Europe’s bulwark?

European countries need to face their challenges head on, Greg Daly is told

 

Given Hungary’s history following the Second World War and its key role in the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, it makes sense that it would be opposed to any hardening of the Irish border in the aftermath of Brexit, according to Szabolcs Takács, Hungary’s state secretary for EU affairs.

In Ireland this month to meet his Irish counterpart Helen McEntee and members of the Oireachtas Committee of European Affairs, he also addressed the Institute of International Affairs on ‘The Abduction of Europa’ and has had meetings with Ireland’s Hungarian community, which could be as many as 14,000 strong in the Republic with up to 4,000 more in the North.

“Of course, we visited yesterday the non-existent border, which we would like to keep as it is – non-existent – and I had meetings with some representatives, both from the North and from the south, who are in charge of the peace reconciliation. I had quite an interesting meeting with them, on how they see what has been achieved in the last few years, and what is at stake now in case there is a hard Brexit, which we hope will not happen.”

Noting that Hungary’s history long meant that Hungarians had an interest in how Ireland had been divided, he says the real challenge is how to square the circle of three apparently incompatible objectives.

“It has become now very evident that there is no border between the Republic and Northern Ireland and we believe in the shared view, I think of everybody in Europe, that this should remain to be so, but the political challenge and the intellectual challenge if you like, is how we can keep the integrity of the Single Market and the constitutional integrity of the UK while not risking this,” he says, expressing the hope that the UK can have an orderly withdrawal from the EU that would clear a path for a subsequent comprehensive deal that would suit everybody.

Businesses

“Yesterday when I had the chance to talk to these people we had the chance to try to understand more in depth what exactly it means – how many people are affected, how many businesses are affected, what it means on a daily reality if there are any borders,” he continues. “But what I have learned, quite interestingly, is that apart from the technical and financial and business burdens any check would mean even if only cameras were installed, the psychological impact would be much bigger, because in the last 20 years what they have experienced is that there is no check whatsoever, no cameras, no border crossings, no check-ups.”

In the meantime, he adds, the North’s religious demographics are changing, and observes that if the peace dividends of the Good Friday Agreement can be maintained, there are real grounds to hope that the Troubles can remain in the past.

The subject of religious demographics naturally turns conversation to the religious demography and identity of the EU as a whole, something Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has positioned himself as championing, and indeed something that EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker recently praised at a meeting of COMECE, the conference of European bishops.

Mr Takács says that the question of religious identity is core to today’s debates, and adds that his message to the Irish Government had been that while Hungary has consistently shown solidarity towards Ireland on the backstop issue, and that this solidarity has been unconditional, at the same time it had certain expectations of Irish support.

“We would certainly expect the Irish Government to show the same solidarity to issues important for Hungary, including this what you are talking about, because our government is a Christian Democratic conservative centre-right government in the traditional sense, as we call it ourselves,” he says, “and I think it would be also a good topic of discussion to identify what we mean by Christian values.”

Respect for life and family are vital in this area, he says, along with issues of gender equality and the role of women in society.

“But I believe there are certain red lines that we cannot pass, like when we talk about genders we believe that there are two genders in the world, a male and a female gender. We know that the world is changing and that as a result of all kinds of human development, technological development, the gender issue has also become one of the hottest topics of political debates and public discourse,” he says.

Adding that solidarity is a key Christian value, entailing help to others, he also said it’s important to analyse why European society is changing and aging while elsewhere the population is on the rise.

“I don’t know; maybe it has something to do with the economic development, welfare society, and better quality of life, where people are becoming more and more individualistic rather than community-focused, family-focused, religion-focused,” he says. “But we believe that this continent where we live was based on these Christian values, you can call them the Judaeo-Christian ones if you like, and we believe that this is what made Europe a successful continent despite difficult centuries in our history.”

It’s a contentious claim, of course, but hardly an unfamiliar one: historians of Europe have long recognised that Europe is less a physical continent, being really just a relatively small offshoot of the vast Eurasian landmass, than a cultural one. Its commonly recognised boundaries have varied over time, and it wasn’t for nothing that Hilaire Belloc famously claimed that what defined Europe, as a civilization, was its Christian identity.

“And now what we see is the European Union which is also a great story of our common European history, that’s why we wanted to join and be part of that because we Hungarians, just like the Irish and everybody else contributed largely to what we call Europe, but we would like to preserve this legacy,” Mr Takács says. “So for us European identity is extremely important, and while we obviously see the challenges of demography, and the labour market needs and demands, and the suffering of the world, we don’t believe that there is only one one-size-fits-all solution.”

This, he says, is exactly the opposite view to that held by Mr Juncker, for example, describing him as being only notionally a Christian Democrat while really having far more in common with liberal and green politicians whose aims go far beyond environmental matters into social policies where traditional social institutions like the family do not matter very much, if they are seen as being important at all.

“What is more important that around this heart of political power there is a soft power which is influencing the mindset of people: media, NGOs, think tanks, universities,” he says, raising the question of whether so-called soft power is where real power lies nowadays.

***

While comments about the importance of respect for life and family may seem utterly in line with Catholic thinking, Mr Takács has clear difficulties with what the Pope has said about migration.

“We also have some debate with Pope Francis, who says that we have to be open to all refugees coming to Europe. But I think we have to sophisticate that – who is a refugee and who is not a refugee? There are different categories of people,” he says.

Much criticism of Mr Orbán has centred around this issue, and in particular around the question of Muslim immigration. Maintaining that religious freedom is important, and that “we cannot expect others to respect our religion if we don’t give religious freedom”, Mr Takács is worried that Europe’s identity is threatened.

