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

Introduction

By shifting the focus from securitising actor to context, post-Copenhagen theorists have opened a new avenue for research into how the logic of securitisation theory ‘travels’ to new locales. Travel has been understood both conceptually, and literally. The former literature investigates how the concept of securitisation can be detached from its liberal-democratic bias and put to work in non-democratic settings, ¹ whereas the latter explores the mechanism of translating a securitising discourse from one context to another. ² This article advances these two avenues of research by looking at the self-styled ‘illiberal’ Hungarian state ³ that has transferred a securitisation discourse on migration across its borders to its kin-minority in Transylvania, a region of Romania that is home to about 1.2 million ⁴ (self-reported) ethnic Hungarians. ⁵ Although we believe the concepts of securitising theory can and should be applied to empirical cases beyond the theory’s original narrow, Western European geographical focus, we also suggest that these case studies can contribute more than new stories. They also reveal a novel, more nuanced picture of how the practice of securitisation works.

We aim to enhance the theoretical discussion by linking the logic of securitisation-as-translation with the empirically rich literature on crossborder kin-state policies that explores the environment in which translation unfolds. Translation itself is a concept ideally suited for capturing how transferred meanings are recontextualised, reinforced or rejected by audiences in the target locale in a process that often renders these meanings radically different from what was intended by the originator. Translation consequently highlights that the process of securitisation is open-ended, dynamic, and most crucially, less securitising actor-driven than originally proposed by the Copenhagen School (CS).

In what follows, we empirically illustrate how translation is actively ‘made’ through agency, but also how it ‘happens’, how security narratives acquire new meaning as they encounter a new context through kin-state politics. Translation in this Latourian sense helps us loosen the actor-centredness of securitisation theory by radically opening up agency and showing how ‘things never unfold quite as planned’. ⁶ At the same time translation also highlights the role of the state as a boundary maker and enforcer. ⁷ We propose that translation can deliver a more nuanced understanding of transborder security dynamics that are otherwise unobtainable through generic terms such as ‘contextualization’ and ‘processual’ within traditional securitisation theory, or through a kin-state politics-based account that in turn would underplay the importance of the unique set of symbols and dynamics that characterises security-speak. Nevertheless, we do not see translation-as-security and kin-state politics as competing approaches. On the contrary, we argue that the literature on kin-state nationalism offers a rich conceptual framework that underlines the limits of the methodological nationalism of mainstream IR approaches to security, ⁸ while elevating the importance of the concept of translation in understanding security dynamics

We maintain that the constructed borderless ‘transnation’ ⁹ that serves as the setting for Hungary’s relations with its kin-minorities offers a unique ‘laboratory’ for investigating these dynamics. What makes this laboratory interesting is that here, the securitising state (Hungary) is not merely inspiring other states to imitate practices, ¹⁰ but actively exports securitisation to the new locale, that is, it acts as a quasi-sovereign beyond its borders. This scenario is seemingly at odds with Westphalian notions of unity between state-society-sovereignty, but is not uncommon for states with considerable ethnic minorities in neighboring countries. In such states, as Rogers Brubaker ¹¹ explains, the term nation-state masks a contradiction: unlike in other parts of the world, the state and the nation are not coterminous. Whereas the nation is a concept rooted in culture, the state is the institutionalised rule over a territory. For kin-state elites and kin-minorities, the ‘national question’ has been about navigating this division. ¹²

Within this transnational context, borders are double-faced, and pose particularly problematic sites for security narratives to unfold in. Securitising discourses like those on migration often depict borders as hardened lines of defense. ¹³ At the same time, transnationalism calls for national unification across borders, that is, for borders to become so porous that they cease to matter as dividing lines within the same ‘national space’. ¹⁴ The Hungarian government’s securitising campaign on migration, launched in 2015, brought this issue and its paradoxes starkly to the fore when a militarised border fence was constructed on the Serbian-Hungarian border to protect the Hungarian homeland from migrants and refugees. Since the fence was completed in September 2015, the government repeatedly voiced its readiness to extend it towards the Romanian-Hungarian border. ¹⁵ The representation of borders was crucial in the political spectacle of symbolically constructing the ‘Migrant Other’ and Hungary as the threatened ‘We’. ¹⁶ But if closed borders are the only measure capable of defending Us (as the securitising narrative suggests), then what will happen to those Hungarians who end up on the other side of the fence, in Vojvodina (Serbia) ¹⁷ and Transylvania? How could the securitisation of migration resonate with the Hungarian minority in Transylvania despite the symbolic paradoxicality of rematerialised state borders is the first element of the empirical puzzle that underlines our research.

