The EU doesn’t understand Hungary and Poland

Rather like Germany with its ill-starred ‘Drive to the East’ in the 19th and 20th centuries, one suspects the EU is quietly regretting its keenness to absorb most of the states of eastern Europe in the early 2000s. If not, events in Poland and Hungary this week may well persuade them.

For a long time, national governments in the older EU states have more or less willingly subscribed to two articles of faith: the complete supremacy of EU law over their national law, including their constitutions, and the unchallengeable power of the EU Court of Justice — not only to expound EU law but also to extend and develop it, and to determine conclusively how far the competences of the EU run.

There are reasons for this surprising submissiveness. The EU’s founding members had recently fought each other; their elites at the time mistrusted popular sovereignty as a potential cause of a return to the horrors of conflict.