The Moral Challenge to Europe

The European Union is experiencing a crisis of values as a number of Member States are faltering in their commitment to the basic principles that were supposed to be secured by EU membership.   Nowhere is a threat to European values more evident than in Hungary.  The Fidesz government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán swept into office in 2010 and almost immediately rewrote the constitution and virtually the entire legal system without any input from opposition parties, while cleansing all public institutions of opposition members and replacing them with loyalists of the governing party.  The OSCE election monitoring body pronounced Fidesz’s 2014 election unfair and PM Orbán has since announced that he is building an overtly “illiberal democracy.”  As this has happened, European institutions, human rights groups and international monitoring bodies have criticized the slide into autocracy, but the slide continues.  Orbán has called the EU a colonizing power but the EU’s response to this open challenge has been disorganized and ineffective.   Hungary reveals that a moral crisis in Europe catches EU institutions largely unprepared.  What can the EU do to respond?   The talk will survey the options, arguing in particular that the Commission should reframe infringement actions to focus on systemic challenges to EU values with the prospect of withholding EU funds as an ultimate sanction.