At the Dec. 14-15 summit of European Union (EU) leaders, Hungary’s soft Euroscepticism took center stage when Prime Minister Viktor Orbán refused to vote in favor of opening accession negotiations with Ukraine. In addition, he blocked the EU from giving the war-torn country 50 billion euros in aid. While Orbán cited Ukraine’s lack of readiness and discrimination against Hungarians living within its borders as the rationale, critics argue that his primary motives are pecuniary and political.
The EU has denied Hungary access to 13 billion euros for allegedly violating rule-of-law standards. Orbán’s veto served as pushback against these accusations (which he denies) and as a ploy to secure the funds that his country needs. The Orbán government also asserts that the United States-led West has squandered its moral legitimacy and global hegemony. The winds of change are shaping a new multipolar world in which China, and an expanded Sinosphere across Eurasia, will rival the Washington-Brussels-Berlin axis of power.
Though Orbán urged the West to “accept that there are two suns in the sky,” he expects the U.S. to confront an ascendant China by dividing the world into a bloc-based international order reminiscent of the Cold War. Lest Hungary be once again relegated to the periphery, it must pursue a geopolitical and geo-economic strategy of “increased connectivity” with the rising East.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Budapest was poised to rule Central Europe as the co-capital of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, and it built one of the largest parliament buildings in the world. The neo-Gothic architectural marvel on the banks of the Danube reflected the nation’s triumphant optimism for the future. But by the end of the Great War, the defeated country was reduced to a rump state, having lost one-third of its population, access to the sea, and the vast majority of its natural resources including iron ore, timber, and agricultural land.
That the Entente Powers punished Germany following World War 1 is well known. Lesser known are the severe penalties exacted from the junior partner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon forced Hungary to give up 70 percent of its territory to new successor states (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), neighboring Romania, and even Austria. Hungarians perceived Trianon as an excessively punitive, traumatic event (sentiments that echo even today), which called into question their place in Europe.
In his book, Go East! A History of Hungarian Turanism (2022), historian Balázs Ablonczy writes that poets and intellectuals subsequently advocated a reorientation of Hungarian identity toward Asia. He points out that literary scholar Frigyes Riedl praised the moral and religious ideals of Asia as “worth more than the modern European ones.” Orientalists rejected the Western academic classification of Hungarian as a Finno-Ugric language, which ethnically grouped the Hungarian people with Finns and Estonians. The latter were seen as culturally inferior.
Instead, Orientalism relied on medieval accounts of powerful Turkic tribes — hailing from the Altai Mountains in Central Asia — that conquered the Carpathian Basin to establish Hungary. The movement sought new political alliances with Turkic peoples as a means of resisting Pan-Slavic and Pan-Germanic nationalism. According to genetic studies, the Hungarian tribes that settled the Carpathian Basin in the late ninth century B.C. originated from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples of the Eurasian steppes, along with admixture from Caucasian peoples and Eastern European Slavs.
Losing World War II turned Hungary into a hostage of the Soviet Union for 40 years, which renewed a sense of belonging to the Free World. But this enthusiasm for the West was short-lived. High inflation and recessions riddled the post-communist transition and plummeted standards of living. Then in 2008, the global financial crisis devastated Hungary’s export-driven and foreign investment-controlled economy, resulting in one of the worst contractions in its history (6.6 percent annual GDP decline in 2009).
Viktor Orbán and his center-right Fidesz party won a landslide victory in the 2010 parliamentary elections after campaigning on a nationalist platform of economic self-rule. Balázs Orbán (Political Director to the Prime Minister) explains that Hungarians countered their disillusionment with liberal democracy by turning to their Turkic heritage for “inspiration and momentum” as well as political action. The new government revived Hungarian Orientalism in political discourse with the launch of its “Opening to the East” policy, designed to increase trade partnerships with Central Asian Turkic nations, Turkey, Russia, and China. In 2018, Hungary became an observer state in the Organization of Turkic States (comprising Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey).
Since joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Hungary has become a poster child for Chinese foreign direct investment in Central Europe. It has received billions of euros from China for large-scale infrastructure projects including the Budapest-to-Belgrade railway. The BRI is a grandiose project to build comprehensive networks — consisting of road and rail routes, oil and gas pipelines, power grids, and seaports — that connect China with over 150 countries across Eurasia and Southeast Asia. It aims to create an economically and politically integrated “Greater Eurasia” (originally a Russian project) and subsume the economies of its member states under a Sinocentric bloc. The flagship initiative reflects China’s imperialist approach to global governance and its overarching goal of constructing an alternate world order that challenges U.S. dominance.
It is worth noting that the Hungarian government has neither eschewed the Chinese effort to construct a geopolitical bloc nor has it extended its criticism of the EU’s “colonial” policies to China. Opponents of the West’s left-liberal politics and progressive messianism argue that Chinese mercantile imperialism constitutes the lesser of two evils. While such a claim is subject to debate, the fact remains that small states like Hungary cannot escape the gravitational pull of great powers.
Non-alignment promises national self-determination in a world dominated by bloc politics, but it can only go so far when confronted with realpolitik. For example, India — a founding member of the Cold War-era Non-Aligned Movement — was forced to ask the U.S. and then the Soviet Union for military assistance against invading Chinese forces in 1962. Stephen Kotkin, an eminent historian of Russia and Eurasia, observes that empires rise and fall but “blocs endure.”
The 2016 victory of Donald Trump and Brexit evinced an Anglo-American reckoning with the failures of globalization, namely the hollowing out of the middle- and low-income classes due to deindustrialization, unfair global trade, and mass immigration. The Trump Administration reversed Barack Obama’s oxymoronic “Leading from Behind” foreign policy by promoting peace through strength and expanding the U.S. sphere of influence.
Poised to win the Republican Party nomination, Trump leads Joe Biden in five (out of six) key battleground states according to the November 2023 New York Times/Siena College poll. If Trump prevails in the 2024 presidential elections, his administration will pursue a more determined agenda to thwart China’s geopolitical ambitions. Although Viktor Orbán has been a vocal supporter of Trump, he defied pressure from the Trump Administration to abandon China’s Huawei 5G technology over spying and national security concerns; in fact, the Chinese telecommunications company opened a new research and development center in Budapest in 2020 — a move that could cause friction between Hungary and a future conservative White House.
A successful conservative U.S. presidency post-2024 will balance its “America First” persuasion with prudent measures to prevent China from exploiting regional power vacuums. The need to limit Beijing’s footprint is especially urgent in countries such as Hungary, which seek partnerships for economic development and carry grievances of historical injustice against the West.
Meg Hansen is the Budapest Fellowship Program’s Visiting Senior Fellow at the Danube Institute in Hungary. Previously, she served as president of a State Policy Network-affiliated think tank in Vermont.
