Translating Security across Borders: Staging the Migration Crisis in Hungary and Transylvania

Abstract

This article highlights the synergies between securitisation theory and the empirically rich literature on crossborder kin-state policies by underlining the unique dilemmas the logic of security brings to the fore in the transborder setting. Doing so, the article critically engages securitisation theory by focusing on two of its underdeveloped aspects: first, the concept’s relevance for non-liberal settings where securitisation can serve multiple goals other than justifying emergency measures; and second, how securitisation can unfold in a trans-border context and thereby disrupt the Westphalian notion of the unity of state, society and sovereignty. The way Hungary’s illiberal regime exported the securitisation of migration to its kin-minority in Transylvania provides the empirical backdrop for the article. Transylvania is neither a target nor a transit region; nevertheless, the securitising narrative resonated with ethnic Hungarians. To account for this resonance, the article relies on the concept of translation to show how local audiences in Transylvania reconstructed the exported meaning of security to suit their own identity, partly by linking it to their historical experiences – even turning it into banal everyday performances – and partly by seeing it as an opportunity to enact national unity and to demonstrate their loyalty to the securitising actor in Budapest, across the border.