The second element concerns how Hungary’s illiberal regime exported its securitisation campaign on migration to Transylvania. One of the pivotal events in the transfer of the Hungarian campaign to Transylvania was the 2016 referendum on the proposed European Union (EU) relocation quota system. As Hungary extended non-residential citizenship to kin-minorities in 2010, and non-resident voting rights in 2011, transborder Hungarians became a target audience for mobilisation campaigns originating from Budapest. What is puzzling about the case is that Romania is neither a target nor a transit country for migration, so Transylvanians had little to no personal experience with the ‘migration crisis’. Nevertheless, the securitising narrative resonated among this particular region’s ethnic Hungarians as they flocked to the voting booth and voted for the Hungarian government’s preferred option. These two elements combined form the central question of the article: How was it possible that the securitisation narrative resonated with the Transylvanian community, even though 1) the symbolically central securitising instrument ¹⁸ (the fence) meant to protect the nation actually separated kin-minorities; and 2) Transylvanians had little to no experience with the kind of mass migration that was depicted in the securitising campaign?

Due to the high penetration of Hungarian state media into the region, the securitising narrative could readily reach the kin-community. In fact, constructing a narrative for Transylvania was a necessity for the securitising actor. Since Transylvanian Hungarians get most of their news from Hungarian state and commercial television, ¹⁹ security narratives tailored for domestic consumption immediately reach the kin-community across the border, and necessitate sense-making.

We stress that a verbatim transfer of the Hungarian discourse to the kin-minority would have simply failed due to the aforementioned lack of ‘factual’ experience with migration, and the problematic symbolism of borders. To make sense of the apparent success of discursive transfer, we assume that a translation of the securitisation narrative happened, and it had to happen. Although the problem of context and audiences have often been explored by securitisation scholars, ²⁰ the issue of cross-context securitisation, or security as translation is a fairly recent addition to securitisation studies. ²¹ Holger Stritzel ²² for instance suggests that when security discourses travel, the meaning of security is always locally produced, involving a multitude of actors, audiences and discursive encounters, leading to a complex and open-ended process of social construction.

We understand translation in the Latourian sense where translation is not merely a linguistic operation on language (relating versions of a text in one language to versions in another one), but a process of negotiation through which meanings, claims, and interests change and gain ground. For Latour, translation has a distinct geometric meaning, that is, moving from one place to another. ²³ Translation in this understanding is not exclusively actor-driven. The Latourian understanding also emphasises that, given differences in historical legacies and experiences between new and original locales, the same utterances resonate differently in a new context in ways that are radically different from the one intended by the securitising and functional actors involved. Although the securitising actor may be aware of this transformative aspect of the target locale and may try to alter their message accordingly, translation would take place even without these agential attempts at context-specific transformation. In our case, even though the securitising actor actively sought to adjust and interpret the core narrative for Transylvanians, the security narrative was nevertheless heavily recontextualised by local political actors, and by the audience (the ‘ordinary Transylvanian voter’). Translation in this Latourian sense can overcome the limitations of the vagueness of constructivist concepts such as ‘context’, ‘process’ and ‘transformation’ by emphasising that meanings are created by a network of actants each adding acting on its own agenda. These actants are not mere intermediaries but mediators who transform, modify and also distort meaning. ²⁴ Put simply, we see the merit of using the concept of translation in that it juxtaposes the transformative effects of conscious agency and socio-political/socio-linguistic context (the locales), and investigates these in unison.

