While in the 2000s, the socialist-liberal educational government in power was keen to adopt European education policies and centred its policy rethoric on the goal of »modernization« and »catching up to Europe«, as part of a broader, populist political turn, the Orbán government's and its educational administration, emphasising the country's sovereignity, has developed a paradoxical relationship to Europe after 2010. I will argue that both political strategies exemplify characteristic strategies of semi-peripheral integration. The government ceased to respond to the mechanisms of soft pressure designed to trigger policy convergence across the European education space, yet it continuingly strives to maximize transfers from European social and cohesion funds. In the presentation, I will discuss two policy domains to illuminate coexisting startegies of policy transfer. Hybridity and continuity characterizes the policy domains of curricular content and professional development. In this area, encapsulating inherent tensions, neoliberal and neoconservative concepts, instruments and goals coexist in the policy documents. The early school leaving policy provides an example of the strategy of deflecting the EU’s expectations (Alexiadou and Lange 2013). The educational administration reluctantly built a Patomkin village of strategic documents and pilot projects to pretend convergence to EU priorities, whilst the sweeping reform of vocational secondary education completely extinguished these initiatives. Hence, Hungary’s paradoxical and complex relationship to the EU cannot be captured by the categories of convergence or divergence. The government simulates the minimum level of cooperation and convergence to maintain the country’s eligibility for structural funds. The window of opportunity to develop this pragmatic political strategy has opened wide in the current context of disintegration across the European Union.

Alexiadou, Nafsika, and Bettina Lange. 2013. “‘Deflecting European Union Influence on National Education Policy-Making: The Case of the United Kingdom.” Journal of European Integration 35, no. 1: 37-52.