Defending Europe at the Trianon Border: Geopolitical Visions of Nationhood and the Remaking of Hungary’s Southern Border

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nationalist arguments justify contemporary border walls around the world. But what happens when nationalism defines the border as a dividing line and mandates its openness to link with ethnic kin beyond the state’s borders? In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government built an anti-immigration fence along the southern border, separating the country from a large Hungarian community in northern Serbia. To avoid the clash with Hungary’s transborder nationalism, Orbán advanced a new geopolitical storyline that explained the border/migration crisis of 2015 as a ‘Muslim invasion of Christian Europe’. The narrative shifted the border’s meaning from a dividing line of the transborder Hungarian nation to a defensive line and civilisational rampart of ‘Christian Europe’. This discursive-analytical study of Orbán’s geopolitical reasoning captures how the border’s meaning changed over several months. The paper represents a critical geopolitical contribution to the border studies literature.