This article was published in Vol. 3 No. 3 of our print edition.

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The Hungarian Model Offers an Alternative

Introduction

Hungary faces significant criticism from both the European Union elite and Western establishment. However, upon closer examination, this criticism is largely a form of political gaslighting. It serves to divert attention from the EU’s ostensibly open, transparent, and liberal society presenting as a substantive reality what is an oppressive Woke ideology imposed on EU nations that resist the prevailing socio-political trends. The Woke agenda’s pervasive influence, propagated as a post-Freudian cult of make-believe, has effectively turned the EU and the West against their true origins and natural interests. The nature and root causes of the cult of Woke amount to a systematic assault on the identity of what the antecedents of the EU once were and what it stood for.¹

This poses a conundrum for the elites of the EU establishment, now confronted by not one, but two wars, one military and one ideological, raising vital questions regarding resolving the eighteen-month proxy war between Russia and NATO. ‘Europe’ is blood-soaked, its identity conflicted, and its natural economic synergies, based on the laws of comparative advantage, have been wrenched apart at an enormous cost. Behind and underneath this is the question of where, and to whom, European nations committed to resolving the military conflict should look, as the first and immediate priority of an authentic post-conflict EU political culture.

This paper presents an analysis of the ‘False Europe’ concept coined by renowned English philosopher Roger Scruton.² It delves into the contrast between this distorted version of Europe, perpetuated by the Woke EU, and the distinct characteristics of The Hungarian Model (THM), which embody the Christian Democratic vision of politics, opposed by Cultural Marxism. The paper sheds some light on the rise of False Europe, whereby the EU has effectively relinquished the governance of its institutions and policies to the Woke, disregarding the foundational values that once defined Europe. In the teeth of such criticism and pressures, Hungary has preserved these core values; they largely shape its domestic and foreign policies. It is precisely these values that have generated the EU elites’ animosity towards Hungary, and especially its initiatives in its social economy.

These values revolve around relational autonomy³ and practical patriotism,⁴ guiding Hungary’s approach to the ongoing war that now afflicts the European continent. THM stands as a beacon in the contemporary European landscape, now fractured by both military and cultural conflicts. Its distinctive Christian identity, defined by an unwavering commitment to Christian Democratic politics, preservation of authentic European aesthetics, promotion of a family-focused political economy, and firm opposition to the increasing militaristic tendencies, now finds itself facing a substantial threat. This peril arises from the covert economic and hegemonic forces exerted by the European elites and their intermediaries. If allowed to dominate, these forces threaten to undermine the core of Hungary’s cultural identity, erode its cherished values, and weaken its steadfast defiance against the militaristic influences shaped by the Russia–NATO conflict.

The paradox lies in the fact that Europe, once steeped in Christian traditions and serving as a pathway to peace in the aftermath of war, now stands in stark contrast under False Europe. This new protagonist champions Woke culture and the cult of militarization, ironically rejecting the very Christian ethos and identity that continue to be preserved in nations like Hungary. Thus, Europe is grappling with two existential challenges: one military, the other ideological. What Europe has become is now at war with what Europe once stood for, and the basic reason for this is that the new Europe has excised God and the transcendent. Europe cannot reconcile its aggressively progressive secular mindset with its deeply rooted spiritual heritage. These contrasting philosophical spheres are in stark conflict.

This paper concludes by advocating for a post-conflict conference—‘Budapest One’—founded on the principles of THM. The three-day visit of Pope Francis to Hungary this past April provides significant impetus to the rationale for, and the success of, such a forum, serving three key purposes:

Peace and Reconciliation: Facilitating peace-building dialogue between conflicting parties, grounded on the fundamental values that underpin Europe’s identity.

Reflective Analysis on Christian Democracy: Providing a critique of Christian Democracy as a viable alternative to Cultural Marxism, particularly in the wake of critical theory and identity politics that are central to the Woke movement.

Critique of EU Militarization: Reflecting on the impending threat of EU militarization, considering not only the financial implications but also the gross misallocation of resources favouring arms over investing in an authentic social Europe. Moreover, evaluating the repositioning of Europe within an emerging nuclear-threatened autocracy due to this escalating militarization.

This situation prompts a series of crucial, politically charged inquiries. Firstly, can the EU, currently entwined both ideologically and militarily with an American ‘deep state’ industrial complex harbouring its own objectives, realistically align itself with the post-conflict vision of Europe that aspired to revive relational autonomy among its members? Secondly, could it indeed emerge ‘victorious’ from a potential conflict with Russia, which at least tacitly enjoys the support of China and other global players disillusioned by the Western agenda? The present stasis, far beyond the parameters initially envisaged by both protagonists, is a negative sum game. What does it mean to win such a war, and at what cost militarily, financially and geopolitically? Keynes would recommend that we consider the economic consequences of that peace.⁵ What damage has it already done to Europe—its identity and economy—over and above the humanitarian catastrophe for the Ukrainian people and the Russian casualties? This includes the lurch towards global autarky which the West failed to anticipate, including reinforcing relationships between Russia, China, and the BRICS countries. To whom, and to what institutions, should European nations turn to address these questions?

Hungary has continued to affirm its Christian identity, resisted the oppression of the Woke, and pushed back against the EU’s miscalculated sanctions and cult of militarism while affirming Ukraine’s sovereignty and advocating for peace. The risks of the Russia–NATO conflict continue to metastasize. The Ukrainian War is now part of a broader, interrelated, and intrinsically unstable calculus. Therefore, in Europe there is no going back to the status quo ante. In the words of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, ‘All changed, changed utterly…’ But what political model—what values—will bring a sustainable and just peace, and a reaffirmation of Europe?

The Russia–NATO Question: Europe and the Twin Threats of Military and Ideological Conflict

A crucial factor in comprehending how the EU now finds itself entangled in two diametrically opposed conflicts, military and ideological, is its evident antagonism towards Hungary. This antagonism is further compounded by Hungary’s assertive critique over the past year of the EU’s flawed understanding and mishandling of the escalating conflict between Russia and NATO. These intertwined elements play a key role in unravelling the complex realities confronting contemporary Europe.

The conflict is, and always has been, about broader and deeper issues than Ukrainian sovereignty. Indeed, the EU’s encouragement to Ukraine to affirm its sovereignty through EU membership—and, by extension, membership of NATO—is not without irony, since the Woke EU rejects anything except a notional concept of sovereignty. The EU’s hostility to Hungary is about something more substantive than its pro-forma alibi of the ‘rule of law’. It is essentially about Hungary’s Christian identity giving substance to its national narrative, including advocacy of the national interest and peace.

