On January 1st, Hungary took over the rolling six-month presidency of the European Union. On the same day, its government introduced a new law severely restricting the freedom of the Hungarian media. Here, Mediapart Editor-in-Chief Edwy Plenel argues that if this scandalous law of censorship, an outrageous attack on fundamental human rights, is left unchallenged by the EU it will give a green light to the politics of authoritarianism now sweeping the continent.
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In his New Year's Eve address to the nation, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said "Europe is essential for our future, for our identity and for our values."
The next day, January 1st, Hungary took over the rolling six month presidency of the European Union Council of Ministers. It was also on that day that a new law was introduced in Hungary, which became a member of the EU in 2004, and which, in its attack on freedom of information, is quite simply worthy of an authoritarian regime.
Since May 2010, the country has been ruled by an extremely reactionary right-wing government, that of the Fidesz party (Hungarian Civic Union) whose leader, Viktor Orban, is back as prime minister, a post which he previously held between 1998 and 2002.
The party is not only a nationalist one, it is uncomfortable with democracy, and fully assumes this fact. While preparing to take over the EU presidency from Belgium, alongside the president of the European Council established by the Treaty of Lisbon, the new Hungarian government passed through parliament in Budapest a liberticidal law that is a frontal attack on the primary condition of a democratic state, that of freedom of information.
The law, adopted on December 21st, 2010, (256 for, 87 against), it places the country's media under the control of a ‘National Media and Communications Authority', and whose five members, including its chairman, are all from the ruling Fidesz party. It has been given the arbitrary power to demand that media organizations correct their reporting in cases where it judges them to have upset "political balance" or "human dignity" - notions that are not detailed in its brief.
If it so wishes, it can punish media it considers have "violated public interest, public morals or order" with a fine of up to 200 million forins (about 720,000 euros) for broadcasters and 25 million forints (about 90,000 euros) for the print press and internet sites. Targeted media organizations will have the possibility of contesting the fine in court - but only once they have rectified the incriminated reporting and paid the fine imposed.
The Authority also has the power to intrude within the activities of editorial offices, by demanding that articles or programmes are submitted for its perusal before they are broadcast or published, and that journalists reveal their sources on subjects involving national security.
All of which is tantamount on paper to the removal of freedom of information in Hungary. While the new law has not yet been used against a media organization, two journalists with the country's public radio station were suspended from their posts for having observed a minute's silence in an on-air protest at the legislation.
As such, Viktor Orban's party now controls the vast majority of media, having in effect added the public radio and TV broadcasters to the small private media empire he built up while in opposition, much in the style of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. By making legal a censuring regime typical of that of the country's Communist past, he has imposed a condition of auto-censorship ensuring that news which upsets the status quo along with dissident opinions will become rarefied or even disappear.
This then is the government that will symbolically lead the European Union for the coming six months. Europe as a political entity, "its future, its identity and its values" to borrow the words of Nicolas Sarkozy, will be represented by a political movement that goes against its very principles. For the new Hungarian media law contravenes the European treaties which Hungary has previously signed up to.
Whatever its (significant) flaws and (grave) insufficiencies, the model of the EU was built on the basis of a perceived political necessity, born from the lessons learnt after the continent's catastrophic experience of totalitarianism, and which held at its core the strengthening, defence and advancement of democracy. In an unprecedented break with this ideal, the Hungarian presidency marks the end of such an ambition. In truth, it had already long become eclipsed by the domination of the financial and business markets, but its absolute disappearance will become official unless Hungary is rapidly brought to book and sanctioned.
The preamble to the European Union Treaty, in place since December 1st, 2009, stipulates that its signatories confirm "their attachment to the principles of liberty, democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and of the rule of law." Its Article Two reaffirms that "the Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights[...] These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail."
In its charter of Fundamental Rights, the Treaty states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers." It concludes that "the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected."
If these words still have any meaning for the EU, then Hungary must be sanctioned as is provided for under an unfortunately heavy and complex procedure set out in Article Seven of the Treaty. This recommends the removal of a number of rights, including voting rights, in cases of "a serious and persistent breach by a Member State of the values referred to in Article 2."
But if nothing is done, we must accept that it is the end of a united Europe's political ideals, for the EU will have shown itself incapable of defending the very principles it justifies and has legitamised. The myth would have lasted a while, but behind the appearances of treaties, speeches and proclamations, there will in fact have been only the harsh reality of national interests and those of the financial markets, while the democratic ideal will have been shown to be a hollow catch phrase.
