The New Federalist - Brussels - May 1990

by Olivier Dupuis

40% of inflation, a soaring unemployment rate, over 20% of the population below the limit of poverty, a foreign debt among the highest in Central and Eastern Europe, hundreds of companies destined to disappear, unions that are but heirs of the "Ancien Régime", ready to fully play the game of demagogy, new union that are non-existant in the main part of the risk sectors, a fiery question of nationality...

Enough to forecast a hot summer. That which more and more Hungarian commentators tend to do. Not enough, it seems, for the European Community to conceive a different type of relations toward Hungary as compared to the traditional one of cooperation and assistance. And the fact that the different agreements are gathered under a single "hat", called, for the occasion, "super-association agreement", does not change its true nature and its deeply inadequate nature.

Any way you choose to look at the problem, the question is always the same: is the national way to political, economic and ecological renewal a possible option for Hungary today? In other words, can this country face, in a national context, with national instruments, problems that are, for their vastness and seriousness comparable only to those of a country immediately after a war? Can we reasonably expect this today of Hungary, when countries like France, Germany, Italy have been engaged in it for thirty years?

To look better, the logic that we wish to force on Hungary as on the other countries of Eastern and Central Europe is exactly the same as that which Mrs. Thatcher wants to convince herself of. These countries are told, basically, that they will usefully integrate in the E.C. only when they will have solved their problems. Mrs. Thatcher is saying the same thing, when she states that, for example, Great Britain will enter the European monetary system only when its inflation problems will have been solved.

No deception is allowed. Thus, Hungary is condemned to a false alternative. The same one that was the centre of a recent electoral debate. On the one hand it can opt for the drastic cure of the Free Democrats and open all its frontiers to the great multinational capitalism. In that case, there will be a process of indiscriminate international privatization of the competing economic structures and a forced socialization of the "obsolete" ones. Socialization which the State will not be capable of financing. Or else it can choose the soft therapy of the Democratic Forum. In that case, it will perhaps be able to restrain the renewal process for some time within acceptable social limits, but it will not be able to benefit from the impulses given by the intensive foreign investments.

This equation finds no solution in a national context. But it would be totally different in the context of the European Community. This context could in fact represent a space for a gradual opening of Hungary to the rules of the world market, the parameter for the regulation of the renewal process. The authority, the competence, the ambitions and the experience acquired in occasion of the adhesions of Spain and Portugal, among others, make the European Community the only institution capable of establishing and making respect this transitory set of rules and norms which would allow for a non-traumatic adjustment of Hungary to the laws of a free market. And this would strengthen its newly established democratic institutions.

But the E.C. can be more than this. In a region in which the liberation from totalitarianism unfortunately does not only mean the return to democracy but also the return of the old evils of nationalism, the European Community could represent the new model of co-existence between peoples. And in the specific case of Hungary, its adhesion would have an immediate, automatic effect, turning the Hungarian minorities of Transilvania, of the Banat or of Slovakia, into minorities of the whole community. We can easily imagine what all this would represent in terms of respect and of guarantee of their rights.

It might be argued - and this is the official position of the Community - that the new adhesions cannot but complicate, and therefore hinder, the process that must lead to the European federation. It is a fact often repeated. Those who remember the adhesion of Spain also remember the fears that were expressed on that occasion. The reality has been completely different. As Felipe Gonzales stated, the adhesion of Spain on the one hand created new problems for the European Community, but "if you place on a scale on the one side the problems and on the other side the mechanisms produced by the adhesion, it is very clear that the latter was beneficial". The same thing was said, a few months ago, on a a possible adhesion of East Germany. Today, only one country - not certainly not just any country - declares itself willing to support the costs involved. This is to prove that when there is a political will...

Hungary and its "Habsburb" neighbours, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (Austria is not worth mentioning) put together have a smaller population as compared to the Iberian peninsula. The average life level is comparable to that of Spain ten years ago. And just like Spain ten years ago, there are reasons to believe that there is a huge potential of vitality, of innovative capacity and of creativity. As for the European Community, no one can question the fact that today it is stronger, has more instruments as compared to the last adhesion negotiations!

