From Improvisation toward Awareness? Contemporary Migration Politics in Hungary [antikvár]

Migration, by its very nature, affects politics. It involves mobile individuals, who oftenarrive in groups and always arrive in great and increasing numbers or so at least it is per-ceived in the media. Migrants cross borders and often cross cultural barriers, which inturn induces technological development and organisational innovation in police work andleads to lots of high-news value stories for the media. And, of course, migration influ-ences the operation of basic economic institutions such as the labour market and the wel-fare distribution system, and even affects the most basic and slowly changing characteris-tics of a society such as the demographic behaviour, ethnic composition, and ethos.Of course, there is nothing new in what we wrote in the preceding paragraph. How-ever, there are new trends all around the process of migration. As globalisation and re-gionalism, result of the weakening of nation states, go together hand in hand, as the neat(though for a time it seemed to us lethal) dual enmities between capitalism and commu-nism disappeared and allowed unstable coalitions and internal hostilities to surface, thesocio-economic characteristics of the migration process have changed.If we reduce our focus - both in time and space - to the immediate past and to the vi-cinity of Hungary, we can nonetheless witness quite new and complex processes whichhave influenced the migration process to a great extent and we can witness changes in thecomposition and techniques of the migrant groups. This set of changes challenges thepolitical actors to adapt their rules and behaviour.Although this is far from an exhaustive list of the changes that have taken place in thepast decade in and around Hungary, a few examples are instructive.The communist party-state was replaced by a multiparty, parliamentary system.The COMECON and Warsaw Treaty disappeared, and through their ruins we aremarching toward the European Union and the NATO.Previously unknown actors appeared. Among the public authorities, new actors, suchas the Ombudsman, the Audit Office and the Anti-corruption Agency were born. Interna-tional organisations, for instance, the UNHCR and the EU, established local branches.Without details, we also mention the blossoming of the NGO sector, from human rightsorganisations to skinhead groups, from self-help initiatives to charity organisations.There has been mass ethnic Hungarian immigration to a country to which no onewanted to immigrate during the past few decades, and to which no one could (except by afake marriage) immigrate. The bulk of migrants came from neighbouring Romania. Yet