Populism and the European Culture Wars

The Conflict of Values between Hungary and the EU

Frank Furedi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138097407
• eBook ISBN: 9781351599498
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Concern and hostility towards populism has become a distinctive feature of contemporary political culture. In Europe such concerns are frequently directed at Eurosceptics, whose opposition to the European Union is often portrayed as a cultural crime. Ancient anti-democratic claims about the gullibility, ignorance and irrationality of the masses are frequently recycled through the anti-populist condemnation of people who vote the wrong way.

This book argues that the current outburst of anti-populist anxiety is symptomatic of a loss of faith in democracy and in the ability of the demos to assume the role of responsible citizens. Distrust of the people and of parliamentary sovereignty is reinforced by the concern that, on its own, liberal democracy lacks the normative foundation to inspire the loyalty and affection of ordinary citizens. Through focusing on the conflict between the European Union's Commission and the Government of Hungary, this book explores contrasting attitudes towards national sovereignty, popular sovereignty and the question of tradition and the past as the main drivers of the culture war in Europe.

1
Who Decides Europe’s Values?

Throughout the Western world, values have become a focus of conflict. Societies find it difficult to establish a consensus on moral norms. Indeed the passions that were once devoted to settling ideological differences are today directed towards engaging in a conflict over values. During the recent decades, all the major conflicts in society have in one way or another been linked to disputes over cultural values. These so-called Culture Wars first emerged in the United States in the 1960s. Acrimonious arguments about family life, the role of religion, sexuality, marriage, the end of life, and abortion indicate that there is little consensus on the fundamental values that guide human behaviour in American society. Conflicting attitudes towards cultural values escalated into a veritable war during the 2016 US presidential elections.

In recent times, the Culture Wars have also made their presence felt on the landscape of Europe. Here, controversy has focused on the role of religion, particularly Christianity and, lately, Islam; on the meaning of European culture; on multiculturalism; and on the value of national sentiment. The key issue that underlies all these different controversies is a conflict over the status of national sovereignty and the nation state. The transnational outlook that pervades the institutions of the EU regards national sovereignty as an outdated and potentially disruptive ideal. Such differences over values exist both within member states of the EU and across national boundaries, where they roughly correspond to the old division between East and West Europe.

That the Culture Wars have migrated across the Atlantic was vividly demonstrated during a debate in the European Parliament in January 2012. The debate, titled ‘Recent Political Developments in Hungary’,¹ was organized as a response to concerns expressed by the EC that a variety of recently enacted Hungarian laws violated the values of the EU. The commission followed up its concerns by launching infringement proceedings against Hungary on three matters: the independence of the national central bank, the retirement age of judges, and the independence of the data protection authority. Outwardly at least, this controversy appeared as a dispute about relatively routine technical matters; but as the debate unfolded, it became evident that what motivated the main protagonists were different visions of values.

Before the scheduling of this debate, EU-phile commentators in the media and policymakers had singled out the Hungarian government and its recently enacted Constitution, the ‘Fundamental Law’, as representing a challenge to the secular, democratic, and liberal values of the EU. Frequently, this Constitution’s references to Hungary’s national and Christian traditions were portrayed as dangerous sentiments that threatened to unleash the resurgence of the xenophobic nationalism the EU believed it had left behind in the 1940s.

José Manuel Barroso, the then president of the EC, set the tone when he introduced the debate. He characterized his differences with the actions of the Hungarian government as an ‘extremely sensitive matter, where I believe we have to be clear on values’. Barroso did not clarify what values were at stake, and he was anything but clear on this issue. However, the implication of his statement was that the Hungarian laws and Constitution violated European values.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, responded to Barroso by insisting that the new Constitution and the subsequent measures enacted by his government ‘took place on the basis of European values and principles’. He went out of his way to reiterate his government’s adherence to European values and concluded his remarks with the words, ‘I ask you to continue to support in the future, in the spirit of European values, the major transformation and restructuring that we are in the process of completing in Hungary.’² Implicit in his statement was the view that there was more than one version of the meaning of European values, and that respecting the right of different nations to interpret them in line with their own traditions was one of them.

