Author: Daniel Markovits

Free Speech and Russia in Hungary

November 20, 2018 / Daniel Markovits / 1 Comment

Free Speech in Hungary

The Hungarian government of Viktor Orban has come under fire for embracing xenophobic, illiberal and authoritarian policies and rhetoric. But while Orban has undoubtedly suppressed political opposition to his left and in civil society more broadly, the Hungarian government retains several key limitations on forms of controversial speech that typically originate from the right – although it has modified these and enforced laws in potentially controversial ways.

Hungary has, at least nominally, embraced EU anti-discrimination and anti-racism priorities. Hungarian law proscribes “incitement to hatred” in general terms, as well as discriminatory actions. These laws are comparable, at least on their face, to countries like France and the United Kingdom, and specifically to the former countries ban on denying the Holocaust and the later’s more specific prohibitions against speech intending to incite hatred against racial groups. These similarities are far from accidental, as both Hungary and the UK derive their laws from common EU directives. However, a key difference exists on the subject of Holocaust denial. Both France and Germany have embraced at least some culpability for the Holocaust, and this is reflected in speech codes, Hungary has a more adversarial relationship with this aspect of its history.

Hungary’s 2010 modification of its Holocaust denial law (by a Fidesz supermajority) creates a clear distinction between the legal codes of most European countries and Hungary’s. These changes removed explicit mention of the Holocaust, instead re-defining the prohibited behavior as denying “genocides committed by national socialist or communist systems.”

Despite the changes to the law, a range of Holocaust deniers have been prosecuted, convicted and punished under the new law. Similar laws against anti-Semitic hate speech have been similarly employed – and have been trumpeted along with renewed funding for the upkeep and restoration of Hungarian synagogues. However, the political implications of the addition of Soviet era crimes to the law remain troublesome. To begin with, the mention of communist-era crimes presents the image of Hungary as a victim (similar tropes have been echoed in Poland) and obfuscates the causes and responsibilities of Holocaust specific remembrance. Similarly,

The enforcement of these laws on behalf of the Hungarian state is particularly interesting in the context of the rhetoric of the Hungarian government itself and of the laws against subtler forms of racial incitement in the rest of Europe. Specifically, it seems likely that government sponsored campaigns targeting George Soros, the Romani minority and Muslim immigrants could all potentially run afoul of the more draconian anti-racist measures of countries like France. The same laws (Bleich) created repeated legal penalties for French actress Bridget Bardot for statements arguably less prejudicial and inflammatory than the rhetoric of Orban himself.

The Kremlin on the Danube

Russia has been immensely, and Hungary’s historical experience, astoundingly, successful in forming alliances with political factions within the country. While Poland, the Eastern European country most commonly compared to Hungary, has retained an intense skepticism of Russia despite the domestic successes of the right populist Law and Justice, Orban’s Fidesz party has retained no such distance.

To begin with, Orban and Putin have demonstrated an ideological and rhetorical affinity – both have opposed the “social progressivism” of the EU, both have employed similar rhetoric surrounding Christianity. The two leaders have been described as forging a “special relationship” based in part on these shared ideological precepts. Hungary has also allied with Russia by pushing a territorial complaint against Ukraine that aligns with Orban and Fidesz’s irredentist policy towards ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries. Orban’s government has provided legal assistance to ethnic Hungarians of Ukrainian descent. Orban has also signed a massive nuclear power deal with Russia and meets with Putin annually.

Russian involvement extends beyond formal diplomatic ties and rhetorical affinity. In 2017, Hungarian prosecutors charged a member of the far-right Jobbik Party with spying. Speculation, admittedly often unfounded, among journalists and pro-democracy observers, suggest Jobbik may be, at least in part, funded by illicit Russian interests. Official Jobbik media has even criticized Orban for insufficient comity with Putin’s regime (Jobbik 2018).

Despite these inroads with various Hungarian parties, historic Russian tensions with Hungary remain salient. Hungary remains a member of NATO, an organization created to counter a previous iteration of the Russian state. Substantial public criticism of Orban’s closeness with Putin remains within Hungary. A clear distinction exists in opinion polling between views of Russia, which is overwhelmingly unpopular (with approximately 20% support), and Putin, who is personally popular on a level on par with Orban among the Hungarian populace. Perhaps pursuant to this discussion, Orban has supported some, though not all, EU measures targeting Russia for various human rights abuses.

Bibliography

Bleich, Erik. The Freedom to Be Racist?: How the United States and Europe Struggle to Preserve Freedom and Combat Racism. Oxford University Press, 2011.

https://www.unian.info/politics/10304088-hungary-escalating-tensions-with-ukraine-playing-along-with-russia-media.html

Jobbik. Why Does Viktor Orban Keep Voting for Anti-Russia Sanctions https://www.jobbik.com/why_does_viktor_orban_keep_voting_for_anti_russia_sanctions, 2018

Responding to Racism in Hungary. http://cms.horus.be/files/99935/MediaArchive/pdf/hungary_en.pdf. European Network Against Racism.

