The news that the governments of Hungary and Poland have vetoed the new budget of the European Union – and therefore also the so-called Recovery Fund – has brought back the debate that has been going on for several years on the presence of the two countries within the EU.
Both have long been led by semi-authoritarian governments that systematically violate values contents in the European treaties: they do not respect the rights of ethnic minorities and political opponents, fill the courts with more than competent and faithful judges, exercise oppressive control over the media and direct public funds – even the European ones – towards a small circle of supporters.
Many wonder why the European Union does not take drastic measures against them: for example, suspension or even expulsion from the EU, as it had explicitly suggested the then Luxembourg Foreign Minister in 2016, and more subtly Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte a few months ago.
There are two reasons why the European Union has never threatened or even taken such measures. The first is that expelling a country from the Union is not at all easy, quite the contrary. The second is that one or more expulsions would have very obvious and potentially very problematic contraindications for other countries.
When in the early 2000s the European Union it widened to the east encompassing a number of countries that until a few years earlier had been part of the Soviet bloc – Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria – the most conservative observers argued that the countries in question were not yet ready to meet European standards in terms of transparency of bureaucratic systems, respect for human rights, independence of the media and courts.
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Concerns led to the inclusion in the drafts of the European Constitution and finally in the Lisbon Treaty, which entered into force on 13 December 2007, a mechanism that allows to “suspend” some rights of a member state, such as for example the right to vote in institutional settings, in the event of a violation of Article 2 of the Treaty: that is, the one that among other things commits the Union and the member states to ” fight discrimination, promote justice and social protection ”.
The mechanism is contained in Article 7 of the Treaty and until recently was called the “nuclear option”, because it was considered the last option in the event of serious violations by a state. In other words, neither the Lisbon Treaty nor other European treaties provide for an instrument to expel other states from the Union. At that time it was considered that Article 7 was sufficient: no member state would dare to stand alone against the others. And even if such a thing had happened, the violation of European values would have effectively excluded him from the international community.
The forecasts of those times were too optimistic. First, Article 7 was easily circumvented: the treaty scenario envisaged that only one country could violate the norms of European values, but did not take into consideration that there were more than one offenders. And given that suspending the right to vote for a certain country requires the vote of all the others, it was enough for Hungary and Poland to pledge to protect each other to defuse the nuclear option. “The current situation, where the rule of law has been dismantled in two states at the same time, has led us to a dead end”, summed up its EuObserver Tom Theuns, who teaches European Policy at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
The drafters of the Lisbon Treaty have placed too much faith in the ability of the international community to isolate countries that refuse to respect European values. In recent years, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been hailed as a role model by far-right parties across Europe, including those who have held government posts such as the League of Matteo Salvini, and received with many honors in the White House by Donald Trump and in the Kremlin by Vladimir Putin. Even the European People’s Party (EPP), the European party to which Orbán’s refers, took several years before suspend its Hungarian MEPs, while those of Law and Justice – the hegemonic party of Polish politics – were legitimized in European politics also thanks to the British Conservatives, who in 2014 welcomed them into the new European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) party.
In short, the European Union has no legislative instrument to expel a member state. Someone he suggested to creatively interpret theArticle 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, what allowed the United Kingdom to leave the Union to be clear: but several scholars they believe that some pieces of article 50 – including the paragraph according to which the process must start from an autonomous decision of the state involved – do not allow the unilateral expulsion of a state.
The expulsion of states such as Poland and Hungary but also of borderline countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania would also cause significant collateral damage.
First, it would worsen the living conditions of the millions of people living in these states: not only from an economic point of view – the countries in question would lose access to the euro, if they adopt it, or to the European common market, risking end up in recession, without any European safety net – but in many other respects. They could no longer move freely within the European Union to work or study, and in all likelihood their governments would further restrict their control over political opponents, trade unions, newspapers and ethnic minorities.
In such a situation, by the way, it’s easy to imagine that they may end up in the sphere of influence of countries like Russia, China or Turkey, hostile to the European integration project. For years, tells Visegrad Insight, the Russian media are preparing the ground for Russia to invest much more attention and resources in Hungary than Orbán, portrayed as “the most attractive of the EU countries”, as “supporter of economic cooperation with Russia, contrary to new sanctions, and a staunch defender of his own sovereignty in opposition to the injustices of Brussels ”. Over the years, China has also exploited the scarce liquidity of some European countries such as Portugal e Greece to finance huge infrastructure projects, putting a foot in the economic and political life of several member states.
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Then there is the problem that the magazine Carnegie Europe defines “Glass house effect”: the leaders of European countries have historically been very reluctant to criticize their peers, aware that they could attract unwanted attention to themselves. “No European country has an immaculate history when it comes to rights and principles,” wrote political scientists Heather Grabbe and Stefan Lehne a few years ago: “in the past, European institutions and countries have turned a blind eye, for example, to dominant position by Silvio Berlusconi on the Italian media or on the fragility of the institutional architecture in Greece ». Criticizing Hungary or Croatia for the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers could renew attention for some controversial practices adopted for years in countries such as Italy, France e Spain.
So what?
The European Union has no legislative instrument to expel a member state: and even if it had them it would have little interest in using them. This does not mean that nothing has been done over the years to change things in Eastern countries. Since 2017, Eastern countries have received countless reminders from the leaders of the European institutions, while Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty – “the nuclear option” – has been invoked to initiate infringement procedures against Poland e Hungary, respectively by the European Commission and the European Parliament. Neither has had any tangible effects, but they have had the merit of raising attention to an issue that was rarely talked about in previous years.
In recent weeks, the Commission, Parliament and the Council have worked on a new mechanism to link respect for human rights and the rule of law to the disbursement of European funds. The mechanism was finally approved – due to a technicality it did not need unanimity in the Council – and it is for this reason that Hungary and Poland blocked the new budget, hoping perhaps to persuade other countries to water it down (or get more money in the next budget).
There are also several other options on the table to strengthen pressure on Eastern governments, including do arrive a large part of European funds directly to the third sector bypassing the mediation of the central government, granting greater powers to the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), establishing a permanent monitoring mechanism for the rule of law throughout Europe.
A shortcut to put Eastern countries in line and solve many other problems would be the elimination of the unanimity criterion in the Council of the EU and the Council of Europe, as proposed by several progressive European leaders (most recently, the president of the Parliament, David Sassoli, in one recent interview with Republic). But even this solution poses problems. No state, especially the smaller ones, would willingly give up such a powerful card. And to change the European treaties that provide for unanimity – guess what? – the unanimous opinion of all member states is needed.
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