During the course of the debate that followed the initial remarks, it became evident that, despite a common rhetorical affirmation of European values, there was a fundamental difference in the way they were interpreted. Speaker after speaker condemned the Hungarian government for its supposed violation of European values. The Flemish Belgian politician, Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, took the floor to denounce the Hungarian government’s alleged violation of European values. He warned that what was at issue in the debate were not trivial technical issues but the fundamental principles on which the EU was constructed. He stated:

What is necessary here is not a debate on technical issues, as we had at the beginning of the year. This is about checking the conformity of the [Hungarian] constitution and cardinal laws with the European values that are enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty: democracy, the rule of law, freedom of religion, freedom of expression and so on.

Verhofstadt demanded that the EU’s Committee on Civil Rights, Justice and Home Affairs draw up a report investigating the actions of the Hungarian government to find out whether ‘there exists a clear risk or a serious breach of our values’. His use of the term ‘our values’ conveyed the implication that they were likely to be different than ‘theirs’.

The oddity of the demand that a member state of the EU – a sovereign nation – should have its values policed was left unremarked. What this call for value – policing suggested was that the EU’s highly acclaimed celebration of the principle of diversity did not apply to different orientations to values and moral norms across national boundaries. Tolerance for the diversity of values – which has been historically a central feature of liberal thought – was clearly not seen as important by those calling for the monitoring of values in Hungary.

Some of the criticisms directed against Orbán were couched in a language that was less restrained than the legalistic jargon used by Verhofstadt. Daniel Cohn-Bendit of the Greens-European Free Alliance condemned the direction taken by Hungary and lectured Orbán that ‘we are here to tell you that you are going in the direction of Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and all the other totalitarian authoritarian governments’. Orbán’s response to the charge that Hungary was travelling down a totalitarian route was to declare that his values were no less European than those of his detractors.

From Orbán’s perspective, the traditionalist system of values promoted by his government were rooted in the historical legacy of European cultural norms. He argued that:

Our ideals are undoubtedly Christian and based on personal responsibility; we find national sentiment to be an important and positive thing, and we believe that families are the foundations of the future. It may be that a great many people believe otherwise, but that makes our position no less a European one. It may be that with this we are in a minority in Europe, but this position is no less a European position, and we are free to represent this conviction.

In defence of his argument, Orbán pointed to the former French foreign minister Robert Schuman, considered to be one of the founding fathers of the EU, who stated ‘there will either be a Christian democracy in Europe or there will be no democracy at all’.

What was significant about Orbán’s response to the criticism levelled against his government was the emphasis that he attached to the politics of culture. ‘We Hungarians believe that what makes Europe Europe is its culture’, he stated. The implication of Orbán’s statement was that his government stood for a system of cultural norms that, though they contradicted the values of his opponents, were rooted in Europe’s historical tradition.

Orbán’s affirmation of traditional Christian values provoked respondents to claim that his approach violated the spirit of the modern values of pluralism and diversity. Verhofstadt indicated that the Hungarian Constitution was antithetical to European values such as ‘democracy, the rule of law, the freedom of religion, the freedom of expression, equality also’. Some of Orbán’s critics went a step further and insisted that Christianity was entirely alien to the values of the EU. Taking this sceptical approach to religion, the French Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Marie-Christine Vergiat, representing the Left Bloc, asserted that ‘European values are not Christian values’. She claimed that ‘European values are freedom of conscience, freedom to believe in a religion of one’s choice, freedom to believe or not believe’.

