NATIONAL IDENTITIES 533 Macedonian Muslim may soon become a member of the Hungarian nation that, according to the Fundamental Law enacted by the Orbán government, is marked by its Christian culture (The Fundamental Law of Hungary, n.d., p. Art. Q (4)). Another example for the non-ethnic implications of Hungary’s ‘ethnic’ citizenship is the case of Venezuelans with Hungarian descent who were offered Hungarian citizenship so that they could escape Venezuela. In 2018 and 2019, the Hungarian government offered refuge to more than 300 Venezuelans. According to reports, many of them did not even speak Hungarian, but they were nonetheless offered free airplane tickets to Hungary, as well as temporary accommodation, free integration and educational programs as well as work permits. This was quite surprising in light of the Orbán government’s harsh nativist populist rhetoric that rejected immigration, and pledged that Hungary offers no refuge to any migrants. When the left-wing opposition accused the government of facilitating migration and spending public money on refugees from Venezuela, Gergely Gulyás, the Cabinet Minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s office, told the press that Venezuelan Hungarians were no refugees, but received Hungarian citizenship through the ‘right of blood’ principle (Budapost 2019). By this formulation, the Hungarian government wanted to assure their ethnonationalist base that the Venezuelan refugees were ‘ethnic’ Hungarians. In fact, they were dormant Hungarian citizens. They had ancestors with Hungarian citizenship who had not bothered to pass on citizenship to their descendants. Therefore, these Venezuelans were indeed eligible to Hungarian citizenship through Hungary’s unrestricted jus sanguinis attribution policy even if they did not speak the Hungarian language and had no other cultural or symbolic (let alone sociopolitical) ties to Hungary. Even if the government used ethnonationalist arguments in the justification of their naturalization, most Venezuelans of Hungarian origin cannot be considered as ‘ethnic’ Hungarians in terms of culture, language or even blood, bearing in mind that all of them had only one distant Hungarian ancestor. Again, from a normative perspective, the implications of the ‘restoration’ of the citizenship status of Venezuelans with some distant Hungarian ancestry is similar to the consequences of unconstrained jus sanguinis rules which make citizenship available for non-resident individuals through the citizenship of their ancestors even if they have no effective political ties to their ‘homelands’ or ‘national’ culture. It is important to note that the ‘ethnic’ content of these putatively ethnically selective rules is less than evident. Paradoxically, the more expansive preferential treatment is, the looser the putative ethnic implication becomes. No sociologically thick understanding of ‘ethnic’ belonging is presumed if non-resident, putatively ‘coethnic’ individuals with a single grandparent (or great-grandparent) are eligible for citizenship without having to evidence genuine sociological or cultural bonds to the national community/culture. Expansive external citizenship policies introduced as part of nationalizing projects may not in their actual content be ‘ethnic’. Fast-track naturalization policies that are intended to strengthen national homogeneity by including presumed ‘ethnic’ kin abroad are not necessarily ethnic in their application. Quite the contrary, citizenship awarded on the basis of descent is available for descendants of citizens who belonged to ethnic minorities as well. In cases where the knowledge of the national language is waived (or not checked properly), there is nothing intrinsically ‘ethnic’ in ethnically framed fast-track naturalization. Expatriates living in ethnic communities in the diaspora may have a strong sense of belonging and may maintain their ethnic heritage, while in other cases ethnic belonging becomes purely symbolic – or disappears completely. Despite these sociological