Diasporic Homecomings by Takeyuki Tsuda

Author:Takeyuki Tsuda [Tsuda, Takeyuki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804762762
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 11240289
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

7

From National Inclusion to Economic Exclusion

Transylvanian Hungarian Ethnic Return Migration to Hungary

Jon E. Fox

HUNGARY, like many other countries examined in this volume, has long shown an interest in its co-ethnics beyond its borders. Ever since the imperial map of east-central Europe was redrawn at the end of World War I, effectively stranding millions of Hungarians in the newly created and reconfigured neighboring nation-states, Hungarian nationalists have pursued various strategies of national reunification. From a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany in World War II, aimed at reclaiming lost territories, to Hungary’s incorporation into the European Union (EU) in 2005, with its promise of the obsolescence of state boundaries, Hungary has been redefining membership in the Hungarian nation to include Hungarians in its neighboring countries. Yet unlike other national homelands discussed in this volume, Hungary seeks to accomplish its national reunification not by bringing Hungarians to Hungary but rather by bringing Hungary to them. Through the elaboration of kin-state politics over the past 15 years, Hungary has been discursively and institutionally bringing transborder Hungarians into the fold of the Hungarian nation.

At the same time, however, Hungary has struggled to reconcile this borderless vision of national unity with migration policies that recognize and reify those same state borders. The greatest challenge has come from the 1.5 million ethnic Hungarians from the Transylvanian region of Romania. Hungary would like for these Hungarians to partake in the richness of the Hungarian nation from the comfort of their own homes. But many of these Transylvanian Hungarians have instead shown a proclivity for partaking in the riches of the Hungarian labor market by working in Hungary. Transborder Hungarians’ roles as both members of a culturally defined Hungarian nation and (potential) ethnic return migrant laborers have not always coexisted harmoniously.

Hungary thus has ethnic return migration without the policy framework for it. While nationalists in Hungary have been fighting over the meaning of the nation, Hungarians from Transylvania and their co-ethnics in Hungary have been fighting over access to scarce resources in Hungary’s post-Communist labor market. In the process national difference has been lived, experienced, and expressed in the migrants’ everyday lives much differently from how national sameness has been imagined, wished, and engineered in elite circles. Through migration, ethnic Hungarians from Romania have gradually redefined themselves as nationally distinct from their hosts in Hungary of the same name. The migrants’ understandings of the nation have taken shape not in response to political imperatives but rather according to the economic contingencies of migration.

It is this mismatch between a politicized vision of national unity and the migrants’ everyday construction of national disunity that is the focus of this chapter. In the first part I sketch out the view from above: the discursive and institutional elaboration of Hungarian national unity not through the promotion of ethnic return migration policies but rather through the elaboration of kin-state politics. In the second and longer portion of the chapter I turn to the view from below: the ways in which national difference is experienced,

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