The Consolidation of Polarization. Hungarian Discourses on Migration

Abstract

What discursive structures, interactions, and related material conditions have helped in the consolidation of polarization and the rise of an extreme nationalist counter-hegemony related to migration discourses? Utilizing Karl Polanyi’s conceptual framework, we advance a strong hypothesis that general marketization and market utopias have led to opposition among pro-market utilitarian, pro-EU, and nationalist anti-migrant and anti-liberal EU discourses. It seems that, in this, the change in migration processes themselves could be an important factor as they have embodied many of the tensions and contradictions of the neoliberal era. However, we need to focus on how to locate the exact historically evolving mechanisms linking marketization with polarization and the rise of the counterhegemony of anti migrant nationalism. In this complex realm, we also need to focus on the discursive mechanisms whose own autonomous and immanent role played out in interaction with material processes and conditions. In this paper, we focus on Hungary, which has become an exemplar in terms of the establishment of counterhegemonic anti-migrant nationalist discourses as opposed to the pro-European managed migration discourses of the 2010s. The analysis is based on 91 systematically selected articles from the overall pool in the period between July 2021 and March 2022. At the end of the paper, we briefly discuss, based on a few preliminary results, how public opinion approves of, follows, or has an alternative view concerning the discursive functioning of the media.