The wider context of our article are the politics of Hungary’s self-described illiberal, semi-authoritarian regime. In our analysis of how illiberal systems approach securitisation, we build on works by authors like Vuori, ²⁵ Wilkinson ²⁶ or Holbraad and Pedersen ²⁷ who apply securitisation theory outside of the confinements of western democracies in order to problematise the theory’s liberal/democratic bias rooted in essentialised, Euro-American notions of democratic politics. ²⁸ These authors highlight that securitisation theory is capable of ‘conceptual travel’, but with the caveat that securitisation in non-democratic contexts is often used for purposes other than seeking legitimacy for breaking the rules, primarily because the CS’s insistence on the clear separation of normal and emergency politics is untenable in non-democratic settings. By not treating normal and emergency as ontologically separate realms, but as a continuum, one opens up a range of varied, securitisation-supported policy goals for investigation at different levels of emergency, ranging from mundane, everyday practices to constructed national security crises.

The logic of security can be used instrumentally for various political purposes in an illiberal setting. Illiberal democracies, despite their turn towards more authoritarian forms of governance, still feature remnants of the democratic process, mostly in the form of elections. ²⁹ Put simply, the elite requires electoral victories to stay in power. Therefore, the audience – in this case the electorate –retains partial agency. Legitimacy is required, just as in non-democratic systems, and securitisation can be used to mobilise the audience according to election cycles. Another important function that securitisation can fulfil is maintaining support among supporters, delegitimising opposition movements, and maintaining a general political apathy among non-supportive segments of the electorate. ³⁰ As the political elite approaches an expanding array of policy issues through securitisation, the boundary between normal and emergency politics becomes gradually blurred, the normal political discourse becomes warlike and security logics become normalised in the everyday. ³¹ Since securitisation involves enabling the sovereign to exert control, securitisation helps propel the regime further away from a democratic ideal type. In addition, security logics, through the introduction of new threats help maintain an atmosphere of uncertainty, where both certainty and security can only come from the regime itself, thereby cementing its power. ³² A final characteristic of illiberal regimes is their control over traditional functional actors, such as the media, the parliamentary opposition, and courts. As these actors are taken over or sidelined by those in power, the possibility of counternarratives against governmental securitising acts becomes negligible.

Through highlighting the normalised, everyday aspects of securitisation, we illustrate how illiberal regimes capitalise on power asymmetries to effectively use fear politics for the purposes of mobilisation in two different arenas: in Hungary, and among ethnic Hungarians across the border. In both cases, the Hungarian government performs the role of securitising actor, and Hungarian (state) media acts as the key functional actor enhancing securitising moves. ³³ Our case study focuses on the period of 2015-2016 when the state-funded anti-immigration media campaign culminated in the referendum on the proposed European quota system. The campaign aimed at mobilising people in both locales in support of the government. Transylvanian Hungarians were directly targeted in the campaign, ³⁴ and ultimately showed overwhelming support for the government’s position in the referendum. Crucially the turnout rate was higher in Transylvania than in Hungary proper.

The article is structured as follows. First, we will explore how the case of crossborder securitisation between a state and a transborder ethnic community can be situated in relation to the burgeoning literature on kin-state politics. Next, after a brief discussion of security as cross-context translation, we will situate our research within the broader literature on the problem of context and audiences in securitisation, and link these to our empirics. Before moving onto Transylvania we will introduce the Hungarian immigration campaign that is being translated to the Transylvanian context. The Transylvanian case study itself is structured into three subsections that deal with the institutional context, the role of the historical context in the mobilisation of local audiences, and voting as performed identity, respectively. Finally, we draw some general conclusions from the case regarding translation as cross-border securitisation, and offer ideas for further application of the framework.

