In the weeks before the European Union accepted Ukraine into membership talks, AIIA National Executive Director Dr Bryce Wakefield travelled to Hungary and asked about Budapest’s beef with Kyiv.

“I’m pleased that nationalism is no longer an expletive.” Not words you would normally expect to hear at a meeting on international affairs. I’m in Budapest attending a conference on 75 years of India-Hungary relations. Balász Orbán, political advisor to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (no relation), is heaping praise on the preceding keynote, a video recording by Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

The underlying theme of the conference is disdain for “liberal internationalism.” Speakers focus on India and Hungary’s shared “civilisational characteristics,” as opposed to the “bloc mentality of the West” which they say renders the nation subjugate to faceless regional powers. Indian speakers laud Hungary for not having been one of the expansionist internationalist powers that invaded Asia.

Brexit and even Beijing’s goals of dual circulation are referenced as positive examples of single nations building walls to prioritise their own citizens. “The world is becoming more democratic and inimical to concentrations of power,” Jaishankar intones. According to Balász Orbán: “anyone who wishes to subjugate the free people of the world, we will not kneel to them.”

The problem, however, is with how Hungary defines its own “free people.” Hungarian foreign affairs officials and analysts I talk to in the days after the conference tell me that Hungary’s opposition to military aid and EU accession for Ukraine is not a sign of Viktor Orbán’s fealty to Russia, as widely reported in the West. It is, they say, an articulation of concern for ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine.

Indeed, Hungary rails against what it claims are the repressed cultural and language rights of the 80,000-odd ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine. They note a 2017 law enacted by Kyiv to promote Ukrainian patriotism in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. The law mandates Ukrainian as the language of instruction for pupils from grade five, roughly age ten and over.

Orbán’s administration uses every opportunity to frame this as the erasure of Hungarian culture, in opposition to the stated values of diversity which emanate from Brussels. The Hungarian officials and analysts with whom I speak are remarkably consistent that this is the single biggest sticking point in bilateral relations, with one official even noting his view that Hungary would support EU accession for Ukraine if this “roadblock” were removed.

I get the sense that their feelings are deeply held and genuine. However, they seem to ignore the fact that Ukraine has updated the 2017 law three times in order to bring it closer to EU prescriptions, or that many ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine support Ukraine’s EU accession.

Meanwhile, officials cite fears that Russia would target the ethnic Hungarian community in Ukraine if Budapest voted to allow military aid or even supply Kyiv with military materiel. They also note how “unfair” it is that those ethnic Hungarians can be drafted into the Ukrainian military when all they want “is to live their lives peacefully in their communities.” Never mind that they are talking about Ukrainian citizens.

Officials stress that Hungary is a country with a population of ten million, with a further five million citizens living abroad. It is perhaps understandable that Budapest prioritises Hungarians outside the country in its foreign policy.

But in Orbán’s eyes, the obligation to ethnic Hungarians supersedes mere citizenship. The prime minister frequently refers to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon in his speeches, where the Kingdom of Hungary was forced to cede around three quarters of its land and two thirds of its population after the First World War.

Since then, Hungary has had it tough. Allying with Germany to conduct a vicious and irredentist campaign meant that it was again forced by the victors of the Second World War to accept the borders drawn for it at Trianon. After the war, it staged an unsuccessful revolt against an occupying empire preaching international socialism, and then, when the Iron Curtain was drawn aside, a period of globalisation saw its neighbours to the West thrive while its own economy tanked.

Since 2010, the twin failures of socialist and liberal internationalism have proved fertile ground for Orbán’s reactionary policies of ethnic nationalism, with throwbacks to an older, greater Hungary.  As one official tells me: “you cannot understand Hungarian foreign policy until you understand Trianon.” Hungary has spun a narrative of countrymen “trapped” within the borders of other countries into a principle for national action.

To be fair, Hungarian officials give further reasons for opposing Ukraine’s EU accession, pointing out the “hypocrisy” of EU member states lowering the bar for Ukraine, while making Balkan states jump through ever tighter hoops to pursue the same elusive privilege.

One official also very reluctantly notes that “the real reason we don’t supply military aid ourselves is that we don’t have much of a military. Why would Ukraine want our antiquated Russian hardware?”

That weekend, at a regional security forum at Château Béla in Slovakia, a well-placed Hungarian explodes into laughter when I relay what I had heard. The part about the lack of a military “is probably true,” she says. “The rest is bullshit.” When I mention the consistency with which officials invoked ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine, one of Orbán’s former parliamentary opponents responds that “the prime minister does have a way of keeping his officials on message.”

Globsec, the innovative and extremely effective Slovakian organisation that hosts the Château Béla Forum, does promote the internationalist values against which Orbán rails. But the thirty or so mostly Central and Eastern European attendees gathered at the exclusive retreat are often opponents in the political world. Disagreement is common, and the debate here is honest and raw.

Nevertheless, those I ask are unified in their disdain for Orbán’s politics. One Slovakian, describing herself as the most conservative politician in Europe, tells me that Orbán’s agenda gratuitously twists history to manipulate Hungarian voters. Wasn’t Slovakian conservatism the same, I ask, referencing Robert Fico, who was elected the prime minister of her country in October. Fico’s victory was welcomed by Orbán as it set newspaper columns ablaze with claims of nationalism spreading across the continent.

“Fico’s just an opportunist and a thug,” she replies, “He has no consistent platform.” A left-wing Slovakian politician agrees that Fico’s current politics are based on short-term local grievances. One Slovakian analyst laments the fact that national politicians have marked out traffic congestion caused by the construction of a bike lane through Bratislava as a front line in their ridiculous and petty culture wars.

Indeed, Hungarians would not be pleased if Fico were really to get serious about ethnic Slovakian nationalism. Despite pretty words about the lack of Hungarian imperialism in Asia and despair over the tragedy of Trianon in Budapest, the 1920 treaty marked the end to a millennium-long Hungarian occupation of Slovakia, even if it meant that the latter was formally subsumed into Czechoslovakia. “Memory” of Hungarian occupation has led Slovakian nationalists, including Fico’s previous administration, to enact policies against the use of foreign languages, notably Hungarian, similar to what Orbán now claims is taking place in Ukraine.

This then, perhaps, shows the limits of nationalist unity in Europe and beyond. Ethnic nationalists have difficulty with the concept that their modern states are not the same structures as previous medieval empires, kingdoms, and fiefdoms, whose overlapping historical legacies and intermingled descendants can never be expected to be defined by the bright red lines of modern borders. They talk big about borders and sovereignty when it comes to immigration and their own sense of autonomy. When it comes to matters of “their” respective ethnicities abroad, they hardly notice each other’s established borders at all.

Dr Bryce Wakefield is the national executive director of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He was in Budapest as a guest of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and in Slovakia as a guest of GlobSec.