Homeland farming? The two faces of national populism and the conceptualization of sustainable agriculture in Hungary

Discursive framing of food security and agriculture in the European Union, in light of growing interest for mitigating the effects of environmental degradation, is a complex process. Economic hardships, which also significantly affected the state of agriculture, enabled political discourses of national populism to flourish as a prominent political framework for addressing a wide array of issues.

Given the infringement of national populism in Hungarian politics, articulation and endorsement of ‘illiberal democracy’ as an answer to the crisis of liberalism, the ways in which these notions inform (and assemble) a secure and emancipated community with agriculture are becoming increasingly relevant. The ambiguous nature of populism allows for the employment of multifarious conceptualisations of “security”, which are often boiled down to Securitisation Theory approach: security as survival. On the contrary, populistic discourse, in emphasising the protection of national identity and national autonomy, tends to present security as a fundamental value of emancipated communities. The attempts to bring together nationalist and even xenophobic ideations with emancipation from the influence of the ‘outsiders’, invariably molds the public outlook on agriculture.

This paper aims to define the differences in approaches to agriculture and security as ontologically and contextually bounded. By unpacking the concept of emancipation (i.e. Welsh School of Security Studies) through the application of critical discourse analysis, this research addresses the ways in which national populism as a political ideation utilises the notion of food security to envisage a framework for sustainable agriculture. In order to discern the features of a national-populist approach to agriculture from liberal political options, political programs of populist parties (Jobbik, FIDESZ), and green liberal parties (LMP) will be scrutinized and compared. The results will then be utilised for engagement with the concept of emancipation, not only from the Welsh School perspective, but also in terms of evaluating the potential for an advancement of this notion in agricultural politics.

This paper was presented at the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) 2018 Conference: "Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World"