Kinstate Politics and Transborder Securitisation

The empirically rich literature on kin-state policies talks about how states seek contact with kin-minorities across borders, both for affective and instrumental reasons. ³⁵ Kin-state politics are by no means a new phenomenon, and they are well-documented in the case of post-Communist Hungary and its quest for national reunification with its kin-minorities ³⁶ through a sort-of ‘virtual irredentism’ ³⁷ that eschews border change. Hungary’s kin-state activism has been most intense under the Orbán governments (1998-2002, 2010-), and primarily towards the largest transborder community in Transylvania. In the past three decades, scholars of Hungarian kin-state policy towards the region have studied how the Hungarian government has established and institutionalised communication channels with its kin minority; ³⁸ how the local party structure evolved under the umbrella of Hungarian policies; ³⁹ how Transylvanian Hungarian communities cope with minority life and how they see their kin-state; ⁴⁰ how the extension of citizenship and non-residential voting rights have changed the internal politics of the kin-minority; and how Transylvanian Hungarians experience voting in Hungarian elections and referenda as an expression of their identity. ⁴¹ These latter two topics deserve special mention: 2010 was a turning point in Hungarian kin-state politics as it marked the introduction of non-resident citizenship and voting rights, which suddenly multiplied the importance of mobilising transborder Hungarians for domestic elections, and reinforced the governing party FIDESZ – Magyar Polgári Szövetség’s central role in national re-unification. ⁴²

Our analysis situates transborder securitisation within this conceptual context. We make the general claim that the symbolism of borders, which is key to kinstate politics as well as transborder securitisation, necessitates translation. Showing how securitisation across borders inescapably involves translation, we mount a critique towards methodological nationalism that characterises mainstream IR, and to a lesser extent, the actor-centredness of the kin-state literature. We maintain that a kin-state approach, where the three main actors are essentialised as the kin-state, the host-state and the kin-minority, ⁴³ would yield a limited account of what unfolds as a securitising agent crosses state borders. Through the juxtaposition of the interests of this trio, kin-state-based analyses focus on policies which target the kin-minority through pre-established institutional channels. The policies themselves can range from education to business grants and cultural exchange, and are framed by the relationship between kin- and host-state.

Yet this conceptual framework is unable to highlight the qualitative difference of security issues in the kin-state-kin-minority relationship. Security namely possesses a unique set of symbols and dynamics: it is about existential threats, immediacy, and emergency measures. Although the main actors are the same, security narratives differ radically from those that are meant to make sense of normal political issues, such as education. Granted, even mundane policy issues within Transylvanian ethnopolitics are frequently framed in terms of ‘ethnic reproduction’, ⁴⁴ i.e. societal security. Yet we contend that the way the Hungarian government securitises migration epitomises security beyond this traditional use, because the migration-related security narrative does not target the local community in Transylvania like most kin-state policies do, but is explicitly limited to the territory of the Hungarian state in its policy measures.

Although building a border fence was crucial in the construction of the threat of the Migrant Other, it also cut across the community, symbolically distancing kin-state and kin-minority. The way migration has been securitised in Transylvania further reinforced this internal contradiction: the narrative both claimed that the Hungarian nation was united and under threat, and that the Transylvanian community could only be defended by a border fence that separates the nation and reinforces borders. The border fence therefore needs to divide and unite at the same time. Interestingly, the literature on nationalism and kin-state politics is largely blind to this contradiction regarding the securitisation of migration.

What is central to our analysis and cannot be explained exclusively through a kin-state politics-based account, is the apparent success of the securitisation campaign in Transylvania. The above contradictions could only be bracketed through the process of translation, which in turn enabled mobilisation. Translation moves the analytical focus from policy to process, and highlights all its actants: how agency (the securitising actor and local functional actors seeking to reframe a message) and context together (re)shape meanings. Crucially, Transylvanians did not necessarily subscribe to the purported threat of migration on the same level as their kin in Hungary. Nevertheless, they mobilised more successfully. This is not a case of blind loyalty, but meaning construction that enables mobilisation: when encountering a distant threat and a contradictory message from Budapest, Transylvanians turned securitised migration into theatre. Security became part of the banal, the everyday, and voting once again became a symbolic act to enact their identity.

Through this logic, we link securitisation/translation back to the kin-state literature by highlighting how the logic of security can render inherent contradictions between nation-building and territorial sovereignty more visible; how the securitising actor from the kin-state uses pre-existing institutional channels of crossborder communication to translate its message; and how traditional ways of coping with minority life can be exploited to smooth over the inherent dissonance of this message. Translation namely did not unfold in isolation, but in the very socio-political context that kin-state scholarship explores. Thus, our analysis can capitalise on the strengths of the kin-state literature, and at use it as a setting to explore and expand upon the logic of security-as-translation.

