It Sucks to Be Someone Else's Bitch, But Hey, That's Life

I don't know about you, but whenever I start traveling a lot in Europe, I come down with something. I don't mean diarrhea, or any of the other minor bugs you pick up when you leave home. The symptoms are more psychological than physiological. Everything starts looking the same, while at the same time seeming bewilderingly foreign. I get disoriented, slightly depressed, and terribly irritable, even to the point of making scenes in public. I call it "Euroconfusion." Happily, I haven't been around Europe much in the past few months, and have been blissfully free of Euroconfusion. Unfortunately, certain members of the Hungarian government have recently been touring Europe like so many rich American honeymooners, and appear to have come down with a near-deadly strain of the dreaded EC virus.

The final test results came in last Wednesday, with the publication of a story in the UK Financial Times, based on interviews with Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány and Economy Minister János Kóka. In the piece, which was penned by the very un-confused local FT correspondent Chris Condon, the two men showed all the telltale signs of a hellish case of Euroconfusion, apparently brought on by the European Union's recent chastising of Hungary for its chronic fiscal incontinence. "What the hell would Europe like to have from us?" Gyurcsány wailed. An even tetchier-sounding Kóka remarked that "Brussels would be on a totally wrong track if they thought about stopping the transfers to Hungary from which we are building highways, airports, et cetera." Did you hear that, Brussels? Don't even think about cutting off our free eurocash! We mean it!

The sky, of course, has not fallen in since the two ministers' outbursts. But that's not really how it works in Euroland, at least with the exception of France, where President Jacques Chirac famously told Hungary and other new EU entrants that they had "missed a good opportunity to keep quiet" after some signed a letter in support of US tough talk on Iraq. Instead, the reaction from Brussels will probably be along the lines of what would happen if a Euroconfusion-addled American tourist were to show up at a fancy restaurant in Paris and demand to see the chef because the ass-cargo he ordered turned out to be icky snails, instead of veel ass-calopini, like at the Olive Garden back in Omaha. The chef would come out, listen quietly, cock an eyebrow, explain to the gentleman that the problem is not with the mollusks but with monsieur, and then stroll in a dignified manner back to the kitchen and pee on the barbarian's tournedos fume au bois. On the other hand, the chefs currently toiling at Chez EU have reason to be even angrier with Hungary's Euroconfused leaders, because unlike the boor from Omaha, les Hongrois came in expecting the meal to be on the house.

But can our Eurofriends really hold our Euroconfused leaders' lapses against us? After all, we're just a small, powerless and poor country, at least in EU terms, and don't threaten anyone with our profligacy, except for maybe the Slovaks and a few others in the neighborhood who could end up suffering from some minor financial guilt-by-association because of their proximity to free-spending Budapest. Also plus, we deserve a break because we aren't actually all that small, powerless or poor, at least compared to, say, Slovakia, which, by the way, we used to rule over like Gods.

The answer is yes, they can and probably will hold our lapses against us, precisely because of this sort of non-logic, which is so common in Hungary that even I find myself believing it. In reality, Hungary is the perfect country for the EU to make an example of, being both too small and poor to bear any real weight on the EU, and too rich to feel sorry for. And there is also the country's historical problem, namely that the Eurocrats we are up against are exactly the type of history buffs likely to know all about Hungary's grand past, and still hold it against us. Just consider this devastating portrayal of 19th-century Hungary in the late historian Edward Crankshaw's masterful The Fall of the House of Habsburg, which was helpfully supplied to me last week by a reader of long acquaintance, and was probably assigned reading in university for some of the Eurolords currently debating our fate:

[It] is hard to discover in the history of modern Europe any nation which has exhibited such sustained and unmitigated egocentricity as the Hungarian nation, any nation which at no time in a century of rapid change ever showed the faintest, the most embryonic, flicker of interest in anything at all but its own immediately selfish interests.

But tell us what you really think!

Of course, I don't believe what this crank Crankshaw had to say about Hungary. How about France, or the damn Slovaks? (In fact, doesn't the phrase "never shows the faintest, most embryonic flicker of interest in anything at all but its own immediate selfish interest" nicely describe every modern European country? I mean, even the supposedly noble Dutch nee'ed all over the EU constitution during this year's round of referenda.) And unlike some of my nationalist Hungarian friends, I don't believe that everyone in Europe has it out for us. But we're certainly not everyone's favorite, either. And this being the case, Hungary cannot afford for its leaders to suffer from the kind of Euroconfusion that appears to have gripped Gyurcsány and Kóka.

The current Socialist-Liberal government may be betting that the EU won't play rough because doing so would be a gift to the country's right-wing opposition, which is currently leading the polls in advance of next spring's general election. As you may recall, the SocLibs got in back in 2002 in part because they convinced some swing voters that the nationalists were ruining Hungary's chances for a harmonious journey into Euroland. For sure, the folks running the EU hate nationalists like the ones that ran Hungary in 1998-2002 and will probably run it again come spring. In reality, however, they don't care enough to let the current lot off the hook, especially now that opposition leader Viktor Orbán is doing his best to sound responsible and Euro-un-confused. This is just business.

Really, this shouldn't be so difficult to understand. When someone is giving you free money, you're not allowed to bitch when they politely ask you to act in a certain way in return. Instead, like old Jacques said, it's a perfect opportunity to keep quiet. And when the amount of money they are giving you has more zeros than you can count… well, then you not only can't bitch - you're their bitch. Just ask my wife. And she only gives me a few thousand forints a week.