‘The Woke agenda’s pervasive influence, propagated as a post-Freudian cult of make- believe, has effectively turned the EU and the West against their true origins and natural interests’

The immediate responsibility for the war was Russia’s immoral invasion of Ukraine. The West/NATO’s extended adversarial stance towards Russia that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union provides the broader context without justifying the invasion. More generally, the EU, directly and indirectly via the G7, has helped enable a choreographed NATO–Russia War on the European continent and a de facto global conflict, with a wide swathe of BRICS and emerging countries sceptical of the integrity and agenda of the West.

It goes against the grain of the West’s political and media establishment to provide a Russian perspective on the conflict and the issues at stake. The brutality of war, in this instance Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, makes partisans of most people. Yet history is replete with examples of the consequences of a failure to critique the agenda of the political establishment—the invasion of Iraq being a classic example.

There have been continuous tensions between post-Soviet Russia’s rebuilding and reforms and the US hegemon’s insistence, at multiple levels, on pushing back against Russia’s reconstruction. This was particularly reflected in the US strategy of expanding NATO eastward, a clear and present threat to Russia. This was reinforced by the US decision in 2008 to invite Ukraine to join NATO: ‘NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.’⁶

This reflects the predominance of the US mindset and is intrinsically unlikely to have reflected the views of all of the European nations; it reflected a pre-emptive decision that did not reflect the economic or governance arrangements in Ukraine. NATO must have been aware of the strategic and political risks that this decision involved vis-à-vis a stable European–Russian arrangement at that time. This process overlapped with, and was reinforced by, the EU’s dangling membership to Ukraine, notwithstanding unambiguous indications that membership was not feasible except in the very long term. Here, Andrew Duff makes the point, in the context of Ukraine’s membership application to the Commission, that:

‘The main thrust of the Commission opinion will be on Ukraine’s ineligibility to be declared an accession country under present rules. Even before the Russian invasion, Ukraine was a very poor country, its GDP per capita below half that of Bulgaria. Since its 2014 association agreement with the EU progress has been slow, with the country’s integration into the single market stalling because it failed to meet EU norms of governance.’⁷

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these developments were not driven by respect for Ukraine per se or regard for the principle of national sovereignty, but rather by the US geopolitical and commercial agenda. It was not about the interests of Europe, which has always been a means to an end in the wider strategic worldview of the US. The EU wrongly accommodated itself to US realpolitik. The rest is revisionism—and a conflict that was foreseeable and avoidable, and continues to exact a catastrophic cost on Europe, third countries, and the wider global economy. What is unfolding in Ukraine is a geo-military conflict in which critique, on both sides, is now hostage to propaganda. The EU’s, and more generally the West’s, impetus towards continued escalation of militarization, in scope, mandate, and fiscal support, needs, therefore, to be seen alongside that of President Putin’s impetus, however flawed, to war. All of this highlights the main theme of this paper that the EU is confounded and conflicted by an identity crisis, leading it to pursue an ideological and a military war, both underpinned by fundamentally left-wing and indeed Marxist politics. Historical amnesia is a terrible thing. To develop the context, President Putin has made the point that:

‘If anything, the developments of recent months could teach us that peace in Ukraine and, for that matter, in Europe was never a part of the US plan. They have long planned to pit Ukraine and Russia against each other, to deliberately ignore the plight of Russians in Eastern Ukraine and Russia’s vital national security interests and to essentially destroy historical Europe–Russia links, relegating Europe to the position of US political and economic appendage…’⁸

Agree, or disagree, this perspective is part of any attempt at critique. Part of the Russian narrative is that in the US and in Europe: ‘The ruling elite have broken away from the people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elite and the overwhelming majority of the people.’⁹ In this view, what is deemed by the same elite as the rise, in recent decades, of ‘populism’ in the US and EU is, in reality, gaslighting the widespread opposition to extreme-left-wing Woke which are the real threat to democracy and political legitimacy.

More generally, the extreme left’s political power and status are invested in an ideology imposed by elites, but one increasingly rejected by disenchanted voters, in parliaments and in the street. This power, and this status, are threatened, and can only be secured by an increasingly oppressive elite, pushing its agenda through a Gramsci-like control of popular culture, media, and an NGO-ecosystem heavily funded by the establishment across the West, enabling its interventions in ‘culture wars’. In the same interview with the Financial Times, Putin made the wider, but related, point that the left-wing Woke, sailing under the flag of Western ‘liberalism’ and encompassing multiculturalism, open borders, and gender theory, is becoming obsolete.¹⁰ If this is true, it represents a clear and present threat to elites heavily invested in ‘liberalism’. Putin’s 2019 analysis of identity politics, some four years on, now resonates across wide swathes of public opinion in the EU, US, and the wider West:

‘They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. I cannot even say what these genders are. I have no notion. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population…[D]eep inside, there must be some fundamental human rules and moral values. In this sense, traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than this liberal idea, which in my view is ceasing to exist.’¹¹

Scruton would surely argue that only a ‘False Europe’, one gifted with its philosophical, scientific, and historical provenance, would miss, dismiss, and override such an obvious analysis—and ask where on earth did the elite think that excising its intellectual and Christian patrimony would lead, because the same left-wing ‘liberalism’ is impelling both identity politics and militarism across the West.

‘Identity politics now suffuse every niche of EU institutions and politics, threatening the cohesion and stability of European civilization’

There has been widespread opposition to Russia’s invasion as being morally repugnant. However, this does not allow for simply dismissing this perspective out of hand or not reflecting on the paradox at the heart of a divide that splits Europe from what it was to what it has become. Originating from Europe, critical theorists honed their philosophies in US academia—and its aligned political landscape—later extending their influence back to their homelands and dramatically reshaping Europe’s traditional Christian ethos. These changes have led to a fundamental restructuring of long-standing beliefs across political, religious, societal, and academic spheres. A significant number of politically disenchanted voters, predominantly in parts of the EU and the US, share this perspective, espousing a rationalist resistance to what they view as the Woke movement’s politically oppressive tendencies. Their main focus lies in opposing the perceived deconstruction of established human anthropology, marriage, and family norms, with particular emphasis on protecting children and women’s status from the excesses of this ideology.