What is Being ‘Sold’: Securitising Migration in Hungary

The contemporary securitisation of refugees in Hungary is generally dated back to the aftermath of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán first labelled migration a security threat both to Europe and Hungary. ⁴⁵ Following Orbán’s remarks, key politicians of the government elite also voiced their concern about migrants, and in late Spring 2015 a coordinated securitisation campaign was launched, with the so-called ‘National Consultation on Migration and Terrorism’. Here, ‘national consultation’ refers to a sort of pseudo-referendum that the FIDESZ government relies on to mobilise its core electorate and assess public opinion on government-mandated frames. ⁴⁶ The consultation was supported by a well-orchestrated media campaign, which was launched months before the summer wave of refugees hit the country in 2015. ⁴⁷

Ever since the Spring of 2015, the rhetoric of the government vis-à-vis migration has been consistently very harsh, and, in terms of the frames it relies on, has largely mirrored that of anti-immigration politicians of European receiving states. ⁴⁸ The narrative gradually moved along the three common axes of securitised migration, initially framing migrants as an economic threat, then, as the title of the national consultation shows, expanding to the threat of terrorism, eventually reframing migration as a threat to culture and national identity, wherein economic and hard security threats are directly derived from the alien culture of the migrant. Culture here is used broadly, and includes cultural and religious differences, a threat to ethnic homogeneity, and a threat to national tradition. Using the identity-based master frame, migrants are depicted as threatening to Hungarian culture, but also European civilisation at large, both defined as exclusively Christian. Underlying this Us versus Them opposition is the strong national myth that a homogeneous Hungarian society exists (and expands across state borders), and that a loss of cultural and ethnic homogeneity would threaten social order. Within this frame, the future of the community is a choice for or against migration, leaving no middle road open for a more nuanced treatment of a complex issue, especially in terms of the state’s obligation to protect refugees, or an intra-EU quota system for treating asylum seekers.

Building on the success of the initial campaign, the government introduced its most controversial ‘emergency measures’: a fence along the Serbian-Hungarian border completed in September 2015; and modified the penal code in order to render illegal border crossings a criminal act. With these measures, the securitising act seemed successful: public opinion polls have consistently shown a considerable increase in xenophobia, ⁴⁹ the public discourse has markedly shifted away from humanitarian frames, and the above emergency measures were in effect.

The process was not unopposed, yet opposition hardly hindered securitisation. ⁵⁰ The logic of securitisation envisions the elite engaging in discursive contestation about the motivation and identity of migrants, often forcing a clash with other actors aiming to prevent securitisation or to desecuritise the issue. Securitisation is thus a contested process conditioned on power relations between the securitising actor and various audiences/veto powers. In the Hungarian case, however, political power relations are extremely asymmetrical. Due to FIDESZ’s dominance of the media, competing frames offered by the opposition and local NGOs received little to no visibility. As both the judiciary and parliament had been filled with party loyalists, other, traditional veto powers also lacked the ability to desecuritise. ⁵¹

Thus, we could easily conclude that the securitisation attempt was extremely successful. However, this seemingly straightforward process of securitisation still bears some perplexing characteristics. First, despite the theory’s suggestion, the introduction of the aforementioned extreme measures did not require audience acceptance. FIDESZ held a constitutional majority in parliament at the time of our investigation, and had already introduced a number of contentious policies against considerable domestic and international protest (e.g. the new media law, the new constitution, the dismantling of checks and balances etc.), more often than not with practically no loss to its popularity. Nevertheless, we argue that this element only puzzling for the original formulation of the theory by the Copenhagen School. Once we add the non-discursive elements of practice-oriented securitisation, the border fence, for instance, seems more like a securitising tool (a non-discursive element of the securitising move aimed at communicating the securitising narrative), rather than a security instrument (a measure designed to combat the already securitised threat). ⁵² The fence clearly communicates a sense of threat, separating Us and the invading Other. With its physicality, it provides striking imagery to reinforce securitising narratives.

