Hungarian Border Politics as an Anti-Politics of the European Union

ABSTRACT

This essay contextualises Hungarian antipolitics of Europe as an element of radical conservative nation-building and as a reflection of the strategic use of borders. Two concrete examples of border politics will be elaborated that document shifts from EU-conformity to EU-contestation and the increasing political significance of culturalist arguments. These cases, moreover, are exemplary of the dual nature of then nationalist-conservative agenda which involves: 1) the implementation of an ethnopolitical and thus extraterritorial, de-bordered notion of nation and 2) the unilateral securitisation of Hungary’s borders, for example with Serbia, in a self-proclaimed defence of European integrity. The research that informs this essay is based on a review of media sources, academic and policy-focused literature. The essay begins with a discussion of links between Hungarian euroscepticism and the radical conservative nation-building project and continues with an analysis of post-1989 border politics with regards to the areas mentioned above. Considerable attention will be devoted to the Hungarian government’s politics of borders and contestations of European Union within the context of the so-called refugee crisis and wider debates regarding immigration and asylum.     

The End of ‘Central Europe’? The Rise of the Radical Right and the Contestation of Identities in Slovakia and the Visegrad Four

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the effects of the migration crisis and the parallel rise of right wing parties on national and regional identities in Slovakia and the broader subregion of the Visegrad Four. It argues that the recent right wing political discourse around migration has been reshaping the meaning of ‘Central Europe’ as a normative project and an identity shared by the V4 countries. The post-Cold War narrative of Central Europe was a story of ‘returning to the West’, which in practice meant that normative conformity with the West was a precondition of membership in key Western institution. The situation has changed visibly after the migrant crisis, as the V4 political elites have now been constructing new identities, in partial juxtaposition with Western European liberalism. These new identities favour a culturalist, conservative interpretation of the nation and reject humanitarian universalism, epitomized by the European Union’s decision to welcome the refugees. This arguably devaluates the previous notion of ‘Central Europe’ as a region that seeks to identify itself firmly with the West. Slovakia is chosen as a case study because of the recent success of the radical right in the 2016 parliamentary elections. The article concludes that although the situation of being structurally locked into the EU does not allow the V4 countries to openly challenge its main principles, the V4 political elites pursue a counter-hegemonic strategy, subverting and resignifying some of its key political notions. One should, therefore, speak not of an end of ‘Central Europe’ but rather of its evolution into a new, hybrid stage, where normative conformity and identification with the West will only be partial. The article makes use of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and related concepts as well as insights from constructivist geopolitics literature to track articulatory practices of the regional establishments. The study relies on evidence from recent political campaigning in Slovakia as well as official Visegrad Group documents from 2015 to 2016.     

A Popular Geopolitics of the Refugee Crisis in Europe: The Re-actualization of Identity-driven Geopolitical Narratives in Estonia

ABSTRACT

The article examines the question of how the refugee crisis in Europe re-actualizes the existing national geopolitical narratives and affects the border-(re)drawing of European political communities. I particularly refer to the Estonian experience, which I examine through two different case studies. The first one focuses on the refugee issue as seen from the perspective of fostering a less nationalistic and more heterogeneous identity in Estonia, expressed in the language of contemporary art. The second one addresses the perceptions of the refugee debate by Russian speakers in Narva who directly relate this question to their personal experiences with integration into Estonian society since the fall of the Soviet Union. I analyse both issues within the framework of popular geopolitics that tackles cultural representations of territories, spaces, and identity politics from the viewpoint of vernacular, home-grown, and routine meanings, to bring this culturally focused approach to the foreground of research into politically sensitive phenomena.     

Integration,Diversity, Plurality: Territorial Governance and the Reconstruction of Legitimacy in a European ‘Postnational’ State

This article deals with the European ‘legitimacy crisis’ from a neglected perspective, looking at ‘Europe’ not primarily as a set of formal (or formalisable) institutions, but rather as an emergent, policy-driven institutional construct. In this perspective, European integration may be very much seen as the outcome of the policies that are enacted in the European supra-national arena as well as of the way such policies are continuously reinterpreted, renegotiated and re-enacted in the different arenas of its multi-level polity. What is at stake in adopting a policy approach to the European legitimacy issue is, hence, a critical appraisal of development of processes of ‘institutionalisation of Europe’ that range far beyond issues of constitutional design. A crucial consequence is the need to ‘spatialise’ discourse on European reforms. The conclusion is a plea for an integration model for Europe not only constitutionally respectful of diversity, but constitutively enhancing diversity, and for an approach to policy reforms acting upon a ‘political geography of differences’.     

