Russia in Global Affairs

The defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary’s parliamentary election shouldn’t be seen as a shock. Opinion polls had long pointed in this direction: fatigue with familiar faces is inevitable, and psychologically understandable. Yet the result contains a paradox. Orban’s defeat appears, in some ways, to confirm the very trend he has come to embody: the primacy of the national agenda, “my country first.”

An attempt at decommunization in Russia has brought about the failure of de-Stalinization. As the Yeltsin regime positioned itself as an opponent of all Soviet history, many Russians were reluctant to see a larger part of their lives thrown into the dustbin.

There has again emerged an area of instability and armed conflict (Ukraine) on Poland’s borders. Its relations with neighbors that are vital for its national security and economic development (Russia, Germany, and the European Union as a whole) are ruined again.

There is a great risk of getting mired in counterproductive discussions about the frontiers of the European model of historical development. References to the history of one region or another or one nation or another as “European” or “non-European” are unscrupulously used today inside the EU itself and along its periphery when it comes to discussing whether the region or nation deserves to be a member of a united Europe.

New Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that after WWII Poland did not receive adequate compensation from Germany for the damage it had suffered and has the right to bring the topic of reparations to the agenda of Polish-German negotiations.

Hungarian PM is preoccupied with battling Brussels as country’s citizens lose faith.

Russia’s soft power should develop a broad and long-term narrative, capable of giving constructive answers to challenges facing Russian and Western societies. Berdyaev’s model of liberal conservatism can serve as the basis for an alternative discourse.

Like any ideology, patriotism comes along with an illusion of being part of “a big common cause.” However, illusion here is not deception, but an objective necessity, something that has to be hidden for society to continue to exist and at the same time adequately conceived at a conscious level.