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Article published In:
Narrative Boundaries: Constitutional struggles in an age of polarization
Edited by Rodrigo Cordero and Raimundo Frei
[Journal of Language and Politics 23:5] 2024
► pp. 747–769

Subverting EU legal concepts

How Hungary enacts illiberalism in constitutional discourse

ORCID logo | University of Antwerp
ORCID logo | Tilburg University | University of Antwerp
This paper analyzes how Hungarian constitutional court rulings subvert EU legal discourse. Drawing on legal studies and discourse studies, we examine how the Fidesz-KDNP regime leverages the Hungarian Constitutional Court to curtail the rights of asylum seekers and migrants within an evolving EU legal framework of identity recognition. We show how an illiberal agenda was enacted in a populist constitutional imaginary that, instead of outright rejecting established legal concepts, inflects these concepts with subversive new meanings. Our analysis reveals how the legal principles of the rule of law, human dignity, sincere cooperation and EU constitutional identity are recontextualized to legitimize a politically exclusionary agenda and redefine the moral boundaries of political inclusion and exclusion within the EU.
Keywords: populist constitutional imaginary, EU migration and asylum, narrative subversion, Hungary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Constitutional imaginaries and the remaking of historical narratives
  • 3.Fidesz’s populist constitutional imaginary challenges the liberal EU myth
  • 4.Subversive constitutional narratives in Hungarian Constitutional Court rulings
  • 5.The narrative subversion of EU constitutional concepts: Analysis
    • 5.1Beyond the rule of law: Restoring a historical illiberal identity
    • 5.2Against the asylum seeker: A collectivized human dignity
    • 5.3Reversing the relationship with the EU: (In)sincere cooperation
    • 5.4EU identity and its priority: Defending a Christian Europe against non-Christian migrants
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 September 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24098.lui
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