4th April 2022
Once I was walking through the streets of an old university town with a religious-minded friend, and he turned to me and said: ‘you do realise that we are still in the early history of the church’.
The truth of that specific proposition was lost on me – I am a non-militant atheist – but the more general point has always stayed with me.
What any one generation may see as the end (or after the end) of a process may just be the start.
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Those of us born after the 1950s and 1960s are used to thinking of ourselves as ‘post-war’.
Hitler and Stalin were regarded as historical figures, not near-contemporaries.
When I started my history degree in 1990, the events of just over forty-five years before seemed like from another century.
But now, thirty-or-so years on, 1990 is like only yesterday.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union feel like recent events.
History had – has – not ended.
And those of us who saw ourselves as fundamentally separated from the horrors of the mid twentieth-century will possibly be seen by future historians as just occupants of a happy interlude before the horrors of this new century.
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This blog has previously covered Viktor Orban and his robust, unapologetic and evasion-free illiberalism.
(Read this post here.)
For Orban there are no polite but insincere platitudes about the value of diversity and individual autonomy.
His illiberalism could not care less about your feelings.
His significant 2014 speech – which should be read by anyone interested in how Europe is going – places the illiberalism in plain sight.
We cannot say we were not told.
Now Orban and his political supporters have won yet another super-majority in Hungary.
And this was achieved despite the opposition liberal and progressive parties working together – and despite Orban’s conspicuous lack of support for Ukraine.
There perhaps could not be more favourable conditions in practice for Orban’s political opponents.
And they still lost.
Of course, the Hungarian political and media system is rigged in favour of Orban.
But not everything can be blamed on conspiracy.
What if – in a democracy – illiberalism is actually more popular than liberalism?
What if illiberalism is – as Orban avers – an ideology of the future, and not something for the history books?
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We may – perhaps – not still be in the early history of the church.
But we may well still be in the early history of populist authoritarian illiberalism.
And Orban – who studied at the very same university college as me and my religious-minded friend, and only the year before – no doubt thinks so.
Orban may be right.
So let us do what we can to show that we are in the early history of liberalism.
For Orban may also be wrong.
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It’s now well past time that the EU actually takes a stand for the values it is supposed to uphold. It must expel Hungary.
The EU has 450 million members.
Hungary has a population of 10 million at most.
Ukraine with a population of 44 million is trying to join the EU.
Poland with 38 million is becoming increasingly assertive within the EU.
If there is to be a President LePen in France in three weeks time this would be a game changer especially as she will also become EU President until the end of June and be able to negotiate directly with Putin whom she openly admires.
The EU has problems just as others in the world do. It will be for the EU to decide what happens. The UK will have little or nothing to do with the decision making.
An openly fascist President in Paris is a greater threat than Orban in Budapest.
The rotating presidency is the presidency of the Council of the European Union (commonly still known as the Council of Ministers). Roughly translated, the Council of Ministers is somewhat similar to the German Bundesrat or the US Senate – it’s the ‘upper house’ of the legislature. The country acting as President gets to set the agenda and chair the meetings, but has no executive power.
The European Council – the collected Heads of Government of the member states – has a permanent President, elected by them. Again, he gets to set the agenda and chairs the meetings, and reports back to the European Parliament. In many ways he is the Council’s Speaker.
The executive body of the EU is the Commission. Made up of Commissioners, each one selected by their member state. To lead them, the European Council nominate a President of the Commission, who holds office for five years (the term of the Parliament). They are confirmed with a yes/no vote in the Parliament. This is currently Ursula von der Leyen – a relatively moderate right-wing politician, a member of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and the European People’s Party, formerly Merkel’s Minister of Defence. It is she who would be doing any negotiating with Putin.
(To complete the picture, the European Parliament *also* has a President, but again this is a Speaker-like figure. For most of the bodies, President = Chairperson.)
As French President, LePen would have veto power on certain subjects in the European Council, and the Council of the European Union. But fewer subjects now have vetos, and France would need to attract support from a lot of other member states to win double-majority votes (a majority of states, representing a majority of the EU population).
That we are in the early days of liberalism is more than an elegant twist at the end there. It may be that this is what inspires support for authoritarian leadership with illiberal values. Perhaps those who balk at the hyper-subjectivity of liberalism’s intellectual spear tip are afraid of its reality-warping consequences. The kind of thinking that leads someone on my LinkedIn today to state flatly that counselling someone before legally recognising their newly stated gender represents the “torture” of trans people. I worry for the fate of liberalism, especially as a lifelong beneficiary of the least cruel culture known to man.
