Notebook: Five easy pieces

Orbán, centre-lexitism, and a song for Europe

Having tested your patience and mine with 6,000 words of pent-up frustration with modern Italy, I’ve decided to see out the dog days of August with something more hit-and-run. (By the way, click on the dog days link and see if you’re as surprised as I was).

Instead of landing on a big theme for a big essay, I’m going to pick out five things that caught my attention in the week – although not necessarily of the week. This should make for a lighter summer read and a lazier summer write. I’ve always liked the many-fathered quip “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one” but it’s not a sentiment I share. For me, writing long takes longer.

Anyway, throat cleared, and where else to begin but Viktor Orbán?

Viktor’s ark

Hungary’s five-term prime minister was the star turn at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas – described more than once as the Star Wars bar scene of the right. In Orbán, the trolls have found their Mountain King. On the new right, he’s attained the status Hugo Chávez once had on the left – a swaggering, illiberal, opposition-owning icon from a self-styled victim state who just keeps on winning.

“This is a culture war,” Orbán told the assembled Trumpists. “Hungary is an old, proud but David-sized nation standing alone against the Woke Globalist Goliath”. Back home, he said in return for a standing ovation, “the mother is a woman, the father is a man, and leave our kids alone!”. It was all a bit too easy and the old pro in Orbán must have hated himself for saying it – like Keith Richards opening Start Me Up for the thousandth time.

A much more interesting insight into the evolution of Orbán's thinking was his 23 July speech at the Tusványos summer festival in Romania. This too made headlines for Orbán's condemnation of "mixed-race" nations and his use of the word “replacement”. But this was just a small part of a 10,000-word speech that really should be read in full. It is the most comprehensive statement of traditionalist conservatism (“tradcon” in the trade) and Christian counter-revolution you will ever read from a frontline democratic (albeit illiberal) politician.

In its own terms, it’s quite brilliant – a reactionary unified field theory encompassing energy policy, diplomatic statecraft, and generational safeguarding communicated to partying activists. Orbán is the Prince. He’s the governing embodiment of Yoram Hazony’s neo-tradconism – discarding post-Enlightenment rationalism and the unwelcome liberal influence of Leo Strauss and Friedrich Hayek and reclaiming conservatism’s religious and nationalist traditions.

There’s so much I could extract from the speech but I’ll make do with one passage – the one most overlooked in the outrage over “mixed race”. That was his digression on Jean Raspail’s “outstanding” Le Camp des Saints and his prediction that one day Christians will flock east for refuge in Hungary. In Raspail’s novel, well-meaning Belgian priests encourage parents back home to adopt Indian children but, as the brown population grows, the scheme is closed. Refusing to accept this, an Indian armada heads for France (for some reason) and invades from the south with the help of incumbent minorities, lefties and anarchists. Swiftly outnumbering the white population (like rabbits, mate), they take Paris then all western capitals and force Prince Charles to marry a Pakistani. Woman, of course. This was 1973, not 2022.

Orbán has updated Great Replacement theory for the new century so it is now a “great historic battle” encompassing “demography, migration and gender”. The surrender of the “post-West” to liberalism, cultural relativism and Queer Theory means it has already lost the civilisational war with Islam. Countries like Hungary – and maybe Hungary alone – will stand as a last redoubt against the coming invasion and must ready their children for the battle ahead. “[I]t will be for our children, who will need to defend themselves not only from the South but also from the West,” says Orbán. “The time will come when we have to somehow accept Christians coming to us from there and integrate them into our lives … But this is not the task of the moment and not a task for our lifetime. Our task is solely to prepare our children to be able to do this”.

In his updated book Orbánland, Danish journalist Lasse Skytt notes that boarding is already underway on Viktor’s ark.

Until now, I’ve always assumed Orbán was a cynic – the kind of showman we saw in Dallas – but the Tusványos speech was on another level. There comes a point, when people keep telling you who they are, you should believe them. The EU and NATO should be preparing as assiduously as Hungary’s children.

La victoria neo-eurocorbynista

Last week, an expat Corbynista-europhile friend WhatsApped me Roy Hattersley’s plea to Keir Starmer, leader of the British Labour Party, to take advantage of Tory and Brexit disarray. My friend added: “Absolutely essential Starmer starts being more positive about the EU”.

This got me reflecting – for as long as WhatsApp allows – on two things:

• how painful it must be to be both pro-EU and an admirer of Jeremy Corbyn (and his spiritual father Tony Benn),

• that neo-eurocorbynism has won.

A reminder for his europhile acolytes. Saint Jez voted to leave the Communities in the 1975 referendum, voted – along with his shadow chancellor John McDonnell – against ratifying the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, then against creating the External Action Service and the European Stability Mechanism. If he hadn’t been leader by the time of the 2016 referendum, I have no doubt that he and most of the Socialist Campaign Group would have swollen the ranks of the seven Labour Brexiteers in the 2017-19 parliamentary battles.

Leadership meant compromise but Corbyn and his entourage never liked it. Lexiteers at heart, they found Brexit a distraction. Their real interests were state intervention in the economy at home and third-worldist anti-Americanism abroad. In their compelling Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn, Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire recount what happened when Seumas Milne – Corbyn’s director of strategy and communications and longtime political soulmate – made a first stab at a coherent Brexit policy.

