The First Post-Liberal Foreign Policy?
Weekly briefings on the life of The New European Capital of Conservatism.
Budapest This Week
Monday 24 November, from 9am, MCC’s Center for International Economy will host a one-day conference on Europe’s Relationship with the Turkic States (TLDR: it has improved since 1526). Sign up here.
Then, Tuesday, at 7pm, Britain’s leading free speech activist, Toby Young, will be in town to explain when a tweet can land you in jail. Expect some tweetable quotes: unless you live in the UK, of course. Sign up here.
Republika Srpska is that appendix to Bosnia & Hercegovina that the world has forgotten to remember since the 90s: a half-state of ethnic Serbs, frozen in the amber of the Dayton Accords. Recently, it bobbed back into popular awareness after the EU took unkindly to its President, Milorad Dodik. Well, Dodik hasn't forgotten about the world, and on Wednesday, at 3:45PM, he presents his findings in: The World According to Milorad Dodik. You'll need a confirmed registration email to attend.
Is Ireland legitimate? Michael Walsh, who appears to be legitimately Irish-American and furthermore is an Irish-American who voluntarily re-migrated himself to Ireland, will present a ‘modest proposal’ to solve the immodest crisis facing the emerald republic. Tonight at 5:30PM, up the hill at the Danube Institute.
What’s Based
Nigerian Christians Under Siege At the start of November, Donald Trump posted about the plight of Nigerian Christians in the face of Islamist threats: ‘If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians," he warned. "The USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country’. But for its part, the Nigerian government disagreed, stating that: "It is a gross misrepresentation of reality" to claim that Christians are being persecuted in Nigeria. Lucky for epistemologists, The Danube Institute has been actively researching the question. Here are the numbers you need to know. 3,100 - According to Open Doors, ‘more believers are killed for their faith in Nigeria each year, than everywhere else in the world combined’. 7th - The country ranks seventh in the world in terms of the level of overall violence against Christians. 290+ - From 23-24 Dec, 2023, 25 Christian communities were attacked across three Local Government Areas. More than 290 were killed; 13,000 were displaced; 8 churches were burnt. 100+ - From 24-29 May, 2025, there were co-ordinated terror attacks in three Nigerian states - Benue, Taraba, and Plateau. Over 100 were killed, and 5,000 displaced. 315 - Since we started preparing this Substack post, 303 pupils and 12 members of staff were kidnapped by armed men from a Catholic school in Niger state, on Friday, 21 November. This surpasses the previous worst case of mass kidnapping, when 276 girls were kidnapped in Chibok in 2014.
Other News
Paper of the Week
Post-Liberal Aid in Practice: Hungary Helps and Christians in Nigeria
In June and July 2025, a Danube Institute research team, made up of Visiting Fellow Dr Nicholas Naquin, Senior Research Fellow Dániel Farkas, and Director of Research Calum Nicholson, travelled to Nigeria to conduct fieldwork across the north and the middle belt on the work of the Hungary Helps Agency, who have been supporting Christian communities from the Middle Belt to Maiduguri, and from Onitsha to Sokoto. They were curious as to whether Hungary's development model constituted the first instance of 'post-liberal aid'.
"Almost all Nigerian practitioners in the humanitarian and development aid sectors agreed that the USAID shutdown was a needed ‘wake-up call’, no matter how abrupt and disruptive. Even those directly and negatively affected by the shutdown shared this general appraisal. There appears to be a widespread understanding that USAID and other similar agencies have helped to create ‘dependency’ and graft that actually worked to prevent the various levels of the Nigerian government."
Eyes & Ears
Comings & Goings
Coming: Marwan Abdallah has joined the DI as a Visiting Fellow. He's Vice-President of the International Democracy Union, and member of Lebanon’s Kataeb Party, where he heads the Foreign Affairs Department, He’ll also be at the IDU conference in DC next week. Going: Fans of organised and affable blokes were in for a shock last week, when David Frost, Lord Frost of Allenton, resigned from the DI to take up a position as the Director-General of Britain's leading neoliberal think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs. Frostie has been with us for just over a year, and has been an absolute trooper in his work, making several intellectually meaty speeches, not least his reappraisal of Brexit in April of this year. We will miss his gentle manner and mischievous wit.
City Life
This weekend, 28-30 Nov, it is Art Weekend in Budapest (AWB). A record 42 art venues await your critical eye. The central exhibition will open on day ‘zero’, 27 Nov at 7pm, at Brody House: ‘Zones of Opacity’ will run until 9 January.
Dates For Your Diary
Battle for the Soul of Europe, Brussels — 3 - 4 DecemberWiener Akademikerball, Vienna — 20 February“Több is veszett Mohácsnál” — “More was lost at the battle of Mohács” (i.e. it could be worse)