Hungary’s prime minister debunks the myth that history is one long march toward Western-style government.

“Liberal Democracy” is not the way forward, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said, July 26, promising to turn his nation into an “illiberal state.”

Speaking at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders, Orban declared that “liberal democratic states cannot remain globally competitive.”

“Today, the world tries to understand systems which are not Western, not liberal, maybe not even democracies, yet they are successful,” he said, pointing to the success of Russia, China, India, Singapore and Turkey.

I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

His conclusion: “I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations .”

“The new state that we are building in Hungary today is not a liberal state,” he said. “It doesn’t deny liberalism’s basic values such as freedom but doesn’t make it its core element. It uses a particular, national approach.”

The status of freedom and democracy in Hungary has been a concern for the EU for some time. Some of its criticism must be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, running your democracy in a different way than the EU and the more left-wing elements of the press would like it run does not make you a Nazi. In the meat of his speech, Orban pointed to the major flaws in the welfare state and the explosion of debt in Western nations—criticism we have madeat the Trumpetmany times.

Before Orban came to power, the Communists had corrupted much of the state and judiciary. In standing up to courts and changing much of the system, Orban may have been fighting communism more than democracy.

Hungary: “The Illiberal State”

Nonetheless, there are still some clear red flags—not the least of which is the rise in open anti-Semitism in Hungary, and Orban’s closeness to some of those leading that rise. But for the biggest part of this story—whether Orban is anti-communism or anti-democracy, or both—it doesn’t matter.

As the Soviet Union was crumbling in 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed “the end of history”—the title of an article that he later expanded into a book. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” he wrote (emphasis added).

This assumption—that mankind is naturally evolving toward liberal democracy—is held, consciously or unconsciously, throughout the Western world. When the Arab Spring began toppling dictators across the Middle East, the development was embraced by Britain and America. Why? In part it was because their leaders assumed that liberal democracy is the natural and default destination of history. Under this assumption, a change of government will more likely than not lead to a liberal democracy.

Orban is the first EU leader to publicly state that his nation needs to experiment with something other than liberal democracy. The speech is the latest in a series of events that debunks this illusion.

Orban is the first EU leader to publicly state that his nation needs to experiment with something other than liberal democracy.

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After World Warliberal democracy seemed to be universal government, the end point of history. Germany’s emperor had been deposed and the nation had been turned into a republic. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had been broken up and replaced by a series of nations, mostly republics. Even the Ottoman Empire was eventually replaced by the Republic of Turkey.

But it just took one major financial crisis to reverse all that. By 1933, Czechoslovakia was the only liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Dictatorship, whether of the Communist or Fascist variety, seemed to be the future.

We are at the start of a similar reversal today. As Orban pointed out in his speech, a big part of this stems from the 2008 financial crisis. Radical change is much more appealing to poor and starving masses than it is to prosperous and content ones.

But America has also been telling the world repeatedly that dictatorship works, and can even be better than democracy. This is the message it sends when it keeps backing down to authoritarian regimes like Russia and China: democracy weak, dictatorship strong.

But America has also been telling the world repeatedly that dictatorship works, and can even be better than democracy.

Orban has called for an “illiberal democracy,” not an outright dictatorship. Yet the examples he gives indicates he wants to set up something like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where an autocrat governs with the apparently genuine support of his people, yet he also controls the judiciary and media, and no one can hold him to account. (It’s easy to be popular if you can make all the newspapers tell everyone how great you are.) Russia’s government could possibly be called a democracy, but it is the rule of Putin, not the rule of law.

As the global economy continues to struggle and the weakness of the world’s foremost democracy continues to be exposed, expect to hear more comments like Orban’s. As times get harder, more nations will repeat the history of the 1930s and experiment with authoritarian methods of government. Taking the long view of history, the rule of liberal democracies are the exception, not the norm.