Creating a fortress within a Fortress: actors and context of (de)securitisation of migration in the Visegrad countries

During the post-2014/5 ’refugee crisis’, the Visegrad (V4) countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - experienced a highly paradox situation. Despite the fact, that neither of the V4 countries (with a questionable exception of Hungary) was a final destination of a significant number of asylum seekers from the MENA region (see, e.g. Globsec 2017; Kucharczyk and Mesežnikov 2018), political discourse and practices, media discourse as well as and an external view of public opinion polls could have made an impression, as if this was the case. Although in 2020, migration is not the most salient topic in the V4 anymore, available research points out to routinization or normalisation of exceptional discourse and practices. Across the region, securitisation of migration has been a powerful tool in a political ’business with the unknown and otherness’; among others, it was used in campaigns accompanying 2015 Polish, 2016 Slovak, 2017 Czech and 2018 Hungarian parliamentary elections, as well as the 2015 Polish and 2018 Czech presidential elections. On the basis of available research on migration securitizing actors and processes as well as literatures focusing on underlying political and societal developments, the aim of the present paper is to point out to similarities and differences in migration securitizing discourse and practices of relevant political and media actors in the V4 states. Moreover, while setting securitisation processes in a wider sociopolitical context, the paper aims to contribute to understanding of relation of securitization to underlying political culture(s), democratic backsliding and/or illiberal trends across the region (e.g. Kazharski 2017; Havlík and Stojarová 2019; Stojarová 2018).