Between East and West, Between Past and Future: The Effects of Exclusive Historical Victimhood on Geopolitical Attitudes in Hungary and Serbia

In Eastern Europe, collective victim beliefs have become integral elements of national ideologies, especially amid rising geopolitical polarisation. In this study, we investigated how exclusive victimhood was related to geopolitical attitudes in Hungary and Serbia. The study involved Serbian (N = 630) and Hungarian (N = 471) adult national samples stratified by gender, age, political orientation, and place of residence. As expected, exclusive victimhood predicted higher support for a geopolitical shift from the West (i.e., EU and US) to the East (i.e., Russia and China) via Euroscepticism in both samples. In Serbia, the strongest indirect effect was observed among participants with neutral attitudes towards the war in Ukraine. In Hungary, there was no expected moderated mediation while the direct effect of exclusive victimhood on the West-to-East geopolitical shift was largest for pro-Russian participants and non-significant for pro-Ukrainian participants. Different measures of ethnic identity showed no expected moderation effect, but an exploratory analysis revealed that exclusive victimhood partially mediated the relationship between identity measures (superiority and attachment) and support for a pro-Eastern (vs. pro-Western) geopolitical orientation. We discuss how the construals of the past based on exclusive victimhood shape future geopolitical preferences of the public in Hungary and Serbia.