Co-sponsored by The Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and The Europe Center

Event Synopsis:

The End of Hungarian Democracy? International Implications
October 21, 2011

After an introduction by Professor Dornbach, Professor Wittenberg asserts that while a spirit of bipartisan ship is a nice feature of the U.S. legislature, it is not a fundamental requirement of democracy and  has historically not characterized the Hungarian parliament. He traces a decades-long tradition of ruling parties using Parliament to limit the presence and influence of minority parties. The current Fidesz government, which ended up with 2/3 of the seats after the 2012 election, now has a supermajority necessary to alter the constitution. Professor Wittenberg attributes Fidesz’s victory to three factors: the incompetence of older right wing parties, partly resulting from lack of governing experience during last four decades of Socialist rule; 2) the arrogance of the Socialist party; and 3) a simple lack of alternatives for voters. Wittenberg points out that Hungary’s complex electoral system resulted in more Fidesz parliamentary seats than the party’s actual popularity with voters would predict. He concludes that the 70% of parliamentary vote won, cumulatively, by extreme nationalist parties, does not bode well for the future of liberal politics in Hungary.

Professor Scheppele describes how the Fidesz party under the leadership of (Victor) Orban has taken its victory as a “mandate to change everything,” often in ways that will allow Fidesz to stay in power in the future. The constitution was amended 10 times during the party’s first year in power. Key changes included reducing the size and jurisdiction of constitutional courts, limiting media activities, allowing election commission representatives to be appointed with a 2/3 majority, and fast tracking the process of voting on new laws to approximately 3 days, leaving little room for discussion and debate. Scheppele echoes Professor Wittenberg’s argument that many voters simply did not have an attractive alternative to Fidesz, which would be less of a danger if the country’s constitution were not so easy to amend. She predicts that Hungary’s current situation should offer lessons to other countries on how to design constitutions.

Professor Halmai concludes the panel by crediting the arrogance (and corruption) of the Socialist coalition with the success of Fidesz in the 2010 elections. He highlights three central problems with the new constitution: 1) It leaves questions regarding who is to be subject to the constitution – for example, does this include the Roma population within Hungary, or Hungarian-Americans living within the United States? 2) The constitution intervenes in the private lives of Hungarians with respect to religion, marriage, abortion, etc. 3) It limits constitutional courts to narrower jurisdictions. He also laments the lack of consensus within the Hungarian government on a set of liberal democratic values.

A discussion session raised such questions as: What prospects are there for pushback from the European Union against some of the recent constraints on rule of law in Hungary? Does the fact that the Hungarian constitution considers the 1.4 million Hungarian-Americans in the United States as Hungarian citizens raise any legal challenge from the U.S.? Does the fact that Hungary has to operates within the frameworks of the European Union and NATO put constraints on its actions with regards to democracy and the constitution? Where does Fidesz’s funding come from?

Synopsis:

Robin Niblett, Director of Chatham House, delivered the following talk in The Europe Center series “The European and Global Economic Crisis”.

With measured optimism about the prospect for a way out of the current Eurozone crisis, Dr. Niblett argues that the introduction of the common Euro, seen by many in past years as a vanguard tool for European integration, is now potentially a functional wedge between ‘debtor’ and strongly capitalized nations.  

Dr. Niblett, arriving directly from participating in the World Economic Forum in Dubai, and based on Chatham House research, described the “perfect storm” of the past two decades of credit-driven growth, divergence within the EU, rising debt-to GDP ratios of member nations especially in the cases of Italy and Greece.  His analysis combines these economic details with the following:

• Demographics – high levels of unassimilated immigrants
• European welfare economies still distributing resources at twentieth-century levels now in the twenty-first century
• The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-free-trade populist parties
• The weakening of Europe’s center parties
• The “Russification” of Europe’s East – especially in recent events in Ukraine
• The stalled integration of Turkey into the EU

The totality of the above paints a grim portrait of Europe under the weight of nearly impossible conditions.   And yet, Dr. Niblett underlines evidence for measured optimism:

• Ireland is making strides to reform its economy
• Ireland’s educated and yet unemployed workforce does have the possibility to immigrate to Europe
• The UK is finally rebalancing its state budget and market liberalization
• France is facing, albeit with massive labor protest, its state budget levels
• Spain will likely turn over its government in the face of its massive youth protest
• Italy is evaluating in its political process a series of budget reforms

These are the structural side of what Dr. Niblett sees as Europe’s tools for recovery.

On the side of European practice, the Franco-German proposals for European Central Bank “bailout funds” include new rules for transparency of internal government operations. This promises innovation to make the EU into an area of political and financial transparency, and to enable the EU to engage in direct investment, as evidence is beginning to show, in the world’s emerging economies.  In this sense, Dr. Niblett sees for Europe a competitive edge over the US in engaging in world markets.

Perhaps most sanguine of Dr. Niblett’s analysis is his reading of the Eurozone crisis as a force to push the member nations of Europe further towards supra-national economic strategies.  In order to participate in the investment in emerging markets, the Benelux countries, not to mention France, Germany, and neighboring European states, are responding to the crisis by considering policy that promotes investment and outsourcing for service-sector employment, instead of export commodities which have been undercut in recent years.