Conservative Developmental Statism in East Central Europe and Russia

ABSTRACT

Russia, Hungary and Poland have been at the forefront of the illiberal counter-movement to neoliberalism. However, while there is increasing knowledge about how ‘populism’ as a discursive strategy has brought illiberals to power, especially in Poland and Hungary, we know surprisingly little about the socioeconomic programme and guiding principles of illiberals. In this article, we argue first that there is such a programme and that – notwithstanding the differences between countries – it features a similar programmatic core in the three countries that took shape in conservative think tanks and guides socioeconomic policy recommendations. Second, this programmatic core is best understood not so much as populism, but as a combination of economic nationalism – subordinating the economy to national interests and to the imperative of protecting national identity – and conservatism, reorienting economic policies to serve the traditional family and undo the perceived wrongdoings of post-communist elites, in particular, privatisation. We call this core conservative developmental statism. Thus illiberalism is reducible neither to populism nor to the whims of the power-holders of the day, and in these countries it needs to be seen in a wider context in which rightwing intellectuals have been working in parallel with politicians to give illiberalism a conservative content.     

EU Eligibility,Central Europe,and the Invention of Applicant State Narrative

This article is about changing regional understandings in Europe and how those changed understandings reflect and shape contemporary geopolitical arrangements in the context of the eastward enlargement of the EU. It is argued in the article that two interrelated questions form the basis of the identity assumption of the eastern enlargement of the Union. First, where Europe's eastern boundary lies, and, second, how the eastern boundary is connected to the region-building, identity formation and moral language within the EU both at national and supranational scales. Special emphasis is given to a national moral language rather than to a supranational one, since, as argued in the article, national and European identities do not need to be mutually exclusive phenomena, but can bolster each other. The boundary between the EU and the 'East' is formed particularly through the national identity politics of the post-communist states applying for membership, and boundary drawing is a result of the 'European criteria' set down by the EU as well as the communist experience of the applicant states. It became a spatial strategy for the post-communist applicant states to locate themselves in historical and geographical Central Europe - the imagined moral heart of Europe - by separating themselves from the signifier 'East' in order to gain recognition as European in the early 1990s. This new narrative is argued to be particularly important for the post-Cold War national identity projects of the applicant states.     

Measuring Change of Capitalist Varieties: Reflections on Method,Illustrations from the BRICs

How to indicate institutional diversity and gradual change in capitalist political economies? What is the appropriate typological method, how could a suitable typology look? In the Weberian tradition, this article pleads for a method that rigorously distinguishes ideal types from empirical cases. Ideal types (like liberal capitalism) idealise reality by emphasising certain aspects, cases (like Brazilian capitalism) are hybrids more or less approximating the types. Contrasting static classifications that do not allow for gradual change, the latter has to be understood as the movement of cases in the field between the types. Using the state–economy and capital–labour relationships as criteria the article proposes a typology consisting of liberal, statist, corporatist, meso-communitarian and patrimonial types. Liberalism, statism and particularly patrimonialism are relevant for emerging economies. In the second half, the article illustrates its methodological recommendation by indicatively mapping institutional change from 1998 to 2008 in political economies that recently gained importance: the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Turkey and a few Eastern European ones. It turns out that most of them liberalised but that this change was rather modest in the BRICs, while it was more significant in Eastern Europe. Yet statism and patrimonialism appear still to be strong.     

Trade liberalization and political support in transition economies

Most transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe have rather surprisingly resisted protectionist pressures-at least during early stages of reform-and pursued fairly liberal trade policies. In this paper, trade policy during transition is explained from a political economy perspective. It is shown that pursuing liberal trade policies can be a rational strategy of reform politicians, maximizing the probability of electoral success.     

Globalisation and the Institutional Re-embedding of Markets: The Political Economy of Price Formation in the Bordeaux En Primeur Market

Contemporary analyses commonly attribute the global credit crisis to faulty regulation. What have been the roots of these deficient rules, particularly in Europe, where rapid spill-over from US markets took policy makers and observers by surprise? This article focuses on regulatory liberalism as the paradigm guiding European Union (EU) regulation. It has dominated regulatory thinking for decades, but it has been implemented throughout Europe only since the mid-1990s. This shift can be traced to political institutions that have filtered policy ideas. EU financial reforms have pushed policy from pragmatism, under which it was adapted to political contingencies, to dogmatism, which adapts it to the intellectual exigencies of rigid policy paradigms. Inadvertently, reforms had created an epistemic community in which ‘professional’ rule setters systematically ignored external criticisms. The institutionalised ambition to craft ‘intellectually sound’ policy–rather than policy that simply ‘works’ –generated rules that persistently ignored the financial markets' self-reflexivity and thereby aggravated the crisis.     

