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The Unbearable Whiteness of the Polish Plumber and the Hungarian Peacock Dance around “Race”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2017

József Böröcz  and
Mahua Sarkar
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Abstract

This contribution interprets the east-central European post-liberal governments’ recent anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-human-rights hysteria in the context of the increasing dependence of the region's societies for livelihood on employment in the western EU, the widespread racialization of east European labor in the western EU, and the refusal of east European political elites and societies at large to consider possible “Left” critiques of the EU. Given those circumstances, and laboring under related anxieties, post-state-socialist political elites and societies have assumed a fundamentalist-racialist posture. They redirect their repressed anger toward incoming refugees, claim an ahistorical, essential kind of Whiteness and contribute to rigidifying European discussions of “race.”

Type
Critical Forum: The East European Response to the 2015 Migration Crisis
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , Summer 2017 , pp. 307 - 314
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2017 

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References

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18. I will capitalize the Polish Plumber as a referent to a trope.

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29. Notice the use of the first person plural to citizens of Hungary who live and work in the United Kingdom, quite a powerful claim of ethnonational unity, intended for the Hungarian media consumer. The legal argument is of course also unassailable. The “trick” is in switching from a commonplace, everyday conversation to a rather technical legal point.

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32. Sometime in early June 2012, Orbán made a set of disparaging remarks about the deep dishonesty of European politics as a fanciful, implicit bargaining process. He referred to the whole process as “pávatánc”—i.e., a “peacock dance.” See Tóth Ákos “Pávatánc,” Népszabadaság Online, June 4, 2012, at http://nol.hu/velemeny/20120604-pavatanc-1312137 (last accessed February 21, 2017).