Securitizing migration in contemporary Hungary: From discourse to practice

This chapter renarrates the ongoing Hungarian anti-migration campaign launched in 2015 as a case of securitization. It departs from observations claiming that the current Hungarian discourse on migration bears a striking resemblance to Western European discursive structures of the 1990s and early 2000s. Rather, despite its liberal borrowing of tried and tested frames, this chapter claims that the securitization campaign is unique due to the conditions underlying its inception and evolution. To highlight this crucial dissonance between discourse and context, this chapter relies on a refined version of securitization theory—one popularized by Thierry Balzacq—that moves beyond the narrow speech act focus of the Copenhagen School and expands it to include practices and processes of securitization. Securitization, seen as a pragmatic act, then invites three assumptions: effective securitization is audience-centered, context-dependent, and power-laden. This approach is used to highlight that, despite discursive similarities, various European societies are receptive to different constructions of security, which also include non-discursive elements. Through a case study, this chapter draws theoretical attention to the potential role of non-traditional desecuritization actors and to the role of non-policies as securitization tools, i.e., the elite’s deliberate neglect of an issue for the purposes of securitization.