Populist Nationalism and the Challenges of Divided Nationhood: The Politics of Migration,Mobility,and Demography in Post-2010 Hungary

Divided Nationhood and Populist Nationalism

In order to fully understand the particular character of populist, nationalist governments in states like Hungary today, it is useful to briefly revisit the literatures on divided nationhood, varieties of nationalism within the European Union, and populism. Divided nationhood, as the term has been used in the context of post-communist ethnic and nationalist politics, refers most often to cases in which nationally affiliated groups have been separated politically and territorially by the shifting of borders. ⁵ Such situations can trigger kin-state activism, or “transsovereign nationalism,” within states that once lost part of their national territory and population as their governments seek to “create institutions to link the nation across state borders.” ⁶ This has certainly been the case with post-communist Hungary, which has made it a priority to foster and develop relations with Hungarians across the borders living as national minorities in neighboring countries, including Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine. ⁷ Yet, in a time of increased cross-border mobility and East–West migration within the European Union, it may be fruitful to expand the notion of divided nationhood to also encompass members of the nation who have crossed the border of their own volition, but remain within the same supranational space. In addition, a more recent border—the one that divides EU member states from nonmember states—creates another kind of potential division within the nation. National minorities affiliated with a kin-state will presumably have more rights of mobility and access to the kin-state depending on which side of that border they are on, as is the case for Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, versus those in Serbia or Ukraine. I employ this expanded notion of divided nationhood to reflect the reality that a state like Hungary must now position itself in relation to a multifaceted set of external populations within and outside of Europe that can claim national membership. ⁸

Another framework that needs to be expanded and updated relates to the varieties of nationalism that are most salient and prevalent within Central and Eastern Europe under conditions of European integration. Csergő and Goldgeier convincingly argued in their 2004 article that shared sovereignty within the EU would not diminish the importance of nationalism, but would allow “old and new forms of nationalism [to] coexist and mutually challenge and reinforce one another.” They laid out four types of nationalism that were most prevalent in EU member states—traditional, substate, transsovereign, and protectionist—and argued that traditional nation-state building and transsovereign nationalism were the two types most evident and salient in post-communist states. ⁹ Recent developments, however, have demonstrated the need for two important revisions to this argument and typology. The first is that protectionist nationalism, the project to “preserve national culture in the face of immigration and social change,” ¹⁰ has become increasingly salient throughout much of Europe. Even in the absence of sustained migration into Central and Eastern Europe, the refugee crisis, combined with popular discontent over economic conditions in the aftermath of the earlier financial crisis, opened the door to protectionist nationalism as a way to mobilize fear among domestic populations. ¹¹ The second is that a related, but somewhat different, type of nationalism has also strongly emerged in these European states, what some have labeled “demographic nationalism.” Melegh defines demographic nationalism as a “form of competitive political demography . . . aimed at controlling and developing a specific group of the ‘population’ who are seen as a source of economic and cultural advancement . . . as opposed to ‘other’ groups which represent danger.” ¹² And Krastev has argued that fears of demographic change have fueled a new and powerful form of protectionist nationalism that he refers to as “demographic panic.” In this variety of nationalism, people are driven to exclude others not in order to build a legitimate nation-state or to protect welfare-state benefits, but out of an existential fear of “ethnic disappearance” as a result of the combined forces of emigration, migration, and overall population decline. ¹³

The final piece of the puzzle is the particular brand of authoritarian-tinged populism that has emerged in some Central and East European states. Populist leaders like Orbán in Hungary combine “vertical opposition” to the old elites with “horizontal opposition” to “groups, institutions, or forces that are stigmatized as non-national or characterized as threatening the nation from within or without.” ¹⁴ Erin Jenne has described this type of populist rhetoric as a component of “ethnopopulism,” a dangerous form of “transgressive politics” that combines “the demagoguing of national outgroups with the demagoguing of elites” and uses “narratives whereby enemies from beyond couple or even conspire with enemies from above.” ¹⁵ This is also a distinctly illiberal populism that sees liberal democratic values as a form of foreign domination and accepts nepotism and clientelism as necessary tools to redistribute power and resources. ¹⁶ So, what may be different about populist nationalism in parts of Europe today is that it brings together the transsovereign and protectionist varieties of nationalism with demographic nationalism and an anti-globalist illiberalism.

