this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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Orban is not forever - whereas integrating a country to EU is a long slow process. Also Budapest is geographically a hub city (whose inhabitants didn't - mostly- vote for fidesz anyway). I find it hard to believe that hungarian people are so fundamentally different from their neighbours. So does it make sense to undo citizens' EU membership for this? Rather, we need some kind of suspension of rights of the current government based on specific behaviour, such as persistent obstruction, distortion of the national media, etc. (although such criteria could apply to others too which might get embarrassing). And in general, to remove all vetos (aka "consensus") from EU processes.
The issue with removing consensus is that consensus leads to stability, and stability is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the EU (just look at how much war Europe saw before the EU). By enforcing consensus, we can have slow but steady progress, rather than the current people in power spending a bunch of time just undoing what the previous people implemented. I'm a big fan of consensus-oriented political systems.
With that said: It should be possible to take away a countries rights to influence decisions, either based on some pre-defined criteria, or on a vote requiring something close to unanimity, where the offending country is of course not allowed to vote. We can't have someone like Orban holding up and disrupting the entire EU pretty much on his own, while holding on to power by flagrantly violating principles at home that countries need to follow to join the EU in the first place.
Stability is indeed a strength of EU - effectively averaging over all the countries smooths over political oscillations - which is useful for tackling long-term policy problems (like climate). I'm not advocating majoritarian voting where 51% overrides 49%. However with ± 30 countries, one or two should not block the rest - the current system leads to transactional brinkmanship where the last hold-outs get some prize in return for postponed obstruction. I've seen similar (worse) problems in UN climate negotiations - also due to "consensus" principle.
Never seen it that way, but it makes sense.
As an American I suggest the EU finds a way to make it work, even if y'all need to take a crowbar to Orban's knees (proverbially) to get him to cooperate. Holding together as political entity is hard, ugly work, and sometimes you need to get ugly to maintain unity.
What you don't want to do is commit was crimes. That should always be a hard line. One out own government has crossed all too often. But it's hard to live up to ideals. But if you sink to the same level as Putin, you're not really winning.