This deconstruction is at the heart of the ‘culture wars’, bisecting Western society. It is the highest irony that, after an epochal war against totalitarianism, the Europe rebuilt by Adenauer, Schuman, and their colleagues on the sensibilities, aesthetics, and culture of Christian Democracy should have ceded itself to Cultural Marxism, under the diktats of critical theorists. Identity politics now suffuse every niche of EU institutions and politics, threatening the cohesion and stability of European civilization. Indeed, this very paradox lies at the heart of the matter. The Russia–NATO conflict presents a profound conundrum for Europe, involving the dual perils of military confrontation and ideological discord. In essence, Europe finds itself struggling with its own foundational principles. How these challenges could manifest during the prosecution of the war and in the subsequent crafting of peace is yet to be determined. Hungary is the radical alternative to the ‘False Europe’ narrative, offering a template for the rebuilding of Europe characterized by Roger Scruton as ‘Our Home’, but now sequestrated by war, Woke, and the resultant and unprecedented economic hiatus.

The EU’s Hostile Mindset and Hungary’s Upholding of European Values

The EU projects the mirage of being free, open, and democratic, in contrast to Hungary and Poland, which are caricatured as repressive and ‘backsliding’ on the ‘rule of law’. The EU’s ‘openness’, including its push for open borders, is a not-too-oblique segue to ongoing ideological colonization and the suppression of members’ national identity. It is what Marxism is all about. The recent history of the EU’s perspective on ‘freedom’ demonstrates an egregious misuse of the term as a moral and democratic imperative. The public square in the EU, and across the West, has seldom been more oppressed than it is today by the systematic subversion of language and law, while the right to free speech and religious freedom is repressed. It is hardly transparent—not in its politics, or in its economics, or media.

Nor even can its position on the war in Ukraine be defined as transparent, given the extent of propaganda and psychological manipulation by both protagonists, which forms an important part of the backdrop to the predictable and avoidable Russia–NATO tragedy. The phenomenon described in The Politics of Lying¹² and elsewhere, now serves the Woke agendas rooted in identity politics. These ideologies, offspring of the critical theory deeply ingrained in EU and UK universities, influence the graduates who ascend through the ranks to direct the governance of higher education and politics.¹³ This influence pervades the EU’s political narrative, much like a boxer asserting dominance in the centre of the ring, extending from culture and high art to media, consumer advertising, and even into the nuances of technology and politics—the confluence of techno-politics. This potent combination forms the medium through which the False Europe political strategy operates, characterized by denial and deflection, steering away from the reality of what the EU has transformed into. This toxic mixture serves as the mediator between the current state of affairs and the narrative presented to the public, effectively skewing public perception of the EU.

The False Europe systematically gaslights those—in politics, media, and academia—who affirm, as Hungary does, the distinctiveness of national cultures, open speech, and who reject the ‘dependency trap’. It professes respect for these features—and then wheels out clichés about ‘Europe’ when it is expedient, while resolutely repressing the lived values of the founding fathers of Europe in the practice of their politics. The EU agenda can be recognized in its aggressively hostile stance towards Hungary’s political values and especially its social economy, refracted through its ubiquitous media narrative. It is evident in the media caricatures of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ‘strongman politics’ cast as the black sheep of a progressive Europe and the tiresome, repetitive references to Hungary’s ‘democratic backsliding’, which deflect from, for example, the EU’s repression of democratically held Greek elections, referenda, and governments during the sovereign debt crisis and the austerity years.

Similarly, in the EU’s mainstream media reporting on the war in Ukraine, there is a skewedness. In this instance, there is a systematic deflection away from Hungary’s unequivocal support for Ukrainian sovereignty and for Ukrainian families displaced by war, both of which are unequivocally set-out in President Katalin Novák’s 2022 inauguration speech.¹⁴ Hungary is painted as ‘pro-Putin’, for not disregarding the realities of economic geography and the imperative of safeguarding the national interests of its people—and for critiquing a sanctions regime that was manifestly flawed and has disproportionally negative effects on Europe and third countries. Through all of this is a studied ignorance of all that Hungary is and has stood for in Europe,¹⁵ and, more generally, a sense of entitlement on the part of the EU and the West to second-guess the democratic decisions of Hungarian voters. In her Inauguration Speech, President Novák stated:

‘You may know that over the past decade, I have participated in public life and the work of the government as a member of a national, civic, Christian Democratic community. I am proud of this and will remain so. My commitment to my nation and home country does not change, and naturally, I also bear responsibility for those Hungarians whose values are different from mine. My task is to find the depth and the height where Hungarians belong together…’

The EU’s political and media narrative is tone-deaf to the irony that it is Hungary, not the EU, that has adhered to Europe’s founding values. An autocratic EU brooks no criticisms and rejects all critiques other than those which are well choreographed. It has decoupled itself from the principles and freedoms gifted by Europe’s post-war leaders to their successors. A Woke EU deploys decadence, the offspring of the dalliance of Marx and Freud,¹⁶ without compunction, since Marxism, under whatever guise, acknowledges neither truth, virtue, beauty, nor the centrality of God and the transcendent. This resonates through Scruton’s concept of ‘our European home’ and the manner in which it has been sequestrated.¹⁷

All of this is part of the modus operandi of Gramsci’s Marxism as an instrument for subjugating European civilization.¹⁸ Scruton’s theme of the importance of the aesthetic of beauty, which featured strongly in President Novák’s speech, and which enabled Europe to contend with and overcome totalitarianism is, once again, under siege. The false ‘freedom’ and the narcissism of ‘choice’ of critical theorists have been weaponized. God—and biology—have been excised from human anthropology across mainstream opinion. Pope Francis I critiqued its effects in Budapest.¹⁹ It is ubiquitous across the EU’s political and social institutions, its media, and the civil spaces.

The EU elite’s strategy is to caricature and gaslight dissonant views on nationality, sanctions, and all things Woke—as ‘extremist’, ‘right-wing’, and ‘populist’, while shielding itself against critique, reform, and renewal—failing, for example, to use the opportunities in the Commission’s 2017 White Paper.²⁰ The more oppressive the political repression, the more it seizes the opportunity to leverage its ever-extending powers to suppress dissent. The introduction of the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 in Ireland is a thinly-veiled means of imposing control over a democratic ‘pushback’ against an autocratic and aggressively secular politics.²¹ The crucial ideological aspect here is that labels like ‘racism’ or numerous ‘phobias’ can be readily mobilized within a political ecosystem deeply rooted in critical theory. Once such narratives take hold, they present an enormous challenge for genuinely democratic politics to resist and counteract this established government agenda. The stripping of Catholic hospitals, founded by exemplary women—pioneers in nursing and medical education—of all religious artefacts is a microcosm of the revisionism and aggression of the anti-Catholic Ireland and its mindset.²² This highlights the importance of the robust defence by Hungary, first against Soviet Communism and more recently an extreme left-leaning and secular EU, supported by overseas actors, in their attacks on Hungary’s political and social values and its governance. The EU’s longer-term objective is to subjugate and then subsume member countries’ national identities under a globalist monoculture. That, after all, is the ultimate objective of Marxism.

