult than some of the earlier countries.
And I also started my work on populism while a Fellow at the IAH, in part because I was in the interdisciplinary environment, and could kind of think a little bit more broadly about what was motivating voters and how certain kinds of politicians were able to craft messages that resonated with voters in ways that had been difficult for perhaps political scientists like me to understand, and then finally, being chair of the curriculum in global studies. It’s just a fascinating, wonderful unit, but it draws on faculty from across the College of Arts and Sciences. And one of the things that the IAH does so beautifully is it helps create connections across units and departments in the College. And if I hadn’t had kind of the depth of contacts and friends among colleagues across different departments, I would have had a much more challenging time trying to be the chair of global, so I was really grateful for that.
RW: You talk a bit about this interdisciplinary, interdepartmental aspect of the Institute and the programs we offer. Can you talk a little bit more about that influence, maybe specifically in one of the Faculty Fellowships, you know, working with all of these different faculty who are coming from different departments. How does that influence a topic like populism or voting?
MV: That’s a great question. So it challenges us as scholars to not just explain our project to a broader audience, but also to sort of look at it from different angles, because we become very siloed in our disciplines, political, science, sociology, English, literature, anthropology – and for all of the talk about interdisciplinary research, and for all of the fellowships out there that try to promote interdisciplinary research, the reality is that for tenure-track professors, all of our promotions and publications are very much within our disciplines. There really isn’t a lot of incentive to go outside of your discipline. It’s harder to publish. You publish in the journal that’s outside of your discipline, you risk that your senior colleagues will sort of discount that publication when you’re going up for promotion.
So it really is something that the IAH promotes, that it helps show us that explaining and thinking about our projects from different angles is actually going to make them better. And that was certainly my experience, and it also dovetailed pretty well with some of the work that I do in trying to present my research in non-academic contexts, which I think I’ve done more over the last 25 years than a lot of other faculty, so I was really ready to embrace that. And finally, I will just say that the friendships that you have across the campus are invaluable. Having other Fellows who’ve become your friends to talk to, who are not in your department and who are a friendly face on campus is really important.
RW: Yeah, absolutely. Earlier, you mentioned a little bit about all the hats you sort of have to juggle with the teaching, with doing your own research. And recently, in July, you joined the Institute as the inaugural Faculty Director for Strategic Initiatives. Can you talk a little bit about these strategic initiatives and what you’re working on?
MV: Yeah, so it’s exciting to take this on, because there’s so much potential here at the IAH, like it’s such a robust part of the College, and sort of beloved by faculty. I think there’s three areas that I’m really excited about.
The first is creating more community partnerships. So for example, right now, we’re developing our partnership with the Carolina Public Humanities program and looking at around for other partners in the community where we can have a larger footprint in terms of kind of who we are, a little bit more outward facing, and that is also mirrored in the international aspect. In the last five years, the IAH has made great strides in having a more international component to the grants. And now we’re looking at ways to create partnerships with our UNC strategic partners. So, the starting point is King’s College in London. And I just visited there a few weeks ago to start thinking about how we might be able to have a joint fellowship with them, which would bring someone from King’s to sit at the IAH Fellows table here, and someone from UNC to sit at a similar table for a semester over there.
RW: That’s really exciting. Thanks for painting a portion of sort of the long-term goals of our internationalization, creating more community. It’s really exciting. Can you also talk a little bit more about, maybe hint at what we can expect in the coming semester for strategic priorities?
MV: One of the priorities is to look at how the IAH can reach out to more departments and more people in departments. One of the things I’m trying to do is look at, you know, which departments we have a lot of application for our fellowships, a lot of involvement, and other departments that don’t quite have that level of participation. And I’ve in my very informal interviews so far with folks asking them, for example, “why didn’t you apply?” And they’re sort of like, “oh, well, that’s for someone else,” or “I’ll never get it.” So trying to kind of say, “well, you’re never going to get the fellowship you don’t apply for it.” [laughs]
RW: Yeah, exactly.
MV: And I think the very fact that I’m, I’ve been appointed to this position, is a testament to the kind of broadness of the definition of humanities that this Institute has embraced. A lot of political scientists or sociologists don’t see themselves, but they should. And they, in fact, might benefit extra from getting to present their work and think through their work with folks from other disciplines.
