The EU has one of the largest agricultural subsidy programs in the world. 40% of their expenditures go towards it, which amounts to 65 billion dollars — more than the GDP of a third of its member-states. The social welfare policy is part of the foundational documents of the EU. However, about 80% of that money goes to only 20% of farmers — and that number is skewed further in Central and Eastern European countries. Hungary, currently run by the far-right, anti-EU, anti-immigration, and pro-censorship Prime Minister Victor Orban, also has come under fire in 2015 for what a European Parliament commissioned investigation has called “dubious land deals.” ً
Those dubious land deals go all the way back to Hungary’s communist era, 15 years ago, when the government owned all the land in Hungary. That communist rule was born from Soviet occupation after WW2, and before that, all land in Hungary was subject to the Austrian empire’s whims.
On paper, Orban began leasing out federally owned land in 2011 and fully auctioned it off in 2015. However, most of the citizens who got those land leases and later bids at auctions were not the farmers who had worked that land — rather, political allies to Orban were predetermined to win the auction, and local small or mid-sized farm operations were discouraged from attending or in some cases not even told about the auction.
The way the EU’s agricultural subsidies work is that whoever produces the most produce gets the most subsidies. However, production is scaled to acreage, and in Hungary, acreage is scaled to political proximity. Two men, both of whom are extremely useful allies to Orban, ended up receiving 28 million dollars total in subsidies. That’s why the European Parliament specifically commissioned an investigation in 2015 into how exactly Hungary was handing out the land, an investigation that turned up all the information that has been laid out already in the preceding paragraphs. EU agriculture policymakers have denounced those findings as unreliable, allowing Orban’s marriage of feudalism and a Jacksonian spoils system to continue unimpeded with EU funding.
The EU has a long history of deferring to national leaders, letting them set their own policies and choosing what to do with EU money. It’s important to note: Orban doesn’t actually have any problem with that. In fact, most Hungarians love the EU — so long as most Hungarians are getting money from the EU. Calling Orban’s politics an example of “anti-EU populism” similar to the Leave campaign in the UK would be a misclassification; his problem with the EU only lies with them telling him what to do. After all, Hungarian nationalism — primarily enacted through the April Laws, developed in the 19th century — has always been at least somewhat about the development of an ethnostate, and somewhat about competition with other states. Hungary is not unique in this aspect; Fichte’s German nationalism and Palacky’s Czech patriotism both defined their nations and races in opposition to other European powers. The “union” part of the EU has not been around for a long time, and Europe has historically preferred holding onto its individual identities and grudges over a more unified and collective approach.
Part of that nineteenth century nationalism is a concept of “European” that informs attitudes towards immigration to this day. Orban’s criticism of the EU has been primarily about the migrant crisis and the EU’s handling of it. He’s not alone here, either; The Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and France have all seen immigration-related far-right pushback. Orbans has just begun the loudest anti-migrant campaigns in his country. While Orban’s conspiracy-theory claims of George Soros seeking to replace the ethnic Hungarian population with Middle Easterners have nothing to do with the EU on the surface, without any pro-Brussels campaigns in the country, many Hungarians see it as the EU attempting to set policy for Hungary. Reuters correspondent Krisztina Than writes that while Hungarian citizens “recognize the benefits of EU membership, some of them see Brussels as an external force that imposes all kinds of demands on them — such as how money coming from the bloc should be spent and whether Hungary should accept Muslim immigrants.”
The EU is an enormous governing organization with many subsidiary governments under its rule, all of whom get an apportionment of funding that they can spend at their discretion. This system is remarkably similar to the US’s distinction between federal and state-level governments, with block grants given to states to spend without that much federal oversight. Why then, was the Californian independence movement Yes California at most a frustrated political joke, when Brexit very much wasn’t? The difference lies in the contracts the member states signed.
The European Union said at the beginning of their existence that they would respect national sovereignty above all. However, as the bloc has had to deal with successive crises and conflicts, it has responded with one of humanity’s worst impulses: a demand for the comfort and order of authoritarianism. In the EU, legislative power and decision-making has begun to centralize in the European Commission and unlike many other parts of the EU, the leaders of the European Commission are not chosen through direct election. Rather, directly elected European Parliament members vote for a president of the Commission, and that president then picks a team and commissioners to fill up their regulatory body. (Since this is both a democratic and bureaucratic process, that is obviously not the end of it. Further explanation are available on the EU website.)
This means, however, that certain power imbalances in Europe — like the one between ex-imperial Western European countries and the de-Stalinized and often destabilized Eastern European countries — are magnified in the Commission.
When online crowdfunding proved to be not quite enough to bail Greece’s banks out, the European Commission was given the power to set policy and monitor Greece much more closely than historical precedent allowed for. The name for that monitoring alone is ominous: “enhanced surveillance.” Critics of the system have said that it gives eurozone lenders too much control over the Greek economy; perhaps not coincidentally, both the UK and Hungary are EU members that have elected not to become part of the eurozone. It has also given the European Commission far more power than they were ever supposed to have.
Remaining out of the eurozone had been an example of one of those decisions that the EU left up to its member states, making it a democratic deferral to national mandate, rather than a unilateral imposition. However, as power began to centralize in the European Union, it centralized in the European Commission. That Commission is tasked with protecting the single market and encouraging free competition, and capable of proposing new EU laws in order to do it. It is also in charge of running the farm subsidies that Viktor Orban is happy to exploit. This episode with Greece has only fomented further distrust with instutions like the IMF in Hungary; If it can happen in another poorer Southeastern European country, why can’t it happen here?
The question over the European Commission is fundamentally a question about a balance of power. Quite a lot of power has been handed off to the European Commission, which explicitly is there to protect bloc-wide European interests, rather than the interests of individual member-states; to roughly approximate a metaphor to American politics, this is a bit like the federal government abruptly taking control of state budgets and setting state spending policy for them. This is a rough approximation because Americans directly elect their federal representatives.
Power has shifted in the European Union’s structures. Both rich western European countries, like the UK, and poorer eastern or southern European countries, like Hungary and Italy, have a problem with that. As mentioned earlier in the article, the EU spends 65 billion dollars on agriculture, which is larger than the GDP of member states such as Bulgaria or Croatia — meanwhile, the German GDP is nearing 4 trillion. Hungary, for a large portion of its history, has been an exploited state; First, the Ottomans, then Austrians, then the Nazi and Soviet influence alike have had their way with Hungarian land. In 2015, when the EU created migrant quotas for accepting their record number of refugees, Hungary added the European Commission to that list for the heavy fines the administrative bloc levied against them as a consequence of refusal.
The European Commission must be more directly democratized if Europe wants to check back against Orban’s “illiberal democracy.” States like Hungary and Slovakia, Italy and Greece — all poor, with sluggish economies and points of first entry for migrants — must have a larger say in an immigration process mostly decided in Brussels and Berlin. This goes both ways, too. Hungary may get a larger say over its own borders, but the member states of the EU, especially those who contribute quite a lot of money to that 65 billion dollar agriculture payout, would also be allowed a bit more say in what leaders do with that money.
Image: Hungarian Protester, AP