The extent to which the EU and the broader West are now locked into an uber-Orwellian world is reflected in the surveillance of citizens, the mandating of gobbledegook Woke language across the professions, and the (mis) use of law to oppress freedom of speech and assembly—and in the UK even thought²³—all in the interests of putative ‘liberalism’ and ‘rights’, is an extraordinary threat. Hungary, as we will see, has firewalled its laws against these precedents. More specifically, the EU’s criticism of Hungary’s constitutional and political values reflects its now intrinsically Marxist mindset. This mindset cannot be decoupled from the EU’s management of the Russian–NATO conflict.

The EU elite’s dystopian politics works through its near-total control of the EU’s political infrastructure and the scale of its scope for patronage. It is reinforced at a national level by ensuring, so far as possible, those nominated to the EU, directly or indirectly, through appointments that are in the gift of the state—are bound to the EU’s agenda. Dissenting voices are largely ‘screened out’ at national level by control of the nomination and selection of candidates standing for election, and in referenda. Dissident voices in the EU are, therefore, largely suppressed from the outset, undermining the EU’s claims to be transparent, democratic, and ‘inclusive’. Inevitably, political repression generates extremism, which can then be used to justify the False EU narrative on the need to legislate against ‘populism’, ‘extremism’, and ‘right wing’ forces.

Critical theorists have captured the left, infiltrated the right, and co-opted them both. Through identity politics, Cultural Marxism has absorbed and displaced the old left–right alignment, and now dominates the EU, US,²⁴ and the West, and bleeds over into the emergent militarization of what was initially an Economic Community. Control over fiscal expenditure enables the EU to fund, propagate, and disseminate its ideology, directly and indirectly, via the EU-supported NGO ecosystems that are ‘on message’. It reinforces this through its capacity to impose fiscal and legal penalties on dissonant voices. All this constitutes a powerful platform enabling the EU to target and put pressure on Hungary: two wars, therefore, connected by the same umbilical cord.

The EU’s Conditionality Mechanism and Hungary’s Pushback

The EU leverages its political and financial power for ideological rather than democratic ends. A primary example is the EU Commission’s efforts to stymie Hungary’s access to its total funding allocation under the €750 billion post-Pandemic Fund, using the so-called Conditionality Mechanism. In October 2022, the Hungarian Parliament enacted a package of measures to address issues of governance and transparency raised by the Commission as a condition for releasing programme funding under this €750 billion fund. Hungary established an Integrity Authority to oversee the distribution of EU-funded expenditures as part of a reform process. What is striking, however, is that conditionality for Hungary continued to become more onerous—the goalposts continued to move. This resonates with the decision by the EU, in their final ‘Bail Out’ strategy for Greece in June 2016 to enforce a degree of conditionality on the Greek government even more onerous than that which they had already been pressured to concede.

‘Control over fiscal expenditure enables the EU to fund, propagate, and disseminate its ideology, directly and indirectly via the EU-supported NGO ecosystems that are “on message”’

‘Conditionality’ is an essential dimension of multilateral lending. It is an integral part of IMF support to member countries. The IMF, however, are professionals; they do not use conditionality for overtly political or ideological purposes. Indeed, the IMF had misgivings regarding the conditionality imposed on Greece by the EU institutions after it had been railroaded into participation in the ‘Troika’ in 2010. It was not the IMF but the EU institutions that imposed an undemocratic and socially oppressive political mechanism under the rubric of ‘Conditionality’ contrary to the spirit and, almost certainly, the provisions of the Treaty. The withholding of funding from Hungary was similarly contrived.

‘Troikanomics’²⁵ involved EU-imposed austerity, with democratic institutions put into de facto receivership, under the control of a non-elected and unaccountable Troika with no recourse or appeal by the nation itself. It was possible only because both Greece and Ireland, to take two examples, were dependent, and allowed themselves to be made even more dependent, on what the EU has become. It exemplifies the EU’s Dependency Trap, to which we return shortly. Hungary set its face against this dependency trap following the 2010 general election.²⁶ It did so in the white heat of a banking and sovereign debt crisis, having inherited severe macroeconomic stabilization and demographic challenges.

This is a pivotal, but seldom remarked, element of Hungary’s model of political economy over the last decade. An authentic Europe does not weaponize dependency. By reducing its dependency on the EU, Hungary has been able to effectively resist the overreach of EU bureaucracy and its increasing militarization, thus preserving its culture and national economic interests. This resilience was particularly evident when the EU attempted to enforce poorly considered energy sanctions without comprehensive stress-testing. Initially, the EU sanctions regime failed to consider Hungary’s economic geography, the extent of its reliance on Russian energy imports, and the considerable costs of restructuring. However, Hungary’s oppositional defiance not only served its own interests but also eased the strain on electricity provision to Ukraine, thereby illuminating the shortfalls in the EU’s approach. The EU’s use of pressures is tantamount to fiscal blackmail, linking access to Pandemic Funding with acquiescence to EU values and expenditures for the Russia–NATO conflict.

All EU members acknowledge the need to monitor and address the issues of public governance and transparency which impact on competitiveness, the effectiveness of policy transmission, and integrity in governance. There are legitimate concerns around the safeguarding EU-funded programmes, including procedures on transparency in public procurement. It is worth reflecting for a moment on how these concerns have played out across EU institutions, member states, and candidate countries. An obvious example is the Qatargate Scandal that has shaken the EU Parliament to its roots.²⁷ So, too, is the recent corruption debacle in Ukraine.²⁸ It is inconceivable that EU and Western intelligence was unaware of long-standing concerns about corruption, even as they dallied with Ukraine’s admission to the EU and, by extension, NATO.²⁹

The quality of public governance, including public procurement policies, is a priority for all countries, including Hungary. This makes the decision by the EU in November 2022 to withhold funding from Hungary under the Conditionality Mechanism more than a little anomalous. The mechanism, implemented after the Fund had already been established, relates to perceived or alleged risks to the financial interest of the EU arising, inter alia, from deficiencies in the quality of government financial management, including ‘sound financial management of the budget’.

