https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1429-0689
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ABSTRACT
Integrating the discursive and practice-based approach to securitisation, this article explores how the police function as the audience of securitising discourse. Taking the Hungarian case of border control, it looks into how the police accept and buy into anti-immigrant discourses of the political elite. Based on a questionnaire survey of Hungarian police officers, it demonstrates the potential of discursive legitimation in shaping officers’ understanding of mass migration. It describes the ways in which attitudes and hence, arguably, practice can be conditioned by securitising discourse. The overall aim of the article is to advance the understanding of the narrative dimension of power struggles between police and the political elite, and how that structures the field of border security. Critical security scholars have pointed out that police filter securitising discourse based on their professional dispositions and preferences. However, the Hungarian case seems to suggest that discourse may, in fact, influence dispositions themselves.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their useful input to this article. I am grateful to the late Professor Andrea Kozáry. Without her help and support the data collection would not have been possible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Locals voluntarily reported individuals to the police whom they assumed to be illegally present, mainly based on their skin colour or outfit. Many of these individuals later turn out to be Hungarian nationals (Gyollai and Korkut, Citation2019).
2 Enemy construction, i.e. the Us and Them dichotomy has always been a core element of Orbán’s politics (see, e.g. Palonen Citation2018). Prior to asylum seekers, he successfully polarised the country against the former left-liberal government and has recently launched a crackdown on the LGBTQ community (implying they are all paedophiles) to gain electoral support.
3 Transit zones were shipping containers behind barbed wire fence along the Serbian border, where asylum seekers were detained during the application procedure and were only allowed to leave towards Serbia. The zones have recently been closed, as the Court of Justice of the European Union confirmed that placing people in the zones amounted to unlawful detention.
4 It is notable that the 2015 events were a novel experience to most of the police regardless of training, as Hungary had not seen mass migratory movements on that scale since the Bosnian War.
5 While the University afforded me the opportunity to conduct the survey, it was administered by a member of the faculty. Although I was not allowed to be present at the lecture when the questionnaire was completed, the voluntary nature of participation and the research objectives were explicitly displayed on the questionnaire and were clarified by the administrator.
6 For reasons of transparency about the circumstances of data collection, it must be noted that the university found some of the statements to evaluate inappropriate and asked for changes or omission. One of the problematised statements was “Soros wants to settle migrants in Europe” which was changed to “Migrants are not coming voluntarily but are sent”. To be approved, the offences in the following statement had to be swapped. The original statement was: “In terms of border control, human smuggling is a more serious problem than irregular migration”; approved version: “In terms of border control, irregular migration is a more serious problem than human smuggling”. The rest of the statements which were criticised referred to the criminal law aspects of the newly introduced offences: “Based on the level of danger irregular border crossing poses to the public, it is not warranted to sanction it as a criminal offence”; “Based on the level of danger facilitating/supporting irregular migration poses to the public, it is not warranted to sanction it as a criminal offence”. I could only include these statements by switching the negation to affirmation. To secure access and because the changes had no impact on the collected data for the purpose of the study, I did not argue the decision, nor did I ask for justification. The approved modifications were more in line with the government’s discourse for that matter.
7 Even colleagues from Hungary complained about the difficulties they face when trying to gain access to the police unless from within the organisation, hence the almost total lack of research on Hungarian border police.
8 The impact of media depiction of refugees on public attitudes towards them has been extensively studied and confirmed in various settings (for review, see Mustafa-Awad and Kirner-Ludwig Citation2021).