EU politicians are learning the wrong lessons from Hungary
Reform plans are too narrowly focused
As the EU enters deeper into its post-Orban era, multiple conversations are springing up around a single topic: how it can prevent a similar incident in the future. Specifically, what changes are needed to ensure that one rogue government isn’t able to abuse the EU’s laws and derail the healthy decision-making processes of the whole bloc.
This is an important discussion to have. Viktor Orban’s influence on European politics was truly noxious and the EU must be better prepared should such a situation arise again. The only problem is that the debate seems to be going in the wrong direction, by focusing on entirely the wrong areas.
This is most obvious in the focus that governments, particularly those coming from Western Europe, have placed on the role of new members of the EU. For instance, some have suggested that new entrants to the EU should not be allowed to use vetoes at all until after a certain period of membership has passed. Similarly, another proposal, hinted at earlier this month by Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos, puts forward new safeguard clauses, allowing certain rights and privileges to be more rapidly suspended in the event that a new member violates fundamental values like the rule of law.
The flaw in this approach is that there is no evidence that fresh joiners to the EU are or were the issue in the first place.
When Orban first declared that he was building an “illiberal state” in Hungary, his country had already been a member of the EU for 10 years. The story is similar in Poland, which was also a member for around a decade before PiS began to really get their project of state capture under way. Future countries of concern, where the far-right is in power and beginning to wear away at the norms and values of liberal democracy, are even further along in their membership.
When we think about it, this makes sense. The process of joining the EU is neither quick, nor easy and requires a significant commitment to certain standards and values over an extended period of time. It is quite improbable that a country could only pretend to maintain this commitment, to then uncover their subterfuge once they are on the inside. More likely is that it takes time for the European values to be undermined and eroded and multiple election cycles for voters to become complacent about their place in the EU and for anti-European politicians to capitalise on shifting priorities.
Part of the reason for why this mistake is being made is that too many politicians from the Western half of Europe still regard the post-Cold War members as ‘new’. Yet it is often 20 years or more since those countries joined the EU. A person born at the time of Hungary’s accession would have been an adult for many years already now. Just as many Millennials and Gen-Xers have yet to adjust to working alongside people who were born after 2000, much of Western Europe has still not fully incorporated that the Eastern European states are now well embedded into the EU and not new at all.
At least, that is the more generous explanation. The alternative is that making this a problem about ‘new’ members is in some way deliberate. It is a framing that allows many governments to avoid looking too closely at the situation in their own countries and how vulnerable they may be to becoming the next source of chaos and disintegration in the Union.
In a sense, the ideas that have been presented so far are not a great deal removed from the real solutions, but their limitation to only new members turns these concepts into displacement activity. As a result, real and necessary conversations on abolishing the veto in foreign affairs or fixing the Article 7 procedure are sidestepped because the policy debates are redirected to ignore all the existing members.
We therefore end up in the incredible situation where the EU produces exacting plans to tackle the possible deviations of Montenegro or Albania in the late 2030s, but has nothing to say on how to handle a far-right government in Poland or Spain (let alone in France or Germany) in the next two or three years.
It should be recognised that it’s not all doom and gloom. At the last European Council meeting, EU leaders decided to extend the sanctions on Russia for 12 months rather than the usual 6. That was a change that came directly from the experience of Orban using sanctions renewals (which require unanimity) as leverage points to extract concessions. Reducing the number of times sanctions must be renewed reduces the number of such blackmail opportunities. However, even this is an imperfect solution and is an exception rather than the rule.
EU politicians are right that new processes are needed to deal with governments that undermine the rule of law and deliberately sabotage the EU, sometimes at the direction of external powers. Yet any solution will only be credible if it is also addressed to the largest and oldest member states, not only the newest and smallest ones.