“I think we have to be very clear about that: we cannot be obscure, and we cannot smudge this debate, because quite frankly, and it sounds very straightforward and very tough, we believe that we see something in Europe which we are not happy with, and that’s the Islamicisation of Europe, in a way,” he says.

Radicalisation

The problem, he says, is that there are real questions around the radicalisation of young Muslims in Europe.

“We must analyse the reason how people could be radicalised, young people who were born in Europe to a Muslim family but who were educated sometimes in Christian schools, trying to teach them the ethos of Christian values, European values, how come that they were successfully radicalised by some in the name of radical ideology behind the walls of madrassas in Europe, behind the walls of prisons in Europe, and they turned against violently the society that educated them,” he says.

***

Venturing that attacks such as that in Paris’s Bataclan concert hall in 2015 are “a result of the unsuccessful integration of these people into Europe”, he says the challenge of achieving this has not been met, and that the demographic numbers are not on Europe’s side as populations rise in countries with a host of problems.

“This will drive millions – tens of millions, probably – in the years to come to come to Europe. The question is are we ready for that, do we want that? They are coming with a very strong identity because the poorer you are, the stronger your religious identity is – this is our experience as well,” he says.

The flip side of this, he says, is that as societies get wealthier religious identity tends to decline, with an impact of a general sense of community identity. “As societies developed, people turned away from traditional values that gave them shelter, religion, church, and they have become more and more individualist because they had a safe zone, that was economic prosperity: they did not need the traditional values too much, like family, like church, like religion,” he says.

There’s a failure of confidence involved in this, he says, and governments need to work to bolster traditional family life.

“That’s why we as a government of Christian values, what we encourage is a very attractive family policy that gives incentive to people who would like of their individual will to have more children. It’s their decision, we cannot force people to have children, but we should provide an environment for them which makes it much more bearable,” he says. There’s always a sacrifice involved in having children, of course, but the state can make this easier.

“We have to encourage it. Because we believe in and we wouldn’t like to see the Hungarians becoming less and less. Demography is a problem in our country as well but the trends are already changing slowly for the better,” he says. In some ways, he adds, central and eastern European countries are in a better position to address these challenges than western European ones, having less experience of multicultural society and different intellectual and socio-economic traditions, never having been welfare states on western lines.

Maintaining that it’s better to address the problems of aging populations through encouraging families than through encouraging immigration, he says, “so we need more people in our cultural context, and that’s why we encourage child birth with very attractive incentives – basically if you have three children in Hungary you don’t pay tax or you pay very little tax.” Acknowledging that this is not a short-term solution, he says that immigration in the meantime should entail newcomers accepting that they are coming to Hungary and embracing its values. The challenge, he admits, can be to define what those values are.

***

Where then does this leave the issue of refugees?

“If you’re a war refugee that’s a different story because we help you regardless of who you are, and this is what we did, by the way, 25 years ago, when the war in the former Yugoslavia happened, we opened up the doors to anybody,” he says. Now, though, he says there is a real question about who is a genuine refugee, maintaining that the real refugees from the crises in Syria and Iraq, for instance, are in camps in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.

These may not be ideal places, he says, but they are safe, and so the priority, he claims, should be helping make the camps better places with the aim of helping refugees return home.

“This is another very, very important element of Christian solidarity, Christian values, and that’s why Europeans as a developed part of the world have to help them financially,” he says. “That’s why we – Hungary – supported very much the deal between Turkey and the European Union that the EU finances the government of Turkey with €2bn a year, to help them keep these refugee camps bearable for the people. The vast majority of the Syrians would not like to leave, but they have one ambition to go back to their own country once peace comes – we don’t know when, that’s the tragedy.”

Crucial too, he says, is working to make other countries better places to live so that people are not driven into desperation – and forced migration.

“We have to cooperate with these countries to give them a future – we simply cannot give up on Africa, we have to make Africa a liveable continent,” he says, implicitly harking back to the 1950 Schuman Declaration, the EU’s founding document, which saw the development of Africa as an important objective of a united Europe.

Returning to the subject of the radical Islam, Mr Takács expresses concerns about rising anti-semitism in Europe, causing Jews to flee countries such as France, apparently in response to Islamist threats. Citing his time chairing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2015-16, he says that during that period alone 8,000 French Jews emigrated from France to Israel.

“The Jewish community is as old as the Christian community in many parts of Europe and their existence should not be threatened just because they belong to a religion,” he says, adding, “We have to analyse this. We cannot put our heads in the sand as if it is not happening.”

Talk of anti-semitism naturally invites a question about George Soros, the Hungarian-born US financier who readers of The Irish Catholic should be familiar with due to his funding of Amnesty International and the Abortion Rights Campaign as they campaigned for a referendum on repealing Ireland’s constitutional protections for the unborn. He and Mr Orbán’s government have frequently come into conflict, most obviously in connection with how a university founded by him had been obliged to leave Hungary for a new base in Austria, with this leading to suspicions of anti-semitism.

“Soft power is creating a perception that is far from the reality,” Mr Takács says. “George Soros, is a Hungarian-born financier of Jewish origin and sometimes he can abuse this and say that we are attacking him because he is Jewish, which is the most serious and blatant lie. Openly we say that we would defend Mr Soros on one occasion: if he is attacked because of his origin. Then we will defend him.”

Claiming that media, universities, think tanks, and NGOs can work as a kind of collective ‘soft power’, Mr Takács says this can be used to stifle attempts to put across what he sees as the Hungarian government’s message.

“Is this freedom of speech? But this is a fight that we are very happy to carry, because we believe in Christian values, and we believe that a large part of European society actually want to support us. The European Parliament elections will be a good test for us,” he says.