Are Hungarians impossibly neurotic?

Napi.hu writes that, out of all the European Union member states, Hungary shows far the biggest controversy in the judgement, acceptance of the EU and the huge EU supports coming in. The Irish are at the opposite side of the scale.

Hungary profits a lot from being an EU member, but Hungarians don’t really value this membership – this is the main conclusion of the survey made by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Hungarians profit more from the membership than any other country, however, they don’t regard it highly.

“The facts, which prove that Hungary gets a lot of support from the EU, are not reflected in the public opinion” summed up Josef Janning, president of ECFR. They used public data from Eurostat and the surveys of Eurobarometer for the estimations.

The aim of the survey was to find out how much EU’s judgement changed in member states between 2007 (the last “peaceful year” before the financial crash and the world crisis) and 2014. On this note, the title of the report is ‘Cohesion Monitor’. “We defined cohesion in two ways” said Christoph Klavehn, the project manager of ECFR.

On one hand, as a type of personal experience, which reflects how much people feel EU’s presence in their everyday lives and what their opinion is about the polity. On the other hand, they analysed EU’s effects that are not present in the everyday life. This concerned aspects like the flow of capital and security policy.

Then they defined the 10 criteria of cohesion. Four of these tried to measure people’s everyday experiences, and six measured bigger structural aspects, like economic relations between countries or participation at collective field-exercise. The results are clear: Hungary stands out.

While we reached quite a high rate in structural cohesion, meaning that the country profits well from EU supports, we stand alone in the negative zone concerning personal cohesion. The country is not alone in the anterior aspect; Hungary is at the same level as Slovakia and Balti countries; however the population of these countries have good opinion of EU.

Professionals translated the personal cohesion rate as Hungarians don’t think of EU as an important part of their everyday lives.

“What Hungary’s case demonstrates is how one country works off the others, which might signal complete disappointment in politics” explained Janning. “I feel like the country couldn’t recover from the Trianon trauma from a century ago, which relentlessly reduced the size of the country.”

The survey shows that the main stream of politic thinking concerns the relation with EU in Hungary. Political frustration is very strong, which leads to the support of parties critically against Europe.

Ireland stands at the complete opposite side of the scale. The majority of Irish think of themselves as Europeans despite the fact that the EU didn’t always deal with them gently. “The country has been through a very serious crisis and they still didn’t lose their European identity” said Janning. This is probably connected to the fact that EU membership has always been important for them, since, this is how they were able to get rid of the former colonial ruler, Great Britain.

Copy editor: bm

Source: http://www.napi.hu/