Viktor Orban is at this point all but a pariah to the powers
that be in Brussels and Washington. He continues to resist the EU and has
voiced considerable opposition not only to the policies of Europe but even the
ideology of the post-war project.
Often cast as an ally or even a tool of Putin, as usual the
reality is a little more complicated than that. Orban would certainly
appreciate aspects of what Putin has being trying to accomplish vis-à-vis the
West but such statements require qualification.
Orban became a public figure back in 1989 when he was giving
nationalist speeches celebrating Imre Nagy and calling for the Soviets to pull
out their troops and tanks. Orban helped to found Fidesz and a year later he was
elected to the Hungarian parliament. Has he completely abandoned his
nationalism only to throw in with Putin? Does he want to spit on the graves of
the resistors (like Nagy) who stood up to Russia in 1956?
Hardly.
Rather he sees the Liberal West as taking a self-destructive
turn. Few seem to know it but Orban is actually part of the Hungarian Reformed
Church. While that denomination has largely succumbed to theological liberalism
not everyone in it has completely abandoned traditional belief. I am not certain
how fervent or real Orban's faith is. Generally speaking I'm pretty sceptical
of politicians. The fact that he's married to a Roman Catholic might indicate
his faith is indeed a politician's faith. Clearly he wishes to retain some
notion of Hungary as a Christian nation, a position I do not appreciate. I
mention it only to place him in context. It is this impulse that explains (in
part) his seeming appreciation of and gravitation toward Putin.
Orban sees the EU as a cancer and he's not alone in seeing
Russia as standing for European tradition and something approaching
Christendom. The EU is becoming a secular tyranny and at this point Orban seems
to be taking the long view. While he's not prepared to pull Hungary out of the
EU, he's putting some distance between Budapest and Brussels.
Undoubtedly he already has many forces moving against him.
American and other Western money and influence have flooded his nation. George
Soros, long an asset of US imperialism, has gotten a lot of attention in this
regard. A radical move to divorce Hungary from the EU or NATO would probably
signal regime change and his life or at the very least his position would be
forfeit.
Moving a little closer to Moscow provides some security and
yet he has no wish to reconstitute the Warsaw Pact and place Hungary under
Russian domination.
Does Putin even want this? The media pundits and think-tank
analysts in the West will confidently state the reconstitution of the USSR is
exactly what Putin wants. On the contrary I contend that history provides the
answer. What Moscow wants with regard to Eastern Europe is a buffer. The buffer
states don't have to be dominated but to be buffers they need to be something
less than hostile. Buffers from what, from whom?
A German dominated Europe.
Whether that Germany is a tool in the arsenal of a greater
power like the United States (under the auspices of NATO) is irrelevant.
Whether that Germany is but the leader of a larger European
conglomerate (like the EU) is also irrelevant.
Germany invaded Russia twice in the 20th century
and tens of millions of Russians died as a result. 19th century German
unification began the process of dismantling the buffer system in Central
Europe. The post-war German partition along with the Warsaw Pact created a new buffer
for the USSR. But everything changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The historical
process was reignited in 1990. Gorbachev who permitted reunification and NATO
membership, is perceived as a fool and from Moscow's perspective the West is up
to the same old tricks and treachery. They can point to episode after episode in
which the Latin West has stabbed the Orthodox East in the back.
Putin is simply looking at history and reacting.
Hungary is doing the same. Like all states within Central
Europe it necessarily must dance a two-step and try to play off the larger
powers against one another.
Hungary has other concerns and interests that would possibly
drive it toward Russia... in the same way it was driven toward Germany during
World War II.
Historical Hungary was dismantled in 1920 with Trianon
Treaty. They lost a huge portion of their historical kingdom. Modern Hungary is
but the nucleus of a large Central European kingdom that had existed for
centuries. They're still angry about it and Orban considers himself the voice
for the more than two million Hungarians living in the periphery regions.
There's bad historical precedent here, for of course Hitler
played the same role with regard to the Germans outside the political
boundaries of the Reich.
But Orban is no Hitler. While the EU still stands, Hungary
will hardly pursue a military campaign to regain its lost portions of Austria,
Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Croatia. And yet if the EU crumbles
there's a chance some lines might be redrawn and Orban is preparing.... just in
case. An EU collapse might be the signal for war on multiple fronts. Hungary
would certainly play a part.
Orban has made noise concerning the treatment of Hungarians
in the Ruthenian region of Ukraine. This of course paints him in the West as
pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine.
