Liminal Populism—The Transformation of the Hungarian Migration Discourse

Alex Etl

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2022, vol. 37, issue 1, 115-132

Abstract: The Hungarian migration discourse has become important not only on a domestic level, but it was also able to thematize Europe-wide debates. Despite its influence, there is still a lack of understanding about how the Hungarian government has maintained its migration discourse during the past few years. Using discourse analysis, the present study fills this gap by focusing on the transformation of the governmental discourse. Whereas the governmental discourse could initially establish antagonism towards migrants and refugees, its turn towards internal actors disrupted this dichotomous structure. Ever since, the discourse has operated through an offensive and alienating frame as well as through a mitigation frame at the same time. The mixture of these two patterns as seemingly ambivalent yet interlocking tendencies characterizes the Hungarian governmental discourse that can be qualified as a liminal populist discourse. Liminal populism has the ability to maintain alienation and to blur social relations at the same time. Liminal populism is a flexible discursive strategy to decrease social pressure, while it is also a discursive necessity, an unsuccessful attempt to establish antagonism.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/08865655.2020.1735479 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjbsxx:v:37:y:2022:i:1:p:115-132

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjbs20

DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2020.1735479

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Borderlands Studies is currently edited by Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, Henk van Houtum and Martin van der Velde

More articles in Journal of Borderlands Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().