European Union Unraveling - It’s Not a Polish Joke

 

Freedom of movement vs the right to block immigrants were the first signs of discomfort within the European Union. Enough to pull the United Kingdom out of the EU in that uncomfortable Brexit departure. But the notion of liberal democracy on a more general plane has objectionable elements in two eastern bloc countries that were once under the illiberal heel of the Warsaw Pact under the control of the Soviet Union: Hungary under right-wing President Viktor Orbán and Poland under uber-conservative Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, pictured above.

Orbán, an admirer of Donald Trump, has poopooed the EU’s commitment to address climate change, calling that effort a “utopian fantasy,” suggesting green measures and associated restrictions were pushing up energy costs in Europe, “raising the prices, having a new regulation, rocketing the prices to the sky, [and] destroying the middle class… Common sense on one side and fantasy on the other one.” Orbán strongly supports anti-immigrant restrictions and is unabashedly a champion of white, natural born Christians; Hungary’s discriminatory laws against LGBTQ rights violate EU mandates to the contrary.

Both Hungary and Poland have reigned in their liberal and independent judiciaries, pretty much dissolving any notion of a separate and independent system of courts. This is also a direct rejection of one of the most basic building blocks that sustains the European Union. “Poland’s government, led by the conservative Law and Justice party, has been in conflict with EU officials in Brussels since it took power in 2015. The dispute is largely over changes to the Polish judicial system, which give the ruling party more power over the courts. Polish authorities say they seek to reform a corrupt and inefficient justice system. The European Commission believes the changes erode the country’s democratic system of checks and balances…

“As the standoff over the judiciary has grown more tense, with the commission threatening to withhold billions of euros in pandemic recovery funds to Poland over it, ruling party leaders have sometimes compared the EU to the Soviet Union, Poland’s occupying power during the Cold War.

“Ryszard Terlecki, the party’s deputy leader, said last month that if things don’t go the way Poland likes, ‘we will have to search for drastic solutions.’ Referring to Brexit, he also said: ‘The British showed that the dictatorship of the Brussels bureaucracy did not suit them and turned around and left.’… Marek Suski, another leading party member, said Poland ‘will fight the Brussels occupier’ just as it fought the Nazi and Soviet occupiers in the past. ‘Brussels sends us overlords who are supposed to bring Poland to order, to put us on our knees, so that we might be a German state, and not a proud state of free Poles,’ he declared.” Vanessa Gera writing for the Associated Press, October 22nd.

But most Hungarians and Poles see themselves modern Europeans, distancing themselves from the dark days of Soviet control and cultural domination. While many support their right wing or populist leaders, most would oppose attempt to engage in Huxit or Polexit – leaving the EU, mirroring the UK’s departure. Yet in October, “Poland’s constitutional court challenged the notion that EU law supersedes the laws of its 27 member nations with a ruling saying that some EU laws are incompatible with the nation’s constitution.

“That decision — made by a court dominated by ruling party loyalists — gives the Polish government the justification it had sought to ignore directives from the European Union’s Court of Justice, which it doesn’t like, particularly on matters of judicial independence.

“The ruling marks another major test for the EU after years of managing its messy divorce from the U.K… ‘This ruling calls into question the foundations of the European Union,’ European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said during the EU Parliament’s debate Tuesday. ‘It is a direct challenge to the unity of the European legal order.’” Gera. But if the EU cannot tolerate this anti-EU upheaval, will the 27-member state simply rule to expel these roguish nations? Ah, but there’s a catch:

“The EU has no legal mechanism to expel a member. In order for Polexit to happen, it would have to be triggered by Warsaw. At the moment, the idea seems far-fetched, because EU membership in Poland is popular, with surveys showing more than 80% of Poles favor being in the bloc… When Poland entered the EU in 2004, Poles won new freedoms to travel and work across the EU, and a dramatic economic transformation was set in motion that has benefited millions.

“Yet some Poles still fear that could change. They worry that if new EU funds are withheld from Poland over rule-of-law disputes, Poles might come to feel that it’s no longer to their benefit to belong to the bloc… Some simply fear a political accident along the lines of what happened with Britain’s departure from the EU. The former British prime minister who called for a referendum on EU membership, David Cameron, had sought to have the country remain in the bloc. He called for the vote to settle the matter, believing Britons would vote to stay. A majority in 2016 did not, and Cameron quickly resigned.

“A European lawmaker from Germany, Moritz Koerner, told Morawiecki during a debate Tuesday [10/18] in the EU Parliament that he was at risk of ‘sleepwalking into an exit from the EU against the will of your European friends and against the will of the Polish people.’” Gera. The schism within the EU is reflective of a pan-global trend of rising conservatism (nationalism, if you will), a reaction against what leaders of those movements feel is the destructive rise of liberalism and openness. It’s happened in so many nations, from Myanmar and China in Asia to Brazil in South America and even the United States in North America, to cite just a few. Is this a permanent vector… or just a phase before liberalism begins to rise again? Time will tell.

I’m Peter Dekom, and just at a time when humanity is facing global existential threats that require a unified approach, we are watching incompatible factions pulling their countries in the opposite direction.