Abstract
Hungary’s entrance into the European Union was a rocky, contested transition, with local resistances and political challenges. Rather than viewing the EU as a stabilizing force that replaces old ways of being with new systems of organization, in Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materiality in the European Union Zsuzsa Gille shows how the existing material arrangements, local history and practices, and regulatory commitments create “friction.” The metaphor of friction means more than simply resistance—an argument that harkens back to simplistic approaches to globalization counterposing imperialism and local opposition. Instead, Gille argues that friction between old and new systems (here, post-socialist Hungary’s political and regulatory regime v. the new regime of the EU) can sometimes create traction that leads to forward movement, even if that forward movement yields unintended consequences.
To understand the consequences of friction requires a careful tracing of actants, tensions, and processes where old and new regimes intersect. To make this friction visible, Gille attends to a heterogeneous set of factors: production processes and their material products, local regulatory regimes before Hungary’s entry to the EU, the regulatory regime of the EU itself, the adaptations made (or not) in response to Hungary’s EU membership, patterns of international trade, local traditions, post-socialist legacies, and Hungarian national identity. This is complex stuff, but Gille carefully grounds the argument in three cases: the 2004 Hungarian paprika ban, the 2008 foie gras boycott, and the 2010 environmental disaster of the “red mud” spill. In so doing, she effectively makes the “global particular” (p.16). The great strength of the book lies in Gille’s engaging and insightful analysis of these three cases.
The book draws heavily from Actor Network Theory, using sociomaterial assemblages as a lens to understand the friction of globalization and the new stakes and strategies of political negotiation. Gille wants to make an argument that these scandals emerge because of a “materialization of politics,” the task of “achieving political ends with seemingly apolitical material tools” (p.112). Rather than relying on crafting shared principles or common politics—a difficult task, as the EU has to honor previous commitments as new EU nations enter with unique national legacies—Gille suggests this political work is enacted through regulations and claims-making around food safety, animal rights, or environmental waste disposal. By reassembling the material world in these ways, a new politics is born.
One seeming advantage of joining the EU was unrestricted export access to EU markets and protections for domestic producers making authentically Hungarian products like paprika. The benefits of this access, though, came with a cost. To join the EU, Hungary had to adopt new food quality and safety standards—techniques the EU uses to control how people engage the nonhuman, material world. No longer was safety associated with trust in Hungarian production; it was now associated with the rigor of the manufacturing process. In this case, Hungarian producers had to follow the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) approach to prevent contamination before it could happen.
Despite Hungarian producers’ adoption of the costly HACCP protocols, in 2004 an aflatoxin contamination was discovered, forcing the Hungarian government to shut down the sale of paprika powder and its use in restaurants. How? Gille argues that liberalized trade policies led Hungarian paprika processors to import cheap peppers from Brazil rather than using homegrown products. These Brazilian peppers were one source of the aflatoxin. The imported peppers weren’t tested at the national level until after production. The aflatoxin could have been caught at the EU port in Rotterdam, but spice peppers had dropped off the list of inspected produce—likely because most EU countries don’t consume these peppers, except for Hungary. Additionally, peppers brought in from Spain didn’t require testing because they came from a fellow EU nation; but these peppers were also found to have molds. Missing these contaminated peppers had great consequences for paprika production and markets once pulled from the shelves. Gille’s surprising finding is this: increased focus on food safety regulations in fact undermined safety by moving regulation from the state to the supranational level.
While people usually associate foie gras with France, Hungary is the second largest producer in the world. In 2008, transnational animal rights activists called for a boycott on Hungarian foie gras, claiming the technique of force feeding birds through gavage was tantamount to torture. This posed a real threat to Hungarian production, even leading to theories that Four Paws (the group leading the boycott) was working with a German poultry company to undermine the Hungerit (the leading Hungarian producer of foie gras) market share.
This moral imposition of animal-rights claims from outside of Hungary was met with derision by Hungarians themselves. Paradoxically, Gille argues, to ban foie gras production in Europe would in fact increase harm to animals because it would leave China—which lacks animal protections—to take over the fois gras market. Hungarian producers followed France’s lead in adopting EU cultural protections as a way to shore up nationalist interests and traditions, and they made explicit claims to moral sovereignty to the farmers who represent Hungarian cultural tradition.
In what was Hungary’s worst ecological disaster, red mud—a toxic byproduct of aluminum production—leaked from a disposal lagoon owned by the company MAL, Ltd. in 2010, flooding three villages, destroying homes, and rendering a river’s ecosystem inhospitable to life. How did this happen? Operating under a hazardous waste program started under socialism in 1981, the classification of red mud as hazardous waste made it susceptible to strict monitoring by the state. Once part of the EU, with its rigorous environmental regulations, one would assume this kind of event couldn’t happen in Hungary.
It turns out that red mud wasn’t considered hazardous waste under the EU regime because other alumina producers in the EU had already moved to more advanced disposal methods. Red mud fell through the cracks. Hungary could have continued to maintain the earlier classification and standards, but it didn’t have to. Moving beyond a story of post-socialist privatization, Gille instead argues that problems emerged in the ambiguous classification of red mud: is it a toxic pollutant or a resource to be mined for additional minerals, given better technology in the future? To make this additional profit, MAL had to delay neutralizing the red mud, which would have stripped its capacity to be mined. The classificatory ambiguity emerging from gaps between new EU and old socialist regimes made the spill possible.
Gille finds that these three cases don’t fit neatly in neoliberal, new regulatory, or cultural commodification explanations. Gille suggests, instead, that what these other theories miss is materiality. “What if the reason culture, identity, and the market are now unpredictably intertwined is because there is a new political substrate that underpins their connection?” (p.111). The political substrate that organizes participation is no longer open democratic deliberation and consensus, but control over non-humans in standardized ways hidden from view. The EU works by establishing standards (e.g., food safety, animal treatment, and waste disposal) that control the material world, but these standards produce unpredictable results.
I appreciated the attention Gille brings to the important subject of the materialization of politics, but the theory was underspecified for my tastes. The theoretical contribution appears at book’s end; engaging these ideas earlier would have better motivated the substantive chapters. In addition, Gille’s unique contributions were lost among lengthy discussions of Latour, Mukerji, Pickering, and Law. Gille makes a strong case for how EU politics organized around the non-human world; but for a book that places materiality at its center, the important actions were in the standards and regulations imposed, not in the agency of peppers, or geese, or red mud. While Gille incorporates these actants into the explanation, they didn’t feel central to the theory. The book offers a theory of politics as the control of objects, not a theory of how objects acting back shape politics. Despite these minor concerns, I found Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud engaging to read, careful in its analysis, and brimming with ideas.