RW: Absolutely. Speaking about your work, I’d like to talk a little bit about your research, your recent work explores the democratic backsliding in European states and the impact on party systems and civic participation. Can you elaborate a little bit about that work?
MV: Yes, so democratic backsliding is not a new problem. And perhaps it’s a silver lining that scholars and practitioners know a lot about how democratic backsliding happens, and perhaps that makes us a little bit more prepared for things, for sort of the sequence of events that we might expect. So in my work, it really started in 2010 when Viktor Orbán won a super majority in Hungary, and he was able very quickly to dismantle liberal democracy in Hungary, and he didn’t do it with like one big, you know, passed one kind of omnibus piece of legislation or something. It was all these tiny changes, any one of which you could say, “okay, that’s fine.” But when you put them all together in the first years, it really eroded democratic institutions. Aand then, particularly the courts, the judiciary, the Hungarian equivalent of the Supreme Court. And then the next step was to go after the public administration, to purge it completely of anti-Orbán, or anyone who was independent minded. And then terrifying, he next went for the media, universities, and the arts.
I’ll give you an example. You’re a small theater putting on independent productions. You’ve never been particularly political. You’re a theater, but you’re independent minded, and at some point you annoyed Viktor Orbán or one of his acolytes. Well, suddenly you can’t raise any, you have no advertising in your playbill. All your source of funding dries up. People stop buying tickets to your place because the word is out: anyone who is associated with this theater in any way will be on the, you know, the enemies list of the government. Also, he has oligarchs who work for him, extremely rich people, some of whom he’s made rich, and they simply buy up media and then close it down. So that’s already done in Hungary, the equivalent of the Washington Post, the New York Times were simply bought by, you know, Orbán’s equivalent of some of our oligarchs here and bought and shut down. So that’s not a hopeful story.
And we have, you know, essentially, an authoritarian regime now in Hungary, which is it’s hard to see how that regime will fall, because they have so corrupted the political process and created such an uneven playing field that the opposition, even if it was completely organized and ran the best campaign in the world, would never, doesn’t break through. The rules are unfair. They have no access to the media and Orbán uses the state administration to fill the space with disinformation, including overtly antisemitic, racist, xenophobic and white nationalist messages.
But there are other countries in Europe. I started by studying, how do these parties win votes? And then I studied how they use the argument that there are all these enemies of the nation, out there — inside, internal enemies – to justify concentrating power. So Orbán will say there are all these communists, there are all these cosmopolitans, there are George Soroses just behind every corner. So we have to concentrate power and use illiberal methods, authoritarian methods, to get rid of this great threat.
In Poland, they tried the same thing. So the Law and Justice government was elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2019. And they tried all those things, and they were quite successful: control of the judiciary, control of a good chunk of the media — but not as much as Orbán — putting out this message of you know, all of these groups are the enemy of the people, focusing on the LGBTQ community, feminists, immigrants, migrants, very familiar story. But in the case of the Law and Justice Party in Poland, they overreached. You know, they were so full of hate towards fellow Polish citizens that they weren’t strategic towards the end and the opposition was able… Everyone together. It’s crazy, right? To defeat these, you have to bring together the equivalent of, you know, the farthest kind of left, to the most sort of very conservative right wing, but believes in liberal democracy, that kind of huge tent, which will be familiar in America when we had everything from Dick Cheney to Bad Bunny, I think you could say that was a broad. But in the case of Poland, they were successful in winning the last elections.
Now, just two things that’s really fascinating. One, those are not the only two countries which have seen these parties elected in democratic elections who then abuse the power of their office to concentrate power. Two things always happen. One, the opposition doesn’t do a great job at first, and in Hungary, they missed the boat. But in Poland, they managed to get their act together. And the second is that citizens mobilize. And so my most recent project has been on citizen response to democratic backsliding, and how citizens protest, and in some countries, become much more active in response to these threats to liberal democracy.
RW: You mentioned this idea of creating division, and you’re already starting to see that there’s critiques of theocracy in America, and a lot of fears about division and like what’s coming in this country. But you know, there’s ways that citizens can create change, and little actions can cascade into larger political change. Do you have any words of encouragement, maybe, in relation to this recent project you’ve been doing for how we can mobilize these smaller actions to implement larger institutional change?
MV: Well, we did a survey of protesters in Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, and Bulgaria. And these protesters were facing different kinds of democratic backsliding, and that was reflected in their responses. But what they all said was that “I decided to step out of my daily life, you know, to skip my Pilates class or not clean my house or whatever it is, miss my kids’ soccer game, whatever it takes to step out of your daily life to actually mobilize in defense of liberal democracy, I decided to do it, not because I thought it would bring immediate change, because the government’s just gonna put up their middle finger at us, but because I wanted to show other citizens that this is what we need to do, that we can’t just put on Netflix and pretend nothing is happening. That if we care about our liberal democracy, we have to go out and show it.” So that was really uplifting.
MV: I think the problem is that, you know, in Hungary and also Poland and now Slovakia. These are young and weak, you could argue, institutions trying to survive this wrecking ball of trying to destroy liberal democracy on the part of the incumbent. Sometimes they’re able, sometimes they’re not. I think what’s worrying is just the exhaustion. And that’s where I think young people come in. Like, if you’ve been through a few rounds of this, you mobilized against the authoritarian incumbent, you fought tooth and nail for that party to lose power. They finally did. And then four years later or five years later, like in Czech Republic next year, that that party comes back to power – people get really tired. And so the sense of community and the sense that everyone is doing their part. Because I’ll tell you for myself, the one thing that really makes me want to just turn on Netflix and forget it all is when I feel like… you know, some of us are out there stepping out of our daily lives and seeking sacrifices in defense of liberal democracy. But other people who may feel the same way can’t be bothered to put any work in.
RW: I want to ask another question about your research. I’m curious because it seems like things can change so quickly, like in the blink of an eye. And I’m sure research feels the same way, where you have to sort of respond to these really rapid changes. How has your research evolved or shifted over the recent years in light of political shifts over the Russia-Ukraine war?
MV: hat’s a great question. You know, I didn’t study Ukraine prior to February 2022. It was a country that I was interested in, I kept up with, I traveled to a few times, but I had a lot of other cases in East Central Europe and the Western Balkans. So like 11 other countries that were more part of my previous research projects. But my parents were refugees from the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They were camping in Big Bend, Texas when the Ranger came to tell them that Soviet tanks had occupied Prague and they were never able to go home again. So I grew up in, you know, low income housing. They were good immigrants. They figured out where the best schools were in Washington State. So I grew up in a place called Bellevue in a tiny apartment surrounded by rich people, which meant a very good school.
And for me, first of all, as a teacher, it was very hard in the classroom, when all of a sudden I realized that I had students in my classroom who liked Putin. And I have to say that that was a real challenge for me to kind of figure out how to teach and how to, you know, not compromise my principles. I always tell my students on day one, you know, ‘I believe in liberal democracy, and I’m not gonna be like liberal democracy on the one hand, authoritarian on the other — what are the pluses and minuses of these things?’ No, like we know that. Anyway, after Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, I started a project on Ukraine’s path to the European Union, because my a lot of my first book and a lot of my previous articles are on EU enlargement, and now Ukraine is a candidate for EU membership. But I also just became very – I follow every everything about the war. And that’s been heavy at times, and at times I’ve had to step back, but one of the things I found most useful for my research and for myself, is to spend time in Ukraine. I spent about two and a half weeks there in the spring of 2023 and I was just there for a month this summer, spring. While I write about EU enlargement, I’ve also written a new piece that’s coming out just in a few weeks for Ethics & International Affairs with my Ukrainian co-author, professor Nadiia Koval about the EU as an ethical actor, and what it means to have essentially a country that’s drowning, you know, and you can see it, and you’re throwing at a few things, but are you really going to help it? Or are you just going to walk away? And Europe, it’s helping, but it’s not helping enough. There’s a German saying — I think it’s German – “not enough to live, but too much to die.” It’s going to be interesting, but also potentially heartbreaking what happens to Ukraine over the next six months to a year.
RW: Let us know when the upcoming piece comes out. We’ll make sure we highlight it so folks can read it.
MV: Yeah.
RW: Is there anything else you would like to talk about that we haven’t covered yet?
MV: Well, I think I would like to say something about teaching at UNC. Because one of the great things about my time here, and I arrived in the fall of 2001 which is a long time ago. I was very young back then, and I realized my current students weren’t even born then.