Taken together, we can imagine the ways in which the reality of this expanded divided nationhood provides a set of challenges for populist, nationalist leaders. While fears of migration and population decline provide useful fuel for the particular brand of populist nationalism we see in places like Hungary, the ability of leaders to offer a coherent and effective narrative of protection for the “people” becomes significantly more complex when there are multiple internal and external populations to protect. The rest of the article will focus on the case of Hungary, highlighting the discursive and policy strategies that the FIDESZ regime has employed in its attempt to overcome the challenges posed by its relationship to various communities of Hungarians—domestic Hungarians, emigrant Hungarians, and external kin Hungarians—at a time of demographic change and increased mobility.

The analysis that follows is based first on a close reading of Hungarian news sources between 2014–2018 (the previous full term of the FIDESZ government) that quoted FIDESZ government representatives on the topics of migration to and emigration from Hungary, supplemented by transcripts of speeches made by the Prime Minister and his allies and the many scholarly works that have analyzed FIDESZ rhetoric on migration. ¹⁷ The discussion of the politicization of Hungarian emigration also relies on my own content analysis of Hungarian party platforms in 2014 and 2018, while my understanding of FIDESZ’s social engineering policies and their divisive implications comes primarily from the work of Hungarian sociologists and political analysts. Finally, the analysis of Hungary’s recent policies regarding ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries draws from the Hungarian government’s own documents, speeches, and summaries on the topic, ¹⁸ as well as the research of scholars with expertise in Hungarian kin-state politics and Hungarian minority communities.

Migrants versus Emigrants: Redefining Threats to the Nation

One challenge that emerged for the FIDESZ regime was how to respond to the significant numbers of foreigners crossing Hungary’s southern border during what came to be known as the “refugee crisis” of 2015 at the same time that a record number of young, educated Hungarian citizens were reported to be leaving the country. While these developments were generated in large part by external and long-term structural conditions largely outside of the control of the government, ¹⁹ FIDESZ was potentially vulnerable to events that made it look like the government was unable to preserve and protect the core domestic population. One of the government’s discursive strategies in response was to redefine migration in such a way that migrants only meant those who came from outside Europe. This allowed the government to demonize refugees and asylum seekers as cultural threats to Europe and to Hungary and, at the same time, downplay or ignore the increasing number of Hungarians living and working in other European countries. Second, the FIDESZ government generated a narrative in which Hungary—and by extension Europe more broadly—was threatened by these external and culturally distinct migrants not through a confluence of unfortunate, global events, but due to the purposeful strategy of a set of dangerous external actors and their liberal European allies, who supposedly sought to change Europe’s demographic and cultural makeup. This narrative provided the FIDESZ regime with a concrete external enemy to battle and rally the nation against.

Since FIDESZ and its allies regained control of the Hungarian government in 2010 and consolidated the party’s governing position, the government has increasingly framed the main threats for Hungary as coming from outside the territory of the state. FIDESZ’s discourse has consistently emphasized the need to protect Hungary from liberalism, multiculturalism, and external actors who would supposedly encourage these dangerous ideologies. In recent years, and especially since the influx of refugees from Syria and elsewhere across the Serbian border with Hungary in 2015, the government has focused in particular on migration as a major threat to the nation, using the issue as part of a “moral-panic toolkit” for domestic consumption. ²⁰ The government’s discourse around migration has conflated both refugees and economic migrants to Europe and sees externally mandated migration and refugee resettlement and integration policies as a direct challenge to the nation’s right to protect itself from cultural dilution. This rhetoric of anti-immigrant fear has continued to be a major facet of the FIDESZ narrative, including during the 2018 Hungarian election campaign, despite the fact that the initial influx was short-lived and the vast majority of refugees coming through southeast Europe did not remain in Hungary. Hungary, in fact, had the third lowest percentage of foreign-born population among the OECD countries in 2017, and asylum applications to Hungary fell by 89 percent between 2016 and 2017. ²¹

In contrast to the rapidly declining numbers of refugees and migrants trying to get into Hungary, an increasing number of analyses between 2014 and 2018 showed a clear and significant spike in the numbers of Hungarians leaving or intending to leave the country. According to recent studies, emigration from Hungary, primarily to other EU member states in Western Europe, increased significantly since 2010. As a result, Hungary has received economic benefits from remittances (as much as 3 percent of the GDP) and has enjoyed somewhat lower levels of domestic unemployment. On the negative side, however, the emigration of around six hundred thousand young, working-age, and highly skilled Hungarians over the last decade has reportedly led to significant labor shortages in key areas of the economy, such as health care, and has worsened negative demographic trends, leaving Hungarian society older and declining in population. This spike in emigration accelerated significantly between 2010 and 2014, which corresponds to the period of FIDESZ’s governing hegemony, making this issue an uncomfortable one for Prime Minister Orbán and his allies. ²² Even though Hungary’s overall levels of emigration have not been as high as other Central and East European countries such as Poland, Romania, or Bulgaria, this reflects a troubling trend for the government. ²³