At the time, Starmer – the party’s Brexit spokesman – went bananas. Today, Milne’s “confident vision” is exactly where he and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves stand. Talking about rejoining the union or even returning to the single market or a customs union is a distraction from the fundamental task of a new government: lifting trend growth and productivity. Their conversion to dirigisme in one country even seems to have the same source. Mariana Mazzucato, who advised McDonnell, is now doing the same for Starmer and Reeves. Her Entrepreneurial State is as appealing to centre-left politicians as it was to a Gaullist like Dominic Cummings.  

Define your terms

The same convenience bias has long been on display among Italian monetary officials – most notably Mario Draghi himself – when they elide “redenomination risk” with default risk. The two risks are and should be entirely different, as I set out in last week’s post.

I was reminded of this a month ago by a Twitter exchange between Martin Sandbu, Erik Nielsen and Luis Garicanos as they discussed how the European Central Bank should contain a widening of sovereign bond spreads as they start raising interest rates.

Sandbu concedes that this kind of unconditional ECB purchasing would still allow for “pure credit risk speculation” but how do you isolate that from pricing-in Italexit risk?

Roberto A. De Santis, an economist in the ECB’s business cycle analysis division, came up with a metric in a paper published during the most acute phase of the Greek crisis in 2015. He used the spreads of credit default swaps (CDS) or the amount the buyer of insurance against default pays its seller over the length of the contract expressed as a percentage of the notional amount. Specifically, he used the difference (“quanto”) between the CDS quotes in dollars and euros. When redenomination risk heightens, this dollar/euro differential will be positive although, as the paper, points out “[a] credit event does not automatically imply the break-up of the euro area, as in the Greek case in March 2012”. To adjust for this, De Santis uses the difference between the quanto CDS for Italy/Spain and Germany and finds it is the “key measure of redenomination risk associated with the break-up of the euro area as perceived by the market”. This should be at or close to zero even if default within the euro area is or should be a genuine risk.

The outer stars

Since French president Emmanuel Macron proposed a European Political Community as a halfway house to the EU for Ukraine, little more has been heard of the idea. First responses were hostile due to suspicions that the French were offering the EPC as an alternative to the EU - a Turkey-style permanent waiting room.

In an interview with Libération, Macron’s new, influential and enlargement-friendly minister for Europe Laurence Boone revealed that the EPC is alive and well and misgivings about French intentions unfounded. A “non-paper” (a deniable short note prepared for discussion by diplomats but without a typical letterhead) was sent to ambassadors in June and Boone followed up with ministers in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. “I know there were questions at first,” she told Libération, “but now we sense interest, especially from non-member states of the European Union".

In an editorial for Politico, Dalibor Rohac from the American Enterprise Institute begged Ukraine and Moldova to seize the moment because “we need a dose of creativity to extend some of the key benefits of membership in real time to these two countries that have amply demonstrated their commitment to European values – in Ukraine’s case, by blood”.

The French have left the scope of the EPC open enough for clever but assertive eastern diplomacy to explore the outer reaches of the EU’s negotiating mandate. As Rohac writes, “Ukraine would … have a lot to teach other European countries about security and defence” but it would be in everyone’s interest to push the EPC into “as wide an array of EU membership benefits as possible” including large parts of the single market, mutual recognition and labour-mobility schemes.

This was an opportunity the EU missed in 2016-17 despite the best efforts of Donald Tusk, the then European Council president, but now there is no excuse. Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia will not join the EU for at least a decade and need milestones that go well beyond regular summits and warm words. And the bigger and more robust the outer ring becomes, the more attractive it will be to the UK and Switzerland.

Besides, Moscow seems to be working around the clock to expand a union it was intent on fracturing as recently as 23 February. A post last week on the Vkontakte account of Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian security council and former president and prime minister, pledged to "restore the borders of our Motherland” – an ambition that would threaten every ex-USSR state. The post was deleted within ten minutes and his always-truthful staff claimed the account was hacked.

A song for Europe

In his farewell address in 1989, US president Ronald Reagan spoke of America as a “shining city on a hill” – “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here”.

As a rule, Europeans cringe at this kind of rhetoric - even more so if applied to the EU. The union had and has its dreamers and visionaries but, for most of us who value it, the EU is a functional, convenient, growth-enhancing arrangement with an often-irritating bureaucracy at its core. For many Ukrainians, however, it’s that shining city.

As long ago as the winter of 2013-14, it was impossible to get your hands on a 12-star blue-and-gold flag in Kyiv. This was when Yuri Shevchenko wrote Ми є (We Are). “This is an interpretation of the theme of the national anthem of Ukraine,” he said. “I remember that, after singing the anthem with everyone on a cold winter evening on the Maidan during the Revolution of Dignity, I went home and wrote the score in a couple of hours. I wanted our hymn to sound like a quiet and bright prayer for Ukraine to the whole world".

A month into the Russian invasion, Shevchenko died from pneumonia in the Oleksandrivska Clinical Hospital in Kyiv after a 40-year career writing for ballet, musicals, and choral ensembles. We Are has been performed a few times since 2014 but it had a special impact when played as an encore by the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra at the BBC Proms on 31 July.

Half the length of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936), We Are has the same painful and haunting qualities. It’s in danger of turning into an alternative, bottom-up anthem to a reluctant shining city on a hill.