This, and problematic ‘rule of law’ assertions by the EU was the pro-forma reason for the EU to withhold part of Hungary’s programme funding which, it should be noted, the EU has been willing to barter in order to overcome Hungary’s objections to certain of the EU’s sanctions and funding policies. In this context, it is worth citing, at some length, the conclusions of a recent IMF study:

‘Hungary has made significant progress in recent years in increasing the transparency and accountability of government, and in some areas has established high standards of practice relative to the fiscal transparency code. The activities of the fiscal authorities are clearly spelled out in the Act on Public Finances, which conforms to EU requirements for regulating budget management…Hungary has a modern and well-working budget process that has comprehensive coverage and is couched in a well-articulated medium-term economic framework…’³⁰

It is difficult to align the IMF’s analysis of Hungary’s transparency and good practice with the use of EU’s Conditionality procedures for withholding funding from Hungary, including a purported lack of transparency. It, once again, points to the conclusion that, in seeking to invoke and enforce the Conditionality Mechanism to protect EU funding to Hungary, the EU had a deeper agenda and was willing to use its fiscal leverage to further that agenda. More generally, the EU will continue to target Hungary’s constitutional values, deaf to its own repressive attacks on freedom of speech, assembly, and anti-Christian discrimination.

This raises the question highlighted at the start of this article, namely, how best EU member countries can resist the subjugation to Woke and accelerating militarization of the EU. Related to this, how best can Christian Democratic nations secure and protect their national interests within an EU that has ceded what was precious to its founders, to ideological activists who reject God, truth, and the realities of human anthropology? The implications are very far-reaching. When, and how, will a Woke EU that has been socially re-engineered in the image of Gramsci, advocate for peace between Russia and NATO, and equally at whose initiative will the EU itself engage in critique and reform?

‘Hungary Not One of Us’

The EU’s ‘Not-One-of-Us’ attitude towards Hungary, weaponized through its media narrative and re-echoed across a thousand EU-supported NGOs, therefore points to a much deeper and broader agenda than ongoing reforms in the domains of political economy. The EU Commission’s agenda will not be assuaged by reforms in Hungary’s governance, transparency, and budgetary systems. The real significance of the Conditionality Mechanism for granting access to the Pandemic Fund is the leverage it gives the EU to pressure Hungary, its Parliament, and its people, into compliance. The ultimate objective is dismantling its distinctive Christian Democracy model, embedded in its Constitution and values on human life, marriage, and family, including the protection of children from medically mediated ideological agendas. In other words, to pressure Hungary to re-align its primordial Christian values to the rather more recently invented ‘European values’ which have no historical provenance prior to the torrent of the EU’s putative ‘rights’, inspired by gender theory.

This should not come as a surprise. It is, quite simply, the modus operandi of Cultural Marxism—ideological capture, from the inside, of public institutions, civic spaces, the media, and, above all, the national culture, as opposed to overt class warfare, are what the struggle for Marxism is now all about. Hungary’s tenacity has been shaped by living under the tyranny of Marxism and its resistance to attempts to suppress its millennium-old identity in the streets of Budapest in 1956. Hungary commemorates annually a special Memorial Day to honour ‘The Victims of Communism’. Hungary has experienced what the EU is progressively becoming, under another name.

Hungary celebrates its authentically European identity, as its president did in her inauguration speech in 2022, and Pope Francis I did in the heart of Budapest during his visit in April 2023. It will, however, do so only as long as it resists the dependency trap. This is perhaps the real rationale for, and substance of, the EU’s and its NGO ecosystem’s hostility to Hungary over the last decade, especially the last five years. Hungary stands for Europe’s foundational values, for the nation, collaborative engagement with other countries, practical patriotism, and for Christian Democracy—the antithesis of the now statist EU.

In her Inauguration Speech, President Novák highlighted, ‘The cradle of sovereignty is the family. A nation’s unity starts in the family, too’, affirming at the same time the enormous diversity of every extended family and her commitment ‘to governing for all Hungarians’.³¹

THM, therefore, epitomizes Hungary’s authentic European political economy, counteracting demographic pressures and ideological constraints that hinder family formation, while simultaneously resisting the encroachment of Marxist critical theory’s dystopian anthropology.³² Hungary stands against the strident EU pressures, explicit and overt, to insinuate itself into its schools, under a variety of acronyms and putative ‘rights’. These same ‘rights’ have ignited culture wars across the EU and the West, eviscerating fundamental freedoms and rights that are based, not on narcissist relativism, but on natural law and the public good. Christian Democracy, at the heart of THM, affirms the primacy of God, as the US Constitution, the EU flag and Ireland once did—and as Hungary still does. This is at the heart of the False Europe opposition to the principle of open speech, freedom of expression of public and private worship, and a social economy based on normative values and human anthropology.

All that Europe once stood for points to the primacy of peace in resolving the Russia–NATO conflict on, it should be remembered, European homeland. However, EU foreign policy—and the economics impelling the growth in US exports of weaponry to the EU³³—points to ever-more ominous weaponry as a basis for ‘peace-building’. A logical fallacy is serving the interests of Woke and the cult of militarism at the cost of destroying Europe and gravely damaging the wider global economy. In the face of casualties on both sides from continued military escalation, the enormity of the humanitarian, financial, and economic costs of war, the case for the prioritizing of peace becomes compelling.

The Hungarian Model: Political Economy

Political economy begins with the purpose the economy intends to serve—the individual, the family, and the nation. Alternatively, an oppressive state serves a statist agenda and brooks no opposition. The leaders of post-Second World War Europe were clear on the person’s unique and irreplaceable value, the role of the family as the source of social solidarity and coherence and, importantly, social capital. The importance of Catholic social teaching runs straight across and through the thinking of Adenauer and Schuman.³⁴ They, and the other ‘Founding Fathers’ were clear on the importance of national identity as an integral part of the wider European adventure. The importance of relational autonomy within the framework of increasing collaboration has been ‘lost’.³⁵ The founders were clear on the responsibility of the national government to safeguard the general good and the national interest, in solidarity with other members of the fledgling European community of nations. That has ‘disappeared’. So too has the primacy of culture, faith, and aesthetics at the heart of Europe as a Christian community.

