- cross-posted to:
- ukraine@sopuli.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- ukraine@sopuli.xyz
EU nations may proceed without Hungary by establishing a new fund outside of the common EU budget that does not require Budapest’s signoff.
EU nations may proceed without Hungary by establishing a new fund outside of the common EU budget that does not require Budapest’s signoff.
That can address things from Ukraine’s standpoint, but it doesn’t really resolve the broader political issue from the EU’s standpoint.
The fundamental problem is that there is a political dispute between Brussels and Orban related to political changes in Hungary. Brussels has decided to put pressure on Orban over it, to use as leverage against him, first with attempting to invoke Article 7 to strip Hungary’s voting rights in the EU, and then with withholding funds. Orban has decided to disrupt EU operations to use as leverage against Brussels.
Orban’s got a bunch of other things that he can block or disrupt. He could do the next EU FTA, say – there, it’s not practical for a subset of EU members to sign an agreement themselves, the way they could potentially do with Ukraine funds.
One way or another, they’re going to have to make a peace at some point.
How can you make peace with someone who deliberately disrupts agreements and acts only in his own interest? Peace requires the ability to honor agreements and act in the common interest. How can you make peace with someone who demonizes you? Peace requires respect and goodwill.
IMHO, the EU will have to revoke Hungary’s voting rights - and make peace with the next government.
To do that, they have to get a successful Article 7 invocation through.
I would bet very much that there are other EU members who will not support an Article 7 invocation on Hungary. However, they have no reason to actually take the political flak for it until it comes up. And then it’ll probably only be one other member, for the same reason as before.
My take has been that both of the options that the EU has tried taking are really bad ideas:
First, they tried Article 7. That’s going to strip all political power from Hungary. I think that it is quite unlikely that the EU will manage to get unanimity among all other members to strip Hungary’s political power in the EU unless Hungary does something a lot more objectionable than the internal political stuff that it has been.
Then, they tried the power of the purse, which is what the current fighting is over.
The problem I’ve got with both of those is that the EU is a confederation, probably likely to become a federation. One thing that a federation requires is a split between central and member state authority, and requires that that split be honored. That requires member states to trust that the central government doesn’t step over the line. That is, the idea now is that member states get more comfortable with the idea that they can trust other member states and the central government, and over time voluntarily agree to increased integration.
Both of these moves are things are very likely to cause problems for that, and aren’t a great precedent.
The first just strips a member state of power entirely. I can guarantee you that that will not go over well in Hungary, and it’ll make a lot of members worried about it being leveraged against them at some point. That’s a last-ditch, the EU-is-going-down-the-tubes scenario, and if it’s used, it should be uncontroversial, done on very clear grounds, and quite urgent. These are not the case here.
I know that when Article 7 was threatened in Poland, part of the issues that were raised were that the Polish government was breaking down Polish constitutional guarantees of judicial independence. Now, that’s true…but it’s also true that there is no objective standard for that which has been equally applied in the EU. The UK has no constitutional judicial independence, and in fact their system of government doesn’t permit for the creation of such a thing in its present form; a simple majority in the House of Commons has the power to simply override the judiciary if they want. Now, the British government wasn’t abusing that, but then we’re talking about a much more controversial subject – “is the government running its country well” than whether it’s conforming to an equally-applied set of constraints on constitutional law. And all the time that the UK was in the EU, the EU didn’t attempt to use Article 7 against the UK.
I remember, at one point – this was when the UK was in the process of Brexiting, the EU was trying to use Article 7 against both Poland and Hungary concurrently, which not surprisingly didn’t work – that Macron hauled off and publicly called Italy a “rogue member” over some immigration dispute and threatened to bring down the hammer on Italy. My response was that the EU’s level of infighting at that point was at an unreasonable level; member states needed to stop threatening each other, as they were already in a position where they couldn’t finish the existing fights that they had going on.
The second is the power of the purse. While a less extreme action, that’s actually worse, IMHO, because it is very hard to restrict a central legislature from leveraging that – no matter what changes are made to the structure of the EU, that will probably remain. In the US, we had some major controversies over the use where the central government wanted to act in the realm of state powers, but didn’t have the authority to do so, so tried leveraging that. That basically violates the state-central compact. It’s appealing to a central government, because it’s available and sometimes the central government doesn’t have the authority to act in a given way. But the reason one has a federation rather than a unitary government is precisely so that there are hard restrictions on a central government. If, when the central government isn’t allowed to do something, they say “well, we’ll just fine a member state until you do what we wanted to do”, then what you have is a unitary government.