Hungary’s Conflicts with the European Union

October 23, 2018 / Daniel Markovits / 1 Comment

In the broader view, Hungarian foreign policy follows the centers of European power in Germany and France. Over the course of several decades, Hungary has embraced European integration, the NATO alliance and Atlanticism. However, the government of Viktor Orban has diverged from these goals and has embraced the politics of another country on the European periphery: the United Kingdom. Hungary has followed the practice of England in one key paradigm: wanting benefits from membership in the European Union without accepting the costs and responsibilities inherent to membership in the block. Both England and Hungary exist on the physical periphery of Europe (albeit on opposite ends) but they also share an ideological distance from the heart of the European project and a recalcitrance to either fully accept or fully reject European integration, an embrace, in other words, of “selective integration” (Zimmerman and Durs 208)

Britain’s embrace of “a la carte” EU membership, in which it not only rejects the holistic package of traditional membership, but rejects the specific costs associated with specific benefits has caused friction during EU negotiations over Brexit. The referendum itself, at least as fought by the ultimately victorious Leave campaign, was replete with this incoherent view of obligations and benefits. The infamous bus adverts that promised “£350 million a week for the NHS” in diverted EU funds is emblematic of this misunderstanding. Current British policy is premised on taking for granted the benefits, subsidies and trade advantages of EU membership while viewing the costs obligations and loss of sovereignty resulting from the EU’s pooled sovereignty model. Both British politics more broadly and the Brexit fight involved chafing at the perception that the EU was subsuming Britain’s once vaunted role on the world stage. This combined one-sided acceptance of integration and feared loss of sovereignty is mirrored by Hungary.

Hungary follows England in the general premise of this policy outlook and sometimes in specific policy conflicts. The Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó declared his government’s deep regrets about Britain’s exit from the European Union because he contended that the UK was a natural ally for Hungary’s resistance to aspects of the European Union’s policy consensus. In addition to this direct alignment in rejecting further integration, Hungary has mirrored the UK’s opposition to accepting EU membership as a holistic unit.

The Hungarian economy is substantially dependent on EU subsidies, in fact to an even greater extent than England’s. The Hungarian government in particular has dispensed subsidies to political allies (likely corruptly). Yet Hungary has chafed at EU attempts to dictate Hungarian policy on a range of issues. Hungary has strongly resisted attempts by the European Commission and European Court of Justice to reign in potentially anti-democratic abuses of the country’s recent re-writes of its constitution. Similarly, it has resisted EU attempts to force Hungary into accepting (relatively minute) quotas of refugees and asylum seekers.

Walls and Moats

There is a surprising and unique symmetry in Britain and Hungary’s position on immigration: their reliance of physical barriers over more traditional tools of immigration policy; this reliance has led to similar conflicts with the institutions of the European Union and fellow European nations. The barrier employed by the UK is natural, the English Channel, and has long been an important feature of European immigration policy. Refugee and migrant camps across the channel in Calais, France have long featured as a humanitarian crisis in Europe, the Channel, which can only be crossed by the Chunnel trains or ferry, provides a clear blockage point for migrants trying to enter the United Kingdom. Hungary, on the other hand, has constructed its barrier, a 500-kilometer long, 4 meter tall border fence on its southern border. This fence has, according the Hungarian government, contributed to a 99% drop in illegal immigration to Hungary.

The conflicts that this has caused Hungary with the institutions of the European Union are sharp and clear. The most direct confrontation on this issue area has been with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the subject of migrant rights and Hungary’s obligations to asylum seekers. The ECJ process is the final stage of a process initiated by the European Commission in 2015. The formal complaint argued that Hungary kept migrants in “transition zones” for excessively long periods and failed to provide proper legal representation.

Hungary’s confrontation with ECJ is mirrored by ideologically parallel conflicts with the European Commission. The commission has complained (Furedi 2017) that Hungary has not met its obligations under the various EU treaties which govern member states. Specifically, Hungary has refused to honor EU requests for it to take its quota of asylum seekers – a measure developed to relieve border state like Italy and Greece of a disproportionate burden in resettling refugees (especially given the standard in international law that asylum seekers must be processed in the country where they first arrive).

These dual conflicts with two of the key institutions of the EU provide a mirror image of Britain’s conflicts during the Brexit negotiations. While Hungary conflicts with the EU from within, and Britain will so do so from outside the block, they both share a politicized and conditional acceptance of European integration. Both countries have also embodied the dual legacies of “technocracy (from the EU) and populism (in reaction to it) (Zimmerman and Durs 218).

Bibliography

Szijjártó, Peter. ‘Migration Is Not a Fundamental Human Right’ Interview by Amanda House. Breitbart, July 2nd of 2018

Zimmermann, Hubert, and Andreas Dür, eds. Key controversies in European integration. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2016.

Furedi, Frank. Populism and the European Culture Wars: The Conflict of Values Between Hungary and the EU. Routledge, 2017.

What is Europe?

September 14, 2018 / Daniel Markovits / 1 Comment

What is Europe?

Definitions of Europe tend to fall into two broad categories: Those presenting an immutable, historically rooted or geographic definition – and those positing a mostly ideological or programmatic construct.