Watching out for regional separatism in the Russian far East: Ideological cueing of territorial security,economic incentives and cultural identity

Why has regional separatism failed to materialise in the post‐Soviet Russian Far East despite the region's remoteness from Russia's European heartland, its proximity to the Pacific Rim economies, the decline of economic support from Moscow, and a ‘frontier’ culture of resistance to Moscow's rule? Focusing on political developments in Primorskii Krai ‐ the key frontier province in the Russian Far East ‐ the study finds that territorial security, economic incentives, and cultural identity affect proclivities for regional separatism selectively, depending on ideological and institutional constraints in which centre‐periphery relations are embedded. In the absence of ideological commitments and enforceable institutional rales and norms, centre‐periphery conflicts devolve into economic bargaining and rule‐manipulation by elites for quick material gains. The changing ideological context amidst post‐Soviet institutional transition in Russia provide the most consistent explanation of conflict dynamic between Primorskii Krai's leaders and Moscow, of the non‐emergence of regional separatism, and of gross economic mismanagement of the province.     

Defence and Promotion of Desired State Identity in Russia’s Strategic Narrative

This article examines how the Russian state promotes and protects its preferred self-identity, using the conceptual framework of ‘strategic narrative’. Nation branding practices, including state-funded ‘mega-projects’ like the Sochi Olympics, have contributed to the narrative by characterising Russia as a welcoming, attractive destination. However, a more salient feature of Russia’s strategic narrative is intense ‘anti-Western’ and ‘anti-American’ political and media discourse, formulated to defend against rival, threatening narratives projected from other countries. Through analysis of official statements and state television content, this article demonstrates how determination to protect ‘great power’ and ‘European’ identities underlay Russia’s strategic narrative in 2014. It considers responses which the narrative has prompted, arguing that desired results in domestic reception have been achieved at the expense of unsatisfactory results internationally. Heavy-handed attacks on the identities of other states boost collective self-esteem among Russian citizens, but they fail to produce – and arguably obstruct – desired responses among foreign audiences.     

Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism

Ordoliberalism is the theory behind the German social market economy. Its theoretical stance developed in the context of the economic crisis and political turmoil of the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s. It is premised on the strong state as the locus of liberal governance, and holds that economic freedom derives from political authority. In the context of the crisis of neoliberal political economy and austerity, and debates about the resurgence of the state vis-à-vis the economy, the article introduces the ordoliberal argument that the free economy presupposes the exercise of strong state authority, and that economic liberty is a practice of liberal governance. This practice is fundamentally one of social policy to secure the sociological and ethical preconditions of free markets. The study of ordoliberalism brings to the fore a tradition of a state-centric neoliberalism, one that says that economic freedom is ordered freedom, one that argues that the strong state is the political form of free markets, and one that conceives of competition and enterprise as a political task.     

International law as a negotiation tool in Banking Union; the case of the Single Resolution Fund

EU’s response to the recent Euro-crisis has involved a mixture of EU and international law, with the latter being linked to all the arrangements that may have fiscal implications for national Member States. The SRF embodies all the controversial characteristics of Banking Union. This article illustrates the legal implications that this political choice creates, and how the interrelation between the SRM, the SRF and the ESM, allows leading economies, including Germany, to control the resolution framework both before and after crisis. This raises questions as to the direction that European Integration is taking and its highly nationalised character.     

The Political Economy of Social Pacts in the EMU: Irish Liberal Market Corporatism in Crisis

The economic crisis is a collective action problem. In the absence of currency devaluations, eurozone governments are faced with the painful social process of wage devaluations. This paper examines the strategic choices facing the government and organised labour in how they respond to this problem. It will argue that the European Monetary Union contains an implicit neoclassical assumption that labour markets will automatically adjust to downward wage flexibility. This ignores the politics of collective bargaining. Labour relations systems are the most regulated of all markets. Based on this institutional embeddedness, the paper will outline a typology of political choices facing national governments: neoliberal market adjustment, national or sectoral concertation and euro-coordination. Institutional pre-conditions of collective bargaining mediate what strategy governments adopt. It will subsequently examine the case of Ireland that tried and failed to negotiate a national pact in 2009. Social partnership was a central institution of Ireland's political economy for 20 years but could not internalise the adjustment constraints of the current crisis. The voluntary and exclusive nature of Ireland's corporatist wage pacts weakened the power resources of labour and enabled the government to pursue a neoliberal strategy of adjustment. As an institution, it was dependent upon the political executive of the state.     

