Hungary’s Foreign Policy and the Realist turn of the European Union

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to highlight the „realist turn” in the strategic thinking of the European Union in recent years with the help of theories of international relations. First, the insights of realism and liberalism will be applied to the Union. After that, the study shows the position of the post-2010 Hungarian governments vis-á-vis the EU’s turn, primarily relying on strategic documents, as well as parliamentary speeches. In comparing EU and Hungarian strategic thinking, the article tries to prove that there is a large overlap between the thinking of the two parties, and in terms of time, the pattern emerges that by 2023, the Union has moved in many areas in a direction that the Hungarian governments had been demanding for a long time. Yet: as we allude to in the conclusion, the Hungarian government does not appreciate this realist turn of the Union, primarily because concrete steps are not yet sufficient for Budapest (migration), or because in the meantime it was Hungary that already waved goodbye to realist thinking on important issues (China).