Looking back twenty years from now, it should become clear that what Hungary and Poland achieved at the Dec. 10 European Union Summit was a historic milestone, political analyst Tamás Fricz writes in a column in daily Magyar Nemzet:
Moving away from the events of several days ago during the EU summit and removing the static and competing claims, we can confidently say that Dec. 10, 2020, was an important moment in the history of the Union — a day which saw the Hungarian and Polish governments achieve an outstanding success. If, in, say, twenty years from now, someone writes on the tumultuous history of the European Union, I am convinced that this day will have to be remembered as a highlight and historic turning point.
But the basic question is: in what way can the victory of Viktor Orbán and Mateusz Morawiecki be quantified? Why is this a success and not a failure, as some of the domestic left-liberals claim who have divorced themselves from reality?
We can talk about victory and success for three basic reasons. Firstly, the direct stake was whether the globalist liberal mainstream of the EU would be able to inflate the requirements of the rule of law or fill them with inappropriate content to such an extent that they could eventually punish “rebellious” Hungary and Poland — not only legally, but mainly financially.
As I explained in more detail in my article on Dec. 12, “We Won, but the Fight Continues “, the rule of law is meant to guarantee a legal framework against arbitrariness, and keep politicians from formulating unilateral political, ideological and value expectations under any pretext.
The rule of law guarantees that democratic functioning and ideological expectations and values must be separated. It also safeguards against arbitrariness which can indeed be expected of members in a democratic community, while the question of how a given member state organizes its life within the rule of law is their sovereign decision.
However, what Orbán and Morawiecki achieved is demonstrating that the clauses that the rule of law and the liberal, globalist values have nothing to do with each other. Under the heading of the rule of law, member states cannot be required to accept migration as a human right, to receive and integrate migrants, to provide housing, citizenship, etc., nor can they be required to practice gender-based jurisprudence, allowing same-sex marriage and adoption of children by same-sex couples. All these are the internal affairs of a sovereign state. So far, the scope of the Union has not been extended, either in terms of the rule of law or in accordance with the current Lisbon treaties.
But this is not just about migration and family policy. The mainstream of the EU, if we had let them, would have come up with more and more liberal, globalist-cosmopolitan demands in the future than just what the quasi-rule of law demands.
For example, after a while, they would have “ideas” about institutionalizing the Muslim religion, then removing nation-state borders, pushing Christian symbols into the background, making gender theories mandatory in school curriculums, and last but not least, making it mandatory to set up gender-neutral toilets.
Not to mention that the agreement also states that, from the point of view of the rule of law, member states can only be criticized and punished on the basis of concrete and itemized reasoning and facts, and precludes proceedings against member states on the basis of general systemic problems. This is a great achievement because it also rules out the possibility of pure political attacks.
What this clause also does — at least for the here and now — is to shove back the spirit of globalist “values” back into the bottle.
Title image: Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawieczki (L) and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (R) meet in Budapest on November 26, 2020. (Prime Minister’s Office/Zoltán Fischer)
