Playing with fire

Published on 28 August 2009 at 14:55

Over the last few months, public debate in Europe has been marked by the increasing prevalence of xenophobic speeches, as well as excessive attitudes and gestures, which everyone hoped had been consigned to the history books at the end of the 20th century.

In particular, political leaders in Hungary and Slovakia are resorting to crude nationalist rhetoric to increase their popularity in the polls. In Hungary, there are provocative allusions to a Magyar homeland in the "Carpathian Basin," while on the other side of the Danube, Slovakians have passed a law "to defend the Slovak language." At the same time, the rise of Hungary's extreme-right party Jobbik has prompted more support for the Slovak National Party (SNS). The latest ugly episode in this saga occurred on August 21, when Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom was refused permission to enter Slovak territory by the Prime Minister in Bratislava, Robert Fico, whose government relies on support from the SNS. "When tempers are heated, even a minor event can lead to a political war, and politicians are only too willing to play with fire," warns Gábor Stier in Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet.

The hope was that accession to the EU would help do away with fanatical nationalism, which was curbed by the redrawing of borders in 1918, and then stifled by "friendship between peoples" in the Soviet era. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was thought to have disappeared, but now it has returned with a vengeance. The European Union "should not be content to sit back and watch a serious turn of events in the dispute between two of its member states," it must intervene now. The announcement quoted by Gábor Stier from an EU spokesman "that no measures have been established to deal with this type of conflict" is simply not good enough. gp.a.

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