The second puzzling element of the campaign is the relationship between its intensity, the fluctuation in the levels of xenophobic attitudes, and the presence of the subject of securitisation: migrants. As mentioned, the campaign itself was launched before the summer wave hit Hungary, and xenophobic tendencies reached their all-time high during the media campaign leading up to the 2016 ‘quota referendum’, six months after the EU-Turkey deal, and more than a year after the completion of the border fence. The securitising attempts of the Hungarian government seem to resonate with their audience. ⁵³ Audience responsiveness can be attributed on the one hand to the historically high, and peculiar xenophobia of the Hungarian population (fear of the unknown, where fear does not require the physical presence of the Other), and on the other hand to the extremely asymmetrical power relations favoring the government to the detriment of traditional veto actors. The latter point is perfectly exemplified by the gross imbalance of the Hungarian media sector. ⁵⁴

Crucially, as we argue that this manner of threat construction is not specific to the migration crisis. The way refugees and migrants have been securitised since 2015 is also reflective of the workings of illiberal regimes, where fear politics attain an everyday status, and are used for various policy purposes. ⁵⁵ In such systems, othering is constantly used to mobilise, create uncertainty, justify extreme measures, and depict the government as the only source of security. Fittingly, the Orbán government has been constantly returning to the topic of migration since the campaign’s launch in early 2015. In fact, we see a gradual expansion of the campaign as the threats associated with mass migration are linked to further subjects, including EU bureaucrats, civil society actors critical of government corruption, the ‘Soros network’, and even critical Western allies like Germany or the US.

We propose that the key to understanding FIDESZ’s politics on migration lies in their performativity. Political spectacles are a recurring element of securitisation campaigns, they are used around constructed crisis situations and political myths, through which the sovereign is depicted as the only source of security, and a sense of belonging is established among the audience. ⁵⁶ What makes the Hungarian case so interesting is that political spectacles are a feature of almost every policy proposal of the FIDESZ government, so a warlike atmosphere is always present, and is periodically reinforced. This logic of governance operates on a sense of insecurity and fear even when it tackles banal policy matters like utility costs, banking costs, or decreasing the national debt. ⁵⁷ These issues are traditionally considered as part of the realm of normal politics, but here, they become rapidly securitised. This constant sense of fear and insecurity in turn normalises emergency measures and government infringement on civil liberties, and reinforces the Schmittian aspects of securitisation. ⁵⁸ These spectacles also fortify the image of an able and protective government, justify policy decisions, and also delegitimise political opposition to said policies as traitors and supporters of the Other. The modus operandi of the current Hungarian regime thus reinforces itself, and highlights the untenability of the CS’s clear separation of normal and emergency politics.

With these peculiarities of the Hungarian context in mind we now turn our attention to Transylvania to demonstrate how this campaign was gradually translated for the new discursive locale. Since translation theory leaves ample room for the exploration of both structure, agency, and their interaction, it is especially suitable for investigating the complex relations between the Hungarian sovereign and Transylvanian Hungarian communities.

Trans-border Securitisation – The Transylvanian Case

The literature on securitised migration indicates that the security discourse is deceptively standard across various locales. Migration is customarily securitised as either a hard security, an economic, and/or an identity-based cultural threat. Migrants and refugees thus often are presented as a source of terrorism, job loss, or cultural decline all across the globe. ⁵⁹ Though our case also shows elements of strong rhetorical correspondence, this surface-level similarity further highlights the need for investigating the context in which securitisation unfolds. Simply put, the image of the migrant/refugee stood for something very different in Transylvania, and buying into the narrative also had a very divergent meaning in the new context. The presence/absence of the Migrant likewise points the importance of context. Migration is a ‘non-issue’ in two very distinct ways in Hungary and Transylvania. Even though neither state is a target for migrants and refugees, Hungary served as a key transit country for migrant/refugee flows in 2015. Romania on the other hand is not one of the common transit, let alone target countries of the recent migration waves. ⁶⁰ Regions inhabited by ethnic Hungarians are not exempt from this trend. ⁶¹

