Meloni, Orbán, and the Future of European Conservatism
Ralf Kniébolo
As a rule of thumb, the best journalists tend to be well-born. Whatever their political leanings, their acquaintance with higher spheres makes them immune to the kind of social insecurity in which, in squeaky clean middle class journogirls, the black parasite of conformism finds a willing host. Their wealth gives them an independence and a degree of leisure, while their station affords them more illustrious connections than the ubiquitous „circles connected to the minister“ cited in the German media (these being invariably the press spokesman speaking under the pretence of anonymity). Patriots, stay vigilant: trust no one whose name isn’t listed in the Almanac de Gotha, not even me.
In Budapest, no journalist stands in better graces than Boris Kálnoky. The scion of one of the most illustrious houses in the Habsburg lands, his great-grandfather served the emperor for over a decade as foreign minister (until he was forced out of office in 1895 on the request of a liberal ministry in Budapest mistrustful of his ultramontane leanings). „Besides their outstanding military and political careers,“ writes Wikipedia’s man on the ground, „the Kálnoky’s have been known for their advantageous wedding strategies. Several members married heiresses of aristocratic families on the verge of extinction, thus considerably increasing the Kálnoky's assets and influence in central and western Europe“. So far, so kino — alia bella gerunt, tu felix Austria nube.
It comes as no surprise that a man as cosmopolitan as Kálnoky should have found foot on our own sceptred isle, that proud and aloof bastion of blue-blooded Europe against a republican continent. A louche wind wafts across the Channel and carries the rhythms and cadences of the Speccy summer party into his wry Viennese style, which reminds of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at his very best. It is not circumstantial to the matter at hand that Kálnoky’s brother, Tibor Kálnoky, is trustee of Chuck Guelph’s Transylvanian landholdings. That an intimate of the court of St. James should be in the confidence of the highest political circles in Budapest certainly gives one cause to reflect. But this is no place for ad hominem: it is not Kálnoky the man who here interests us, but his Arguments.
In 2020, Kálnoky penned a brief article for the Mathias Corvinus Collegium’s blog that gives an unusually clear insight into the nature of the Orbán system. In marked contrast to the usual feuilleton theatre of heroic battles over the rule of law, ghey rights, and other such cozy themes, Kálnoky sketches a picture of the incumbent Merkel and Orbán governments’ relationship as a productive symbiosis in the value-pluralistic spirit of Helmut Kohl’s Europe, built on friendly personal relations between the two countries’ democratically elected elites. For those unversed in the tongue of Goethe and Schiller, it is worth running the entire thing through google translate — I suggest you read no further until you have finished it.
One name conspicuously absent from Kálnoky’s account is that of a certain management consultant from the Black Forest to whom I alluded in an earlier contribution for J’accuse — I will refer to him as Peter Gigatschadowitsch on account of his uncanny physical resemblance to the aforementioned individual. Gigatschadowitsch has done good business in Hungary: in 2021 alone, he received around two million euros in on-budget „consultancy fees“ from Hungary’s Ministry of Human Resources (the superministry created in 2010 from the merger of the education, culture, health, social affairs, and work portfolios) — and that was only one ministry, in one year, in declared spending.
It appears that Gigachadowitsch’s particular contribution to human resources in Hungary was to open certain doors for Orbán in the Moscow business world. Rosatom’s involvement in the expansion of the Paks nuclear power plant — the most high-profile engagement of a Russian firm in Hungary — came about through his shrewd solicitations. By all accounts, Gigatschadowitsch enjoys Putin’s genuine friendship and dines with the president whenever he happens to be in Moscow or St. Petersburg. The broader question of why Orbán needed Gigatschadowitsch as a fixer when, as head of government of a sovereign state, an entire diplomatic apparatus (with legacy connections in Moscow, at that) stands at his disposal, is worth asking, though the answer is fairly obvious in its broad contours — he didn’t trust his own bureaucrats, and trusted the Germans more. Why?
The Europe created by Helmut Kohl is often idealised as a patchwork of interlocked, overlapping sovereignties. By ostensibly breaking down the „authoritarian rationalism“ (Habermas) of the classical nation state, she provides common ground for ultramontanists and critical theoriticians alike. Strictly speaking, this is all so much dewy-eyed singing of ode to joy, since the very notion of sovereignty, no matter how compromised or “pooled”, already cedes too much ground to the Westphalian settlement for the EU to really represent a RETVRN (I append this in anticipation of an angry letter from “Disgusted, Karlovy Vary”), but for our purposes, the notion of nulle terre sans seigneur nonetheless describes the relationship between Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and the Dark Rechtsstaat quite well. If the chronology argued for in J’accuse is correct, this lasted from Orbán’s return to office in 2010 (although the groundwork was presumably laid earlier) until the Dark Rechtsstaat’s undoing in the late 2010s.
The terms of the deal ran something like this. Orbán received Berlin’s authorisation to govern Hungary in fief to the full extent possible within a notionally liberal democracy (these limits having already been explored and mapped by the CDU’s Bavarian sister party). In exchange, he would act as a stalking horse for German positions within the EU that Merkel’s government did not publicly want to take. These related, most pertinently, to Russia, where — the Common Foreign & Security Policy being one of the remaining EU portfolios where unanimity is required — Hungary enjoys power of veto over the bloc’s decisions.
