In his article “Europe must stand up to Hungary and Poland,” which deals with the Polish and Hungarian governments’ veto of the seven-year, €1.15 trillion EU budget and the €750 billion European recovery fund, George Soros expresses his strong support of the European Union “as a model of an open society built on the rule of law.” He also expresses his concern about “the situation in Hungary,” the country of his birth, where he has been active as a philanthropist for more than 30 years.
The rest of the essay is devoted to a description of the state of democracy and the rule of law in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. He specifically calls attention to corruption involving Orbán’s own family and friends, the transfer of public money into private foundations under Orbán’s control, and reckless international transactions that serve personal gains. In addition, Soros summarizes the political steps that have been taken since the October 2019 municipal elections to financially destroy those municipalities that are no longer under government control. Finally, he calls attention to the Fidesz-dominated countryside, where in many villages voting is not secret.
In the course of the essay, he describes a possible way out of the crisis caused by the veto, which has been widely discussed by EU politicians as well as commentators. If Poland and Hungary refuse to alter their positions and therefore no new budget can be adopted, the European Commission could extend the old budget on a yearly basis, while the recovery fund could be implemented using an enhanced cooperation procedure. “The question is whether the EU, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel perhaps leading the way, can muster the political will,” he adds.
These are, in brief, the main points of George’s Soros’s opinion piece. These are the topics that should be discussed by anyone who wants to counter Soros’s points. But instead of “an intellectual argument or policy proposal intended to inform readers and broaden public debate,” which Project Syndicate expects from its contributors, Orbán begins his diatribe with an ad hominem attack on his “non-debate partner.” According to Orbán, “many believe” that Soros is an economic criminal who ruined people’s lives through his speculation. Just as with “terrorists,” a prime minister doesn’t engage such a man in debate.
After this personal attack, Orbán moves on to praise the “nation state” and, in its course, to highly disputable generalizations. Let’s start with perhaps the most startling claim: that “Christian freedom … created benign competition among the continent’s nations.” I’m not going to get involved in trying to tease out the meaning of “Christian freedom,” but from what I have learned about it, the concept has a purely religious meaning and no relevance to anything political. On the other hand, the alleged “benign competition” among the continent’s nations is an obvious howler. We know that Orbán wasn’t a devoted student of history, but he must have learned something about the wars that have been waged in Europe since nation states became the basic political units. Here are a few from the nineteenth century: the Russo-Turkish war, the Finnish war, the Polish-Austrian war, the French invasion of Spain, the Austro-Hungarian war, the Crimean war, and the Austro-Prussian war. The list of the wars of the twentieth century is just as long, including two world wars. So much for the benign competition of nation states.
There are also serious problems with his claim that “European nations were bound together by the common roots of our faith.” Religious wars in Europe have been common ever since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517, and they continued all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) close to 10 million people perished. We should also add that Europe’s population is not homogeneously Christian or, if Orbán is being generous, Judeo-Christian. Islam has been a powerful force in the Balkans (Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania), Russia (10% of the population), and naturally Turkey (98%).
What does Orbán have in mind when he talks about the “magnificent amalgam of contrasts [that] made Europe the world’s leading power through the centuries”? I’m really puzzled by this claim. Orbán, the devoted supporter of nation states, talks about Europe as the “world’s leading power.” It is true that at different times in history certain regions, countries, and city states experienced a great economic and cultural flowering. But Europe as a whole, in the sense of a United States of Europe, couldn’t have because it didn’t and still doesn’t exist.
After his confused thoughts on history, he moves back to personal attacks on “this speculator,” who is “the most corrupt man in the world.” Orbán alleges that “on the payroll of George Soros are a long list of politicians, journalists, judges, bureaucrats and political agitators masquerading as members of civil society organizations.” He also accuses “many high-ranking EU bureaucrats [of] working with the Soros network.”
The bulk of this rant doesn’t warrant serious analysis, but there is one important sentence that exposes an inconsistency in Orbán’s political thinking. In domestic politics, Orbán justifies his one-party rule by appealing to “the rule of the majority.” Fidesz has a super-majority, and therefore it can disregard the opinions of the minority. And the government party does just that. It forces its ideas on the population as a whole. But when it comes to European affairs, he accuses EU politicians of forcibly imposing “a unified way of thinking, a unified culture and a unified social model on Europe’s free and independent nations.” Then, as an afterthought, he adds that “this is also the purpose of their ‘rule of law’ proposal—which does not, in fact, recognize the rule of law, but of strength. It would be more honest to call it the rule of the majority.” But then isn’t it fair to ask why “the rule of the majority” at home is any more legitimate than “the rule of the majority” in the European Union?
A person who cannot have a rational and consistent dialogue and who meanders all over the place with half-baked ideas doesn’t deserve the kinds of accolades he receives even from antagonistic quarters. We hear that he is really sharp and able to comprehend complex thoughts almost instantaneously. Perhaps so, but this piece of writing belies those appraisals. The intellectual level of Orbán’s answer to George Soros is a terrible indictment not only of his own incoherent thought processes but also of the primitiveness of the political system he has built in Hungary.