That perspective has been swept away by an anti-Christian EU, dismissive of its heritage—other than for propaganda—when it is wheeled out to celebrate ‘European values’ wholly at odds with the lived values and aspirations of its founding fathers. In this ideological mindset the individual is a bonded and indentured ‘activist’ under the control of the state. Marriage—at the heart of health demographics, social capital, and an anthropology of love—has been changed into open-ended, consensual arrangement impacting negatively on outcomes for children.³⁶ In his book, Is Europe Christian?, Professor Oliver Roy points out that:

‘The importance of Christianity in European history, even in the very idea of Europe, cannot be doubted. The area we call Europe today roughly corresponds to eleventh-century Latin Christendom, and it is self-evident that the main legal and political concepts that structured state-building, and later European integration, were forged in a Christian milieu.’³⁷

That intrinsically Christo-centric concept of Europe threatens to be eclipsed, indeed is now being eclipsed, across the West by the ideological colonization of Europe. Hungary is a singular and notable exception. Pope Benedict XVI in his final book, What Is Christianity, reflects on the growing intolerance across a deeply and systematically engineered antipathy of the False Europe towards the Christian faith. It has not, he said, ‘yet turned into open persecution […] it manifests itself in an increasingly authoritarian way with the aim of achieving, by appropriate legislation, the eradication of what is essentially Christian’.³⁸

Pope Benedict XVI warned of the danger of a ‘radical manipulation of human beings’ and ‘the distortion of the sexes by gender ideology’. For the False Europe, that is the target on the back of Hungary, which also emphatically rejects such forms of ‘progressivism’. That is an unambiguous reality confronted by Hungary in its engagement with Europe, on Woke and on war. The then Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło, at the EU summit in Brussels in 2017, pointed out that ‘Christians in Europe should not need to feel uncomfortable or ashamed about their faith and traditions’. She went on to say:

‘We are in favour of [an EU] where Christian traditions are not subject to ideological censorship…The EU’s principle of respect for the rights of its citizens will cease to be an empty one only when the debate about the future of the European Union takes place with the participation of all concerned, not in three or four capitals…’³⁹

That is the extent to which Scruton’s False Europe has become alienated from the politics and political economy for which it once stood. The evisceration of Christian Europe is an explicit objective of Cultural Marxism, whatever the labels—identity politics, critical theory, or Woke and its many variants. It is this extreme leftist ideology that has sequestrated what Scruton has called ‘our (European) home’. The same mindset that is waging Europe’s culture wars on nations that dissent is, directly and indirectly, facilitating the escalation of a military conflict between post-Soviet Russia and the post-Christian West and which, once ignited, has inevitably evolved into full-scale war and economic autarky.

What is unfolding within the EU, and across Europe, poses a dilemma for Western civilization. On the one hand, there is Cultural Marxism, now espoused by the EU and, on the other hand, Christian Democracy, embraced by Hungary and Poland. They have diametrically opposed values. A war on two fronts is being waged for the soul of Europe. One of the insights wrung from the bloody end of the First World War was that Europe had not thought through what was to replace a broken political order. The established political order got it catastrophically wrong. Hungary, to take just one example, was dismembered. The seeds of bitterness, resentment, and totalitarianism were sown. The consequences continue to reverberate via the Second World War, down to our own time.

Analogously, the West did not think through the consequences of the pursuit of hegemony in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The EU demonstrably did not think through the calculus of provoking Russia into a conflict with NATO, using Ukraine’s premature membership of the EU as a bait. It did not think through the military and geopolitical aftermath.

‘Hungary is a template for a political renewal of a Europe, one that rejects the systemic psychological manipulation by the EU’s politics of Woke’

The irony is that it had every reason to defer the issue of membership. Also, neither the EU nor the West, nor analogously the old Soviet Union, have shown regard for the inviolability of any nation’s sovereignty. Still, prospective EU membership served the purpose of trip-wiring a war, severing the European continent, and imposing incalculable damage, directly and indirectly, through its sanctions.

A Woke and militarized EU/NATO cannot protect Europe from the subversion of its values and its freedoms. Neither Germany nor France now offer an axis, much less a template, for resolving the post-war identity crisis of the EU. Both are, in their own ways, weak, divided and, of course, self-serving. Leadership has been displaced by militarization, virtue signalling, and tectonic economic strains. Adenauer and Schumann were clear that Christianity alone offered redemption, true solidarity, and cohesion to a sundered Europe. Marxism in all its guises offers only the emasculation of Europe’s post-Second World War vision and the primacy of a military and commercial agenda for Europe.

The Search for Truth

War, whether in Ukraine or Iraq, is always failed diplomacy. To look beyond this failure requires the search for truth. Truth is inextricably rooted in the EU’s once Christian identity. The EU has ceded truth to the Marxist phantasmagoria of critical theorists. There is a deep uneasiness and uncertainty about the EU. It was given voice by Polish Prime Minister Morawiecki at the EU Summit in 2021:

‘A dangerous phenomenon threatens the future of our Union. We ought to be anxious about the gradual transformation of the Union into an entity that would cease to be an alliance of free, equal, and sovereign states, and instead become a single, centrally managed organism, run by institutions deprived of democratic control by the citizens of Europe.’⁴⁰

This takes us back to the question posed earlier: to whom should European Christian nations look for truth? To the Kremlin, the US State Department, Brussels, or any of the ideologically captured parts of what remains of the global architecture of governance? Or to social media, where truth is stalked by lies, disinformation, and propaganda?

The war in Europe resonates as the epochal face-off between Christian Democracy and Scruton’s False Europe. There is an ideological chasm between the two—a dichotomy between the ‘Spirit and Truth’ at the heart of Christianity and the tyranny of relativism and narcissism. So, to whom can democratic nations seeking leadership in the interregnum of war and its aftermath turn?

The West’s war on Iraq was launched based on a lie. So, too, was the Russian revolution and the revolutions and wars engaged by the former Soviet Union. In both instances, truth was the first casualty of war. That continues to be the case. The EU’s greatest vulnerability is that truth, at the core of Christianity, has been displaced and is hostage to the tyranny of relativism. The important point is this—the point at the epicentre of the two wars being waged by the elites of the EU against its true self. Aggressive secularism is never ‘neutral’. Nor can a post-Christian Europe be neutral, nor a politician that is in effect a ‘timeserver’ in what purports to be a democracy. Christ, and therefore Christianity, are precisely about the synergy of truth and the sensitivity of moral conscience—of the individual and of the nation:

‘When the conscience is dulled, this lets in the violence that lays waste the world […]. For the reform of human relationships rests in the first place on a reinforcement of moral strength. Only morality can set limits to violence and selfishness, and wherever it becomes insignificant it is man who is the loser every time, and the weak first of all.’⁴¹

The Hungarian Model

In the shadow of war at the heart of Europe and the tyranny of Woke, an alternative model of ‘Future Europe’ has taken shape. Hungary robustly safeguards the integrity of its national identity, its history, its borders, and its culture. It firewalls this culture in its Constitution—which embraces diverse political perspectives—in its schools, and its universities. It protects it in its values and principles, and in policies which Hungarian electors have endorsed in successive elections. They are its strength, as a sovereign European nation, engaging in collaborative relationships with others. It is an alternative to what the EU has now become.