Within the European Council, Germany has always positioned itself as a shepherd of consensus; an honest broker concerned, above all, with harmony in Europe. Laundering extreme versions of its own positions through Budapest and other Eastern European allies allowed Berlin to manipulate outcomes in the Council without getting its hands too dirty and present the whims of the heart as the products of hard-won, pragmatic compromise. The antagonistic public posturing during these negotiations allowed politicians from both camps to portray themselves as hardline defenders of their favourite flavour of values: the rule of law and ‘openness’ in Berlin, and national sovereignty and multipolarity in Budapest.
Near to the end of Merkel’s chancellorship, this spirit of comity withered as the Dark Rechtsstaat was harried by the winds of Woke. Orbán’s exclusion from the European People’s Party, the activation of the insidious “rule of law mechanism” (I suspect here some secret bargain was struck that von der Leyen simply reneged on, since it was Orbán who ultimately convinced the Polish government to withdraw its own veto at the decisive European Council meeting in December 2020 — Kálnoky described the whole affair as „a problem solved by compromise“, which one assumes, reflects his sources’ understanding of the proceedings), and Hungary’s increasing willingness to threaten to play its CFSP veto all bespeak to a rupture in the perennial bond between lord and vassal. At some point around the turn of the decade, Orbán clearly made the decision to abandon the CDU and look for a new patron.
It must be stressed that the Dark Rechtsstaat was only ever one node in a larger transatlantic network. Reinhard Gehlen’s attempts to harness American power against Guelph designs on the Chinese market have already been noted in the pages of this journal. The Central Intelligence Agency, Gehlen’s correspondence partner, has always been a bastion of popery — former CIA directors James Jesus Angleton, William Donovan (who technically never held the position, having instead ran the agency’s predecessor, the OSS), and William Casey were all members of the Sovereign Order of Malta, to which paragons of „movement conservatism“ like William F. Buckley also belonged. The Conservative movement, too, was a Catholic enterprise from the very beginning; that — after the stillbirth of Goldwater’s libertarian platform and the collapse of Nixon’s low church insurgency — it managed to unite the disparate anti-Civil Rights forces under their own banner and deliver a mass constituency for the Christian Democratic, anti-communist, anti-colonial doctrines propounded by Konrad Adenauer in the 1950s (which had faded from the political mainstream in Germany and had no autochthonous roots in the United States) brought the Counterreformation its most resounding triumph since Alessandro Farnese retook Antwerp in 1585.
Although it brings us out of the zone of rigorous arguments and into the realm of speculation, I believe it a plausible conjecture that America’s continued postwar involvement in Europe to have rested, in high degree, on a part of its elite’s Catholic leanings and their ties to European political catholicism. That, for example, German reunification came to pass during the apotheosis of the Maltese Order in American politics — the George H.W. Bush administration — seems more than felicitous, and there is a good chance that this would not have occurred under a more anglophile regime (although this hypothetical is somewhat by the way, since it was Reagan’s reinvigorated offensive against international communism — marshalled by Bush and Casey — that drove down the Soviet Union and her East German client). The reinstitution of the Reich was not the formality it appears in retrospect: old Kohleads today will acknowledge they only had „a short window of time“ to bring it about, and they faced powerful enemies at home and abroad. HM Government’s displeasure at these developments is a matter of general knowledge; the fact that German reunification went through is — at least in the type of conspiratorial Brexit historiography to be heard from ex-UKIP consulaires politiques on boozy Brussels nights — only yet another issue on which Thatcher cucked.
The old dame’s record is not so deplorable when compared to the alternatives. What really made the Guelphs’ hairs stand on end was the prevailing opinion within the Bush Administration (at least, in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s) that future Eastern European security arrangements would be handled by a revivified Western European Union, the moribund defence bloc initially called into being as a military component to European integration after the French National Assembly shot down the proposed Treaty Establishing the European Defence Community. That this construct would even be considered is, I think, is the most profound evidence of the Dark Rechtsstaat’s influence within the administration, or at least Bush et al.’s paneuropeanist convictions. It would mean a united, autonomous Europe under the German security umbrella in loose alliance with NATO, allowing for a gradual drawdown of American forces on the continent and a „pivot to Asia“ to confront the Japan That Can Say No. For the second time in half a century, Britain stood alone in Europe — who do you think you’re kidding, Mr. Kohl?
The general understanding of NATO expansion in the 1990s has been muddied by Russian propaganda and even more confusing refutations by serious historians and credulous journalists. A close reading of contemporary debates — a more extensive task than we may dedicate ourselves to here — would reveal it to have been a policy decision taken, above all, to contain Germany (this of course having been the alliance’s original raison d’être, at least if we are to take Lord Ismay at his word). The Guelph party line was laid down by Samuel Huntington in a 1991 paper ambiguously titled America’s Changing Strategic Interests. „United Germany,“ quoth Huntington, „could attempt to use its economic power not only to dominate the European Community, but also to extend its economic hegemony and political control through Central and Eastern Europe. That, too, is a course which German governments - imperial, democratic and Nazi - have followed in the past. The political integration of the European Community, if that should occur, would also bring into existence an extraordinarily powerful entity which could not help but be perceived as a major threat to American interests.“ Huntington’s pointe: it fell to America to „promote a stable equilibrium of power in Eurasia“ informed by the British strategic doctrine of offshore balancing. As recent research by Josh Shifrinson shows, Huntingtonian arguments beecame increasingly influential in the latter years of the Bush Administration, with the inter-agency European Strategy Steering Group — convened by Robert Gates as Deputy National Security Advisor and including his boss Brent Scowcroft (a Kissinger acolyte), Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and a rotating cast of Bush-era „Vulcans“ — emerging as the driving force of Guelph subversion within the Beltway.