22 June 2011
Some eyebrows were raised recently when it became known that the Hungarian government had bought a significant number of shares in MOL, a national energy champion of sorts. Political opponents focused on the apparent use of funds previously loaned by the IMF to complete the deal – somehow suggesting that such a move was improper – while other commentators noted the undercurrents of energy security as a prime catalyst for buying the shares.
Completely absent from the debate, however, was any reference to national security. Clearly there is a link between energy security and national security but no emphasis was placed on what security in the early decades of the twenty first century might look like and certainly no recognition by the security elites in Budapest that modern national security, in both concept and practice, is changing.
Take for example cyber security. The Hungarian government must surely have recognised of late that both state and non-state actors have been deliberately disrupting, probing and penetrating key web features of a number of critical sites and functions, including e-government websites, corporate databases and the communication platforms of key government and industrial targets.
Consider the recent and lethal outbreak of e-coli in Germany. Was this simply a random and spontaneous combination of different e-coli strains or could it have been some form of deliberate modification or research gone wrong or worse, a form of agro-terrorism? Several weeks after the initial outbreak we are no closer to attribution.
The point is that many NATO countries are now becoming more proactive in seeking to position their security apparatus for a different form of national security. Debate in these countries is lively and many have developed new policies and priorities as a result. It has moved on from Afghanistan!
However, in Hungary, the defence and security establishment remains muted. Why is there no debate on future defence and security risks and threats? Only the Government can answer that question but perhaps one way to answer at least this critic is to generate a new and informed debate and at least consider identifying the state’s vulnerability to these new threats.