by Judit Sándor
Prof. Judit Sándor is a full professor at the Department of Political Science, the Department of Law and the Department of Gender Studies at the Central European University in Vienna. She is the director of Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine (CELAB) in Budapest. She has been involved in numerous research projects funded by the European Union. In 2019, she received the ERC Synergy research grant LEVIATHAN (Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good). In 2004–05 Sándor headed the Bioethics Unit of UNESCO in Paris. She has published numerous books and journal articles in the fields of human rights, bioethics, and biopolitics.
I would like to approach the 2004 EU accession from the perspective of time.
Time is perceived to fly fast in certain periods, then it appears to slow down before speeding up again. In Hungary, for example, time stood still during the sleepy decades of state socialism before, from the late 1970s onward, transformations of historic significance occurred in no more than a couple of years. Still, although there were some cathartic episodes here and there, the change of the political and economic system took place peacefully: law professors, historians, and other intellectuals sat down at a table in 1989 to lay down the fundamentals of a new social and political order. None of them was really an expert on capitalism; they approached the issue as social scientists. The intent to create a more dynamic system—one that respected the full range of human rights as well as individual endeavors—connected these people, notwithstanding their varied backgrounds.
Many years—too many, I feel—elapsed between 1989 and Hungary’s accession to the European Union in 2004.
However, despite serious economic difficulties, restrictions and misguided privatizations, 2004 may have been the last time when there was social cohesion, a consensus at least regarding whether the Hungarian people wanted to live according to European values.
They wanted to enjoy the freedoms of speech, religion, and expression and the right to privacy while also retaining social rights, such as the right to health care, make use of the freedom to travel, to conduct business, and to establish associations and even political parties without having to fear anything. There were, of course, some people who believed that accession would promptly result in reaching European living standards. The accession was preceded by a referendum held on April 12, 2003. With 45.62 percent of the eligible voters participating, 83.76 percent of the valid votes cast were in favor of joining. Looking back, it is funny to think that poppy seed bread was one of the staples of the celebrations on April 30, as it seemed important to quell suspicions that the EU would ban this local favorite due to its high poppy seed content. The complexity of what it means to be part of the European Union was simplified by one of the assurances that, if you wanted, you could open a patisserie in Vienna.
There was great anticipation regarding accession to the European Union. The first day of May in 2004 saw the greatest enlargement in EU history, with the Union growing to include 25 Member States. In addition to Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and a part of Cyprus also joined the European Union. This was a long-awaited moment in Hungarian history. On the night leading up to that day, orchestras representing the various nations of the European Union played on Heroes’ Square in Budapest, people danced merrily on the streets, and we received text messages welcoming us in the Union. With tears welling up in my eyes, I thought of my grandparents who weren’t alive to experience this moment, who had rarely been able to see their relatives living abroad and who had dreamed of traveling across Europe. My maternal grandmother passed away just four years before this great event. My grandparents always felt nostalgic about West European countries and sighed deeply whenever they recalled their memories of traveling. Trips to the West were a privilege and a rarity, possible only if someone set their savings aside and if they were willing to live on nothing but tinned food to see Rome, Paris, or London. Crossing the border was always quite stressful: we all have memories of hoping to do so successfully at Hegyeshalom while carrying foreign currencies that had been secretly hoarded for three years.
We all experienced what it was like to be second-class citizens: our clothing and our little money screamed ‘Eastern Europe’. Just like snails, we carried our little shells with us: everything we could possibly need just to avoid having to purchase things abroad.
As a student, I traveled across Italy for a couple of weeks with cheap train tickets that were made available to young students – the total cost of which was only 1,000 HUF for a whole month, around 120 Euros in today’s currency terms. I did so after carefully organizing the entire trip. Since the many travel books would not have fit into my backpack and it wasn’t possible to simply Google the sights back then, I had to learn everything about the various cities by heart, including Venice, Rome, Padua, Naples and Florence. Today, it is impossible to fathom the enormous effort it took just to be able to study, travel, learn a language and peek out from the constricting world that was placed like a box on our heads.
In the early hours of that 1st of May in 2004, there were settlements along borders where people waited until midnight to see if they could actually cross without any obstacles.
Many families that had been torn apart could now be reunited – there are in fact settlements in the region whose inhabitants had lived in three different countries without ever having left their homes as various eras came and went. The freedom of crossing borders was hugely memorable.
