Securitisation of migration crises in Hungary - 2015 and 2022 cases comparison

Abstract

Following the 2015 refugee crisis, the issue of migration became significantly more politically contensious across the European Union; however, the influx of Ukrainian refugees in 2022 posed a new challenge for Europe, specifically for states bordering Ukraine. Hungary has been in a spotlight of scholarly research around migration, with a number of researches highlighting the issues of refugees alienation, political othering and exclusionism. While there is a significant body of literature regarding the political and social context as well as implications of the 2015 migration crisis in Hungary, not much light has been shed on Hungary’s political discourse and its possible change following the new refugee influx of 2022, and specifically the discourse produced by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. This thesis uses Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the speeches of Viktor Orban that shaped the 2015–2018 and 2022–2023 migration discourses and employs a securitisation theoretical framework to assess how, if at all, the issue of migration has been securitised in the two cases and what securitisation narratives could dominate the discourses. The results of this research show that the 2015–2018 discourse contain significant securitisation which aligned with fundamentalist framing of Hungary and political goals of Viktor Orban, and suggest that the securitisation of migration was used as one of the tools to rally up the electorate for the 2018 parliamentary elections. However, the 2022–2023 discourse has shown evidence of multiple desecuritisation narratives, specifically concerning Ukrainian refugees, which could be attributed to the absence of need to legitimise new and possibly contentious policies, as Hungarian government followed the EU’s approach towards Ukrainian refugees.