Unequal exchanges and the radicalization of demographic nationalism in Hungary

Abstract

This paper analyzes the structural and discursive context in which Hungary is becoming a low fertility emigrant country during the refolding of the Hungarian society into the direct competitive mechanisms of global capitalism. These changes include the increasing demand for labor within the internally open European Union and other longer-term local developments which have uprooted and continue to uproot a large number of people in Hungarian and East European societies. Following the logic of structure versus discourse interplay in a global and local context, we first carry out a historical structural analysis of the key demographic processes. Then, policies and institutionalized norms are reviewed. Finally, we analyze the radicalization of wider and popular political discourses in order to complete a complex and dynamic analysis of Hungarian demographic nationalism and panic in the second decade of the Millennium.