Andrew Tettenborn

The EU doesn’t understand Hungary and Poland

It's a battle between popular democracy and the Brussels bureaucracy

Rather like Germany with its ill-starred ‘Drive to the East’ in the 19th and 20th centuries, one suspects the EU is quietly regretting its keenness to absorb most of the states of eastern Europe in the early 2000s. If not, events in Poland and Hungary this week may well persuade them.

For a long time, national governments in the older EU states have more or less willingly subscribed to two articles of faith: the complete supremacy of EU law over their national law, including their constitutions, and the unchallengeable power of the EU Court of Justice — not only to expound EU law but also to extend and develop it, and to determine conclusively how far the competences of the EU run.

There are reasons for this surprising submissiveness. The EU’s founding members had recently fought each other; their elites at the time mistrusted popular sovereignty as a potential cause of a return to the horrors of conflict. This helps explain why their governments have consistently seen supranational control organised on technocratic lines, legally supreme and discreetly insulated from national voter pressure, as a price worth paying.

The Polish and Hungarian governments are freely elected; and the issues involved, especially immigration in the case of Hungary, are hot-button topics about which electors feel strongly

However understandable in the West, such feelings cut little ice further east. Having escaped 30 years ago from a supranational state apparatus that was indeed technocratic, all-powerful and all too successfully insulated from popular pressure, the nations of eastern Europe understandably have no big desire to go back to it.

In the last few months, Poland has increasingly made this clear. Ordered by the European Court in two separate judgments to change its internal judicial system to satisfy EU impartiality norms and to shut the Turów coal-mine on environmental grounds, it demurred, essentially on the ground that the first was none of the EU’s business and the second was necessary to keep the lights on.

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