Hungary
Today
“Hungarians have never lost sight
of their mission,” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared in a speech on Thursday at
Budapest’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium.
Orbán said the 21st century belonged to Asia though Europe was
proudly bearing “its spiritual primacy”. The United States, meanwhile, was used
to global economic and military leadership role, he added.
He said the West had bestrode the globe for 400 years with a sense
of exceptionalism and a mission which gave it inspiration and self-confidence.
But at the start of the 21st century Western civilisation had started to
confront serious challenges, he added.
A “woke” neo-Marxism, he said, was
taking hold in America, while Europe was beset by a Muslim demographic,
political and economic tide, creating a new state of affairs in France, Italy,
the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Austria.
The West, said Orbán, was not up to the task of providing adequate
political solutions to such problems.
“We central Europeans, in short, believe that the West has
gradually lost faith in its own mission,” he said. It no longer seeks meaning
in its own history but instead reinterprets or obliterates certain periods with
a sense of shame, while failing to discover alternatives.
Recalling Karl Popper’s ideas on the “open society”, Orbán
insisted that Popper saw any special value or historical mission attached to
the nation or political community as open society’s enemy. This, he said, was
perhaps the most influential and destructive Western kind of thinking after the
second world war.
The concept of an open society robbed the West of its belief in
its own values and historical mission, the prime minister said. Amid the
current “Muslim tide” and the rise of Asia, the West is unable to confront its
own mission, he added.
Orbán argued that central Europeans
believed that, without a mission, they were destined to failure. He said that
historically, Hungarians had taken on the mission of ensuring the coexistence
and prosperity of the peoples living in the Carpathian Basin and to make sure
it was not enfolded in the political and cultural framework of the German or
Ottoman world.
He noted the Tatar invasions, Muslim invasions in the Middle Ages,
the Nazi occupation, the Soviet occupation and the anti-Christian nature of the
decades of communism. The protection of the Carpathian Basin and Christianity
was a mission of national, central European and even European significance, he
said.
The prime minister said Christianity was about faith and the ways
of life inspired and formed by faith; Christian democracy was about ways
of life that had grown out of societies imbued with the Christian faith, he
said.
Accordingly, central Europe, he said, had a different outlook on
life and its esteem of the nation.
Orbán said western European leaders saw differences of opinion
over gender, migration and national sovereignty as developmental backwardness.
“But they don’t get that we’re talking about a deep cultural, geopolitical and
philosophical difference.”
Orbán said western European leaders
saw differences of opinion over gender, migration and national sovereignty as
developmental backwardness. “But they don’t get that we’re talking about a deep
cultural, geopolitical and philosophical difference.”
Orbán said Hungarians saw their work as a personal profession on
which their life depended, “bringing us together towards a common fate”,
providing “endless self-esteem”. Addressing the students, he said the duty of a
spiritual people was to understand this mission and to reflect on it and its
changing forms in public affairs, he said.
https://hungarytoday.hu/orban-protection-carpathian-basin-hungarians-centuries-long-mission/
