Everyone has a price: On Hungary, Russia and proto-fascism

I’ve been having discussions with comrades and friends recently, about the importance of Putin and Russia in the — undoubtedly terrible — turn towards the populist right and far-right which has characterised the last few years. I think it’s fair to say they’ve been quite heated, these discussions. Until recently, I tended towards extreme caution myself in regards to all this… after all, there is a whole industry, a whole complex, which benefits from intemperate relations between Russia and the western alliance. And Russia has been encircled, and has acted defensively in response to the ideology of neo-conservatism. However, there are a few additional factors which have been nagging me, and they relate most specifically to Hungary, and the influence of Putin’s Russia on Hungary. I’m going to list them, quickly.

The more neoliberal the state, the more corrupt it is

The post-1980s Anglo-Saxon model has made many, if not all, countries in the West more porous: taxes are still collected, but the whole model of a ‘procurement’ neoliberal state lends itself to multiple levels of corruption, especially at a local level, with many vested interests quietly at work within the public sector. Therefore the former communist states, being subjected to ‘shock therapy’ and textbook neoliberalism, have been primed for corruption on many, many levels, and arguably, it is the liberal, or even social democratic parties, which have done most to entrench this corruption since 1990. That said, corruption extended across the political spectrum.

The Stasi state compromised a generation

The system of surveillance and monitoring, whether somewhat downplayed and normalised, as in Hungary, or more obviously structured, as in East Germany, inadvertently led to the wholesale compromise of thousands and thousands of people — either through information gained by the state, or the sheer fact that so many people were involved in collecting information. East Germany was forced to painfully confront the Stasi legacy. Other countries, meanwhile, such as Hungary, have had huge bonfires of records, and cannot therefore establish fair processes of reconciliation. In Hungary, there isn’t just corruption based upon capitalism — this is also based upon corruption built in the ruins of the security state.

National security is very difficult in a corrupted state

There’s very little chance of establishing a genuine sense of ‘esprit de corps’ in a state where everyone is interested primarily in lining their own pockets. So the UK and US have huge, overblown and fraudulent defence contracts. The situation for post-communist countries is similar, but without the big initial budgets for defence, it becomes a question of other big projects: power stations, perhaps. The planned Russian-Hungarian development of the Paks atomic energy site — notable for its outrageous scale which involves damming the Danube not just once, but twice — is quite obviously overblown to ensure the main people get huge cuts, but it also ties Hungary to Russia for optional infrastructure requirements, for a very long time.

Infrastructure matters

Hungary uses two main sources of heating fuel in the winter: Russian gas, and logs of wood. Logs of wood are, unsurprisingly, a distant second. Russia now provides Hungary and Slovakia with relatively cheaper gas than was previously the case, and these ‘warm’ relations in the energy sector represent a hard-wired mutual dependence between Russia and Hungary. Even it wanted to, Hungary cannot divorce its economy entirely from Russia.

More than just friends

Contrary to every single piece of rhetoric between 2002 and 2010, in which Orbán berated the socialist-liberal governments as Russian-friendly traitors, the second Orbán government announced a ‘turn to the East’ and developed a model based on ‘illiberal democracy’ (ie barely any kind of democracy at all). Almost everything that Putin did in his early period in power was aped by Orbán:

• flat taxes
• attacks on the media and judiciary
• an attempt to restore ‘national order’
• the portrayal of opposition as being ‘anti-patriotic’, effeminate and politically correct
• The loyalty of the lowest is expected, with no intermediate layers of mitigation. Teachers are sacked and schools are closed on the merest whim
• the ‘spoils of the state’ are divided amongst friends and family
• absolute, total management of the electoral process
• alteration of the constitution in favour of executive power

This is the operating model of Putinism, and Orbanism… there is no real difference, other than, perhaps, the lethality of the means deployed. Such is the closeness in the actions and rhetoric, one is simply forced to ask what the exact relationship between Orbán and Putin actually is.

The model is expansive, and can translate

Because Putinism weaponises neo-liberalism, every country can, in theory, have its own Putin moment. The more unequal and the more deprecated the political institutions, the better, and the more Putinism looks like a refreshing break from the weakness, softness and indecision of the past. It’s a remorseless logic. We all just need someone to look after us.

Even the most comfortable western European country has its angry people venting their rage, always agitated by a string of crises, many with a sense of being rendered foreigners in their own towns and cities. All this needs is someone to orchestrate and co-ordinate this discontent, to loudly give vent to often unstructured howls of rage, and start pointing the fingers. And this what some people call ‘active measures,’ which every state may do to a degree… but which Russia now does expertly based upon its own experiences of neo-liberal economics,with the specific aim of spreading a form of proto-fascism across the world, using ‘soft’ power. And for this story about Hungary, see also the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, France… the list goes on. The right populist insurgency is not purely driven by the Russian government, but it is being pushed by the Russians, and, to a degree, orchestrated.

There are no limits

Some writers and commentators on Putin’s Russia have highlighted Russophobia (which seems disingenuous, to say the least), or have highlighted a number of fallacies regarding interpretation of Putin’s actions. But the real question surely relates to boundaries: just how far will Russia go, using the already extensive networks of contacts and allies, in combination with the successful active measures it has developed in recent years? In the USA, people have pointed out the danger of a ‘Reichstag fire’ incident, which would prompt the Trump regime to assume emergency controls.

But to an extent, Europe has already had its Reichstag fire, and there is odd, if circumstantial evidence, regarding Hungary’s role. As we know, the Syrian crisis sent a wave of refugees heading into Europe via the Balkans, and the Hungarian government was the first to begin closing off its perimeter borders. What is odd here, is how quickly this was done: by the time refugees started arriving in large numbers on the Serbian border, Hungary had already been mounting a campaign against immigration for five months. The minimum implication here, is that Hungary knew, better than other countries, that there was going to be a huge influx of people from its southern border. This raises questions of how much they knew.

A wider question, though, relates to the extent to which the concentration and intensity of the refugee flow was controlled and accelerated. A NATO general has already accused Russia of weaponising the crisis. If the Russian and Hungarian governements are as close as it seems, then it also seems that, at the very least, both countries knew the crisis was coming, and the pressure it would place upon the European Union (and of course, this was also part of the Road to Brexit). This is all circumstantial evidence, but it is heavy circumstantial evidence. We can conclude there are no boundaries to the actions of Putin, Orbán, and other players within this axis.

Now, what?

And what, exactly, are we going to do about it? As people have pointed out… it is neo-liberalism which has created these conditions, so in order to address the underlying social conditions which are being exposed, we cannot defend shock therapy, or the post-Reagan/Thatcher settlements. But we’re going need clear red, and clear gold water, between international democratic socialist movements and non-democratic populist movements. We also need to address the threat of an accidental conflict emerging, as Russia and NATO increasingly eyeball each other, and suspicion grows on both sides. A new ostpolitik would therefore attempt to remove the legitimacy of Russia’s worst fears, whilst enhancing a positive, democratic identity to what is left of Europe’s political culture: developing a clear set of European standards to the conduct of government and democracy, which allow for differences, but also draw clear lines between what government can do to its people, and how elections can be conducted.

Having done that, it is also time to take the responsibility of providing objective and clear information much more seriously: the media in many Western countries needs massive reform in order to diversify ownership and ensure a degree of reliability, whilst the European Union will need to improve its co-operation to begin providing reliable and highly trustworthy news services in different languages, including Russian, whilst also offering rebuttal and fact-checking across the continent. These are just a few, non-military, steps which can be done, and which may help.