It's not that simple. His opposition to Kiev is not rooted in
Orban's wish for Putin to dominate the Donbass or Crimea. His conflict with
Ukraine is over that status of Hungarians, especially under the new Western
installed government. Hungary is hardly alone in protesting the new Ukrainian
educational laws. These laws were meant to combat the influence of Russian
language and culture but have instead angered not only Hungary but Poland,
Moldova and Romania as well. In seeking to revise history and erase Russia from
its culture, Kiev is also de facto attacking the minorities of its periphery,
minorities with deep historical roots... much deeper than Ukraine's. There is
little truth in the West regarding the corrupt and even pernicious nature of
the Poroshenko government in Ukraine. Putin is hardly a saint but to pretend
that NATO's lackeys in Kiev have some kind of moral standing is laughable.
Orban is nevertheless playing a dangerous game. He obviously
intends to beef up Hungary's military but again, is that due to aggressive aims
or because he fears an outside power will topple his regime?
There are bad historical forces at work and as much as the
United States and Brussels want to pull the West into a new era, history keeps
rearing its head. If the EU collapses or NATO becomes obsolete every historian
and intellectual will be filled with dread. History will return and the same
forces, issues and unresolved questions going back to the era of the World Wars
will quickly reappear. This is what happened in the Balkans with the breakup of
Yugoslavia.
There's an additional irony to Orban's complaint regarding the
treatment of Hungarian minorities in places like Romania and Ukraine. Hungary's
crown had come under Habsburg domination and they felt particularly betrayed in
the wake of the Turkish retreat post-1683. Hungary had fallen to the Turks in
the 1520's and yet the nobility had survived, particularly in Transylvania.
This is part of a larger story I've written about elsewhere. Many forget that
Hungarian Reformed Protestants were fighting with the Turks against
the Habsburgs in the 1683 siege of Vienna. The Hungarians and certainly all the
Protestants of Eastern Europe hated the Roman Catholic Habsburgs and considered
Turkish rule preferable, if those were their only choices.
So much for the modern Christian Right/Evangelical narratives
concerning the West's war with Islam.
The Hungarians rejoiced to see the Turks driven out of their
kingdom but were embittered by the Habsburg yoke. This culminated in the
revolutionary year of 1848. Led by the Protestant Lajos Kossuth the Hungarians
rose up and tried to break free of Vienna. The uprising failed and Kossuth
spent years exiled in Ottoman Turkey and later toured extensively in the United
States where he was hailed as a hero. There are towns, counties and many
monuments in the US named after Kossuth. He was viewed as a heroic champion of
liberty and is among the exclusive club of foreigners permitted to address the
US congress.
A freemason, there are still lodges named after him. I
frequently drive by an Oddfellow's lodge called the 'Kossuth Encampment'. I am
quite confident no one knows who he is anymore.
Kossuth failed but significant and bitter setbacks in the
1860's drove the Habsburgs to finally acquiesce and permit Hungarian autonomy.
The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was formed in 1867. Each nation had its
own government under the auspices of Habsburg rule. In reality the Hungarians
now wielded tremendous power and on a day-to-day level became almost the
dominant power in the dual arrangement.
This period was the beginning of a dark age for the minority
populations of Hungary. No longer ruled from Vienna they were now controlled
from Budapest. An aggressive period of Magyarisation ensued with Hungarian
becoming the official language and the dominant force in education. Other
cultures were suppressed. Even names were changed to fit Hungarian onomastic
norms. There was a great deal of bitterness about this and it fueled
nationalism among the minorities. This in part explains why there was such zeal
to break-up Hungary on the part of its minorities in the wake of World War I.
The Slovaks who had been dominated by the Hungarians for
almost a thousand years quickly and eagerly agreed to form a historically
unprecedented nation... Czechoslovakia... in order to find some political
protection.
In the south, the Serbs and Croats were quick to join up in
the forming of Yugoslavia, a political entity meant to unify the various South
Slavic peoples and protect them from domination by the larger powers.
Hungarian nationalism had fueled a great bitterness that in
the end helped to undo Hungary. It's not the simple of course. Woodrow Wilson
also played a prominent role in dismantling Austria-Hungary and to this day
many historians think its dismantling was a bad idea. Even many Slavophiles
thought so. While there are few today who love the Habsburgs they had created a
system that welded together Central and Eastern Europe. Its dismantling, while
a cause to rejoice for some, ended up bringing about a series of catastrophes.
Hitler ended up finding a lot of support in Eastern Europe due to old grudges
and desires to correct historical wrongs.
These forces while subdued during the Cold War have never
quite gone away. Orban can make noise about the treatment of Hungarians but
he's unlikely to garner much sympathy in places like Slovakia, Romania, Croatia
and Ukraine. The peoples of these nations will almost certainly shrug and point
to the past when the Hungarians did the same thing... sometimes violently.
How quickly will the oppressed minorities happily turn into
the oppressor when given the chance. It's how power works in a fallen world.
See also: