How does Hungary manage to stay on good terms with both Washington and Beijing, despite their growing rivalry? Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s rapport with Donald Trump is well known, burnished through shared disdain for liberal orthodoxies. At the same time, Hungary has quietly cultivated some of the EU’s closest ties to China, embracing Beijing’s Belt and Road overtures with open arms. Many observers explain this dual alignment as mere pragmatism—ideological kinship with the American right, economic opportunism with China. But that tells only part of the story. Hungary is not precariously balancing between two powers; it is positioning itself at the vanguard of a broader geopolitical shift. Its foreign policy embodies the sovereigntist Zeitgeist—a rising current that connects national conservatives in Europe, Trump-era Republicans, and even the ideological framework of Xi Jinping’s China.
Of course, this emerging Zeitgeist, by its very nature, is hard to pinpoint, easy to overlook, and anyway only vaguely discernible. A Zeitgeist is like water to fish: you swim in it. Hence, an emerging Zeitgeist is hard to detect. Never are you fully outside of it. Never does it stand in front of you. Instead, it nests in your priorities, assumptions, and the way you perceive. Yes, the great conflicts of our times—those can be all too noticeable in their surface manifestations. But the deeper accords behind the conflicts, the secret alignments that set the conceptual stage upon which the disagreements play out? Those remain obscure. Thesis and antithesis, violently clashing, make themselves heard, though they can still be misunderstood; the true challenge is to spot the silent synthesis sneaking into the shared background assumptions of the rivals. It is what ushers in the New Era.
‘Despite…their antagonism, Xi’s China and Trump’s America are midwives to a world of multipolarity and reawakened nationalisms’
Thus, we have all noticed the rivalry between Beijing and Washington. Fiercely ‘America first’, the Trumpists out-hawk everyone in their China rhetoric. Intuitively, then, you would surmise that the ‘America first’ worldview nowhere substantially overlaps with Xi Jinping Thought, China’s state doctrine. But there is such overlap. Underneath the polemics, power struggles, and vilification—which, regrettably, is mutual and far from harmless—is a shared rejection of the liberal consensus that has captivated the West and Westernized elites since the early 1990s; a rejection of its self-referential liberal universalism, dogmatic anti-nationalism, and monopolistic claim to the future of humanity. Despite—and even through—their antagonism, Xi’s China and Trump’s America are midwives to a world of multipolarity and reawakened nationalisms.
Ideally, this emerging world would be anchored in neo-Romantic, particularist self-reflection and something like a ‘sovereigntist peace’, Yet this idealistic potential remains fragile and unrealized—and unless we realize it, the emerging post-liberal or post-Occidental constellation will descend into a brutish reality of bullying great powers, resurgent nationalist egotism, and narrowing chauvinism. Everything is at stake. The new Zeitgeist must be channelled in virtuous directions.
However, let us first try to establish the contours of the emerging Zeitgeist. Here are three fundamental ideas about the political world that you could uncontroversially bring up in national conservative circles in Budapest and the United States, including among America first Trumpists, and among academics and politicians in China.
1. We have reached a pivotal moment in history as the liberal era comes to an end and a sovereigntist-multipolar world order is emerging, one in which the USA is a great country, not the world’s policeman, nor the upholder of liberal universalism.
In a typical ‘America first’ expression, this means that America is going to stop ‘paying for everything and everyone’ and ‘fighting other people’s wars’. The new era is when the US will again become great as a country. A similar but more theorized sense of transition imbues Orbán Viktor’s notion of a ‘global system change’ (világrendszerváltás), which his last Tusványos address referenced 13 times in its various Hungarian grammatical inflexions. The Xi-ist eschatology, finally, is the most elaborate, revolving around concepts such as the new era, the shared future for all mankind, and the great change unseen in a hundred years.
Most striking is the conceptual proximity between the Xi-ist eschatology and Orbán’s ‘global system change’. Both perceive liberal Western-centrism in world affairs giving way to a multipolar and multi-civilizational constellation. China’s rise most forcefully drives that shift. The United States must abandon its exceptionalist claim to liberal-universalist ‘world ideals’ and any unipolar supremacy, rediscovering itself as a great country, that is, as a particularity. Regretfully, Trumpism shows no signs of developing such particularistic self-reflection.
2. The central units of international politics are sovereign nation-states, while the greatest units of culture are civilizations, neither of which can be overwritten with an abstract and universalistic political model, be it liberal or Leninist.
We are moving away from a liberal ontology that emphasizes free-floating individuals and placeless, ‘culturally neutral’ institutions, preferably decentralized, supranational or international ones—and toward asovereigntist political ontology, the central units of international politics are sovereign nation-states, which culturally cluster into larger cultural zones and civilizations. The heterogeneous particularisms of this landscape of nations, peoples, cultures, and civilizations prevent a universalistic regime model from becoming the global norm, be it Leninist or liberal.
‘Most striking is the conceptual proximity between the Xi-ist eschatology and Orbán’s “global system change”’
Previously, and analogously, the Chinese Communist Party had already moved away from the universalist pretension of Leninism, particularizing China’s political self-image via the notion of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (中国特色社会主义), which, in 1978, was coined as a slogan for furthering economic pragmatism, yet became the official state doctrine and umbrella concept under General Secretary Xi Jinping. The meaning of the term shifted, as the ‘Chinese characteristics’ were increasingly emphasized and came to refer to the unique, historically-grown, and substantive cultural essence of Chinese civilization.
3. Peace relies on sovereignty, respect for political and cultural borders, and the absence of ideological bloc formation—and not on the maintenance, whether through moralism and diplomatic pressure or exogenous regime changes, of something like a ‘liberal world order’.
Great powers should refrain from forcing their political systems on others out of regard for political and cultural boundaries. That same regard for boundaries incidentally makes them seek control over mass migration to their territories. Also, great powers should not pit geopolitical blocs against each other in ideological standoffs. Instead, they should embrace the lasting coexistence of distinct nations, cultures, and civilizations.
It remains highly uncertain whether the notion of a sovereigntist peace can succeed in practice—indeed, it has yet to be coherently articulated even in theory. The precedent set by Trump’s tariff wars against traditional US allies such as Canada and the EU bodes ill for the prospect of a prosperous, cosmopolitan sovereigntist co-existence. Yet, we must remain hopeful—and commit to shaping the sovereigntist Zeitgeist before it hardens into a new disorder of power without principle.
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