The Fifth Corrosion of International Law

Last Thursday, in Brussels, Viktor Orbán blocked, once again, the 90 billion euros approved in December by the European Council for Ukraine. The argument is familiar: Ukraine does not repair the Druzhba oil pipeline as quickly as Budapest requires, damaged by a Russian attack in January, and without oil Hungary does not support anything. “We are waiting for the oil. The rest is fairy tales.”

António Costa responded in terms that are rarely heard in European diplomacy: Hungarian behavior constitutes a violation of the principle of loyal cooperation between Member States enshrined in the Treaties. Budapest had approved the loan in December. He vetoed it on Thursday. The logic is simple: Russia damages the infrastructure, Ukraine is to blame for the delay in repairs, and Hungary turns the damage into an instrument of institutional blockade. It’s not energy policy. It is the doctrine of fatigue applied from within the European Union.

In less than three weeks, on April 12, Hungarians will vote. Orbán, who has governed with an absolute majority for 15 years after redesigning courts, media and electoral laws in his favor, now appears in second place in the polls, behind Péter Magyar and the Tisza party.

Last week’s veto cannot be separated from the campaign: the external enemy that threatens the heating of Hungarian homes is exactly the argument that mobilizes the Fidesz base. Moscow realized this before any Western analyst. The alignment of narratives between Budapest and the Kremlin does not require explicit coordination to be functionally perfect: Russia attacks infrastructure, Hungary blames Ukraine, the EU paralyzes, and Russia advances on the ground. The result is functionally identical to that of a coordinated operation, without it being necessary to demonstrate that it is so.

This is where what I call the fifth corrosion of International Law comes in. The first four erosion mechanisms are known and operate mainly from the outside. The territorial fait accompli – that the recurrent American claim to treat Greenland as a tradable asset is the paradigmatic case – establishes that formal sovereignty is a negotiable variable and not an absolute constraint, progressively emptying fundamental principles on territorial integrity and delimitation of spaces, such as those enshrined in United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The privatization of multilateralism replaces binding forums with networks of personal loyalty with diplomatic status, reproducing the form of institutions without their normative content.

The privatization of the strategic decision transfers effective power to actors without a democratic mandate: when Elon Musk unilaterally restricts access to Starlink in a theater of war, the international standard has no language for the actor who holds power without holding the title. And endogenous subversion installs operators within the democracies themselves who treat the norm as an internal obstacle and not as an external shield, of which Orbán or the positions of the AfD party are today the perfect example within the European Union.

The fifth corrosion is different because it is indirect and operates from within the only institution that could still function as a global normative guarantor.

The European Union does not defend International Law out of idealism. He argues out of existential necessity: it is Europe that loses the most in a world governed exclusively by force, because it is Europe that has relied most on the norm as a substitute for power. To fulfill this role you need cohesion. A single Member State with blocking power, aligned with Moscow’s transactional grammar and the selective veto logic that has contaminated the system, paralyzes the mechanism from within without formally destroying it. A blocked European Council is worth as much as a Security Council with a permanent veto: it exists, but it does not decide.

The same pattern is repeated in Fico’s Slovakia, and the growth of the AfD in Germany points to its possible expansion. The logic is always the same: there is no need to abandon European institutions. Just occupy them to neutralize them.

This is why the Hungarian elections on April 12th are not an internal Hungarian matter. They are a defining moment on whether the fifth corrosion consolidates or retreats. A country with an electorate the size of Portugal has become as effective a vector of normative erosion as an external actor with military capacity. It does not destroy International Law. It paralyzes those who could still defend it.

The end of International Law is not an event. It’s a process. And last week, it got a little closer, in Brussels.

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