In response to these politically inconvenient data points on migration and emigration, FIDESZ chose a discursive strategy that would enable the party to continue its demonization of migrants while, at the same time, downplaying the reality of emigration. It did so first through redefining the meaning of migration to mean mobility that originates from outside Europe, not something that happens within Europe. Migrants in the Orbán regime’s discourse refer to people of non-European origin or background, and even more specifically non-Christians, who cross the border into Europe. FIDESZ also emphasized the cultural threat posed by migrants in addition to framing them as harmful economic actors or competitors for jobs or benefits. According to Prime Minister Orbán, the main problem with (non-European) migration is that it leads to the “alteration of a country’s ethnic makeup,” which “amounts to an alteration of its cultural identity.” Allowing this to happen is something “a strong country can never afford to do.” ²⁴ The stakes of failing to protect Hungary, and Europe more broadly, from migration is to lose “the European way of life” ²⁵ and “all that we have achieved” by becoming “like others an immigrant country that is not built on its own national culture and Christian traditions.” ²⁶ This narrative of cultural threat has allowed the mobilization of fear against non-European migration to remain significant, and existential, despite the declining numbers of migrants and refugees. ²⁷ While this has similarities to the racially tinged ethno-nationalism and rhetoric of “replacement” that has emerged out of societies experiencing demographic changes in large part due to immigration, ²⁸ the strategy in Hungary differs in that it is being used to foment fear of a nonwhite, non-Christian future that may never come to pass while quietly attempting to manage a demographic imbalance caused in part by emigration.

FIDESZ then combined the discourse of non-European migration as cultural threat with a narrative in which Hungary had become victim to outside forces working to import culturally suspect migrants into Europe. Among others, this external enemy has often been personified by the émigré Hungarian billionaire George Soros, long a funder and proponent of liberal democratic institutions and organizations in Europe and elsewhere. In 2017, government-sponsored billboards were placed in Hungary urging Hungarians not to let Soros have “the last laugh,” referring to a false narrative that Soros planned to use “his wealth, power, influence and a network of non-governmental organizations . . . to settle millions of migrants in Hungary and the European Union.” ²⁹ Other billboards and public speeches in the run up to the 2018 parliamentary elections also targeted the United Nations, presumably for pushing countries to live up to international obligations on refugee processing and resettlement. “Hungary decides, not the UN” was one of the government’s slogans during the election campaign. ³⁰ Orbán also talked about cultural diversity as a threat to the nation, which the government had to protect against. As the Hungarian Prime Minister said in a February 2018 speech, “We must state that we do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed: we do not want our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. . . . We do not want to be a diverse country. We want to be how we became 1,100 years ago here in the Carpathian Basin. . . . This is something that we must fight for, this is something we must defend.” ³¹

This focus on migration as the nefarious plan of outside actors provided the party with a set of external enemies that brought urgency to domestic politics in the absence of a unified challenge by a weak and fractured Hungarian center-left opposition. After being in almost complete control of the government for eight years and counting, it was difficult for FIDESZ to return to an older narrative that the main threat to the nation came from ex-communists and other domestic political actors who were not sufficiently patriotic and trustworthy. It also allowed the governing party to justify the marginalization of internal regime critics through tactics such as the targeting of NGOs, internationally connected educational institutions, such as the English-language Central European University (originally established by Soros), and independent media outlets. ³² Finally, a xenophobic rhetoric focused on the cultural threat of non-European, non-Christian migrants combined with the not-so-veiled anti-Semitism of attacks against “globalist” forces helped FIDESZ protect its right flank against the more extremist Jobbik party, which was seen as a potential competitor for FIDESZ votes. FIDESZ’s success in moving farther to the right on these issues was reflected in the fact that Jobbik showed signs of trying to moderate toward the center during the campaign for the April 2018 parliamentary elections. ³³ FIDESZ also used the threat of the potential financial costs of migrant resettlement and integration as a way to mobilize the Roma community before the election. Party representatives suggested that EU cohesion funds would be spent on migrants and would take away from the funds bookmarked for improving Roma integration. ³⁴

