All I see in the news is Hungary being a thorn in the side of the EU. Why can’t they just kick Hungary out of the EU?
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There’s no mechanism to do so… but I have always thought, can’t they just copy and paste everything and label everything v2 and then just not include Hungry? 🙃
There is no mechanism for that in the EU’s charter or bylaws. The presumption when the legal framework of the EU was put together was that a strongman country in a position like Hungary would naturally want to fracture with the union, which was the original purpose of article 5. They did not anticipate that such a country would deliberately stay within the union to cause problems at the behest of an external superpower.
Edit to add: And, to be clear, changing the charter to include such a mechanism would be a very hairy thing to get passed in any form that could actually be used against Hungary. One of the core tensions of the EU is that basically everyone in it wants to also be seen as an independent sovereign state, so any forceful removal mechanism would have to either have incredibly high bars to clear (direct territorial aggression against another neighbor, for example) or be so vaguely-worded it would be unenforceable and probably un-passable as other fringe nations object to a threat to their EU status.
EU members (or the EU itself) can not decide to kick out members. This is just not possible according to EU law.
The maximum is to suspend a member and temporarily suspend certain rights. But even that is a quite complicated process, and this never happened yet.
Let’s say you and your friends build a tree house. You all contribute to building and maintaining it, so you all write a piece of paper that says:
* Every friend in the group can enter the tree house
* Every friend can leave the group if they want to
* Every friend has equal right to make decisions about the tree house, the group, and this rules document
Now, you find that after your friend Hannah started dating this drug dealer Victor, Hannah has been nothing but trouble, and she leaves needles and broken bottles in the treehouse.
Can you kick out Hannah without breaking your own rules? Your rules say nothing about kicking anyone out, and your rules say that Hannah has a right to the tree house.
You could try to make changes to the rules, but your rules also say that Hannah also has a right to decisions about the rules, so adding a rule to be able to vote out members would likely be blocked by Hannah.
You can try to kick her out anyways, but what does that communicate to the rest of the group? It tells them that they cannot rely on the rules being followed and they might fear that they are next to be kicked out. Then they might decide to leave the tree house and not put any more money or effort into it.
So you hope that maybe she’ll leave Victor some day, or maybe Victor dies soon, and Hannah will be her old self again. In the meantime you try to clean up after her as good as possible.
Countries can leave by referendum like Brexit but there is nothing in EU law or treaties that allows for forcing a country out of the EU. All EU countries would have to approve a new treaty, including the one(s) up for being kicked out.
Practically when they created the EU everyone thought that once some country gets in they enjoy the benefits and do not want to screw over with everyone. Therefore, no real sanctioning was developed in the legal framework (and now they can’t do that because that would need an all countries agreement which Hungary definitely would not give)
EU is based on a treaty. This treaty doesn’t provide any legal way to expel a country from the EU. There is (article 7) a way to suspend some rights of an EU member and (article 50) for a member to leave by its own will (used by UK).
The procedures of suspension are slow and require unanimity. There is also the strategy of “peacock dance” employed by politicians like Orban and Kaczyński where they will offer some compromise when the situation gets too hot. Still, however, some sanctions were imposed against both Poland (suspending the payment of post-covid recovery plan) and against Hungary.
Because every member is supposed to be an equal partner and you can’t gang up on other countries just cause you don’t agree.
Because they can’t, you can’t remove countries from the EU.
The only way to leave the EU is to get a referendum and vote for it. That is why Brexit was possible.
Basically, this is due to the EU not being a nation and Hungary being one. Hungary as a nation has rights, the EU does not. A nation always has one very important right: the right to govern themselves, SOVEREIGNTY.
For the EU to work while maintaining the sovereignty of their members (their capacity to govern themselves FREELY as a nation), it’s important that decisions are made democratically and applied only consensually (ie, the Euro was approved but not everyone joined the Euro). No one is forced to do nothing, which means that Hungary can avoid adopting changes that the EU mandates, which means we can’t adopt measures that require specifically Hungary to be there (mainly war measures).
For this democracy to sustain itself, it’s important that stronger members can’t abuse weaker members, which is why kicking out someone is not even contemplated – because at some point, it could be used as coercion by the stronger members.
If coercion could be used, then the EU would be violating the sovereignty because the decisions are no longer made without interference, they’re being “manipulated” and they’re losing their “freedom” as a nation.
This has the side effect of creating an inverse scenario – because we’re not able to kick them out, they’re able to be a pain in the ass. But given that the EU is not a nation, no sovereignty is being violated.
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