1917–2017: The Geopolitical Legacy of the Russian Revolution

The essays collected in this forum discuss the geopolitical legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917, one of the most momentous political events of the twentieth century. From a range of different academic disciplines and perspectives, the authors consider how the profound transformations in society and politics were refracted through space and geography, and how enduring these refractions proved to be. The authors focus on three themes that have been dominant in Russian affairs over the past century: 1)the problem of center-periphery relations, 2)the civilizational dynamics of Russia’s self-identification in relation to Europe and to Asia, and 3)the geopolitics of national identity.     

Resisting Protectionism after the Crisis: Strategic Economic Discourse and the EU–Korea Free Trade Agreement

In 2006 the European Commission announced its Global Europe strategy, which proposed pursuing a series of ambitious Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) premised on exchanging the EU's remaining ‘pockets of protection’ for market access. The first of these agreements was signed with South Korea in October 2010. This article asks how the Commission's Directorate-General (DG) for Trade could successfully conclude this agreement in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis. Given a strong mobilisation of protectionists with access to policy-makers, this liberal policy outcome cannot be explained purely in terms of institutional insulation, as in much of the literature on EU trade policy, nor be simply ‘read off’ from the material interests of societal actors. This article, therefore, develops a constructivist framework which broadens our understanding of the power of strategically invoked economic discourses. By developing a novel analytical strategy to determine the intentional invocation of such discourses, it is able to show how DG Trade constructed an ideational imperative for liberalisation in Global Europe, enabling it to overcome opposition to the EU–Korea FTA. Beyond its contribution to constructivist scholarship, this article draws attention to the neglected dimension of ideas in trade policy and highlights the continued purchase of neoliberalism after the crisis.     

Can a comparative capitalism approach explain fiscal policy activism?

This study investigates the implications of models of capitalism for the responsiveness of countries’ fiscal policies during business cycles using new data for member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and China. We expand the literature by adding the category of East Asian nonliberal capitalism to the established distinction of liberal market economies and nonliberal coordinated market economies. These three differ substantially not just in their fiscal policies, but also in monetary policies, degree of financial market orientation, exchange rate regime, and labor market organization. As in previous studies, we find that governments of liberal economies adopt more countercyclical fiscal policies. Departing from existing studies, however, among the nonliberal models of capitalism, (East Asian) state-led models have more countercyclical fiscal policies than (European) coordinated market economies, perhaps as countercyclical as liberal economies, both historically and during the 2007–9 crisis. This is due to less independent central banks, managed float of exchange rates, and limited financial market orientation and financial openness in East Asia, which allow for more active fiscal policy. Among political factors, left-of-center governments, fractionalized party systems, and election years are associated weakly with countercyclical fiscal policy, as expected. Labor market coordination and welfare generosity have unclear roles in regard to fiscal policy, a topic for future research.     

Europeanisation versus Euroscepticism: Do Borders Matter?

ABSTRACT

Several overlapping crises which affected the EU during the past ten years have recently aggravated. Especially the progressing refugee crisis, the persisting financial crisis and geopolitical turmoil in the EU’s neighbourhood contributed to the rise of anti-EU movements and diverse articulations of Euroscepticism. Although public opinion and mainstream political analysis have easily identified right-wing populism as one of the most important drivers, it is still doubtful if it can be equated with Euroscepticism without further ado. To date it is by no means clear how and where Euroscepticism exactly originates.     

ADMINISTRATIVE CHANGE IN THE EU: A CROSS‐COUNTRY EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE CONTEXTUAL DETERMINANTS OF NPM REFORM RHETORIC

Framed within the paradigm of New Public Management (NPM), structural reforms in the EU aimed at modernizing the public administrations of Member States (MSs) have long since been a priority area of the EU's economic policy. Since the 1990s, these reforms have been sharply intensified across European countries with the declared purpose of enhancing economy, efficiency and effectiveness in their national public sectors’ organizations. In line with the European Commission's recent research initiatives in search for novel quantitative data on NPM in the EU, this paper studies European parties’ NPM reform rhetoric. More specifically, it investigates the MSs’ institutional, economic and political context within which parties have declared their intention of reforming national administrative systems. Thus, it sheds light on the MSs’ domestic factors that are associated with the diffusion of the NPM values across the political discourse of EU's national parties.