Europe Will Regret Selling Its Values Too Cheaply
The European Union’s failure to discipline Hungary and Poland could prove more damaging to its stature internationally than Brexit.
A superpower of values.
Photographer: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images
We non-Europeans tend to get lectured a lot by folks from the European Union about “European values.” In their defense, we always believed they were sincere. Surely a continent so ruined by devastating wars, which had somehow managed to extricate a form of concord from the wreckage, understood that a union was about more than budgets, transfers and regulations: It meant creating some sort of solidarity across the divides of ethnicity and nationality, and defending — no, not European, but universal — rights and principles.
That faith in the EU’s bedrock of values began to weaken in recent years as far-right populists climbed in the polls across the continent. And it crumbled when faced with the actions of leaders of Hungary in Poland — two countries that, had they not been located in Europe, would have been the subject of much head-shaking by European diplomats and criticism as budding third-world autocracies.