Incessant ideological pressures including funding, from within and outside of the EU, target Hungarian schools and tertiary education, both directly and indirectly via external NGOs. The ‘capture’ of schools by critical theorists is—as is evident from the battle lines, from legislatures to school gates, across the EU and the West—a prerequisite for political re-engineering. Hungarian schools protect the national memory against dystopian revisionism. They transmit its 1000-year-old Christian culture. Hungary’s Constitution guarantees freedom of thought, expression, and religion. To preserve these freedoms requires proscribing the imposition of gender theory and its appalling consequences being propagated in schools. It has, of course, been criticized by the EU for not enabling a mindset that has no generalized anthropological or normative basis and involves the subordination of parental consultation and consent to what is taught and what is being ‘normalized’. Marxism, given the slightest opportunity, does not do ‘balance’ or consultation with parents, much less their consent. It breaks down doors and then enforces its will, displacing parental rights, responsibilities, and cultural norms.

Universities are pivotal not alone to the intellectual infrastructure of a country but also to its culture and politics. Their vulnerability to radical identity politics and ‘cancel culture’, which shout down free speech and critique, is enabled and supported by the EU via multiple policy levers of government. The radicalization of university faculties enables critical theorists to mobilize student activists through ‘cancel culture’, NGOs, and a largely compliant media. The control of academic appointments, pre-appointment screening and post-appointment indoctrination, committees to monitor, impose, and enforce Woke identity politics on the infrastructure, all follow, as night follows day.

The irony is that in Europe, of all places, identity politics, frequently at least partly externally funded,⁴² works its way through the critical theory ‘playbook 101’ to destroy the very freedoms that universities exist to uphold, suffocating the freedoms around which Europe’s universities have been formed for centuries. They appropriate, then relativize the search for truth and meaning, displace science, and eviscerate linguistics and literature. Their patronizing and presumptive revisionism of literature, from the ‘greats’ of European culture to children’s novels, knows no limits. Hungary’s refusal to cede the pivotal importance of education to gender theory has displeased the progressive elites. But in the process, it has done some service to Europe and what remains of its intellectual traditions of open inquiry and free speech.

It is important to emphasize again that this has only been possible because of Hungary’s rejection of the dependency trap and, by extension, a vulnerability to de facto political blackmail. There is, therefore, no little irony in EU and mainstream media’s criticism of Hungary’s ‘discriminatory’ policies in its schools and universities and its restrictions on media. These do not begin to approach the restrictions and oppressive control of media, broadcasting and publishing in the EU, and across the West.⁴³ Hungary has rejected cultural infiltration of its education system for precisely the same reasons Brussels, directly and via NGOs and external agencies, seeks to colonize schools and tertiary educational institutions. A Woke EU knows that control of education is the segue to control of a nation’s politics, institutions, and its future.

Radical Alternative

THM therefore offers a radical alternative to the dichotomy of the EU elites engaging as protagonist in two wars that currently bisect Europe. It provides a plurality of democratic forms that go with the grain of its foundational Christian Democratic tradition and aesthetic, uniquely indigenous to Europe. It embraces practical policies to address looming national and European demographic—and associated fiscal—challenges and, importantly, in education and the professions a scientifically informed anthropology rooted in the authentic European tradition of the unique and unrepeatable value of the human person. In an increasingly hegemonistic and militarized Europe, Hungary advocates for a values-driven democracy embedded within relational autonomy across the EU, setting it apart from the monoculture that has rolled across the EU.

Every nation needs reform, critique, and a more complete realization of its culture and identity, engagement with others, as well as a social economy that serves the common good and, more immediately, the national interest. In a Europe fraught with unprecedented geopolitical risk and vulnerable to pressures to continually escalate the provision of armaments to ‘resolve’ the Russia–NATO conflict, Hungary advocates for a negotiated end to the war. Hungary is on the right side of history. It has been vindicated by the damage of sanctions to Europe and to vulnerable third countries.⁴⁴ The attributes that constitute THM, and its tenacity to resist and push against what the EU has become, are an indicative route map for a renewal of a Europe confronted by the already apparent demographic winter. THM was the first in the EU to take realistic and innovative social policies to address the demographic challenge—and to do so as an integral part of a politics that respected and valued women and motherhood. Other countries are now opportunistically seeking to emulate Hungary.

THM is shaped around policies that reject dependence on hegemons and the risks of becoming embroiled in conflicts driven, not by the constitutional values and the national interest, but by wider geopolitical agendas. Dependent countries cannot uphold their national interests. They are particularly vulnerable to political pressures transmitted via monetary, fiscal, and trade policies. Hungary’s rejection of the dependency trap has enabled it to reverse its demographic decline while contributing to marriage, marital stability, and ‘Family Friendly’ fiscal policies that are pivotal to the formation of social capital. While seriously impacted like the wider EU by inflation, Hungary has thereby mitigated the longer-term fiscal pressures of rising age-related dependency.

Conclusions and Proposal

A Woke Europe presents two existential threats to its foundational values and to the sustainability of all that it has contributed to civilization. These two threats are, firstly, ideological and, secondly, a pivoting away from peace and toward militarization. THM offers an alternative vision and template. In a highly networked, interdependent, and increasingly multipolar world, THM demonstrates the need for nations, and Europe, to safeguard against external pressures bearing down on identity and memory, and the importance of nations retaining the freedom to engage with all countries. In other words, to retain the freedom to engage in relationships that are informed by European solidarity as well, importantly, as their national interest, rather than by ideological diktat. More than at any time since its founding, Europe needs to engage in critique of what it was and what it has become.

Hungary affirms national responsibility for rebuilding an authentic Europe to displace this False Europe, a responsibility that includes the moral dimension of Europe’s identity. THM stands for respect for the history that shaped the identity of European nations, and, importantly, for affirmation of religious values in the public square and freedom of intellectual inquiry in education. Hungary advocates for the primacy of peaceful resolution of international conflicts. In Ukraine, it opposes what has now become an arms race, fuelling an already escalating war which, planned or simply not thought through, has piled geopolitical risk on Europe. Hungary rejects the export of arms to protagonists in the present conflict, including the transfer, across its national borders, of military equipment. It acknowledges the importance of national security, alongside the right of a nation to affirm, as Switzerland does, neutrality as a vital witness of Europe’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political disputes.

These attributes of THM are all of a piece. External pressures which threaten one of these attributes threaten the whole tapestry from which the nation, and Europe, have been woven. Hungary is a template for a political renewal of a Europe, one that rejects the systemic psychological manipulation by the EU’s politics of Woke that have as their objective inculcating ‘guilt’ rather than celebrating the achievements of Europe’s Christian identity, its culture and its aesthetic; a vindication of fundamental rights, including parental rights and responsibilities that are rooted in the natural law and in normative human anthropology.

