Attending the “Charlie Hebdo” solidarity march in Paris, on 11 January, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán perhaps unintendedly struck at the heart of the matter, beyond endless debates regarding free speech and the ‘nature of Islam,’ by calling economic immigration “…a bad thing in Europe [...] because it only brings trouble and danger to the peoples of Europe.” He went on to elaborate:
“While I am PM, Hungary will definitely not become an immigration destination. We do not want to see significantly sized minorities with different cultural characteristics and backgrounds among us. We want to keep Hungary as Hungary.” (emphasis added) [1]
The meaning of these remarks is that immigrants endanger the welfare and values of people living in (morally and economically more developed) Western capitalist democracies. The so-called argument runs like this: “Our civil liberties and human rights were won through centuries of moral and societal progress, the result of countless sacrifices and difficult challenges. Now we must safe-guard our freedom and prosperity from those who seek to take advantage of them [i.e. terrorists, radical leftists, immigrants etc.].” This rhetorical constitution of the ‘enemy’ is characteristic of the symbolic and material patterns of inclusion/exclusion that any group must establish as a pre-requisite to its existence. Without clear and accepted rules of membership, groups cannot effectively function, and this is also true of democracies, where decision-making is intimately bound up with citizenship.
Diversity, whether ethnic, religious, or of opinion, complicates things in our contemporary capitalist democracies that submit to the logic of the global market and the interests of a transnational capitalist class. Diversity not so much questions as it demands the idea of politics as ongoing dialogue between alternative world-views and differently positioned social groups;this has been supplanted by the ‘austerity, security and innovation’ discourse of the European Union. The grotesque consequence is that our favourite authoritarian ‘villain,’ Viktor Orbán in fact openly expresses the fears and positions of ‘more respectable’ political figures. Let us not forget how EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker promised in Parliament “A New Start for Europe” that includes “securing the EU’s borders” with millions of euros of increased funding for its border control agency, FRONTEX.[2]
New political alternatives are hard to come by. In Hungary, the Migrant Solidarity Group (MigSzol) was founded in 2012 by refugees and asylum seekers living in reception centres and seeking a more humane and transparent treatment from the government.[3] Two years later this grassroots, non-hierarchical and consensus-driven groupalso includes Hungarians and expats (many of them from CEU), who dedicate their time, efforts, and passion to build a more inclusive society and a more open kind of politics. This includes giving voice to the immigrants attacked in Prime Minister Orbán’s comments in a recent demonstration in Budapest’s Deák Ferenc tér.[4] In contrast to mainstream political attitudes, MigSzol embraces diversity as something intrinsic to democracy and essential for the well-being of everyone, regardless of membership to states, unions or alliances.
Cătălin Buzoianu
Graduate, Sociology and Social Anthropology
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