Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper discusses ethnic return migratory processes between Hungary and two Latin American countries, Argentina and Venezuela, with a special focus on how the Hungarian government made them serve its political purposes on the national and on the European level.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper discusses ethnic return migratory processes between Hungary and two Latin American countries, Argentina and Venezuela, with a special focus on how the Hungarian government made them serve its political purposes on the national and on the European level. These developments were, on the one hand, inseparable from recent shifts in the Hungarian government's policy towards minority and diaspora Hungarians living outside Hungary. On the other hand, these migratory patterns were shaped by the democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe making space for diasporic return migration; and were intensified by economic crises (Argentina, early 2000s; Venezuela 2010s) and by the subsequent social insecurity there. The paper provides two examples to compare and contrast the reception and use of these two flows of diasporic return migration from Latin America to Hungary. There was visible affinity between the values and cultural practices the spontaneous diasporic return migration from Argentina and the Hungarian government's ethno political ambitions at the turn of the millennium. Particular connection is drawn between the deliberate, systematic yet subtle dissemination of the subversive and academically questionable Hungarian ethno political world view developed by a self-made historian returnee from Argentina and the recent dramatic populist turn in official Hungarian cultural politics. The second migratory pattern has taken the form of a still ongoing, informally organized, state assisted yet unpublicized immigration program for Venezuelan migrants of Hungarian descent, filling up Hungary's official European quota of refugees to be received.