Despite the long process of legal harmonization, and the completion of a large variety of forms, knowledge of the workings of the European Union remained quite limited in Hungary.
Not only did Central and East European people know little about the functioning of the EU: West European citizens knew little as well, and perhaps even less, about the countries preparing for accession.
When I first participated in a high-level expert group in Brussels, after greeting all those in attendance and thanking them for traveling to Brussels, the hosts extended a separate welcome to me “who had come from so far away.” Looking around the room, I saw a number of people who had arrived from Manchester, Lisbon, and other “distant” European cities.
While my own flight had been less than two hours and could not at all be considered a long journey, yet they viewed me as if I had arrived from as far as Siberia.
Despite the intense legal harmonization activities that had taken place in all technical fields, involving in the process not only government representatives but also lawyers with academic backgrounds, all parties came to possess only limited knowledge. We were sometimes surprised to find that Hungarian law had a number of legal terms whose meaning differed from the expressions translated from EU terminology: although a given legal concept would exist in Hungarian law too, it had a different name than in the EU legislation.
Moreover, the free movement of workers was not established concurrently with accession. Free movement of labor has been implemented without delay only by Sweden, Ireland, and United Kingdom. All other countries decided to “wait” and that inevitably resulted in another transitory period after the accession. The fears underlying such restrictions led the old member states to overestimate migration from the newer ones. According to Eurostat, in 2022 only 3.7% of EU citizens of working age (between 15 and 64) lived in an EU country other than that of their citizenship. In truth, the potentials inherent in the free movement of labor was realized only to a very limited degree.
There were misunderstandings concerning the EU’s rule of law mechanisms as well. As compliance with EU law was implemented via the use of a questionnaire, many experts took it as a mere formality. They paid little attention to suitable legal solutions, to continuously maintaining those legal principles, even their very meaning.
In addition to integrating EU law into their legal systems, countries with few democratic traditions should have been supported with special trainings and extra explanations.
Then, a new era started on the 1st of May in 2004, both in fact and figuratively. On the occasion of Hungary’s accession to the EU, a large hourglass sculpture was unveiled in Budapest: the Wheel of Time, which was erected next to Felvonulási tér (Procession Square) in April 30, the location where during state socialist times International Labor Day parades had been held. With a diameter of eight meters and a height of two, the Wheel of Time was quite imposing; what’s more, it was made of red granite, stainless steel, and bulletproof glass. It weighed 60 tons. Inside, fine granules of glass cascaded to the bottom so slowly that they could only be seen from up close even in broad daylight.
It is now 2024, and it seems time has, once again, come to a standstill.
Several fundamental rights, including the right to social security and freedom of education, have been violated in Hungary. Similarly to the time of state socialism and its one-party system, Hungarian public television is again broadcasting pro-state propaganda. The Wheel of Time has also stopped. It only functioned until 2011. It was vandalized, then fenced off during the construction works for the Liget Project, and finally dismantled in 2021 and shipped off.
Although Hungary was among the first countries to apply for membership in the European Union, during the past decade, the country’s legislative practices have often been found to be contrary to European rule of law principles. The Commission is of the opinion that the fundamental rights of LGBTIQ persons are violated by the Hungarian law that prohibits, or restricts, the access of those under 18 to content that promotes or portrays “divergence from self-identity corresponding to sex at birth, sex change or homosexuality.” Since then, books wrapped in plastic foil “protect” Hungarian youth from “gender propaganda”—while serious abuses have come to light in state institutions supposedly devoted to the sheltering of children. A number of terms have been deliberately twisted by populists, among them ‘refugee’, ‘migrant’, ‘gender’ and, most recently, ‘sovereignty’.
In February 2024, the European Commission opened another infringement procedure against Hungary for violations of EU law. The decision was based on its assessment of the new law on the Defense of National Sovereignty, which the Hungarian Parliament adopted on December 12, 2023. The Law establishes the so-called Office for the Defense of Sovereignty and tasks it with investigating specific activities carried out in the interest of another state or a foreign body, organization or natural person, if they are likely to violate or jeopardize the sovereignty of Hungary as well as organizations whose activities using foreign funding may influence the outcome of elections or the will of voters.
The illiberal democracy and corruption that developed have moved Hungary away from the values that it had desired and strived for in 2004, while the very name Brussels is being used as negatively loaded word by the propaganda machinery.
It is time to once again harmonize the wheel of time with the challenges of the present and build a 21st-century Hungary within Europe.
