A culture war between East and West threatens to tear the EU in two

Liberal Western states need to learn to live with their neighbours. Heavy-handed intervention from Brussels is not the answer.

Source - Daily Telegraph - 18/07/21

Douglas Murray

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The European Union has always had a number of hard to reconcile differences. In the 2000s the clearest was that between the north and the south, specifically the question of how to reconcile Mediterranean fiscal habits with more Germanic ones. In recent years another divide has kept asserting itself: that between East and West. This has erupted again in recent days over the question of how to adapt Western European social attitudes with Central and Eastern European ones, most crucially those of Hungary, Poland and the other “Visegrad” countries.

The latest spat between Brussels and its partners to the East has centred on a new schools policy in Hungary. The government of Viktor Orban has passed a new law similar to Britain’s now-defunct Section 28, forbidding the portrayal or promotion of LGBT people to the under-18s. The law is draconian, misguided, overly broad and likely to fail. But it has allowed the EU to once again attempt a punishment-beating of Hungary.

As it happens some of us, including many gay people, believe that the fight for gay equality has been badly and needlessly derailed in recent years. At the point at which it was won in Western Europe, it morphed into a fight to deny sexual differences and the pushing of “trans” ideology. It is hardly a wonder that a conservative society such as Hungary might object to this ideology. Or that they would end up passing laws that wrapped up an understandable objection to magical gender thinking with the necessity of sex education lessons for young people or a simple acceptance that there are good gay role models in life.

At such junctures the EU might take a number of attitudes. It might agree with the Hungarian government that what is taught in Hungarian schools is a matter for the Hungarian authorities. Failing that, the Western European nations could try to listen to the concerns of the Central and Eastern European countries, wonder whether their own ideas had not become too dogmatic, and attempt to mediate with their neighbours.

Instead the EU chose to make an example out of Hungary. From Ursula von der Leyen down, EU officials have queued up to attack the Hungarians. Once again it plays into the Brussels interpretation of Europe, which is that the Hungarians and Poles, among others, are slow learners and need to be put into a liberal crammer class. But it also plays into a Visegrad view of the EU which is that it consists of liberal Western Europeans trying to force their way of life upon an unwilling East.

EU politicians love these moments. Unsure of how to address the huge financial and social questions facing the continent, here is an issue about which the bureaucrats can feel truly confident. In her comments to the European Parliament condemning the Hungarian law, Von der Leyen claimed that the it “goes against all the values… of the European Union”. A grandiloquent overstatement if ever there was one.

The EU has now voted for urgent legal action against the Hungarian government. It comes at the same time that the bloc is engaging in an ongoing legal fight against the government of Poland over that country’s judicial appointments. 

The EU’s actions have caused considerable ill-feeling in Poland. Last week a Polish court declared that Polish law stood superior to EU law. That stand-off will continue. But in the Polish case, as in the case of Hungary, the EU keeps doing things which confirm and deepen the growing distrust between these two uneven blocs within the EU. 

What is worst about this is that it is a massive distraction for an EU which badly needs to sort out its post-Covid affairs. The EU recovery fund (a multi-billion Euro package designed to boost Europe’s economies post-Covid) risks being derailed by these cultural standoffs. And yet both parties seem unwilling or unable to end them. 

The EU believes that it cannot allow political difference on certain social questions. But in the process it fails to realise that it is being at least as dogmatic as the governments it is criticising. In recent years the northern economies had to find a way to live with the southern ones. The challenge of the EU’s current decade may well be Western Europe finding a way to live with its Eastern neighbours.