Migration is usually discussed as a question of borders, identity, or national security. This angle might obscure other more fundamental aspects. The real question to pose is not simply who moves, but how decades of marketization transformed both labor and the politics of fear.
These ideas were at the heart of Attila Melegh’s presentation at the the Democracy Institute Annual Conference, held in Budapest on June 25- 26. With the title Imaginary Exhaustion?, this event asked to what extent today’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion and how we might rebuild our collective imagination to shape more hopeful democratic futures. Melegh spoke in the panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety.
His central claim is that migration has become one of the defining contradictions of our age. Whilst mobility itself is not new, decades of marketization turned labor into a global commodity. In Eastern Europe particularly, the transition to capitalism produced social dislocation, mass emigration, which in turn lead to what he calls ” an ontological insecurity”. These transformations, rather than migration alone, created fertile ground for anti-migrant nationalism.
Our conversation develops these arguments further. Firstly, Melegh situates the post-socialist transition within a broader global history of neoliberalism. Both East and West gradually abandoned the idea of reforming social institutions in favor of market fundamentalism. Then, he explains how economic anxieties were displaced onto migrants, allowing political elites to personalize structural contradictions instead of confronting them.
Our conversation also examines the transformation of demography into what he calls a ”science of population management”. As a solution, we need more critical demography that reconnects migration, labor markets, social reproduction, and human rights. Rather than treating migration as the problem, Melegh invites us to rethink the economic institutions that have made it the central political question of our time.
Attila Melegh is a Hungarian sociologist, President of the Demographic Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, and Scientific Advisor at the Hungarian Demographic Research Institute.
The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file.
Photo: Daniel Vegel / CEU Democracy Institute
