September 14, 2021 - 10:15am
One of my all-time favourite news photos is from 2018. It shows Sir Philip May, husband of former PM Theresa, playing lawn bowls with Melania Trump, watched by a Chelsea pensioner, two schoolboys and a US Secret Service agent. I have no idea of the context, and I don’t really want to know. It just strikes me as a wonderful illustration of the incongruous meetings thrown up by the demands of international relations and diplomacy.
One such meeting occurred this weekend, between Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and Pope Francis. They did not play bowls; the pontiff was in Budapest for a flying visit to the 52nd Eucharistic Congress, a quadrennial peripatetic Catholic jamboree, and had only a short meeting with Mr Orban. Officially they discussed the environment, family policy and the Hungarian Catholic Church.
The Holy Father spent about seven hours in the country on Sunday, before moving on to Slovakia for three days. The rather striking disparity has led Vatican-watchers to speculate that this was a subtle rebuke of the Hungarian government, for its loud and persistent hostility to large-scale settlement of migrants within its borders. If the brevity of the papal visit was intended as a snub, Orban gave as good as he got, gifting his visitor a copy of a medieval letter from King Bela IV of Hungary to Pope Innocent IV, requesting help against the invasion of Europe by tribes from the east.
The arguments about Hungary will run and run, not least because the country is treated by both sympathisers and critics as a symbol, rather than a real place with its own complex history and political conditions. Are you for Based Orban, the heroic defender of our way of life against insidious international liberalism, or do you loathe Wicked Viktor, the anti-Soviet dissident tragically gone bad, who foments hatred for minorities and neuters the judiciary to shore up the power of his own cronies?
What seems more interesting to me is the way in which Francis and Orban represent two approaches to what Christian politics should look like in the modern world. Among all the governments of Europe, Orban is probably the leading standard-bearer for what you might call ‘civilisationism’. He is concerned with the persistence and survival of a particular people, and a particular culture, in a particular place — primarily the Hungarians, but also Europe more widely. This explains his attempts to raise the birth rate in Hungary, and his hostility to George Soros, that archetypal representative of globalising, homogenising modernity, and to what he perceives as socially destructive trends in academia and left-liberal activism.
Francis, by contrast, draws on other streams in Christian political thought. As an Argentinian Jesuit, the type of villain that looms large in his mental furniture is the aggressive and chauvinistic nationalist leader, who cements his own power with cynical attacks on foreigners and the enemy within. South American nations are not, generally speaking, favoured destinations for intercontinental mass migration, so are not facing the prospect of large-scale demographic change. For the Pope, a Christian country and culture is not one preoccupied with its own integrity and its own survival, but one which makes an unshakeable political imperative from the divine commands to welcome the stranger and to recognise all men as brothers.
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SubscribeNo. What Europe needs is more men like Orban. When two people have mutually incompatible views finding a compromise often isn’t the optimal solution. A wants more urine in the water supply while B wants none at all. So is just a little urine in the water supply a good compromise?
As silly a metaphor as ever I read!
All complex problems of this nature require compromise.. only a fascist sees one and only one solution: a final solution perhaps?
I suspect that whatever compromise is, or is not, negotiated, the reality, in the long-term, will turn out to be something different.
It seems a perfectly sensible example of how splitting the difference is not always the right solution. We could both think up many more, no doubt you might point to an example of a putative less extreme version of National Socialism.
And ‘only a fascist’ ? That is a stretch definition of the word ‘fascist’. Totalising thought is of course also common to Marxist-Leninism, modern identity politics, Islamism, and extreme environmental advocates.
The substance of the issue:- no, Hungary (and the UK) is under no moral obligation to accept people deposited on its borders by criminal people smugglers. It does not need to accept half of them.
It is so refreshing to read this brief cogent analysis which (regardless of the actual prescription offered) eschews the usual hyperbole to focus on fundamentals
Well, I suppose if you ignore the actual prescriptions you could find it refreshing. I read the concluding sentence several times and still cannot make out what is being suggested.
I think it means that the concerns of the Somewheres should be recognised, rather than the views of the Anywheres being assumed to be as historically guaranteed to succeed, as Marxists thought of communism.
Hungary is a small nation with a much reduced area from the traditional state after being considered a defeated nation in World War 2. It has every right in my view to protect its identity from mass and uncontrolled immigration. But in any case, it is of course impossible to solve the problems of the developing world by allowing everyone who wants to and can afford to pay a people smuggler from being able to enter and settle in your country. The people who advocate are never willing to specify any limits whatever to the scale of this migration. The asylum laws were designed for a different era, are now being abused on a huge scale, and either need to be reformed or ignored. Instead many Western nations prefer grubby deals, such as that between the EU and Turkey, to reduce migration flows.
Orban is quite within his rights to protect his fellow citizens and their civilisation from a flood of alien immigrants. We can see the results in France, Germany, Sweden and of course the Uk. Unchecked immigration equates to invasion.
This Pope lacks gravitas. Many of us miss Benedict a great deal. If a leader of a nation does not put the interests of his nation primus inter pares, he’s not much of a leader. If a Pontiff does not effectively discriminate between what it is Caesar’s and what is God’s, it is not confidence-inspiring.