The first of these sets of definitions focus heavily on history – often distant history, including epochal battles like Lepanto, Tours and the defense of Budapest (Betz and Meret 2009, 1). These visions also rely heavily on a Huntingtonian civilizational clash thesis, presenting Christian Europe in conflict with a series of (usually Islamic) enemies. This vision is frequently paired with a mainstream geographic interpretation that sees the boundaries of Europe as the Ural and Caucasus mountains (Glencross 15), the Mediterranean and the coastlines of north and western Europe. This interpretation has appeared in official EU documents and reflects a common sense geographic vision that is linked to history – the countries within these borders simply had more historical contact with each other than with external countries.

The second set of definitions describe Europe as a political project, often embodied by the European Union and a concomitant embrace of liberal democratic values. From this view, countries in the former Eastern Bloc “became” part of Europe when they embraced a particular set of ideals (perhaps best operationalized as the EU’s formal criteria for joining) and countries like Turkey and Morocco can “Europeanize” with time. While this vision may pay lip service to geographic boundaries it stresses that countries on or beyond the European periphery can join a values-based vision of “Europe.”

Neither of these definitions, each of which distinct political factions have periodically embraced, is entirely viable by itself. It is self-evident that Europe is not purely ideological and has some geographic definition – no serious observer suggests Japan or the United States is a part of Europe. Equally, Europe’s borders are not necessarily fixed by a particular set of geographical boundaries.

More controversial is Europe’s relationship with its own history. The Huntingtonian vision – often invoked with notions of blood and soil – is far from the only mechanism by which history continues to shape Europe. Europe’s history, for the most part confined within the its putative geographic borders, is defined by a struggle to remain “free from the menace of absolute rule” (Glencross 2014 – 15). Much of this, to be sure, occurred within the borders of the EU’s 28 current members or in the Council of Europe’s vaguer definition (Glencross 2014, 17) – but the nations of the former Ottoman Empire and North Africa also played a role in such struggles. This series of military and ideological confrontations, from the Reformation to the Thirty Years’ War to the World Wars, shaped the essential compromises that make today’s world possible.

A comprehensive definition of Europe must combine aspects of both ideology, history and geography: Europe is defined as a set of countries embracing external toleration and internal pluralism in response to centuries of geographically specific religious and national conflict – it is impossible for countries to fully embody the first set of criteria without having lived through the second.

What is Europe to Hungary?

The question of a definition of Europe is particularly integral to the future of Hungary – a country that could find itself on either side of putative ideological definitions of Europe. Viktor Orban’s publicly declared project to re-imagine Hungary as an “illiberal democracy” (Buzogány 2017) clashes with the liberal democratic vision of the institutions of the European Union. Instead, Orban endlessly invokes a immutable, historically rooted vision of a Christian Europe locked in a civilizational struggle with Islam.

The first iteration of this question is institutional as Orban argues, both through public speeches and government actions, with the institutions and structures of the European Union. The recent initiation of Article 7 proceedings, designed to strip countries of certain EU voting rights, against Hungary has elucidated the stakes of this confrontation. The institutions and leadership of the EU have sought to impose their definition of Europe onto Hungary. However, that does not mean Hungary is alone in its definitional challenge.

Orban’s vision of Europe is clearly not without allies. So-called “Eurosceptic” parties are often precisely skeptical of the liberalizing impulses of the EU’s ideological project – preferring more parochial national and communal visions, and also resisting the oversight of supranational regulators and anti-corruption watchdogs . More subtly, social conservative factions of the European People’s Party (of which Orban remains a member in good, if tenuous standing), like the Bavarian CSU shared aspects of Orbans historically and religiously mediated definition of Europe. Recent denunciations by EPP leader Manfred Webber mark an exception to general EPP support of Orban’s vision which was heralded by mainstream EU leaders as providing a respectable and democratic face to right wing populism (Kelleman 2015). In Poland the Law and Justice government has mirrored aspects of Orban’s attack on democratic structures and publicly supported Orban.

To Hungary, Europe is a negotiation between civilizational roots and contemporary ideology. Orban’s government seeks to emphasize the former to compensate for its abandonment of the latter as it embraces an increasingly authoritarian agenda. Orban’s personal corruption and increasingly neo-feudal economic approach also clash with EU attempts at oversight. But there is nothing permanent about this alignment. Both Hungary as a country and Orban himself were once symbols of a rising, liberal democratic Eastern Europe. Hungary as a country is a part of Europe by any reasonable geographic or historical vision. Orban’s Hungary may not be.

Bibliography

Betz, H. G., & Meret, S. (2009). Revisiting Lepanto: the political mobilization against Islam in contemporary Western Europe. Patterns of prejudice, 43(3-4), 313-334.
Glencross, Andrew. Politics of European Integration: Political Union or a House Divided?. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
Rupnik, J. (2012). How things went wrong. Journal of Democracy, 23(3), 132-137.
Buzogány, A. (2017). Illiberal democracy in Hungary: authoritarian diffusion or domestic causation?. Democratization, 24(7), 1307-1325.
Kelemen, R. D. (2015, June 18). EPP ♥ Orbán. Retrieved from https://www.politico.eu/article/epp-defends-hungary-orban-against-criticism/