Former Hungarian diplomat: Corruption is next decades’ biggest security challenge

Political corruption will be one of the next decade’s biggest security challenges for intergovernmental organisations like NATO, and will further jeopardise the work of international organisations going forward, Zsolt Rábai, the former Foreign Policy Adviser to the Hungarian president, writes.

Zsolt Rábai is an independent security policy expert, diplomat and former Foreign Policy Adviser to the president of the Republic of Hungary, Árpád Göncz. For almost 20 years, he served at the NATO Public Diplomacy Division and became the secretary general of the Atlantic Treaty Association.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has woken up the paralysed and often naive Western European political leaders who – for too long – wanted to believe that Putin’s Russia would stop its series of aggressions against neighbouring states and could be engaged with. Even after the illegal annexation of Crimea, the EU and NATO were desperate to avoid the use of the expression “cold war”, believing that Putin would not cross a certain red line and would not try to destabilise Europe.

Western political leaders were often ill-prepared to negotiate with Putin, who was always very open about his hostile intentions and very aggressive in his negotiation techniques. As a former KGB agent, he is professional in destabilising his negotiating partners by abusing information on their weaknesses and fears.

They keep forgetting regional specificities, and political psychology arising from local culture and history. In Eastern – and in many respects in Central Europe as well – one can still find the remainders of the past, regional features of social structures, weak civil society, remains of an order-based society or the feudal dependencies which lead to what we can clearly qualify as ‘corruption’.

As soon as the client network becomes the ruling system in politics and the economy, every decision serves the interest of the ruler and the clients. This might easily lead to ‘irrational’ steps or even to armed conflicts.

Political corruption remains one of the biggest security challenges for the next decade. For an intergovernmental organisation like NATO, that is very difficult to handle. However, political corruption can jeopardise the efficient work of international organisations (see the recent corruption cases in the European Parliament).

Western policy has become overly defensive and mainly reactive in the past decades. Many translate it as the decline of Western values and civilisation.

Being proactive was never a strength of international organisations, but if we want to have long-lasting peace and stability in Europe, there is no other choice. Yet, trying to understand Russia or China cannot lead to the relativisation of our values.

Now, the task is not only to react to Russian aggression and respond to the new security challenges but to have a clear vision and shape the European and Euro-Atlantic security environment.

We have to take into consideration that the World is in constant movement. If we want to find long-lasting solutions, we have to think in dynamic models. One of the biggest challenges of the present international conflict management is that the aim is always to maintain the status quo, even though it leads to increasing tensions and eventually to explosions (see the Balkans).

The current crisis in Ukraine has forged a strong unity inside NATO. However, it has also provoked a clearer dividing line between the majority of NATO nations and some of NATO’s “illiberal” members.

How to explain that the enlargement of NATO with Sweden is practically blocked because the country consequently represents the founding principles of NATO? It looks like Huntington was not fully wrong in saying that international organisations can function when consisting of countries of the same culture.

In Hungary, there is considerable public support for both the EU and NATO. The membership is also important for the Hungarian government because, without it, the country would lose importance even in the eyes of Russia and China.

The Hungarian government foresees national and religious radicalisation of Europe. As political analysts close to it do not exclude wars in Europe in the foreseeable future, the government wants to be militarily prepared for such an eventuality, which coincides with NATO’s defence development requirements.

Moreover, it foresees a growing economic and political influence of Russia and China parallel to the decline of the power of the US and Western Europe. Thus, in its foreign policy, Hungary continues to follow a poor political heritage, which Endre Ady, a famous 20th Century Hungarian poet, described “ferry nation, ferry nation, ferry nation, which even in its most formidable dreams only runs between two shores, from East to West, but preferably backshore.”

(Zsolt Rábai)