There is a risk, in Dr. Niblett’s view, that Europe will respond to the Eurozone crisis by fracturing into rival “clubs” of small and large or debt-restructuring and creditor nation-states.  But the European nations, especially those currently participating in the Eurozone, have untapped capacities for growth:

• Educated youth
• Underemployed female laborers
• Outstanding higher educational institutions
• Pent-up small- and medium-enterprise markets
• Potential for growth in the service sector labor market
• Room for more tightly integrating and rationalizing the region’s energy market.

Those interested in further detail and analysis are invited to visit the work and productivity at:

The Europe Center, at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies: http://tec.fsi.stanford.edu

Chatham House, at the Royal Institute for International Studies: http://www.chathamhouse.org/

Speaker bio:

Robin Niblett became the Director of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International
Affairs) in January 2007. Before joining Chatham House, from 2001 to 2006, Dr. Niblett
was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Washington based
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). During his last two years at CSIS, he
also served as Director of the CSIS Europe Program and its Initiative for a Renewed
Transatlantic Partnership.

Most recently Dr. Niblett is the author of the Chatham House Report Playing to its
Strengths: Rethinking the UK’s Role in a Changing World (Chatham House, 2010) and
Ready to Lead? Rethinking America’s Role in a Changed World (Chatham House,
2009), and editor and contributing author to America and a Changed World: A Question
of Leadership (Chatham House/Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is also the author or
contributor to a number of CSIS reports on transatlantic relations and is contributing
author and co-editor with William Wallace of the book Rethinking European Order
(Palgrave, 2001). Dr Niblett is a frequent panellist at conferences on transatlantic
relations. He has testified on a number of occasions to the House of Commons Defence
Select Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee as well as US Senate and House
Committees on European Affairs.

Dr Niblett is a Non-Executive Director of Fidelity European Values Investment Trust. He
is a Council member of the Overseas Development Institute, a member of the World
Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Global Institutional Governance and the
Chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Europe.

He received his BA in Modern Languages and MPhil and DPhil from New College,
Oxford.

Audio Synopsis:

First, Professor Joffe asserts that the introduction of a common European currency was politically rather than economically motivated, pursued on the basis that it would protect Germany's strong export-oriented economy and ensure monetary discipline throughout the Euro zone without the need for heavy political management. However, good political intentions were not enough, and a disregard for sound economic principles has led to the current crisis.

In discussing causes of the crisis, Professor Joffe cites high spending and rapidly growing labor costs in the Mediterranean countries.  A common currency gave an impression to lenders of equal risk between Euro zone countries, who had little incentive for responsible monetary policies when they could borrow cheaply. Although northern countries like France and Germany also violated deficit rules prior to the crisis, they were better able to "devalue from within," cutting costs and wages, and lengthening work weeks to control unemployment. Professor Joffe uses the analogy of a steam-powered train to illustrate the challenges of the monetary union: each country represents a train car, and to move together there are three options - 1) drivers can impose discipline on other cars to ensure they don't burn too much coal; 2) when one car runs out of coal, others can share their resources; or 3) the cars can break apart, forcing out those who don't follow the speed limit.

Professor Joffe then offers several insights for the future. He reflects that the dominant system in the EU lately has been a “transfer union” (option #2 in the above train analogy). He predicts that this system will likely prevent a default until at least Spring 2012. While the crisis suggests that the monetary union should not have been forced, Joffe asserts that the desire to save the Euro is universal and a complete collapse is unimaginable. In conclusion, Professor Joffe discusses the different political challenges facing Europe and the United States, and cites several encouraging factors, including that democracy remains stable even during the economic crisis.

A discussion session following the talk address issues such as: the potential for the continued political integration of Europe to force less disciplined countries to "shape up"; how the EU hierarchy may change after the crisis; Ireland's role in the crisis; the validity of proposals to strengthen the European Parliament and implement a transactions tax;  the potential for an "Arab Spring" uprising among Greek youth; and prospects for transatlantic relations.

A police “encounter killing,” or simply “encounter,” is a term with no legal validity but which has seeped via the media into Indian English so surely that it has acquired a life of its own. It refers to a face-to-face interaction between the police and suspects leading to the killing of the suspects. While intended to convey serendipity, encounter killings in reality are often pre-planned executions by police or security agencies. First used against Maoists in the 1970s, and counterinsurgents in the Northeast and Kashmir, executions as unstated state policy were perfected in dealing with Sikh militant groups in the 80s and 90s. The ‘Punjab solution’, as it came to be known, became the model for the internal security establishment. Mumbai’s underworld was reined in through a series of high profile encounter killings—much celebrated in the popular media for imposing order into the urban anarchy that the gang-wars were breeding. Indeed, this became the preferred quick-fix method of dealing with a range of ‘undesirables’, from petty criminals to gangsters, to alleged terrorists and separatists. But more often than not, those lumped together as ‘encounterables’ were simultaneously marked out through their caste, ethnic and religious affiliations. The talk will discuss the history of fake encounters in India and the role of the media and judiciary in dealing with them.

Manisha Sethi is Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Comparative Religions and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research interests are in the area of gender and religion, communalism, and law and terrorism. She has published extensively on these themes in academic as well as popular publications. She is currently Associate Editor, Biblio: A Review of Books, India’s premier book review journal, with which she has been associated for over a decade. Sethi is the President of the Jamia Teachers' Solidarity Association, which has been closely involved in a campaign against extra judicial killings. Her book, Escaping the World: Chastity, Power and Women’s Renunciation among Jains, Routledge India, is due later this year.

This event is co-sponsored with the Stanford Center for South Asia and

The Indian American Muslim Council