This article investigates the international genre of “retro” and how it is used in Hungary to re-matter the nation’s modern past, repositioning the country within a twentieth-century European history where it was never cut off by an “Iron Curtain” from the modern West. It does this by selecting for modern consumer goods and popular culture from both East and West that fit international criteria for retro. For both young and old, retro “matters” the past in a way that affirms contemporary market sensibilities, infusing it with value through assertions of market equivalence in the past and new value as commodities in the present. If Hungarian Retro works as a form of nostalgia for some, it is for an era of perceived national prestige, value, and economic sovereignty relative to the demoralized present. While distinct from right-wing nationalist politics, Hungarian Retro nonetheless shares in the project of erasing a stigmatized state socialism from national history. This article builds on scholarship on the role of the material in producing the nation in everyday life. It contributes a perspective that brings together: (a) the domestication of international commercial and popular trends; (b) the global hierarchy of prestige based on national exports and imports; and (c) the constitution of value in citizens via the qualities of consumer goods both produced and consumed.

Political debates on the Baltics, and in particular Estonia, have often pointed to “nationalisting” and exclusive narratives constructed at the institutional level. Accordingly, emphasis has been put on the lack of opportunities for Russians to integrate into an Estonian context. While acknowledging the shortfalls of the Estonian political project, this article contrasts these views in two ways. By emphasizing people’s agency and their capacity to question, contrast, or even reject the identity markers proposed by Estonian official narratives, we maintain that the integration of Russians might be more advanced than insofar claimed by other studies. We then look at the way identities are lived in an everyday context by inhabitants of Estonia to counterpose national narratives proposed by the state and its political institutions, with the way people live and whether they accept these narratives. By doing this, we explore the role of the everyday in the reconstruction of national identity narratives, in which citizens actively participate in their individual capacity. We suggest that, from a James Scott “infrapolitics” perspective, these micro-actions have a fundamental role in the reshaping of a national identity and its acceptance among citizens.