Ep.115: A Real Nuclear Option for Orbán's Hungary

Call it the real nuclear option for bringing Viktor Orbán's Hungary to heel — but also call it a risky thought experiment. Tom Theuns of Leiden University wants to empower the EU to sever ties with a rogue member state like Hungary, where Orbán has fashioned an autocracy and set about cultivating the EU's strategic rivals. Introducing an expulsion threat could push EU autocrats like Orbán to show more respect for rule of law and democracy, says Tom, while the current lack of any such mechanism has instead emboldened them. For now, Tom's ideas still are legally theoretical, not to mention politically delicate. In his new book, Protecting Democracy in Europe, Tom envisages democratic states each leaving the EU and then immediately re-founding the Union — an EU 2.0 — minus any autocratic states. More than two dozen countries would need to coordinate national consents in advance, using the same EU treaty article that Britain used in Brexit. But if all doesn't go to plan — think obdurate legislators, sudden calls for referendums, or a even French demand for more subsidies — the exercise could usher in the kind of political warfare that sinks the EU for good. Tom's goal is, above all, to end what he calls fatalistic and defeatist thinking — that the EU must remain stuck in perpetuity with Orbán's brand of kleptocratic illiberalism. "Supranational union with an autocratic state is a choice," insists Tom. "EU member states can also choose to disengage." In this episode Tom also reflects on what happened a quarter-century ago, when European authorities failed to block Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) from government, to elucidate a pattern of insufficient EU responses in the Hungarian context.