The other major benefit to this discourse was that it gave the FIDESZ-led government a way to reframe the scope and the context of emigration from Hungary. If migrants were only those that came from outside of Europe, then young Hungarians going to work in Western Europe could not be considered migrants. According to FIDESZ, what others called emigrants were really just young “adventurers” or “guestworkers” moving within a common European space. ³⁵ These Hungarians should be seen as Europeans exercising their right to mobility, temporarily working abroad, learning languages, and having experiences as is their right as EU members. ³⁶ Emigration itself was not the problem. However, Hungarians living and working abroad needed protection from being mischaracterized as economic migrants by other West European countries. When the then UK prime minister David Cameron visited Hungary in January 2016 to discuss his plan to restrict access to public assistance to UK migrants who had less than four years of residency, Orbán appeared sympathetic to the desire to restrict migrants’ right to benefits. However, he wanted assurances that this plan would not affect “Hungarians working honestly” in the United Kingdom, who should not be conflated with “benefit migrants” from outside Europe. ³⁷ While Cameron’s plan was never implemented, it is clear from years of discriminatory language by British politicians and media, ³⁸ as well as the overheated rhetoric of the Brexit Leave campaign in the United Kingdom, that anti-immigrant forces certainly consider Hungarians and other “East Europeans” to be part of the migrant population that they wished to restrict and regulate. More recently, the Hungarian government also pushed back against Austria’s decision in May 2018 to cut benefits for foreign residents and their families, appealing to “European regulations and European treaties” to prevent discrimination against Hungarians working there. ³⁹

While FIDESZ clearly preferred to downplay the reality of emigration and to keep the debate focused on the supposed threat of migrants coming into Hungary, Hungarian opposition parties attempted to use emigration as a wedge issue in domestic politics. The parties that had been shut out from power since 2010 saw emigration as way to criticize the government, particularly because far more Hungarians knew someone who had emigrated or was planning to emigrate than those who had actually interacted with a non-European migrant or refugee. The parties on the center and left of the political spectrum used emigration as a way to highlight the negative consequences of FIDESZ’s populist nationalism and to point out weaknesses in its economic and social policy. For example, a representative of the center-left Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) placed the blame on FIDESZ’s failure to provide an economic future for the country’s working-age population and repeatedly called emigration “another, modern Trianon for Hungary,” ⁴⁰ making a pointed comparison to the 1920 treaty that caused Hungary to lose two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its population after World War I. FIDESZ’s competitor on the right, Jobbik, gained much of its support from a younger demographic, which was a significant proportion of those emigrating, giving the party every incentive to politicize emigration. Gábor Vona, formerly head of Jobbik, called the emigration of young people Hungary’s “biggest problem,” emphasizing that “this is all on Orbán” because the youth feel that the game is rigged against them. ⁴¹

These criticisms gained additional salience in June 2017 when the Hungarian press reported on the results of a study showing that around 1.2 million Hungarians planned to look for work abroad in the future, with around 40 percent of young people (those under thirty) considering emigration. ⁴² Those surveyed blamed emigration intentions primarily on low pay, the FIDESZ government, and poor economic conditions. Polling data from July 2017 also suggested that more people (54 percent) considered emigration to be a major problem for Hungary than refugees (39 percent). This poll also reflected an overall drop in concern about refugees compared to emigration from a high in 2015, when more refugees were physically present in Hungary. ⁴³ Given the domestic interest in emigration and the highly partisan politics of blame surrounding it, it is no surprise that the six main parties running against FIDESZ in the 2018 parliamentary elections all included emigration as a key issue in their campaign platforms. ⁴⁴ Jobbik’s language in its platform was the most dramatic, calling emigration a “demographic catastrophe,” but all blamed FIDESZ for the problem, specifically the conditions of low wages, high corruption, and the lack of social and economic infrastructure. ⁴⁵ For its part, FIDESZ did not even bother to put out a campaign platform, and certainly did not focus on emigration in the months and weeks before the April 2018 election. Despite the politicization of emigration, FIDESZ still managed to maintain its governing majority in the election, demonstrating the party’s hegemonic position, the overall weakness of the opposition parties, and the relatively successful mobilization of fear since the previous election in 2014.

