Hungary and Migration: Illiberal Values and an Inward Gaze...Unless You Can Pay

Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Holabird (InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile)
Karl Philip Benziger , History, Rhode Island College
Richard R Weiner , Rhode Island College, Rhode Island College
Is Viktor Orbán's defensive-minded "Illiberal Democracy" the future of Europe? How is it a paradigm for protecting "the nation" when faith in universalistic humanism has gone? How is its call to preserve the nation from "cultural death" but a smokescreen for manipulating the fear of a threatened ethnic majority that its culture and welfare model is endangered to the point of vanishing?

Orbán's Fidesz Party project is intent on creating a self-proclaimed illiberal state designed to accommodate white workers. The recent wave of migration to Europe from Western and Central Asia is manipulated as a central defining issue in turning against liberal media, liberal intelligentsia and economic liberalism. This has been underscored not only by a fence that was built largely by unemployed Hungarian workers, but by his attack on the independence of the Central European University that was funded by the Hungarian-American financier George Soros. From Fidesz State to Fidesz Nation to Fidesz People.

At the same time a contradiction to this narrative emerges in revelations of a now suspended program offered by a Hungary that enabled those who could buy their way into Hungary for 250,000 Euros. But if the prices were too steep they could buy their way in by "purchasing" Hungarian bonds at half the price in a scheme where they borrow the money from Chinese banks with the rest coming from a Hungarian Special Debt Fund. In exchange, the Chinese banks secure the rights to collect the interest on the bonds when they mature.

Paper
  • Hungary and Migration Paper Draft 9.doc (127.0 kB)