In the 2020s, Hungary’s government intensified a politics of reindustrialisation to position Hungary as a link between Western carmakers, East Asian battery suppliers, and Russian energy import. What critics described as authoritarian centralisation of governance has become a tool to coordinate processes of investment, infrastructure-building and industrial production, with the aim to enable the expansion of state-backed domestic capital. Analysing what looks like a perfect example for polyaligned policies of industrial development, we focus on dynamics of technological and financial dependence, and the interaction of the economic limitations they pose with requirements of geopolitical balancing. We argue that this interaction of dependent development and geopolitical balancing reflect a long-term aspect of Hungary’s world-economic integration, which we propose to grasp through the concept of geoeconomic bridging. Tracing its origins through successive regimes after the collapse of socialism, we identify current polyaligned reindustrialisation as an FDI-based, export-oriented re-enactment of the country’s Cold War model of import-substitution industrialisation (ISI), which reproduces the ISI model’s limits in the context of deepening geoeconomic rivalry, protectionist industrial policies and militarisation.
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