Migrants versus Mothers: Selective Demographic Engineering

FIDESZ’s discursive strategies of redefining and demonizing migration and mobilizing fears of external threats generated another set of challenges for Hungary’s governing party. How could the government respond to reports of demographic decline when its leaders had reviled immigration as an unacceptable threat and argued that emigration was not really happening? I argue in this section the politics of migration, mobility, and demographic change in Hungary were reflected not just in discourse but in policy as well. The government has employed social and economic policy to create hierarchies of Hungarians within and outside the country and used the rhetoric of external threats caused by migration to justify these policies. Constrained by the political sensitivities around emigration, the FIDESZ government engaged Hungarian emigrants in Europe only minimally. Domestically, FIDESZ embraced a form of “demographic nationalism” that sought to exclude non-Europeans from entry while promoting “selective pronatalism” among the Hungarian middle class. ⁴⁶ Finally, the FIDESZ government opened the door to more ethnic Hungarian migration as it looked to ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries, particularly those from the non–EU member states of Serbia and Ukraine, as a form of non–culturally threatening demographic and labor-market replacement.

The party’s need to mobilize the perceived threat of migration and deflect attention from emigration has shaped the Hungarian government’s responses to the issue of demographic decline, which Orbán has described as Hungary’s “Achilles heel.” ⁴⁷ We can see this is in the government’s reluctance to include discussions of emigration in policy approaches to demographic change in Hungary or in its broader external engagement policies. As I suggested in the previous section, this is partly because of FIDESZ’s political sensitivities around the concept of emigration, but also because policies to prevent emigration or incentivize return can be costly and have relatively low levels of success. ⁴⁸ Earlier, FIDESZ attempted to deal with emigration in a limited way through creating financial incentives for some Hungarians abroad to return or by penalizing those who might leave, but such policies have not been terribly effective. For example, the FIDESZ government created a quite modest return program for young Hungarians working abroad in 2015 titled “Come home, young people!” (Gyere Haza, Fiatal!), which aimed to help young emigrants to find jobs back in Hungary. This was the first attempt by the Hungarian government to specifically reach out to intra-EU emigrants, but the program proved to be ineffective and was eventually shut down with little fanfare by May 2016. ⁴⁹ Legislation introduced in 2013 made any university students funded by government money sign an agreement that they would stay in the country for a certain period of time after they graduate. These policies were clearly attempts to discourage emigration, but were seen as unlikely to have little impact other than to make university education in Hungary “seem less attainable and more risky.” ⁵⁰

While other states experiencing significant emigration have chosen to promote policies to engage recent emigrants as potential diaspora communities, ⁵¹ this was not an option for FIDESZ, as this would involve admitting that Hungarians had left and were largely not planning to return. Orbán’s aversion to the idea of emigration helps explain the curious lack of any substantial discussion of out-migration in the government’s official policy documents regarding migration, and the marginalization of emigrants within key institutional structures. For example, emigration is barely addressed in Hungary’s Migration Strategy for 2014–2020 passed in 2013 nor in a 2016 report by the State Secretary for National Policy on “Hungary’s Diaspora Policy: Strategic Directions.” ⁵² This is a significant contrast to the migration and diaspora strategies of states with even higher rates of emigration, such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, which devote a great deal of space in their strategy documents to the issue of managing both immigration and emigration flows. ⁵³ The Orbán government also instituted a number of cultural programs to strengthen Hungarian identity in diaspora communities, but these have little relevance for young, mobile emigrants in Western Europe. ⁵⁴ Hungarian emigrants are a difficult external population for the FIDESZ government to manage since they are less likely to support the governing party, cannot be placated easily through symbolic politics, nor are they organized in such a way to help lobby and protect Hungary’s international image, like the Hungarian diaspora in the United States or Canada.

Given the political and practical difficulties of managing emigration and the disdain for immigration, the FIDESZ government has chosen to respond to demographic deficiencies and labor market shortages within Hungary through “social selective population policies” that incentivize and subsidize middle-class families that have multiple children. ⁵⁵ The government’s version of demographic nationalism includes neonatalist policies to provide material incentives for middle-class families to have more babies, for example, through the Family Housing Allowance Program (CSOK), which provides subsidized loans for families to build or purchase homes when they have or promise to have multiple children, ⁵⁶ and policies introduced in 2019 to eliminate taxes on mothers with four or more children. ⁵⁷ On one hand, such policies support the conservative gender norms underlying the government’s “familialist policies” that promote marriage, women’s duty to bear children, and the primacy of “Christian values.” ⁵⁸ They are also policies meant to provide subsidies for key political constituents in the middle-class, and to exclude other members of the population. For example, members of Hungary’s Roma community are often shamed or given very little state support when they have multiple children and are clearly not the target population for subsidized home-building loans. These policies also further justified the government’s illiberal antidiversity and anti-Islamist policies. Building walls against refugees and refusing resettlement quotas were framed as ways to protect Hungary from demographic changes that would challenge the key moral and cultural components of the nation. ⁵⁹ As such, the FIDESZ government decided not to sign the Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women in part because the real threat for women was the culture transmitted by “millions of migrants” arriving in Europe who are violent and do not respect women. ⁶⁰ The state’s efforts to prevent migration and maintain Hungarian culture would protect women without such treaty-based interventions.

