Even as the European Union congratulates itself on being the world’s most sophisticated exercise in self-administered tedium, a voice has lately drifted across the Atlantic with the calm, dispassionate authority of a man who has already abolished several impossible things before breakfast. Elon Musk, part South African wizard, part Bond villain who forgot to apply for the licence, has publicly recommended that the entire EU be abolished. Not reformed, mind you; not trimmed around the edges like an overweight hedge in a Versailles side-garden. Abolished. The word lands in Brussels with roughly the same charm as a grand piano dropped through the roof of a Michelin-starred restaurant during the fish course.
One pictures the scene in the Berlaymont press room: spokesmen clutching their reusable coffee cups, eyes widening like rabbits who have just read the menu and discovered they are the plat du jour. Musk, speaking from the comfortable distance of several billion dollars and an even larger number of kilometres, offered no detailed roadmap, only the serene observation that the EU has become a regulatory blob that smothers enterprise faster than a wet duvet smothers a candle. Coming from a man whose companies are regulated by entities that still use fax machines for light entertainment, this counts as almost touching concern. Yet the suggestion hangs in the air like cigarette smoke in a post-war Paris café: impossible to ignore and guaranteed to annoy everyone who believes the continent’s problems can be solved by another 400-page directive on the curvature of bananas.
In an age when the European Union resembles nothing so much as a vast, overfed bureaucracy suffering from existential indigestion, it is refreshing—nay, exhilarating—to contemplate the one figure who might finally administer the necessary emetic. That man is Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, fence-builder extraordinaire, and the living embodiment of what one might call true Europeaness. Not the watery, Brussels-approved version served lukewarm in Strasbourg canteens, but the full-blooded, paprika-spiced variety that still believes nations are allowed to disagree without first filing Form 27B/6 in triplicate.
The distinction, as any discerning observer must now acknowledge, is between Europeaness and Euroness. The former is the glorious chaos that gave us Roman ruins, Renaissance swagger, Bach, bratwurst, Proust, patisseries, Fellini, fettuccine, the siesta, the sauna, and the peculiar British conviction that their language is the only one worth speaking properly. It is the continent’s genius for arguing over borders the size of a suburban lawn while producing wine that makes angels weep. Euroness, by contrast, is the grey sludge brewed in the Berlaymont building: a monochrome dream of “ever-closer union” enforced by regulations so numerous they require their own bureaucracy to catalogue the bureaucracy. It is the euro that turned Greece into a debtor’s prison, the Common Agricultural Policy that pays French farmers to grow nothing while ensuring tomatoes taste of wet cardboard, and the starry blue flag that nobody asked for and fewer still salute unless a subsidy is attached.
The European Union, in its current incarnation, has become the world’s most ambitious exercise in herding cats with PowerPoint presentations. Its founding myth—that without a federal superstate, the continent would immediately revert to flinging trebuchets at one another—is touching in its naïveté. Europe has enjoyed eighty years of peace not because Jean Monnet had a particularly persuasive slideshow, but because NATO parked a great many tanks on the Elbe, because Marshall Plan dollars rebuilt the rubble, and because even the most enthusiastic nationalist eventually grew tired of total war. Yet the Eurocrats press on, dreaming of a United States of Europe that would require another American Civil War just to agree on the spelling of 'catalogue.'
Enter Viktor Orbán, stage right, wearing the expression of a man who has read the Lisbon Treaty and found it wanting. Orbán understands that Europe’s strength has never lain in conformity but in its magnificent, quarrelsome variety. He looks at the Brussels machine—currently attempting to fine Hungary for refusing to turn itself into a migrant transit camp—and sees not a noble project but a sausage factory with a fetish for red tape. Where lesser leaders tremble before the wrath of the Commission, Orbán builds a fence, vetoes a sanction, and pockets an exemption with the serene confidence of a card-sharp who knows the deck is marked in his favour.
Imagine, if you will, Orbán elevated to the presidency of the European Council (or whatever grandiloquent title they invent next). The first act would be symbolic yet devastating: the quiet retirement of that circle of gold stars on a blue background. In its place, perhaps nothing at all—because real Europeans do not need a flag to tell them who they are. The second act would be the Great Unravelling: Maastricht reversed, Lisbon shredded, the euro gently euthanised and replaced by a polite arrangement whereby each country prints whatever currency best matches its national character. The third act—ah, the third act—would see the European Union transformed back into what it was always meant to be: a benign association of sovereign nations who cooperate when it suits them, trade enthusiastically, argue incessantly, and otherwise leave one another alone. A continent of checklists replaced by a continent of cafés.
One envisions the scene in Brussels. Ursula von der Leyen, pale beneath the studio lighting, demanding 'solidarity' in the tone of a disappointed headmistress. Orbán, leaning back, orange tie glowing like a Carpathian sunset, murmuring something about national sovereignty in the soothing cadences of a man who has never felt the need to apologise for existing. The translators would give up in despair; the simultaneous interpretation booths would fall silent; and for the first time in decades the European Parliament might actually hear itself think. Of course, there are risks. The Eurocracy does not surrender power gracefully. When confronted with a leader who refuses to accept that “European values” are whatever the Commission declares them to be on a Tuesday afternoon, the response is predictable: Article 7 procedures, frozen funds, sanctimonious editorials in Der Spiegel, and—when all else fails—the discreet funding of “civil society” groups whose commitment to democracy is curiously selective. One need only glance at the treatment meted out to Poland’s Law and Justice government, or the sudden discovery of “corruption” whenever a troublesome nationalist wins an election, to see the pattern.
Orbán, having survived more coup attempts than a Latin American colonel in the 1970s, is harder to shift than most. But the machinery is patient. Give it time, a pliable opposition leader, a few well-timed leaks to the international press, and even the Magyar Magyarbuster might find himself replaced by a photogenic globalist who promises to “bring Hungary back into the European family”—which is to say, back onto the leash. Thus the warning, dear reader, delivered with the weary cynicism of one who has watched too many good rebellions end in focus groups: enjoy the spectacle of Orbán tweaking the dragon’s tail while it lasts. The Eurocrats play a long game, and their weapon of choice is not the tank but the NGO, the grant, the “independent” judiciary, and the slow drip of manufactured scandal. One day we may wake to discover that Hungary, too, has been returned to “normality”—a colourless, borderless, flag-free normality where the only permissible patriotism is the kind that salutes twelve gold stars and apologises for its carbon footprint.
Until then, let us savour the glorious anomaly of a European leader who still believes Europe is something worth defending from its own supposed guardians. Viktor Orbán may not save the continent—he may only delay the inevitable—but in an era of managed decline, delay itself is a kind of victory. And if the price of that delay is the permanent outrage of the bien-pensant commentariat, then all I can say is: pass the popcorn, comrade. The show is just beginning.