Perhaps the only fortunate thing about autocrats (for Orban is an autocrat at heart and I suspect he will further alter the constitution to allow him to remain in power) is that they are mortal. At the moment his mortality is small compensation, but it is a certainty. And few autocrats die peacefully in their beds. I imagine over 50% of Hungarian voters feel betrayed and ashamed this morning. But we must be philosophical: this too shall pass.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Often attributed to William Burke.
The problem with a laissez-faire approach to democracy is that you have no guarantee that the autocrat currently choking the life out of democracy in Hungary will not be replaced by a like-minded successor.
Well said !
On eras and the sense of them, I’m interested by what you say about the sense of being ‘post-war’. I’d say the same for myself, but, born in the mid-50s, it took me a while to realise that the phrase had a very different meaning for people born even a decade or so later.
I grew up in Leeds, and I remember bomb sites still undeveloped across Leeds and the West Riding well into the 60s. We played on them as kids. Only with the hindsight of adulthood did I realise that for my parents, events of just ten years ago were still barely in the past.
I’d give more credence to your friend’s observation, maybe. I’m a bit bicephalic, one head very liberal believer, one head very sceptical. (‘Some of my best friends are atheists’). But it means I’ve had a lot of encounters with churches. In particular, I think the Church of England is on a cusp. It still is part of the British State and, informally, still is an important legitmator of the establishment (in the broadest sense) and of the status quo. See, for instance, the impact of Welby’s intervention contra-Corbyn and Labour on election eve, and the disproportionate number of CofE members who supported Brexit. Within the Church, this is the Establishment Principle – the Church’s consent to a strange marriage whereby Church (big C) and state legitimate each other.
That’s a dance that’s carrying on long after the music stopped. Other Christian denominations, other faith groups, and humanists all, rightly (IMHO), object to it. It’s fundamentally incompatible with a pluralist society. At the level of the House of Bishops, and in public pronouncements from the two Archbishops, there is not a hint of the Establishment Principle being questioned – and who could be surprised at that. But the writing must surely be on the episcopal palace walls.
To return to eras, I can’t really say what lay behind your friend’s observation, but there is force in it for all of us, not just believers. It does maybe put focus one of the more peculiar aspects of the British polity, that prelates in fancy dress still play a part in both its formal and informal politics.
You make an excellent point and one which has troubled me for years : The state is legitimised by the Church and vice versa. I fear in the UK that many people support the Establishment in an uncritical manner. I have observed recent actions of the CofE that smack of political involvement in areas which in my view that Church should not involve itself.
If illiberalism beats liberalism honestly, as it did in the Brexit referendum, there is only one thing left to say:
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.
(In fact, that’s the only thing to say whenever people vote for illiberalism in an honest election, even if liberalism still wins.)
People who vote for illiberalism don’t truly understand what they’re voting for. On some level they think democracy and the rule of law cannot be broken, and that’s why they vote to break it. As a way to signal dissatisfaction, or as an expression that they want illiberal results for other people but not for themselves, not as a truthful exercise of self-determination.
Excellent comment
People vote for illiberalism because they are illiberal, though they’d never admit it. They understand what they are voting for. They see illiberal policies as sensible and common sense and liberal policies as something to be feared. They simply don’t see the link between illiberalism and loss of freedom. In my experience they often argue that liberalism restricts freedom, which is a contradiction in terms. They don’t care about democratic principles. They are quite happy to see those undermined as long as it doesn’t affect them. They may not understand the implications of such changes on the future but they don’t care as long as their politics prevails.
This is clearly the case in this country too, where large numbers of people are in favour of quite draconian measures on law and order, immigration and asylum. Margaret Thatcher appealed to Labour voters with an illiberal outlook and the current Tory Party does too.
Couple of points.
Firstly, it is entirely specious to conflate the question of liberalism or illiberalism with Brexit. There are numerous reasons for this, but let’s stick with just two:
1. You cannot show that either outcome (remain or leave) was intrinsically liberal or intrinsically illiberal. The two points are at best orthogonal, at worst not even closely related.
2. This is especially true when the broad terms of Brexit had not been negotiated at the time of the referendum. So when you write, that people “don’t truly understand what they’re voting for”, this was, in a nutshell, true for every single person who cast a vote in the referendum, irrespective of their personal choice.
Secondly, when you write, “On some level they think democracy and the rule of law cannot be broken, and that’s why they vote to break it”, you appear to be making a non-sensical argument. If something cannot be broken, then voting for it to be broken won’t make the blindest bit of difference. You might just as well sit with King Canute and instruct the tide to remain out.
Where I think we do agree is your observations around grievance politics when you write, “as an expression that they want illiberal results for other people but not for themselves…” These grievances are the tools of the autocrat.