In order to understand the Transylvanian context and its impact on translation, we will proceed to disentangle its elements: the audience, power relations between the securitising actor and local actors, and the framing of the threat. The institutional context is different in the two locales, and we must once again address the fact that Transylvania is the sovereign territory of another state. Yet, culturally, the audience has some key characteristics that make it receptive not just to securitisation, but to virtually any political message from the current Hungarian government. Therefore we will pay special attention to the role the historical context plays in the mobilisation of the audience. ⁶²

Local Hungarian communities, especially in areas where ethnic Hungarians still hold the majority, have decades of experience with being threatened by the Romanian majority not just through legal means (e.g. banning Hungarian education in schools), but also through forced resettlement during the Ceausescu era. For these communities, ethnic identity is therefore a salient element of the everyday. ⁶³ Not surprisingly, the Romanian majority has been frequently securitised as a threat to societal security. ⁶⁴ Given the Hungarian left’s general avoidance of identity politics since the change of regime in 1989, major support against perceived threats posed by the Romanian majority came predominantly from Hungary’s biggest right-wing party, FIDESZ. By granting non-resident citizenship and pouring funds into minority institutions in Transylvania, Orbán’s FIDESZ established itself as the representative of the unified Hungarian nation that transcends borders. ⁶⁵ Thus, Transylvanians generally look towards FIDESZ and its PM/chairman with a sense of gratitude and loyalty, which suggests that even if migration was hardly seen as a serious threat for some Transylvanians, the call to show loyalty to FIDESZ at the ballot box was still heard.

The Hungarian government’s 2015 campaign against refugees at first received mixed responses in Transylvania. For instance, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania/ Romániai Magyar Demokrata Szövetség (DAHR/RMDSZ) – the major Transylvanian Hungarian party – fiercely guarded its neutrality ⁶⁶ in Hungarian party politics. DAHR/RMDSZ was initially home to varying views on FIDESZ’s actions and the migration crisis itself. For instance, former party chairman Béla Markó, a veteran of Transylvanian politics, argued in a 2016 interview that migration was not a Transylvanian problem, and expressed concern over the Hungarian government’s ‘irresponsible fearmongering’ that preceded the ‘quota referendum’. ⁶⁷ Though expressing his private opinion, Markó’s stance was reflective of the plurality of voices within Transylvanian politics. This plurality, however, has weakened since 2015 when FIDESZ announced it would channel funds to RMDSZ’s party foundation. This event signalled the start of an unprecedented level of cooperation between the main Transylvanian ethnic party and FIDESZ. This pact then further facilitated the gradual reproduction the Hungarian illiberal regime’s asymmetrical power relations in Transylvania, from buying political loyalty with a windfall of Hungarian government funds, to the kin-state’s operatives taking over the local media landscape. ⁶⁸

Conclusion

By investigating how the Hungarian government (the securitising actor) exported a pre-existing securitising discourse to Transylvania (the new audience), we sought to shed light on the contingent, open-ended, and audience-centred nature of ‘security as translation’. Using translation analysis we highlighted in detail the ways in which the local sociopolitical and socio-linguistic context forced the securitising actor to reshape the narrative, and also how the transmitted narrative was appropriated and reshaped by this very context. The article showed that the transfer of security challenges across borders resulted in the expansion of the referent object into the societal sector, turning the migration threat into a proxy for fears of preserving the identity of the Community, with Community standing in for – in increasing concentric circles – the kin-community, the Hungarian (trans)nation and European Christian culture. This reframing of the immigration threat into concerns over identity channelled the migration crisis into the realm of minority politics, and thereby coupled it with concerns that the kin-community has been living with for close to a century. Crucially, this narrative did not trigger a sense of emergency in the new audience, which explains why the language of security could seep into everyday life. Existential fear in the immediate, psychological sense was absent in Transylvania, and security became a performative practice at the voting booth, and the village fair. This observation, we maintain, challenges mainstream securitisation theory’s reliance on a strong link between emergency politics and securitisation. Instead of a clear separation of normal and emergency politics, and the focus on the legitimation of emergency measures, our case study draws attention to how securitisation can become a spectacle in a government’s symbolic politics for national unification.

Our analysis reinforces the common proposition that migration-as-threat offers a perfect referent for identifying such circles of ‘Us’, given the diffuse nature of the threat and its strong cultural component. ¹⁰¹ This is especially the case in East Central Europe, where societies have largely been devoid of experience with mass in-migration. Therefore, mass migration towards the region has remained a diffuse and unseen threat that is suitable for othering and everyday fear politics, as we can see in a multitude of countries in the region. These intangible threats can be readily securitised through multiple frames, while still keeping up a sense of threat to mobilise citizens.

Two main observations follow from our discussion of the case. First, in Transylvania, securitisation was primarily used not for directly legitimising emergency measures, but for mobilising ethnic Hungarians to vote for the government-preferred option in an upcoming referendum, and later to support the governing party in national elections in 2018. The goal of mobilisation was to send a clear message about the domestic legitimacy of the Hungarian government to critical European elites. Second, due to the peculiarities of the domestic and kin-communities, what has transpired between the two locales points well beyond a linear transfer and transformation of pre-existing discursive frames. Instead, we offer the case study as an example of how the concept of translation can be utilised to understand the dynamic, non-linear and open-ended process of securitisation export, most crucially how audiences engage and enact meanings of security challenges.

The empirics we have presented in this article offer an intriguing way to see key concepts of securitisation theory in practice, and highlight ways in which these abstractions should be adapted to deal with the dynamism and idiosyncrasy of securitisation practices. One of the peculiarities of the Transylvanian case is that, unlike previous case studies on translation, it is an instance of not only the transfer of a securitising frame, but an extension – both geographical and societal – of a pre-existing frame and the discourse that carries it. Because of the division between state and nation, the securitising act of the Hungarian government is contradictory when viewed from Transylvania. In its Hungary-based anti-immigration campaign the government conflates state and society, rendering the borders of Hungary a first and last line of defense against migration as a threat to societal security, which justifies the construction of hard borders. But paradoxically, when talking about migration as a threat, the Hungarian government extends Hungarian society as the referent object to include ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries, including those in Transylvania. Meanwhile, and related to the previous points, the ‘emergency measures’ used by the Hungarian government – most notably the border fence – effectively cut the now expanded referent object into two, leaving Transylvanians on the other side of the fence.

These internal contradictions that frame the translation process pose challenges to both securitising actor and audiences in the new locale. But they equally draw attention to how securitisation-as-translation can be synergised with the rich literature on nationalism and kin-state politics. Similarly to Hungary, states like Russia or Serbia also possess kin-communities in neighbouring states (e.g. the Baltics, Kosovo and Bosnia) that were created by moving borders, rather than migration. These states show increasing kin-state activism and often rely on the language of security. ¹⁰² State media penetration into these kin-communities further increases the need for translating even narratives that were primarily tailored for a kin-state audience. The framework we offered in the article can be adopted to expand empirical research to these, and other cases.

In addition, there are further aspects of the case that make it a valuable contribution to theoretical debates. Earlier empirical studies on security as translation, for example Stritzel’s seminal work on the translation of the discourse on organised crime from the US to Germany, ¹⁰³ depicted two locales where a similar problem was perceived, and elites were trying to make sense of it. Translation in these cases presented two problems: one in the word’s narrow, linguistic sense (moving in-between two languages); and a second in terms of the differences between two socio-linguistic and socio-political contexts (security as translation). Our case diverges from previous studies in both aspects. First, the referent objects differ in the two locales due to the geography, but also overlap when it comes to societal security. Second, the subject of security is completely missing from the second locale as Transylvania is neither a transit nor a destination country, and the local elite did not talk about migration in security terms before the campaign. Third, the two locales share the same language, so the first problem posed by translation can be controlled for. Fourth, in previous case studies, translation was primarily initiated to facilitate policymaking. In the Transylvanian case, translation was also instrumentally initiated by the securitising actor, but its purpose was strictly political. Finally, and related to the previous point, the securitising actor in other cases was specific to individual locales, whereas in our case, the two locales share their securitising actor. We argue that these peculiarities of the case offer an interesting testing ground for the theory, but also highlight the need for more nuanced conceptualisation and extensive empirical research.