Vergiat’s disassociation of European values from Christianity expresses the political sentiment that is integral to the outlook of the secular liberal and leftist post-war tradition. However, it should be noted that this outlook has never monopolized the prevailing definition of European values, and it certainly runs counter to the way it was perceived by the advocates of European integration in the past. Schuman, who is proclaimed as one of the ‘Founding Fathers’ of European integration, was in no doubt about the foundational role of Christianity for this project. In 1958 he proclaimed that, ‘we are called to bethink ourselves of the Christian basics of Europe by forming a democratic model of governance which through reconciliation develops into a “community of peoples” in freedom, equality, solidarity and peace and which is deeply rooted in Christian basic values.’³ Even Jacques Delors, the former president of the EC, spoke in July 2011 of the ‘Europe of values’, in whose Constitution ‘Catholicism, or rather Christianity more generally, played a major role’.⁴

However, by the time Delors made his statement, the political interests associated with EU integration had become reluctant to explicitly associate their values with Christianity or, for that matter, with many of the historical traditions associated with the legacy of Europe. In response to this anti-traditional European federalist political culture, Delors observed that ‘today we have hidden our shared values’. As an example he pointed to the Lisbon Treaty drawn up in 2007, in which ‘several heads of governments refused to have these roots alluded to’. He added that ‘this is very sad, because we need to know where we have come from’.

Confusion – or indeed, a fundamental disagreement – about the legacy of Europe and the values that define it transcends the 2012 debate between Orbán and the MEPs hostile to the policies adopted by his government. It was evident that whatever the EU meant, it was not a community of shared values. The debate also revealed that the conflict of values was far more polarizing than differences over economic or social policies. As we shall outline in the chapters to follow, the not-so-silent Culture War sweeping Europe has become the focus for some of the most important disputes in the current era.

The manner in which the 2012 debate was represented in the West European media illustrated the heightened sense of tension that surrounds conflicts over values. An article titled ‘Hungary in the Crossfire; Orbán Lashes Out at Critics in European Parliament’, carried by the German Spiegel Online, condemned Orbán’s speech as a ‘nationalist tirade’,⁵ stating that Orbán ‘came across as pugnacious, dogmatic and unforgiving’. The British Guardian predicted that because of his speech ‘ Hungary PM Viktor Orbán faces EU backlash over new policies’.⁶ Other media outlets cast Orbán into the role of an authoritarian demagogue and characterized Hungary as the EU’s pariah state. As one columnist for the Canadian Globe and Mail, writing a ‘Letter on Freedom to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’, asserted, ‘you run a country that has become a pariah of the European Union’.⁷

One of the few Western media outlets that attempted to stand back and offer a more dispassionate account of the debate was the British Financial Times. In a live blog on the debate, its blogger noted that ‘although there were some fireworks, they mostly came from MEPs on the ideological left and not from Orbán himself, who sat through the entire session and remained decorous throughout.’ The reporter added that ‘after enduring more than three hours of criticism and complaint, Orbán kept his cool in his closing’.⁸

The rhetoric of alarm conveyed by the media is itself sociologically significant. The claims that Orbán launched into a ‘nationalist tirade’ during the course of the debate are difficult to reconcile with the minutes of the proceedings. However, the rhetoric of condemnation was in all likelihood genuinely felt. Why? Because from the standpoint of the EU’s cosmopolitan political culture, the mere hint of a positive orientation towards religious or national traditions was likely to be perceived as out of step with the culture of the new Europe. The passions and hostility that Orbán’s statement incited amongst his detractors in the European Parliament and sections of the media were motivated by a genuine conviction that the Hungarian government represented a threat to what, for a lack of better expression, can be characterized as the EU way of life.

Conflicts over culture are noisy and intemperate, and many Western advocates of the EU’s anti-national and federalist approach regard Orbán and his government as a unique threat to their project. As the Hungarian MEP György Schöpflin pointed out, ‘There seems to be a well-established view in some parts of the European Commission that Hungary under its Fidesz government has become a tiresome member state, that it is constantly breaking the formal and the informal rules of EU membership’. Schöpflin remarked that ‘this attitude seems so deeply engrained that in the eyes of some, it no longer needs any p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Who decides Europe’s values?
• 2 Why hide our shared values? The problem of tradition
• 3 National consciousness vs denationalized identity
• 4 Memory wars or the crusade against the past
• 5 Anti-populism and the crisis of valuation
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index