'Democracy has become bothersome for oligarchic regimes'
Some Euro-sceptic readers might say that we have at last seen the light of day, while others, Europhiles, might argue that we are exaggerating the importance of a small country with a population of just 10 million inhabitants, and which has still not adopted the euro. To each group, we would suggest that the Hungarian "disaster", to borrow the phrase employed by German daily Die Tageszeitung, (see below its front page blazoned with the words "Freedom of the press reaches an end in Hungary" written in all the EU member-states' languages) is a double event. It both marks the running out of steam of the political drive behind European unity, and illustrates the regression of democracy across the continent at the hands of governments that play with fear.
Some 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the demise of the USSR (1991), the principles of freedom and rights that were previously cited in opposition against oppressive regimes have been shelved by those who benefited from them. Once used as an argument against the enemy of yesterday, democracy has today become a bothersome item for oligarchic regimes which want to definitively consolidate their domination of power, without sharing it or allowing opposition. Their policies are those of authoritarianism in the name of security, and a denunciation of the disorder they perceive to be represented by the media.
They play upon popular fears about the economy, social and cultural issues and national identity, fears which preoccupy European populations at a time of uncertainty, of a lasting economic crisis and the upset in the balance of world order. As was the case in President Sarkozy's New Year address, their key word is the notion of ‘protection', along with the identification of the dangers that threaten, summed up as the immigrant, the foreigner, the elsewhere, the far-off. The nasty trickery employed by these new conservative parties, now dominant in Europe, is to set up an exchange of freedom for protection. Be fearful, and we'll look after the rest! Give up your rights, and let us look after things!
Politically, the European ideal emerged from the painful knowledge of what a terrible trap is hidden behind this unequal exchange. For the Europe of the first half of the 20th century - that of the removal of freedom, horrific wars, and the resulting massacres perpetrated across the world - was one in which it fell into this hell, when the German and Italian populations accepted the end of their freedoms in exchange for an illusory protection that revealed itself to be no more than a license for crime and catastrophe.
When the European consciousness was awakened, it was with the certain belief that only the extension and deepening of freedoms could prevent a repetition of such tragedies. That lesson is today becoming lost amid the battering of nationalistic politics, whether that be the anti-Rom discrimination in France during the summer of 2010, or Hungary now with its law restricting press freedom - the fundamental right of citizens to information that is independent and pluralist.
There is no reassurance offered by the knowledge that history is never a simple repetition. On the contrary, it should make us all the more aware of the new perils, their new disguises and new illusions. It is not the far-right that today threatens our freedoms, but rather a conservative right that has been extreme-ised, adopting for itself the themes of xenophobia and authoritarianism, digging the same furrow of political hysteria and brutality. From Orban's Hungary to Sarkozy's France, via the Italy of Berlusconi, each country presents this evolution to its own particularities. The European face of this slide is the European People's Party, the largest group in the European parliament, of which Fidesz is a member and which unreservedly applauded the arrival of the Hungarian presidency.
The French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin, quoting from the 18th-century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, says "there where peril grows, grows also that which saves." In 1987, three years before the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a unipolar world, Morin published a pamphlet called ‘Penser l'Europe' (roughly translated as ‘To think Europe'). He concluded with a call for a vigorous democracy as being the only guarantee of a shared, debated and controlled political path. The exercise of democracy, he wrote, "possesses in itself no transcendental truth; its fundamental truth is that it has no truth in order to allow diverse truths to express themselves, to be confronted, to confront, in mutual respect - that is, in respect for the law of democracy."
"The key of the democratic idea is in its law", he added. "The rule of the democratic game allows social, cultural and political diversity to be productive through the conflicts that arise. It is what allows conflicts to eventually become creative."
It is this democratic law that Hungary has just trampled over, and it is the one that the European Union will betray unless it decides to call to account Viktor Orban's liberticidal policy. "Democracy in Europe is awaiting a second lease of life," wrote Morin in his prophetic text of 1987, "We are not in the era of endings, but in that of democratic beginnings." So here we are, at a starting point that is played out just as much here in France, in 2011 and 2012, the year of presidential elections, as elsewhere. After all, if Europe must be saved from itself, from its demons and its wayward drifts, it is also a challenge for us.
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