RW: I was born in 2001. [laughs]
MV: Yeah, that was 9/11 right? So 9/11 happened just three weeks after I arrived at UNC. Anyway, all of the work that I’ve done over the years I have shared with students as in draft form, I’ve tested it out in my lectures. I’m very lucky to be able to teach what’s basically my favorite class called “Undivided Europe.” And the syllabus is very dense now because things keep happening. It was a lot easier to teach my class before we had, you know, the financial crisis, COVID and Russia’s war against Ukraine, etc. But having UNC students, who I am convinced are as good as any students in America, and slightly better than you know students at Harvard – being able to teach through my research, has just been incredibly great for me.
RW: Yeah, absolutely. I’m curious. Over the years, have you seen any shifts or maybe persisting patterns amongst your students?
MV: Well, I think when I first came here, I certainly felt that we as a country, although we disagreed extremely strongly about some things, including, you know, the war in Iraq. It had already been eroding in the 1990s for sure, but we still had more of a sense of common national interest. And now I think most of my students want that. They certainly want the sense that the United States has a common sense of national interest, and that things like foreign policy and defense should and are above party politics, that we’re going to have robust institutions. There was a time when we had a sense of national interest, and we were holding on to that. Then there was a time where in my classes, I could see the divisions coming out, and it was hard to grapple with a student who would write on my evaluation, “Professor Vachudova is not objective about Putin.” I’m not sure what that means, right? I got that a couple of times, but that’s not where I feel like we are now. I feel like where we are now is a student body that’s really trying to continue to believe in American institutions and American democracy, and trying to figure out what is going to be their place in that and their role. And I don’t, you know we don’t have answers for students, but I have seen real resilience and real a real sense of curiosity. And I guess I’ll say, I hope that whatever happens in America politically does not kind of extinguish that curiosity. I keep mentioning Netflix, but it really is my greatest fear for this country, that people will retreat into their homes. This is what happened under communism. Under authoritarian regimes, people are afraid in the public sphere, and they don’t think they can make any change, and so they retreat to their homes. You know, a lot of baking, a lot of gardening, which are all wonderful things, but we need folks to stay in the public sphere.
RW: One last question that we ask all of our guests. Can you share a book or any creative piece of media, game, song, TV show that has changed your life when we impact on you?
MV: So many things. So first of all, I love music, and I am always playing music and sharing music with my students. And next week, my students will make a playlist, like we always do, so I can learn about these new bands.
RW: Pearl Jam
MW: Pearl Jam. I try to teach them about Pearl Jam, but they teach me about other things, you know, like Bad Bunny. [laughs] And so I don’t know if there’s one music that really – there’s not one song or one artist, but I might say, when I was a high school student outside of Seattle, I started listening to Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger. And, you know, I listened to lots of different things. But that folk tradition, working class defending the working class, that’s really and also they sing about trains, which I really love.
And the other thing I’ll say is, you know, in my class every semester, we read a book called Under a Cruel Star by Heda Kovály, and I really recommend that to anyone who wants to understand 20th century European history. It’s about a young woman, a Jewish woman, a Czech and Jewish woman, very young, who’s deported at the beginning of World War II and survives the Holocaust and comes back. Czechoslovakia is the only country in Eastern Europe that has free and fair elections in 1946 but then there’s a communist coup in 1948 – when my whole family loses their jobs by the way and some of goo to jail – but she’s a part of all of that. And she survives unimaginable persecution and heartbreak, but somehow remains resilient through all of it, and ends up as a librarian at Harvard here at the very towards the end of her life, and writes this book specifically for students to try to help them understand how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes operate and how individuals can be crushed by them, but you can still remain resilient and have hope, and things did get better in that case.
RW: Seems like a fitting recommendation.
MV: Yes, if you’re ready to cry a little bit. It’s the only book that I cried in college when I first read it. I was assigned in a seminar by an incredible historian named Tony Jett. And I remember sitting on the quad just sobbing. [laughs]
RW: Thank you for your recommendations. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today.
MV: It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you.
RW: This has been the Institute, a podcast by UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities. This episode was hosted by Ruby Wang and edited by Kristen Chavez.
Listen to other and upcoming episodes of the institute by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Visit our website, iah.unc.edu, to find past episodes and transcripts. There, you can also learn more about our programs and opportunities for UNC Chapel Hill faculty, find upcoming events and read stories that feature our arts and humanities fellows. Thank you for joining us.
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