Balázs Orbán, Political Director for the Prime Minister of Hungary, appeared at a celebratory event for the 35th anniversary of the Hungarian history periodical Rubicon on 25 January. The magazine, evidently named after the river Rubicon which Julius Caesar crossed with his troops in 49 B.C., was first published on 1 February 1990. However, multiple anniversary events will be held by the Rubicon Institute leading up to that exact date.
The first one of these events featured Mr Orbán. In his speech, he told the packed-house audience that the Rubicon periodical has been a real ‘reference point’ for people in his generation. He also said that the publication’s main purpose at its launch was to ‘unravel the entrenched historical interpretations of the communist period, to try to remove ideology from the teaching and discussion of history, and to make these discourses based on facts’.
Mr Orbán stressed that history education today has ‘a national strategy dimension’ to it in Hungary, even if that is not the case in other countries; and it is one of the most important tasks of the Hungarian government to ‘reproduce the Hungarian historical identity generation after generation’.
He then shifted the subject of his speech to more topical matters. ‘We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the geopolitical world order,’ he proclaimed, after noting that this may sound a bit of a cliché at this point. The old world order was based on the unipolar power of the United States, which it used to spread its neoliberal ideology. Francis Fukuyama famously referred to this post-Cold War period as ‘the end of history’. But now, the speaker believes that the neoliberal system of government has proven itself to be ineffective and unsuccessful. As he pointed out, there are a number of recent historical events that are viewed by many as the catalyst of a paradigm shift in their respective areas, such as the terror attack against the World Trade Center in 2001, the 2008 financial crisis, Donald Trump’s first election victory in 2016, or the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union also in 2016.
‘We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the geopolitical world order’
He also noted that many in the West blame the Eastern powers for the end of the unipolar world order, as they took advantage of the benefits of a more connected, liberal global trade, but never adopted the neoliberal ideal of governing in their own countries. On the other hand, Eastern powers tend to accuse the West of exploiting the old world order to push their own interests.
‘I don’t think we Hungarians necessarily have to take a side in this question,’ Orbán added.
He then described the new era in geopolitics as ‘the age of sovereignty,’ in which ‘the main organizing principle will be who is sovereign, who can behave in a sovereign way in this system, and the movements of these sovereign actors’. He also expects to see more competition between nations in this new era, which will likely lead to the sudden development of some countries, and the sudden decline of others.
Mr Orbán said that the outgoing Biden administration’s response to the changing world order was the reforming of blocs; and wanted to ‘strike’ those who challenge the US’s unipolar power, either militarily, economically, or culturally. President Biden’s world view of the ‘democracies and the authorities’ of the world competing with each other is similar to that of the Cold War era, Orbán pointed out. The former POTUS also looked to isolate the democracies of the supposed autocracies.
In this world view, ‘Saudi Arabia is not democratic or autocratic depending on whether it has free fair elections every four years, but on if it accepts this description of world order and joins democracies in fighting autocracies or not,’ he went on to explain. A ‘final battle’ between democracies and authocracies has Marxist connotations, and not by accident, he added.
President Donald Trump and his administration, however, have a completely different approach to geopolitics, Mr Orbán believes. They do not seek to create a new world order based on confrontation, prioritizing stability instead; and they accept the fact that they will have to make compromises with sovereign power centres. However, they also have a ‘cowboy-style’ negotiating tactic, often threatening with trade wars, the speaker said.
Meanwhile, the European Union—which was founded on the idea of halting the competition of great powers within the continent, as it led to the continent as a whole losing prominence on the geopolitical stage, the speaker explained—has ‘checked out of the geopolitical competition,’ Mr Orbán proclaimed, ‘which has led to a radical, brutal loss of position, whether we deny it or not’. This is something that even former left-wing Prime Minister of Italy Mario Draghi and the right-wing populist Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán more or less agree, he highlighted.
‘The European institutions have in fact been taken prisoner by progressive liberals with a utopian agenda. They have diverted the Union from the original purpose for which it was created and replaced it with their own objectives. According to their ideology, the European institutional system must be used for this purpose, a new European quality, a new European way of life, a new European social order must be created, and the European institutional system must take the lead in creating it. And so it is perfectly understandable why Europe is underperforming,’ Balázs Orbán said. This way of thinking was forcefully rejected by the European people in the European Parliamentary elections last June, he concluded.
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