Whether it was Hitler stoking mistrust of Jews in late 1930s Germany, or Trump demonising Mexicans as “rapists” in 2016, or Putin claiming that Ukraine was a hotbed of fascists in 2022, the technique remains the same: vilify some unfortunate group before using often false claims about them to justify your own atrocities.
And in all cases, the best defence against autocracy, is an engaged, informed electorate. One of the most fundamental dichotomies of politics is the apparent contradiction between elected parliamentarians as simultaneously both elected leaders and public servants.
They key is the safeguards.
Liberal democracy is difficult. It means voters have to clear opinions about all sorts of stuff, much of it requiring difficult tradeoffs (we want more green energy but I don’t want windfarms or energy from waste near me etc.).
Illiberalism appeals to the instinct of many for The Big Man or father figure, who can solve everything for us – as our parents did when we were kids. Then we dont have to make the difficult choices, and we believe the choices are made for our own good even if we really really wanted sweets before bedtime and cant have them.
I don’t understand the appeal, but then again I have a family background that innoculated me against that.
Illiberalism is a strong narrative.
Orban has won four elections in a row since 2010 – about 2/3 of the seats each time. One could quibble about how remarkable that is, given that Hungary is hardly a model democracy. But if one can believe the results, he has at least won more than half of the votes this time. The previous two times, he had an unassailable majority with 44% and 48% of the votes. More popular than any other party, perhaps, but he is not supported by an overwhelming majority of the Hungarian people.
A strong leader winning a large majority of the seats with a minority of the votes, and then entrenching the ruling party’s power for years to come, sounds all to familiar.
So far the EU has been willing to offer the economic benefits of membership to countries that seem to despise its core values. How long, one wonders? What benefit does the EU derive from Hungary’s membership? Perhaps Orban would be more comfortable in the authoritarian embrace of Moscow or Beijing?
Surely liberalism predates the post WWII several years, stretching back beyond Renaissances? Humans, once again like chimps, are empathetic and curious. Some, often more naive types are egotistical and/ power hungry. I find that folk either look out, or in and that inwarders are often agressively defensive. The autocrats by definition put themselves before others. Are those from the rest of us who do not repudiate them feart, uneducated or do they really have a need to be controlled, abused and told what to do?
I am all for universal suffrage, but we can still make the right to vote subject to a basic knowledge of what folk might be asked vote for: left right, centre or extrême , communism authoritarianism, entreprise and austerity or heavier taxes and less homeless. I am certain a test could be devised, refined and updatedby subsequent parliaments to filter out dolts, chumps and psychopaths (literally, those who can only put themselves first). Same problem though as proposing PR, those in power do not want to go there.
Well, at least we can then vote them out next time. Is that not the rub?
Partic is surely closest: those in power want more and will not easily relinquish it. And some branches of most religions can always be found to accommodate such glorious leaders.
“I am all for universal suffrage, but”
Years ago, I saw Shakespeare history plays performed over a day (start at noon, finish at 10:30) which made me realise that history doesn’t fall neatly into periods – and at any one point we can be at the beginning, end or middle of various things.
Are we now at the end or the beginning or stuck in the middle? Who knows? Perhaps we are working on several timescales at once – if that doesn’t sound too much like Doctor Who.
From my perspective, liberalism can feel complicated with no clear solution (perhaps wrong but romantic) whereas illiberalism is based around – apparently – simply solutions to complex problems (rarely right and often repulsive).
The key, though, often seems to be whether people are thinking about other people or just their own narrow interests. Sadly, often forgetting how much we are dependent on each other. (No man is an island etc.)
Lots of excellent comments as usual.
I’m (finally) reading ‘Europe A History’ by Norman Davies, owned it for nearly 20 years, too busy or lazy to start it.
The first 1,000 odd pages only gets me to 1939. I felt now was the time to start.
It puts this current discussion in perspective.
“There perhaps could not be more favourable conditions in practice for Orban’s political opponents.”
Is “in practice” meant to mean, “taking as given the absence of a free and fair election in Hungary these days?” There is neither a free press, and the constituency boundaries are heavily gerrymandered. In practice, the former was the main thing, as Orbán got over 50% of the vote, and didn’t need the gerrymander to win. Though it did give him the super-majority.
The state controls the media to a considerable degree in Hungary. Reporters Without Borders put Hungary 92nd on their freedom of the press index. That’s the worst in the EU, by a stretch, and a long way from where most EU countries lie. Next worse are Malta at 81, Greece at 70 and Poland at 64.
You answered your own question
I personally have come to the very depressing conclusion that the equilibrium condition of industrial society is probably fascism. However, as, among others, I remember Will Wilkinson pointing out, we do not have to settle for equilibrium. We just have to recognise that it involves work to keep us away from it.