Ceding the stage to the jester
The EU gets flustered about Orbán's peace mission, yet fails to show any initiative of its own
(My original German version of this text was published by IPG-Journal, a publication of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.)
When Viktor Orbán snapped back at the outraged reaction of EU representatives and member states to his meeting with Putin with “this is precisely the Brusselian bureaucratic nonsense that yielded no results in finding a way to peace, a Canadian foreign policy expert sighed “I’m no fan of Orbán, but he has a point.”
The measures taken by the EU’s top officials and member states against Orbán seem petty, with a touch of the governess about them. There is huffing about “inacceptable breaking of taboos” and promises to “show firmness”. That smacks of offended sentiments. It is not substantive criticism.
The EU’s Legal Service concluded – suspiciously promptly – that Orbán had violated “the spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity”. According to one former EU-official and now independent Brussels-based expert, this is “problematic, because politics should not be a purely legal matter”. None of this makes anything better, nor does it help anyone.
Where, then, are the respectable European leaders? In line with the saying “When only the jesters are left speaking the truth, something is not right at court” – why don’t they steal Orbán’s thunder, by coming up with political proposals of their own? Why do they leave peace, the most precious thing of all, to him, while they close ranks to stick their heads in sand together? After all, the most recent polling shows that the overwhelming majority of Europeans wish for negotiations.
The Brussels-based expert opines that the mini-sanctions that some member states and the Commission are now wielding against Orbán make him look more important than he is. “Orbán is essentially a con man. He’s signaling to Trump, his other fans and the Hungarian population that he’s one of them, that he has political stature. He doesn’t care about results, because he can always argue that it didn’t work out because others sabotaged his efforts.”
Orbán’s trip was a pretty amateurish affair
The Hungarian journalist Csaba Tóth criticizes that the EU should have long resisted Orbán’s excesses, for example when he was responsible for massive human rights violations during the 2015 refugee crisis. “But back then we saw hardly any reaction. And now all of a sudden he’s supposed to have crossed some red line and gets punished? Because he is trying for a détente between Russia and Ukraine? That makes people around here think.“
In truth, Orbán’s trip was a pretty amateurish affair. Professional, serious diplomacy does not look like this. He must know that, too, because after a cumulative 18 years as prime minister, he’s been around the block a few times.
Since the start of the “big war” (as my Ukrainian acquaintances call it) in February 2022, Europe’s political class appears to have forgotten how diplomacy works, or rather that it exists at all. In light of this collective amnesia, things that should be common knowledge bear repeating: Diplomacy depends on discretion. Relationships are cultivated over long periods, so that they can be built on when things get serious. Once a conflict reaches so-called „ripening“, exploratory talks may commence, possibly mediated by neutral third parties or with the aid of well-connected private individuals (“track-II diplomacy”). When particularly sensitive issues are at stake, initial conversations typically take place off the record and only among unnamed negotiators, to avoid pressure from opponents and from so-called spoilers, who itch to deliberately wreck talks.
Early on, there may be talks without conditions, to get a sense of what the other side thinks and wants. From there, an initial draft agenda may be compiled. Public negotiations commence only when all parties are firmly on board and when things begin to look like something can indeed be achieved. Meetings at the highest level normally do not occur until negotiators have agreed most points, the often voluminous technical details have been fleshed out, and the deal is ready to be signed. Because heads of state and government don’t like to be associated with failure (except when precisely that is the point – when they want to demonstrate that nothing can be achieved with this or that counterpart).
Orbán probably did it for the limelight – or maybe to make his colleagues in the EU Council hyperventilate.
So Orbán put the cart before the horse. For no good reason, since Budapest has embassies in Moscow and Beijing, and their teams could hold such consultations discreetly. He presumably did it for the limelight – or maybe precisely to make his colleagues in the EU Council hyperventilate.
EU member states pouting over this, the Commission and Orbán himself are all gaslighting Europe’s citizens: The former tell a tale of how diplomacy and a political search for peace and security are not only impossible and absurd, but immoral and taboo; the latter acts as if the great old men running the world can solve complex problems in a few hours tête-à-tête (if with plenty of cameras and red carpets). None of this is serious.
Despite all that, we shouldn’t reject a priori that Orbán may be serious about peace, be it for moral or purely practical reasons. Time and again, otherwise deeply problematic statesmen made enormous contributions to peace. Metternich should be mentioned here, or Richard Nixon. And the president of Turkey, Recep Erdoğan, whose government has played the most important role to date in peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine – first as mediator of the astonishingly productive talks between Ukraine and Russia in spring 2022, then as the implementation hub of the Black Sea Grain Initiative.
Europe’s governments and institutions must finally take responsibility for peace on our continent
This doesn’t mean that Obran should continue playing this role all by himself. Quite the contrary: Europe’s governments and institutions must finally take responsibility for peace on our continent. But the perspective needs adjusting: away from the notion that only the purest democrats are permitted to work on peace (once they have finally gotten over themselves), towards a more realistic, pragmatic and professional view of diplomacy.
Virtually no wars end with one side’s complete victory, and virtually all of them end with negotiations, even if those often lead to no more than a halt in fighting, as, for example, in Kashmir, Cyprus or the Korean peninsula. Ukraine isn’t just running out of soldiers; it is, due to flight and collapsing birthrates, running out of people in a very elementary sense. The country is bleeding out; it is losing its future.
In the discourse in the US, unlike that of the German-speaking world, it isn’t controversial that neither side can win this war outright. The American government’s position has long been that this war will end through negotiations, if only once Ukraine has gained the upper hand militarily and finds itself in a better position for talks. However, for the past one-and-a-half years, there can be no talk of that anymore, despite massive Western support, which culminated in the failed counteroffensive in summer 2023. The deal Ukraine achieved at the negotiation table in Istanbul in spring 2022 appears out of its reach today – a realization so tragic it knocks the breath out of you.
In the discourse in the US, unlike that of the German-speaking world, it isn’t controversial that neither side can win this war outright.
Europe’s governments can now diss Orbán from the corner where they’re sulking and over time slink back to business as usual. Or they can take his clumsy and possibly cynical stunt as a challenge to do better than him. Meaning, above all, that they apply everything we have learned about ending armed conflict over the past decades.
For example, the concept of people-centered peace, which places human security, i.e. the subjective security of people affected by war (as opposed to military-political security), their rights and their well-being at the core and has been shown to achieve more sustainable peace in this way. Or, according to UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the equal participation of women at all levels of peace processes.
There has been much speculation about whether Boris Johnson ordered Ukraine to break off negotiations and keep on fighting in spring 2022. It is wrong, though, to only ask what might have happened if Johnson had done nothing back then, because “doing nothing” wasn’t the only option on the West’s table. The right question to ask is, what would have happened, if, together with Turkey, Europe had actively supported these negotiations and had thrown its diplomatic weight behind Ukraine.
Not all peace processes end well by default. Often, they fall apart several times before they stick. They can drag on for years. But I make this assertion: if, in spring 2022, we had seized the chance at diplomacy, tens and maybe hundreds of thousands would still be alive today, and millions would have never experienced enormous pain and trauma.
This should make us think. We know how to do diplomacy. We know it at least as well as how to manufacture weapons and ship them to Ukraine, and certainly better than Orbán does.