Defending Europe at the Trianon Border: Geopolitical Visions of Nationhood and the Remaking of Hungary’s Southern Border

Nationalist arguments justify contemporary border walls around the world. But what happens when nationalism defines the border as a dividing line and mandates its openness to link with ethnic kin beyond the state’s borders? In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government built an anti-immigration fence along the southern border, separating the country from a large Hungarian community in northern Serbia. To avoid the clash with Hungary’s transborder nationalism, Orbán advanced a new geopolitical storyline that explained the border/migration crisis of 2015 as a ‘Muslim invasion of Christian Europe’. The narrative shifted the border’s meaning from a dividing line of the transborder Hungarian nation to a defensive line and civilisational rampart of ‘Christian Europe’. This discursive-analytical study of Orbán’s geopolitical reasoning captures how the border’s meaning changed over several months. The paper represents a critical geopolitical contribution to the border studies literature.