Abstract
ABSTRACT. Over the past fifteen years, Hungarian nationalists have been redefining membership in the Hungarian nation to include all Hungarians in the region, irrespective of citizenship. This deterritorialised notion of the nation has been given increased discursive and institutional legitimacy. But ethnic Hungarians from Romania who have gone to Hungary in search of work have not discovered national unity. Rather, the vision of national inclusion preferred by elites has been met by the reality of economic and national exclusion engendered through labour migration. The migrants' national self‐understandings have taken shape not in accordance with the wishes of nationalist elites, but rather in response to the economic imperatives of labour migration. Rather than deducing the salience of national unity from its political privileging, the purpose of this paper is to explain how national disunity is experienced, constituted and reproduced in the context of ethnic Hungarian labour migration.
Highlights
In spite of the predictions of some, nationalism has shown few signs of fading from the post-communist landscape of east Europe
It has responded to the n This article was awarded the annual ASEN/Nations and Nationalism prize for 2006. nnThis article was developed while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego (2003–2004)
I am grateful to Jozsef Borocz, Rogers Brubaker, David Cook, Steve Fenton, David Fitzgerald, Steve Gold, Istvan Horvath, Nadia Kim, Gregor McLennan, Endre Sik, Eszter Szilassy, Gaku Tsuda and Eric Weaver for the comments and suggestions they have given me
Summary
In spite of the predictions of some, nationalism has shown few signs of fading from the post-communist landscape of east Europe. It has responded to the n This article was awarded the annual ASEN/Nations and Nationalism prize for 2006. NnThis article was developed while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego (2003–2004). I would like to thank Wayne Cornelius, Gaku Tsuda and all the other Visiting Scholars for providing an ideal environment in which to conduct my research. I am grateful to Jozsef Borocz, Rogers Brubaker, David Cook, Steve Fenton, David Fitzgerald, Steve Gold, Istvan Horvath, Nadia Kim, Gregor McLennan, Endre Sik, Eszter Szilassy, Gaku Tsuda and Eric Weaver for the comments and suggestions they have given me. I would like to thank Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt and Liana Grancea for permission to use data from our collaborative research (Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvania Town, Princeton University Press, 2006)
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