In conclusion, we reiterate the call made at the beginning of this paper, for the convening of a post-conflict conference—‘Budapest One’—predicated on the principles encapsulated by THM. The conference would serve three pivotal objectives: 1) peace and reconciliation—a platform for fostering dialogue aimed at peace-building, and drawing from the foundational values intrinsic to European identity; 2) reflective analysis on Christian Democracy—as a potential counter to Cultural Marxism, especially against the backdrop of the prevalent Woke ideology entrenched in critical theory and identity politics; and 3) critique of EU militarization—encompassing not only the social and political ramifications, but also the massive resource diversion favouring the military-industrial complex over the genuine cultivation of a social Europe. Furthermore, it would assess Europe’s shifting position in the context of a potential nuclear-threatened autocracy as a consequence of this mounting militarization. The Budapest One conference, therefore, encapsulates a proactive step towards healing, understanding, and redirecting the course of Europe towards peace once again.

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NOTES

1 D. E. Paul, ‘Under the Rainbow Banner’, First Things (2020); O. Roy, Is Europe Christian? (Oxford University Press, 2019).

2 R. Scruton, ‘The Paris Statement: A Europe We Can Believe in’, in Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016).

3 R. Kinsella and M. Kinsella, Troikanomics: Autonomy, Austerity and Existential Crisis in the EU (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).

4 F. Duff, ‘Organising for a Christian Society’ (1958), The Burkean (15 August 2021), www.theburkean.ie/articles/2021/08/15/organising-for-a-christian-society-frank-duff-1958.

5 J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace (Palgrave MacMillan, 1919).

6 NATO, ‘Bucharest Summit Declaration Issued by the Heads of State and Government Participating in the Meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Bucharest (2008)’.

7 A. Duff, Constitutional Change in the European Union: Towards a Federal Europe (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).

8 V. Putin, ‘The Conflict in Ukraine: From Provocation to the Proxy War’, The Telegraph (23 February 2023), https://telegraph/The-Conflict-in-Ukraine-from-Provocation-to-the-Proxy-War-02-23.

9 L. Barber, Transcript: ‘All this fuss about spies … it is not worth serious interstate relations’, Financial Times (2019).

10 Barber, Transcript: ‘All this fuss about spies …’.

11 V. Putin, ‘The Conflict in Ukraine’.

12 L. Cliffe, M. Ramsay, and D. Bartlett, The Politics of Lying: Implications for Democracy (Macmillan Press, 2000).

13 N. Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (HarperCollins, 2021). Note that the difficulties faced by Professor Biggar in the publication of this authoritative analysis exemplify the stultifying effects of overt censorship on ideological grounds and, more generally, of the effects of cancel culture within higher education.

14 ‘Inauguration Speech of Katalin Novák, President of Hungary’, 14 May 2022, https://abudhabi.mfa.gov. hu/eng/news/inauguration-speech-of-katalin-novak- president-of-hungary-14-may-2022.

15 ‘Pope Francis I meeting with the authorities, civil society, and the diplomatic corps: Address of His Holiness, Vatican, 28 April 2023’, www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2023/april/documents/20230428-ungheria-autorita.html.

16 D. E. Paul, ‘Under the Rainbow Banner’, First Things (2020).

17 Scruton, ‘The Paris Statement’.

18 M. Dooley, ‘Antonio Gramsci’s Long Struggle’, Public Discourse (2022).

19 ‘Pope Francis I meeting with the authorities’.

20 European Commission, ‘White Paper on the Future of Europe: Reflections and Scenarios for the EU27 by 2025’ (2017).

21 Houses of the Oireachtas, ‘Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022’, (2023); D. Roughneen, ‘Would “Hate Speech” Censorship See Fr Sheehy Locked up in Jail for Preaching Catholic Teaching’, Gript (10 November 2022), https://gript.ie/would-hate-speech-censorship-see-fr-sheehy-locked-up-in-jail-for-preaching-catholic-teaching/.

22 R. Kinsella, ‘Disremembering the Daughters of “That Matchless Woman”’, Gript (12 April 2023), https://gript.ie/ disremembering-the-daughters-of-that-matchless-woman/.

23 G. Gilholy, ‘Sunak’s New “Free Speech” Plans Do Not Protect Christians’, Catholic Herald (5 June 2023), https://catholicherald.co.uk/sunaks-new-free-speech-plans-do-not-protect-christians/.

24 M. Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (Harper, 2017).

25 R. Kinsella and M. Kinsella, Troikanomics.

26 R. Kinsella, ‘Hungary and Ireland’, Hungarian Review, 12/2 (2021).

27 C. Francavilla, ‘European Parliament: Wrong Response to “Qatargate” Scandal’, Human Rights Watch (18 January 2023), https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/01/18/european-parliament-wrong-response-qatargate-scandal.

28 T. Law, ‘What to Know about the Corruption Scandals Sweeping Ukraine’s Government’, Time (2023).

29 N. Buckley, ‘IMF Warning Sparks Ukraine Pledge on Corruption and Reform’, Financial Times (2016).

30 International Monetary Fund, Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes (ROSC) Hungary (2001).

31 ‘Inauguration Speech of Katalin Novák, President of Hungary.’

32 R. Kinsella, ‘The European Family’, The Article (1 March 2020), www.thearticle.com/the-european-family.

33 S. T. Wezeman, P. Wezeman, and J. Gadon, ‘Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2022’, SIPRI (2023).

34 Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, ‘History of Christian Democracy’ (2023), www.kas.de/en/history-of-christian-democracy.

35 R. Kinsella and M. Kinsella, Troikanomics.

36 J. Sacks, Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places (Bloomsbury, 2020).

37 Roy, Is Europe Christian?

38 Pope Benedict XVI, What is Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2023).

39 L. Kelly and P. Sobczak, ‘Polish PM Calls for an EU Where Christianity Is Not Censored’, Reuters (2017), www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-poland-christianity-idUSKBN1D92D3.

40 J. Cienski, ‘Polish PM Warns of Dangerous EU Effort to Control Members’, Politico (2021), www.politico.eu/article/poland-mateusz-morawiecki-eu- dangerous-efforts-control-member-countries/.

41 J. C. Ratzinger, God is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life (Ignatius, 2001).

42 B. O’Brien, ‘Foreign Funding Buys Undemocratic Influence’, The Irish Times (2017).

43 R. Legutko, ‘In Defence of Poland: A Reply to Daniel Johnson’, The Article (23 August 2021), www.thearticle.com/in-defence-of-poland-a-reply-to-daniel-johnson.

44 F. Rodríguez, ‘The Harm That Sanctions Do to the Vulnerable’, Financial Times (2023).

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