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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

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Subverting EU legal concepts

How Hungary enacts illiberalism in constitutional discourse

ORCiD logo with link | University of Antwerp
ORCiD logo with link | Tilburg University | University of Antwerp
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Antwerp.

Published online: 13 September 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24098.lui
Abstract
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.
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
References (44)
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Steuer, Max
2025. Rule of Law Minimalism and the Fear of ‘Politics’: The Slovak Constitutional Court amidst the Illiberal Surge. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique DOI logo

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