The FIDESZ-led government has also instituted policies that make it easier for ethnic Hungarians throughout the region to live and work in Hungary, in part as a way to attract Hungarian-speaking labor to the country. Hungary’s decision in 2010 to allow non-resident ethnic citizenship for those with Hungarian ancestry and language competency in particular increased opportunities for mobility among Hungarians throughout the region. The expansion of nonresident Hungarian citizenship by the FIDESZ-led government in 2010–2011 was framed in part as a way to incentivize continued cultural and political identification with the Hungarian nation by those external to the Hungarian state. However, while Hungarian citizenship—and voting rights—may help to solidify identification with the Hungarian nation and the Hungarian state political sphere, it also serves to increase the migration potential of Hungarians in the region, particularly those from non-EU member states, such as Ukraine and Serbia. ⁶¹ Polling data have shown that the practical benefits of Hungarian citizenship, including the ability to work and live more easily in other states, have been among the main motivations for applicants. ⁶² In addition, more and more analysts have come to the conclusion that the potential out-migration of minority Hungarians from countries neighboring Hungary was not simply an unintended consequence of the policy, but part of a strategy by governing Hungarian policymakers to minimize its demographic and labor market problems by drawing workers of Hungarian nationality to Hungary. ⁶³ In addition, the government has lowered work eligibility requirements for Ukrainian and Serbian citizens, with the intention to make it easier for Hungarian speakers to migrate there for work. ⁶⁴ These policies were a way for the government to engage in selective replacement migration, while providing more mobility to minority Hungarians not yet in the EU. ⁶⁵ However, there is little evidence to suggest that policies to incentivize coethnic migration can actually fill demographic deficits in the long term. ⁶⁶

Migrants versus Minorities: Creating a Regional Hungarian Nation

The FIDESZ government’s selective approach to the country’s demographic problems, as described above, generated another set of potential policy and discursive challenges for FIDESZ and its government. The FIDESZ party has long staked its nationalist credentials on being the primary advocate for and defender of the Hungarian minority communities in neighboring countries, ⁶⁷ and has repeatedly argued that assimilation and out-migration from those communities are the biggest threats to the survival of the larger Hungarian nation. So, how could FIDESZ plausibly maintain its focus on “transsovereign” nation-building, while at the same time making it easier for ethnic Hungarians to leave their homelands? Here, I argue that the FIDESZ government has attempted to centralize and homogenize Hungarian minority political and cultural space to ensure Hungary’s continued enjoyment of the political and symbolic, but also economic and demographic, resources that those external communities represent. The regime has increased its funding for Hungarians in the region, reestablishing old and creating new patronage networks that will maintain support for FIDESZ throughout the Hungarian minority communities in neighboring countries.

The Hungarian state and its various governments have a long-standing commitment to help preserve and promote the communities of Hungarians living as national minorities in neighboring states, with the largest communities located in Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia. Hungary’s kin-state commitment was reflected in the Hungarian constitution beginning in 1989 when language was added that Hungary would “bear responsibility for Hungarians living outside the borders.” This commitment was then expanded by the FIDESZ-led government in the 2010 “National Cohesion” preamble to the new constitution, which declared that “all members and communities of the Hungarian nation, subject to the jurisdiction of other states, belong to a single Hungarian nation whose cross-border cohesion is a reality and, at the same time, a defining element of the personal and collective identity of Hungarians.” In addition, Article D was added to the 2011 Fundamental Law, which reflected a renewed commitment to protect Hungarians beyond the border: “Hungary shall bear responsibility for the fate of Hungarians living beyond its borders and shall facilitate the survival and development of their communities; it shall support their efforts to preserve their Hungarian identity, the assertion of their individual and collective rights, . . . and their prosperity in their native lands.” The Hungarian minorities have, therefore, been the main external subset of the nation seen as being deserving and in need of protection by the Hungarian state.

