Xenophobia without migrants in Hungary: the imported enemy, platonic xenophobia, and moral polarization after 2015

In 2015, Europe turned migration into its central narrative of urgency. Yet Central and Eastern Europe produced an outcome that challenges common sense: hostility toward immigration, particularly toward Muslims, reached high levels precisely in countries with lower "real exposure" to migratory flows and terrorism (Kende & Krekó, 2020). From a comparative perspective, more favorable attitudes toward immigration tend to cluster where Muslim populations are larger, integration policies are more liberal, and state support for religious pluralism is stronger and clearer (Schlueter et al., 2019). This paradox suggests that the decisive factor was not a demographic "fact," but a political and cultural framing capable of turning fear into a governable resource.This article develops a conceptual argument, supported by illustrative evidence and secondary literature, rather than a causal empirical test. Its central claim is that the so-called "migration crisis" operated less as a cause than as a catalyst. The populist right turned migration into a machine of national cohesion by drawing on fragile national identities, normalized intergroup hostilities, and a discursive supply capable of translating insecurity into existential threat (Minkenberg, 2017;Wohl et al., 2012). In this sense, the article examines how migration came to be constructed in Hungary as a political, cultural, and security problem through state discourse, legal restriction, and symbolic boundary-making.Hungary provides a theoretically relevant illustrative case for this argument. Despite comparatively limited immigration and a restrictive approach to refugee reception, the Hungarian government has developed one of the most forceful anti-immigration repertoires in the European Union. Since 2015, this repertoire has included border fences, restrictive asylum measures, national consultations, opposition to EU relocation mechanisms, and official narratives associating migration with terrorism, sovereignty loss, and the erosion of Christian European identity. Thus, the "problem" does not lie in an overwhelming number of immigrants living in the country, but in the political conversion of migration into an existential threat that organizes national cohesion and confrontation with Brussels.The Hungarian case also reveals the selectivity of this anti-immigration politics. Although the government maintains a hardline stance against irregular migration and refugee relocation, recent labor shortages have encouraged the controlled admission of temporary "guest workers," often under restrictive conditions that limit long-term settlement and family reunification. This tension does not weaken the article's argument; rather, it reinforces it. It shows that anti-immigration politics does not target all forms of human mobility, but those forms of migration that can be framed as culturally threatening, politically useful, and symbolically external to the nation.Within this framework, the article introduces the concept of the "imported enemy" to capture a mechanism not fully explained by related concepts such as symbolic threat, scapegoating, securitization, or othering. The concept refers to a discursively produced and politically mobilized figure that, although weakly present, distant, or even absent from everyday social experience, becomes available as a stable object of fear through media narratives, state discourse, legal restriction, and identity-based mobilization.The "imported enemy" differs from scapegoating because it does not necessarily involve blaming a materially present group for a specific domestic failure. It also differs from securitization because it is not limited to declaring an emergency or framing migration as a security threat; rather, it also depends on prior identity anxieties, normalized prejudice, and moral narratives of national protection.Unlike symbolic threat, it does not describe only a perceived danger to cultural values, but a political mechanism that turns a weakly encountered or absent group into a governable object of fear. Finally, it differs from othering because it emphasizes not only symbolic boundary-making, but also the strategic and institutional use of an externalized figure to produce cohesion among "the people" and to oppose them to elites, Brussels, or allegedly threatening outsiders.The concept of the "imported enemy" is analytically distinct from Gerő and Sik's (2020) notion of the "Moral Panic Button." Whereas the "Moral Panic Button" describes a state-driven mechanism through which governments manufacture and repeatedly activate fear as an instrument of governance, the "imported enemy" refers to the specific symbolic figure produced through that mechanism: an externalized, weakly encountered, or largely absent group that becomes politically available as a stable object of threat. In this sense, the "Moral Panic Button" explains the institutional and communicative process through which fear is generated, amplified, and normalized by means of campaigns, consultations, media control, legal measures, and official narratives; the "imported enemy," by contrast, captures the political ontology of the target itself, that is, how distance, abstraction, and limited everyday contact allow a group to be imagined as more dangerous than direct social experience would otherwise sustain. Therefore, the two concepts are complementary rather than interchangeable: the "Moral Panic Button" identifies the machinery of state-induced fear, while the "imported enemy" names the figure through which that fear is condensed, personified, and transformed into national cohesion.This distinction is especially useful for interpreting the Hungarian case. Since 2015, the government has linked migration to terrorism, sovereignty loss, and the erosion of Christian European identity, while reinforcing this narrative through legal measures, border practices, national consultations, and opposition to EU relocation mechanisms. What matters is not the complete absence of migration, but the mismatch between the intensity of the political response and the scale of direct social exposure. This mismatch allows the "imported enemy" to operate as a cohesive device: the less the targeted group is encountered in everyday life, the fewer opportunities ordinary interaction has to contradict the narrative of danger.The concept can therefore be identified empirically through a set of observable indicators. First, there is a disproportion between the intensity of hostile discourse and the actual size or visibility of the targeted group. Second, the group is represented mainly through mediated images, future-oriented warnings, or civilizational narratives, rather than through sustained local interaction. Third, political actors connect it to existential themes such as terrorism, demographic replacement, sovereignty loss, cultural decline, or the defense of Christian Europe. Fourth, the discourse becomes institutionalized through laws, border policies, campaigns, consultations, or party competition. Fifth, the state may admit selective forms of mobility, such as temporary guest-worker schemes, while preserving hardline symbolic opposition to migrants or refugees represented as culturally threatening.In this sense, the "imported enemy" should not be understood as a materially present group that is later instrumentalized, but as a symbolic and mediated construction that may refer to real external populations, while deriving its political force from distance, abstraction, and limited experiential disconfirmation. Its analytical value lies in explaining how the scarce empirical presence of migrants does not constrain, and may even facilitate, the effectiveness of threat construction. By turning an absent or minimally present other into a visible political danger, the mechanism enables populist actors to stabilize narratives of fear, sovereignty, and national cohesion.The mechanism becomes clearer when framed as a demand-supply fit. On the demand side, the region carries territorial insecurities and historically contested sovereignties that feed a logic of "collective angst," in which the nation appears perpetually at risk of disappearance (Wohl et al., 2012;Minkenberg, 2017). This identity vulnerability can take a defensive form associated with collective narcissism, which turns difference into suspicion and legitimizes hostile vigilance toward internal or external threats (Golec de Zavala et al., 2009;Golec de Zavala, 2011). On the supply side, populism, as a thin-centered ideology, organizes politics around a moral boundary between "the people" and "the elites," a flexible structure that incorporates internal and external enemies without requiring meaningful material presence (Mudde, 2004). 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