The normative threat of subtle subversion: the return of ‘Eastern Europe’ as an ontological insecurity trope

Abstract

A combination of undemocratic developments in Hungary and Poland as well as Eastern Europe’s reluctance to engage in solidary burden-sharing at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe has brought back familiar allusions of Eastern Europeans as troublemakers for European unity and peace. This article offers a discursive dissection of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a subtly subversive challenge to Europe’s security of ‘self’, entailing a fear of being overrun by an ‘other’ perceived as endangering one’s normative and cultural order. Proceeding from Ingrid Creppell’s (2011) notion of normative threat, this article argues that the reappearance of ‘Eastern Europe’ as an ontological insecurity trope is indicative of deeper anxieties within Europe, some of which are systemic (such as doubts about the efficacy of integration and the legitimacy of the European Union) and some of which are contingent (such as concerns about defending the European political order from populist upsurges amidst ‘resurgent nationalism’).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maria Mälksoo is Senior Lecturer in International Security at the University of Kent, Brussels School of International Studies. She has published widely in the fields of critical security studies and memory politics. Her current research is on rituals in world politics, militant memory laws, and the prospects for provincializing IR from Central and Eastern Europe. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1 ‘Eastern Europe’ and ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ are used interchangeably in this article. While this is hardly an unproblematic shortcut, the semantic complexity of Eastern Europe remains beyond the scope of this paper. For a book-length enquiry into the definitions of ‘Eastern Europe’, see Twardzisz (2018).

2 This is compellingly captured by Mária Schmidt, a vociferous defender of Orbán’s version of democracy in Hungary, in the following quote: ‘While [the western half of Europe] see[s] themselves as being able to integrate millions of Muslim migrants, they are unable to even tolerate us, who—like them—have been socialized within the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian traditions. They consider “the other” to be beautiful, but we are too similar to them to be beautiful, and are unable to rise to their “progressive” standards’ (Schmidt 2018, 262).

3 Although populism could be regarded as ‘the ultimate essentially contested concept’ (Kinnvall, this issue), its core characteristics are generally taken to include a revolt against the ruling elites, anti-pluralism, and a moral claim to represent ‘the people’ (Müller 2016c). It is the latter that appears most abrasive for the democratic credentials of the European polity, as the populists commonly criticize the unaccountability and technocratic nature of the EU (see Browning, this issue).

4 <http://hungarytoday.hu/news/u2-frontman-bono-blasts-hyper-nationalist-hungary-poland-existential-threat-europe-98661>, accessed 15 August 2018.

5 As in the context of Brexit, and the broader European debates displaying fear and aversion towards the phantom figure of the ‘Polish plumber’ as a symbol of West European welfare chauvinism (see Noyes 2018).

6 Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia refused to participate in the relocation scheme of the asylum-seekers conceived by the EU at the height of the migration/refugee crisis in 2015, rejecting the European Commission’s mandatory quotas designed to distribute asylum-seekers in a solidary manner among EU member states.

7 True, the nationalist parties in the heart of the EU have yet to reach the kind of power Fidesz and PiS are enjoying in Hungary and Poland.

8 The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing that point.

9 The subtitle is borrowed from the eponymic article by Jan-Werner Müller (2014) in Foreign Affairs.

10 On Hungary’s illiberal turn, see further Tóth (2012), Verluise (2012), Lendvai (2012), Müller (2012) and Fletcher (2017).

11 See Ost (2016).

12 For discussion, see Isaac (2017). See also Müller (2016a), who argues against the murky notion of ‘illiberal democracy’ in the cases of Hungary and Poland, preferring ‘populist authoritarianism’ instead. For a broader debate about the intricacies of the democracy–liberalism nexus, see Berman (2017).

13 Müller (2014) maintains that ‘the problems with the [EU’s] Eastern European members have grown so numerous that they can hardly be dismissed as a matter of one or two bad apples’.

14 The so-called ‘Holocaust law’ of January 2018, amending the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (INP), criminalized public statements that ‘accuse the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich’ (Gross 2018). The law was amended in June 2018 after a diplomatic rift with Israel and the US, turning a criminal offence into a civil one.

15 As most evocatively expressed by Guy Verhofstadt to Orbán (2017) in the European Parliament debate on Hungary: ‘how far will you go? What is the next thing? Burning books on the square in front of the Hungarian Parliament … ?’

16 As captured in the caustic observation by Douzinas (2017, 182), ‘The rapid expansion from six to twenty-eight members added to the club of post-Communist states, which were economically, culturally and politically distant if not incompatible with the European core.’

17 Such as non-recognition, infantilization and exclusion (Rumelili 2015; see also Zarakol 2011).