According to the Hungarian government, the main threat to the Hungarian minority communities is demographic decline, primarily via emigration and assimilation. The Hungarian minorities are framed by the Hungarian state as under threat from the assimilationist policies of their own states, and by poor economic conditions that prevent them from prospering, which then causes them to leave their communities. ⁶⁸ The emigration of Hungarians from the neighboring countries must be prevented because it weakens the political, cultural, and institutional strength of the minority communities, which is seen as a threat to the Hungarian nation as a whole. The goal of Hungary’s kin-state support, therefore, is to disincentivize the mobility of the Hungarian minorities so that they will stay where they are, both physically and in terms of their identification with Hungarian language and culture. As Árpád János Potápi, the State Secretary for Hungarian Communities Abroad, stated in 2015 about Hungary’s kin-state policies, “the most important aim is to halt demographic decline” in Hungarian communities abroad. ⁶⁹

But, how could the Hungarian government intervene into processes and developments that are primarily internal to the countries in which Hungarian minorities live? Hungary’s response has been to provide external sources of funding and institutional support that can serve “the economic prosperity of these communities, and also their demographic growth.” ⁷⁰ One way to do this has been to increase funding for Hungarian language educational institutions as a way to “encourage [young people] to stay in their homeland and try to live there, have children and enroll them in Hungarian schools.” ⁷¹ The Hungarian government has focused a great deal on Hungarian language education in the last few years, funding the creation of a new Hungarian-language university, Európa College (Európa Kollégium), in Serbia, and providing support for Hungarian primary schools in Ukraine. Hungarian public money has also become an increasingly important source of funding for Hungarian-language media in Transylvania, the area of Romania with the highest concentration of ethnic Hungarians. ⁷² Another policy response by the Orbán regime has been to fund a number of vocational and economic development projects in Hungarian minority communities as part of the project of combatting mobility and demographic change. For example, the government designated 2015 the year of “Hungarian Vocational Schools Abroad,” 2016 the year of “Young Hungarian Entrepreneurs Abroad,” and 2017 the year of “Hungarian Family Businesses Abroad” as a way of focusing Hungarian state funding initiatives for external Hungarians overseen by the Bethlen Gábor Foundation. ⁷³ Separate piles of money were also promised since 2015 to support the Vojvodina Economic Development Programme (around 160 million Euros) for minority Hungarians in Serbia to be overseen by the Association of Vojvodina Hungarians (VMSZ), the Egán Ede plan for Transcarpathia in Ukraine, which includes funding for Hungarian businesses, and the Mikó Imre plan for Transylvania. In addition, from 2015 on there was a rather large spike in overall funding from Hungary that appears to be rather nontransparent and is tied to political and patronage networks coming from Budapest. ⁷⁴

On one hand, the Hungarian government’s framing of Hungarians in neighboring countries as discrete and bounded communities that must be protected from demographic changes fits with the larger narrative about protecting the Hungarian nation from diversity and dilution. Similar to the supposed right of the Hungarian state to protect itself as it was “in the year 1100,” Hungary has framed its responsibility as ensuring that Hungarian minorities, whose ancestors “have been living here for a thousand years,” ⁷⁵ are given an elevated protective status above other minorities, and certainly above migrants. This constitutes a static and territorialized idea of cultural identification for the minority Hungarians in that they are only deserving of special rights and protections if they remain at home and resist the evils of emigration and assimilation. If they do decide to migrate, this is framed as a tragedy that must be prevented and as a failure of European policies on minorities, in contrast to FIDESZ’s downplaying of emigration from Hungary. Through the increase in extra-territorial funding and institution-building, the Hungarian government has also aimed to create a set of Hungarian minority economic, cultural, and education institutions that are directly linked to and guaranteed by the Hungarian state. Hungary’s kin-state policies have supported the project of “ethnic parallelism” in Hungarian minority communities: the creation of cultural, political, and social spaces in which minority Hungarians may have only minimal interaction with the majority language and culture. ⁷⁶ This serves the protectionist logic of pushing back against assimilation and the need for emigration, in addition to potentially creating more Hungarian economic opportunities throughout the region.

However, the increase in funding amounts and the positioning of Hungary as the central financial, informational, and political hub of a regional Hungarian nation also has problematic implications for the long-term goals of the minority Hungarians. First, it raises the stakes of patronage coming from Budapest, which may generate “loyalty-based competition” among Hungarian political actors and lead to factionalization within the minority community. ⁷⁷ These policies also constitute a form of “material outbidding” in which the Hungarian government becomes a more powerful source of financial goods than the state in which the minorities live. ⁷⁸ The homogenization of Hungarian political, economic, and social space leaves less room for minority agency and claims-making and risks the further financial and political isolation of the minority communities from their state of residence. ⁷⁹ There is also the irony that minority Hungarians have been asked to support the xenophobic, antimigration, and antidiversity policies of the Hungarian government while they are often the targets of xenophobic and antidiversity policies within their own states. For example, external Hungarians in the neighboring countries were urged by FIDESZ and their surrogates to vote against the EU’s mandates on refugee resettlement in an October 2016 referendum. ⁸⁰

