Professor Anthony R. Oberschall delivered his inaugural speech entitled „Sociological reflections on a family history” on the occasion of the ceremony during which he was awarded a honorary doctorate by our University on 27 September 2017. Anthony Oberschall is professor emeritus of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). After receiving a PhD at the Columbia University as a student of Paul Lazarsfeld, he taught at UCLA, Yale and Vanderbilt.

His work has focused on issues of survey research, empirical sociology, social conflicts, conflict management and peace making, and the theory of rational choice. Besides having studied conflicts, he was a consultant on the Kofi Annan plan for Cyprus and an expert witness for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Anthony Oberschall was interviewed by Júlia Sipos.

Why did you choose a topic on family history when you could have talked about numerous achievements in research for which you ar recognized internationally?
Professor György Lengyel suggested that I choose this subject for the occasion as it could be more exciting for a broader audience. Two relatives had an important public impact in Hungary. Dr. Magda Oberschall was an outstanding historian of art who wrote the well-known book on the St.Stephen crown and other works on art history. Her husband was be Olympic silver and bronze medal winner István Bárány. They separated in 1947-ben and Magda fled to Rome with her daughter Judit. Here she worked as researcher, and also made arts and cultural programmes for Radio Free Europe in Munich. Ilma Oberschall stood out as a politician. She was an MP in the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet Freedom Party after the Second World War, and as such became persecuted as early as the end of 1946. Her husband was an MP of the Smallholders’ Party, they both escaped to Austria and ended up in New York. She participated in the Columbia University oral history project on the Communist takeover and the subsequent events of Hungarian history.

You have been working in a diversity of research areas, you also conducted research on Africa. Your best known book „Social Conflict and Social Movements” was published in 1973. How did your career as a researcher start?
Upon graduating from Columbia, I was immediately offered a job at UCLA. I was concerned about the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the cold war, the two superpowers competing in Asia and Africa. There was a prestigious African Studies Centre at UCLA that I had a chance to join and work with. I spent about three years in Africa, in Uganda, in Zambia, and in Congo (Zaire) on development and social change topics. The situation deteriorated in much of Africa, t corrupt dictatorships replaced the early democracies. I was unable to teach and do research and protected my students under such dictatorships. I decided to pursue other interests.

This was the period when new left and civil rights movements as well as feminist, environmental and black power movements started in the US. And Together with Charles Tilly and Mayer Zald social scientists we studied these phenomena with our students using "resource mobilization theory" ; I later wrote Social Conflict and Social Movements on these movements. Social movements took place elsewhere and young researchers in Germany, France, the Netherlands got interested in our theory because Marxism and ideological analysis failed to explain them. Our approach was empirical, and made sense to European researchers in Germany, France, Switzerland, even in Japan. When these young researchers became well established in their intellectual milieu and generated their own research program, I decided to do something else, something new.

Anti-Communist movements had just started in East Europe which came to fruition in 1989-90, except in one country, Yugoslavia. Instead of transitioning to a liberal democracy, the situation evolved into the Balkans war. The question for me was why the transition was successful in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and even East Germany, but failed in Yugoslavia? How did ethnic conflict and social division influence the building of democracy? I launched a research project to investigate this particular case, but realized that it was relevant for other conflict zones as well, like Northern Ireland, Palestine.

My Balkan publications came to the attention of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and they asked me to summarize what social science knew about the impact of xenophobic national propaganda, hate speech and fear mongering on public opinion and on the fighting forces, and about how all this rendered post-war co-operation difficult. I was an expert witness for the ICTY and provided a lreport on these topics in a war crimes trial
My publications on ethnic manipulation are based on these analyses. My book Conflict and Peacemaking in Divided Societies was published in 2007.

In the meantime the Chinese Communists had more or less come to terms with the US and the way for scientific research was opened. I was among the first U.S. social scientists in 1985-86 to teach and conduct research in China owing to a Fulbright grant. When I returned I was wondering whether I should become a China expert. This, however, would have required years of Chinese language studies and there were enough experts, and there were developments in Europe and the United States that I should pay attention to.

Since then social division has spread and has reached the United States, too. How do you see these matters in 2017?
First of all, when I studied polarization in Yugoslavia, in the Balkans and in Ireland, I did not think that it could occur in the US. In the last 5-6 years, however, what I studied in these divided societies has grown in the US. The process started as early as in 2000, at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Masses of economic migrants were arriving from Mexico and Central America and one particular section of society was not concerned about jobs, but about culture. They were white nationalists. The people who voted for President Trump came from this section and the trend has become even more powerful since then.

I am currently working and writing on perception of threat to traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and the identity politics and polarization it has spawned. Many ordinary white people are scared of being in a minority, cultural minority. A lot of politicians have playing on these fears and gotten elected. Even in places like Wyoming where there was no Hispanic or Central American population, fear was greater than in Texas with lots of Hispanics. Nevertheless, after the 2016 elections many woke up and have come to understand the societal dangers and oppose polarization.

In view of such an oeuvre and such a career, what importance does the honorary doctoral title of the Corvinus University have for you?
I am very pleased and touched by having been awarded, as I first came here in 1991 and now am retired. Nowadays I work out of sheer intellectual and personal curiosity. At Corvinus I did a joint project with Zoltán Szántó and with Zsuzsa Hantó at Godollo on the privatization of cooperative farms. Believe me or not, I had been to more villages and small towns in Hungary than those who attended my lecture on Wednesday. We toured the whole country, conducted interviews, made films. I am also an occasional lecturer in the CoDe program.

As a sociologist, what would intrigue you in today’s Hungary?
The country is ageing demographically, some of the talented young people leave the country. I am interested in how this situation is handled, and how Hungary works out its European Union relations for mutual benefit.