19 April 2012
If you believed the wider international media, you could be forgiven for thinking that the ongoing contretemps between Hungary and the EU was nothing more than the Hungarian Government’s failure to adhere to European Union political and economic norms.
However this rather simplistic appreciation overlooks a far more wide-ranging and complex set of clashes which will, in time, be repeated throughout Europe. Therefore, in a sense, the continuing stand-off between Budapest and Brussels is worth monitoring.
The underlying cause of the EU-Hungary dispute is a clash of visions on the nature of modern democracy and concepts of power, justice and tolerance.
The initial skirmish so to speak was set off by the election of Fidesz and Victor Orbán in 2010. The scale of the election victory was such that the former ruling Socialist Party was virtually destroyed and their Liberal allies sent into oblivion. Yet despite the enormity of the Fidesz victory, the political opposition since then has failed to acknowledge the settled will of the electorate. Furthermore, in funnelling their opposition through the European Union, it has sought to by-pass and to ignore national democratic politics as so understood by the Hungarian electorate. Indeed the sight of German, Belgian or Austrian MEPs belittling the election result has cast a shadow over the Union’s concept of democracy.
By taking this initial domestic conflict of political and democratic legitimacy to Brussels, there quickly arose a further aspect of the conflict, albeit with a different set of power elites and concepts of democracy. Mired in economic and financial mismanagement, the EU is currently framing new forms of democracy based on their concept of the common good which includes the deepening of political integration but with no popular consultation, the removal of national politicians that fail to adhere to the new orthodoxy and a concept of Europe which is firmly secularist and which ignores its own history.
What Victor Orbán has done – intentionally or not – is to raise the whole issue of democratic accountability in the modern age and ask how it fits with the EU’s current move for greater political centralisation absent any form of consultation with the electorate.
Another facet of this clash of ideas between the EU and Hungary is the relationship between justice and power to tolerance of unorthodox views. Fidesz repeatedly claim – with some justification – that their election victory was inspired by a sense of justice: the legacy of both communism and its link to post-communism crony capitalism would be swept away through a new constitution and the actions of a previous government that admitted it had lied and cheated its way to an election victory and condoned state violence against the public would likewise be held to account. In short, the desire for justice would defeat the lust for power at all costs.
This notion of justice has, however, run up against a concept of power which has been developed and nurtured within the European Union and which stresses so-called ‘core European values’ as some sort of glue which binds an ever closer union. The glue includes liberal and progressive values and codes of conduct on mostly all aspects of economic and financial policy, on the righteousness of the dilution of national sovereignty and politics and crucially, on sustaining a secular model of European life.
Fidesz’s election victory and its concept of justice has therefore led to a whole raft of new measures being introduced, which impact on many spheres of life and which clearly points to another concept of society and Europe, one in which the nation state is the democratic capstone, that national economic preferences have equal footing with Brussels centralised economic planning and which seriously questions the limits of secular values as opposed to those values which have evolved and are clearly based on Christian tradition and nation state historical and cultural development.
Clearly associated with this struggle is the question of toleration, an issue which goes to the heart of the conflict of democracy, power and justice. Viktor Orbán clearly believes that the EU, under the guise of upholding their package of universal values, has actually become intolerant of ideas or moves which run contrary to their orthodoxy. He knows very well that European popular sentiment on a range of political, economic and social issues is far removed from the view from Brussels and that by coming down hard on Hungary, the EU is in fact limiting toleration and displaying an unwillingness to debate a different form of European formation.
Having defeated what he believes to be injustice and corrupt power in Hungary, Victor Orbán might just be thinking that by encouraging such concepts in Europe, he is at the vanguard of a movement to dilute EU orthodoxy. In this dispute, Hungary might not be alone.