I don’t like this fight because it harms the EU in important ways; what matters much more, in my eyes, is the EU’s integration, which fights like this risks delaying or derailing. Orban’s shennanigans principally hurt Hungarians. That sucks, but Hungarians have the vote and have decided that they want to keep him.
Orban has a lot of influence over the media in Hungary, and that gives him a fair amount of control over the political process. I am onboard with the idea that that provides an incumbent government with at least some barrier to change – though I also think that it only goes so far, and if people really wanted him out, he’d be out. However, I think that if the EU wants to change that, the fix needs to be of a form where something like a set of explicit media freedom rights go through EU-wide, where all members sign onto it. And that’s not the route that was taken. Rather, the approach was Hungary-specific.
I think that, rule of thumb, you don’t start a fight unless you intend to finish it. If you aren’t going to bring down Orban, then don’t start a political fight with him. I doubt that the EP has that will and intent (and personally, I think that as the EU stands, it’s questionable that Brussels is in a good position to bring down member state governments), and I think that that’s why the EC wasn’t interested in the fight, and that it was probably a bad move to pick this fight.
[continued in child]
Found Orbans burner account.
Thank you for your detailed thoughts. Although I have not read the upcoming continuation, let me respond.
IMHO, the situation is urgent, as the alliance of Orban with Putin threatens the very existence of the EU. The imminent external threat will force Europeans to act in concert and find balanced and effective solutions to this and similar impasses. The EU can’t develop further with any member able to blackmail it.
So I believe in the wisdom of Europeans and their ability to learn and grow. Due to an exceptional external threat, the force major will be substantiated and will only enhance the cooperation between the member states.
[continued from parent]
The reason Orban is demonizing the EU is because he doesn’t want the EU to be able to politically-undermine him; he wants the Hungarian public to attach to him more strongly than to the EU. And the reason he’s worried about that is because, well, the EU has tried to do so.
So there are only a couple routes I can see through this.
One way is the EU decides to bring down the sledgehammer on Orban. The other member states can, one way or another, probably force Orban out, even if not via EU mechanisms. They put through the policy changes they want in Hungary. I personally think that this is a bad idea, sets a bad precedent, and is likely to cause political problems in the EU (what happens the next time there’s some dispute in the EU with some other member state government? Is this gonna be a go-to again?) But it is one route the EU could take. That’s a way to do centralization of power hard. I think that it’d make sense if the goal were a unitary EU. But as far as I can tell, that’s not any kind of widespread aim. But, yeah, they could take that route. It’d be one way to make a peace.
Another is that Hungary leaves the EU. I don’t think that this has any chance of happening, from everything I’ve read. Orban has no reason to do that even from a self-interested standpoint unless he is absolutely certain that the EU is going to take the above sledgehammer route. He’s fine with Hungary being in the EU. He just doesn’t want any political threat to him from Brussels.
Another is that the EU drops the issue enough for Orban to be entirely happy with things. I think that that is unlikely; Orban thinks that he’s going to be at political risk.
What I think is a lot more likely is that the EU convinces Orban that it’s not going to near-term go after him politically and Orban backs off a little too, and ultimately integration happens, either under Orban or a later government, via agreements that no individual government sees as presenting a near-term political threat to them. And the bigger the fight now, the slower that process. Orban probably keeps criticizing the EU to the Hungarian public, to limit the degree to which it poses a political risk to him. The EU probably has people snipe back.
Lastly, I’ve seen people propose adding more tiers to the EU, and dodging the whole issue by basically creating a more-integrated tier and leaving the EU in its current form to basically go no further. That’s basically the “loophole” being described above. Now, maybe that will happen, but I think that there are some good reasons not to do that. The EU has not been very enthusiastic about opt-outs or things like Switzerland’s status, and has been pushing back on both. Creating a new layer is effectively creating new opt-outs in bulk all over the place. If it happens, I think that the driving factor will be a lot more than this particular dispute.