Contemporary illiberalism has been able to adapt and turn into easy clichés the terminology of progressive politics. ‘Alternative’, ‘identity’, even ‘revolution’ have all been ‘borrowed’ by the illiberal phrasebook, though in a form hardly recognizable by their involuntary lenders on the Left. ‘Colony’ and ‘colonialism’ are in this category of perverted parlance also, including when they are used to describe the condition of Central Europe visa-vis the West.

Facing hundreds of thousands of applauding Hungarians clad in coats on a mid-March day in 2012, Viktor Orbán declared defiantly, ‘We will not be a colony!’. Orbán was then only two years into his second mandate as prime minister, after an election that he had won by promising that the country would abandon the liberal democratic course that, he believed, had led it from the slavery of Russian-dictated communism to the false freedom of free-market neoliberalism dictated from ‘Brussels’. ‘We will not live according to the commands of foreign powers’, he promised. ‘We are more than familiar with the character of unsolicited assistance, even if it comes wearing a finely tailored suit and not a uniform with shoulder patches.’

This was three years before the ‘migrant crisis’ and the highprofile resistance to refugee quotas that Orbán would organize in Central Europe. In 2012, the issue was essentially economic, although Orbán was already being accused of authoritarian practices toward the judiciary and the central bank. The EU was threatening to withhold 495 million euros of transfers, because Hungary was projected to have an annual deficit of 3.6 per cent, more than the required limit of 3 per cent set in Brussels in the spirit of neoliberal discipline. The punishment was unprecedented. Never in the history of the EU had a state been refused funds because of breaking deficit targets. Spain had just increased its deficit forecast to 5.6 per cent. But Spain was not punished, prompting even Austria to note that the EU was applying double standards.

In this chapter, we will see that with the cry, ‘we will not be a colony’, the illiberals of Central Europe recognize the real problem of the quasi-colonial takeover of Central Europe by the West, even, at times, correctly analysing its economic foundations, though giving it the wrong response.