Despite the tensions created for minority Hungarians as they try to make claims on their own governments, these kin-state policies are a winning proposition from the FIDESZ government’s perspective. The intervention into neighboring countries through the funding of ethnically parallel institutions is not a project of forced multicultural integration, like the one that Orbán rejects for his own state, but a way to institutionalize a regional Hungarian nation. In this sense, the entire system of kin-state funding for language and vocational training can be seen as a way to create a regional Hungarian labor pool as well as market that will benefit Hungary. Despite the issue of demographic decline within the Hungarian communities, FIDESZ has mostly been rewarded electorally for providing citizenship to nonresident Hungarians, with more than 95 percent of the voting-eligible external citizens supporting the governing party in the last two elections, at least in part to show loyalty to Orbán for the expansion of citizenship. ⁸¹ FIDESZ, therefore, gets credit for offering citizenship to minority Hungarians, but has not so far been blamed for their increased mobility, particularly if that mobility is confined within the regional Hungarian space with a “strong Hungary” at the center. The expansive, extra-territorial notion of Hungarian nationhood allows the government to discount mobility within Hungarian political space, and to base assessments of demographic and cultural strength on the identifications and actions of Hungarians throughout the region. It is not surprising then that FIDESZ clearly saw more advantage in extending its position of political hegemony by focusing on and mobilizing external voters in the ethnic Hungarian minority communities in surrounding countries, than by courting unhappy or globally minded Hungarian voters in Berlin or London.

Conclusion

More and more it is becoming clear that the European political, social, and economic space is one in which there is both increased transnationalism and, simultaneously, increased competition between groups. The case of Hungary outlined here shows how the discourses around populist nationalism—and their connection to fears and tensions around mobility, migration, and demographic change—both feed off and contribute to intergroup competition. Even groups within the same divided nation can be played off one another, depending on where groups are located, both physically and in terms of their position in a hierarchy of economic interest and symbolic importance to states, parties, and populist elites. There is also clearly a significant disconnect between the rhetoric of some state leaders against migration and cultural diversity and the reality of migration and mobility in which their own citizens and national members are engaged. As Gáspár Miklós Tamás has argued, leaders like Orbán are in fact engaged in “competitive immigration” within the EU, working hard to deny refugees access to the same West European labor markets on which they rely to provide jobs and social services to their own mobile emigrants, thereby “easing the burden” on their domestic budgets. ⁸²

At the same time, this moment of migration and mobility within and into Europe has created a “gathering sense of existential melancholy” surrounding national and Europe-wide demographic changes. ⁸³ Stoking these fears rather than addressing them through a broad set of policy responses is the tool of modern populists. In the case of Hungary, as I suspect elsewhere, the governing party has constructed the main opponent against which it must protect the nation as migration itself and, by extension, the diversity that it brings to societies. The practical problem with this narrative of protection is that there is not a great deal of migration into Hungary, a fact that seems to be reflected in some decreasing public concerns about migration, though this has not yet seriously weakened the purveyors of the narrative. Another issue is that constructing a discourse of protection against migration and mobility significantly narrows the Hungarian government’s possible responses to challenges faced by both Hungarian minorities in neighboring countries and its own emigrating citizens within Europe. The Orbán regime, therefore, is driven to actively fight mobility and its consequences in the former and to ignore or deny mobility and its consequences in the latter.

While FIDESZ’s rhetorical and policy strategies to maintain political hegemony under conditions of divided nationhood have so far been relatively successful, they have not been without costs. The rhetoric of antimigrant fear will likely lose some of its power to mobilize the longer that migration flows into the country remain negligible, and the demonization of external and internal actors and institutions will further isolate the government within Europe and may possibly jeopardize access to EU funds. If this happens, the funding strategies behind the government’s centralizing, patronage-based kin-state policies will be in jeopardy. Finally, emigration will continue to be a thorn in the governing party’s side, one that a more organized opposition could possibly exploit more effectively. While there is some evidence that emigration from Hungary has peaked and returns are increasing, there is no reason to think that a significant percentage of emigrants are coming home. ⁸⁴ As demonstrated by the 2018 protests in Romania, when emigrants do come home, they may demand more transparency and openness from their governments than those governments are willing to give, leading to domestic unrest. ⁸⁵