On October 3, 2024, The
European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, filed a legal complaint
against the E.U. state of Hungary with the E.U.’s judicial branch—the high court
of which being the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The Commission had won a
case against the state and recently subtracted the amount of fine issued by the
court from the federal money set to go to the state because the Hungarian
government was refusing to recognize the verdict. Like Britain before it had
seceded from the Union, Hungary was operating under the incorrect premise that
it still enjoyed full sovereignty even though every state delegates some of its
governmental sovereignty to the Union in becoming a state thereof. In the case
of Hungary, the state law at issue in 2024 had in its very name the fundamental
problem out of which the state’s disputes with the E.U. were emanating.
In its written statement, the Commission
describes Hungary’s “contentious act,” which “establishes the so-called
Sovereignty Protection Office (SPO) to investigate people and organizations
suspected of undermining the country’s ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘constitutional
identity.’”[1]
Assisted by the state’s secret police, the SPO could legally “collect
information on individuals or groups that receive funding from abroad and are
perceived to influence the democratic debate and electoral processes ‘in the
interest of another state’ or ‘foreign organ,’ meaning a non-state actor.[2]
Undue political influence from outside the E.U. state could presumably come
from another state in the Union or from outside of it. Treating both the same
involves making the dubious claim that for one state or people therein to buy political
advertising or contribute to a political campaign in another state is
anti-democratic.
Furthermore, that such
interstate political influence somehow violates Hungary’s sovereignty ignores
the fact that every state in the Union has given up some governmental
sovereignty even just for qualified majority voting to be allowed at the
federal level in the Parliament, the European Council, and the Council of the European
Union. Only if every E.U. law, directive, and regulation required the unanimous
consent of the state governments, which could legally ignore rulings by the ECJ
would the Union be composed of sovereign states, such as the U.S. was under its
initial Articles of Confederation from 1777 to 1789.
The claim of Hungary’s
government that its sovereignty is violated by political influence from elsewhere
in the Union can be answered by pointing out that the state is no longer in
fact sovereign anyway because it is in a Union whose federal system rests on
dual-sovereignty. Put another way, the states have consolidated politically to
an extent for their common good, which includes being able to have more
political weight in the world, so interstate political influence can be viewed
as part of that intermingling that is actually a good thing for such a federal
system. If states are too heterogenous (i.e., different), then achieving united
action at the federal level is very difficult. The combined sovereignties that instantiate
federal sovereignty is actually partly Hungary’s, so interstate influence does
not necessarily violate Hungary’s sovereignty.
Back in February of 2024, the
Commission cited “the principle of democracy, the right to private life, the
protection of personal data, freedom of expression, information and
association, and the presumption of innocence, among others,” as being violated
by the state of Hungary presumably because they threaten the state government’s
sovereignty.[3]
More accurately, they may have been a threat to Viktor Orbán’s party remaining
in power in Hungary. The principles of liberty and democracy that the Commission
was arguing that the Hungarian government was violating can be viewed as competencies,
or domains of authority, that both federal and state governmental institutions
could legally act on. Put another way, the Commission was well within its
rights to protect democracy at the state level. In the U.S., the executive
branch had acted to protect democracy at the state level, as in enforcing civil
rights with regard to the access of Black people to schools and voting. Alabama
could hardly say that its sovereignty was being violated because the federal
institutions had the authority to enforce democracy in the United States.
The very name of Hungary’s Sovereignty Protection Office is wrong, for the state had delegated some of its sovereignty when it joined the European Union. Just days after the Commission announced that it was taking the state of Hungary to court at the federal level (i.e., at the ECJ), the Hungarian trade minister voted no in a vote taken at the Council of the EU on whether the EU should put tarriffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Had the measure passed the Council, Hungary would have had to recognize the tarriffs as valid within the state. This alone means that Hungary had given up some governmental sovereignty when it acceded to the E.U. as a state. As it happened, too many votes were abstentions, so there was no final vote either way. So the Commission used its exclusive authority, or competency, in commercial law and policy to enact the tarriffs. So it is not just qualified majority voting in which the E.U.'s state governments were no longer fully sovereign states. That the E.U. has shared and exclusive competencies, or domains in which it can enact laws and regulations, means that the state governments no longer were fully sovereign. Hungary's "National Sovereignty Law" was thus not only contrary to a basic EU value (and norm), but also a misnomer that gives people the wrong idea concerning Hungary in the E.U.
To pretend to be sovereign still, such as by ignoring a negative verdict by the ECJ, undermines the sovereignty that Hungary and the other states delegated to the Union, and thus in a way their own sovereignty too because the state governments play a significant role at the federal level not only in the European Council and the Council of the E.U., but also in nominating commissioners for the College in the Commission. In this respect, the state government of Hungary was compromising a part of its sovereignty—that which had been combined with parts of the respective sovereignties of the other states. By making interstate political influence illegal in Hungary, Orbán failed to recognize that the sovereignty at the federal-level has a legitimate interest in there being at least some interstate harmonization, and legally includes protection of the basic values of the Union, such as democracy and liberty. If as I suspect he believed that Hungary was still fully sovereign as a country, then it had no business being a state in the European Union. Britain seceded for this reason—David Cameron, as prime minister, had said that the E.U. was just one of the networks that the UK was in. Similarly, Orbán’s Sovereignty Protection Office explicitly belies or undermines Hungary’s claim to be a state in the Union of states. The Union would be better off without that internal contradiction.
1. Jorge Liboreiro, “Brussels
Takes Hungary to Court over Its Controversial ‘National Sovereignty’ Law,”
Euronews.com, October 3, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
