Anti-Migrant Populism and Simulated Embeddedness in Eastern Europe

Based on the analysis of an emerging excellent recent literature on an authoritarian turn in the region and my 2023 book of "The Migration Turn" anti-migrant populist rethoric is not only and instrument of authoritarian governments, but it is part of a real historical event and represents the emergence of a new epoch. The Eastern European developments have been shaped by the interplay of global and local demographic transformations, a wave of marketization, and structures of migratory capitalism— appearing in ideational processes as reification and a sense of biopolitical competition. Eastern Europe is not a passive victim in this historical change, but it has been legitimizing the neoliberal order for a longer period of time and it is now questioning some of its consequences without any systemic critique. This has led to the isolation of humanitarian discourses and the rise of anti-migrant populism. These discursive developments have also been facilitated by the particular varieties of migratory capitalisms and mechanisms of unequal exchange in the region that have been accompanied by a demographic and migration panic and a nationalist claim for further sovereignty and national emancipation with regard to intra-European hierarchies. After summing up some points concerning local-regional development, the paper ends with reflecting on why the enormous tensions of marketization and the reification of migration (the migration turn) have become immanent engines of change. I will also argue why we should speak about neoliberal nationalism and populism as stated by Joppke, and why these changes do not represent a Polanyian double movement and why the claim of rising embeddedness in this respect needs more careful consideration.It seems that it is better to talk about a simulation of embeddedness as a new form of populism, when we confront a deepening crisis of the neoliberal regimes.