On the Serbian side, a makeshift camp of tents and tarpaulins had emerged, as more people arrived on a daily basis than the number let through the transit zone. A couple of children were running around, looking and smiling at us from behind the wire. They were now waiting to hear whether or not they would be allowed into Hungary. After a few kilometres of emptiness, we had suddenly reached a site of intense activity: the Hungarian army and the police were busy surveying the transit zone where fewer than a dozen people had been admitted from the Serbian side that same morning. In the middle of the otherwise deserted countryside, a set of containers surrounded by a wire fence stood incongruously, presenting us with a somewhat surreal scene. At the end of the path, we arrived at the border: if it had not been for the barbed wire fence cutting through the grass, I would never have guessed that this was where Hungary stopped and Serbia commenced. We drove through open fields of paprika stretching to the horizon and reached a bumpy road going through a small forest. Tamas Footnote 1 had offered to drive us to the border crossing point in Röszke where, in the autumn of 2015, the Hungarian government had established one of the transit zones in which migrants wishing to enter Hungary are systematically detained as they go through the asylum process. One early morning in July 2016, I travelled to Szeged with a colleague to meet with one of the organisers of Migszol, the local pro-refugee movement. KeywordsĪn earlier version of this chapter was published by the CEU Center for Policy Studies (CPS) as a Working Paper (2017/3). Ultimately, this chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of politics of (dis)integration in Hungary, in the context of a highly exclusionary, yet contested, process of nation-building. Finally, I examine instances of solidarity initiatives with migrants and assess the extent to which they undermine the political frames put forward by the Hungarian government and produce common spaces between established residents and migrants. Second, I reflect on the way in which these hyper-visible ‘events’ authorise the deployment of quieter processes of negligence and destitution towards refugees and asylum-seekers that directly contribute to the disintegration of the social, economic and political ties which migrants and refugees may build in the country. I explore the way in which this hyper-visible spectacle of migration produces particular representations of the Hungarian state as the protector of a national public.
SPECTACLE IN A SENTENCE SERIES
First, I examine the spectacularisation practices deployed by the Hungarian government in relation to migration and borders, with a focus on the series of anti-migrant campaigns and the construction of border fences since 2015.
In this chapter, I reflect on the politics of in/visibility that underpin the government of migrants and refugees by Hungarian authorities and assess how they contribute to and authorise an on-going process of disintegration of the already narrow social, political and economic space navigated by migrants and refugees in the country.
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