But between all the possible arguments in favour of the immediate adhesion of these countries, there is one that has priority over all the others. That of the political responsibility of the European Community not only versus the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, but also versus the whole of the European continent. And therefore also versus that country.

The privileged situation in which Western Europe has lived for forty years and that enabled it, among other things, to create this draft of a federal integration, in fact forces it to something much more substantial as regards these countries of Europe who return to democracy, as compared to the vague projects of a European confederation or of a new foundation of the CSCE. Not to mention the less vague, but equally inadequate projects of adhesion to the Council of Europe or of a "super-association" to the European Community.

These three countries, each of which faces, from the inside or from the outside, potentially explosive political and social

situations, but which all have, in one way or the other, contributed to the resistance against totalitarianism far more than our countries, could add vitality, courage and political imagination in a European construction which is prey to the perpetual and sterile conflicts of sovereignty.

We are deeply convinced, as members of the Radical Party, that the paralysis affecting the European Community, its incapacity to transform itself into real United States of Europe, are caused by two factors. On the one hand its insistence in considering the political and institutional dimension of the Community construction as a additional structure which would complete a unified Community edifice. A conception which reduces the unification process to a quarrel of experts and to a constant inter-governmental conflict. On the other hand there is its incapacity to set itself goals that are adequate to its ambitions.

The problem therefore is twofold: to link the question of the European construction in the political field and to aim higher. It is an urgent problem. Because in the absence of an undoubtedly political and priority challenge, the inter-governmental conference to be held in December could turn into the usual representation of a well-known show, where the larger part of the member countries will hide their fears or their national or even electoral concerns behind the so-called inflexible opposition of Mrs. Thatcher. And the revision of the tasks of the European Parliament might bear the consequences of it.

The question of the immediate adhesion of the "Habsburb countries" could represent this challenge. For the simple reason that not to accept that challenge could have incalculable consequences for the whole of Europe. The economic debt weighing on those countries are well known. The political reservations are even more serious. From the centrifugal tendencies operating in Czechoslovakia to the tensions (the first explosions have already occurred) between Romanians and Hungarians, to the accelerated libanization of Yugoslavia...All this is enough, undoubtedly, to bury, in the space of a few years (and perhaps less) the great hopes for 1989. To include the Habsburb question in the menu of the European Community in terms of pure and simple (and rapid) adhesion would mean to force the heads of state and of government to start with the main course; to reply in a different way, no longer in vague and distant terms, to the political, institutional and strategic issues which the present and the future of Europe depen

d from; to conceive the European Community no longer in the final pattern established by Yalta, but as the instrument of the overcoming of Yalta.

The Radical Party wishes to be an instrument of this challenge. In other words, it wants to be a place in which men and women, in addition to their political and national responsibilities, can meet and unite to face this challenge together. Without this preventing them from pursuing other goals within their party or their movement or their country. A transnational and transpartisan instrument (but we could also call it a transmovement). An instrument which, overcoming the traditional conception of the political party which wants to represent the whole of the aspirations, of the ideas if not of the feelings of its members, presents itself and represents itself as a simple added value, as a place, among other places, where each citizen can express one or some of the infinite parts that make up his personality and his existence.

Members of the Radical Party are present in about thirty countries, mostly European. In Yugoslavia, in occasion of the renewal of the parliament of the Republic of Croatia, a dozen of them were candidates on several tickets, among which a European and green federalist ticket. Next June, for the administrative elections, several Czechoslovakian Radicals will be candidates on tickets of the Civic Forum, of the Republican Union or on a ticket of independents. In Hungary they are preparing to organize a referendum on the question of the adhesion to the European Community. In each of these three countries they have just begun gathering signatures for a petition requesting the adhesion to the European Community and, at the same time, the summons of a Constituent of the United States of Europe.

This is a battle that encounters many difficulties. One of which is the perception that this right to belong to the only Europe that counts (because it exists) will not be acknowledged them precisely by those who are already part of it. To join the Radical Party can also be a sign of the will to fight in order to change things.