“Backing an authoritarian loser, such as Vladimir Putin, will have consequences. It already has on the Polish–Hungarian friendship”, former Polish minister of foreign affairs and national defense Radoslaw Sikorski tells Válasz Online. The politician of Poland’s Civic Platform suggests there is no justification for Hungary to delay to do what is necessary for the unity of the Western alliance when there is a war in the neighborhood. Válasz Online met Mr. Sikorski in Strasbourg on 14 December – hours after the European Parliament had decorated the brave people of Ukraine with the Sakharov Prize – to discuss the Polish opposition’s (and Donald Tusk’s) chances of scoring an election victory next autumn, the death of Visegrád Group as well as his world famous tweet about the explosion of Nord Stream.

Last week the deal between Hungary and the EU was finally done. Are you happy that your former schoolmate scored another victory?

We never actually met at Oxford. Viktor Orbán attended Pembroke College for one academic year, 3 years after I left. We only met in politics years later. Something similar is happening in Poland as it happened in Hungary over the past weeks. The government has proposed a law that would fulfill the rule of law requirements of European treaties. I hope it happens but I will still feel humiliated as a Central European that we are having to do this under external pressure. These people talk about sovereignty and they end up adopting laws dictated by external institutions.

Shouldn’t they adopt them?

This is what fanaticism leads to. They have the wrong conception of sovereignty but they undermine their own conception because they are having to do what governments, that behave themselves according to agreed treaties and procedures, don’t do.

Are you suggesting that if they were really attached to their own ideas, they shouldn’t have agreed with the EU?

Their ideas of sovereignty are completely wrongheaded. They understand that sovereignty is like a piece of sausage that you have and you can hand over and then you have lost it. That is not how sovereignty works.

Sovereignty is your right to voluntarily enter into agreements with other entities – nation states, international organizations – and it is not its restriction that you then have to abide by the rules you have voluntarily agreed. It is like entering a marriage.