UNDERSTANDING STRATEGIC SOVEREIGNTY highly competitive and globally integrated, as opposed to underdeveloped, dependent on others and parochial, shapes Eastern Europe's perceptions of the strategic environment just as much as do weaker government performance and corruption, the role of religion, differences in mentality, with some of these being vestiges of the communist era. 2.3 THE CONUNDRUM INVOLVING VALUES The third and last objective is promoting European values. According to the President of the European Council, the financial resources and competences of the EU are solid instruments that can be used in this regard. In the same way as the second objective,»European values«, although conceived to be at the core of the European Union, can be manifested in differing depths, especially when it comes to Western versus Eastern Europe. In fact, few words are to be heard more frequently than »sovereignty« in discussions of values – in the West as well – and this has weighed heavily on relations with some Member States for almost a decade. What is particularly striking is that oftentimes positions and reactions stemming from Eastern Europe have been at odds with exactly what could be described as the»fuzzy membrane« of the EU, the one built around a universalist understanding of human rights and liberal democracy, which would permit it to interact with the outside world and would indeed be more consistent with the ambitions of being more in touch with the rest of the world. The vision of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban and some of his Visegrad Group(V4) colleagues of constructing a»fortress Europe« and erecting fences to protect it from the outside world is not without irony. To be fair, there are populist and extremist political forces in Western Europe as well entertaining similar views. How serious the issue of values is and how easily it could turn into a make-or-break situation is reflected by the concerns relating to rule-of-law in Hungary and Poland ⁷ as well as in some other countries, which reached a peak with these two countries' obstruction of approval of the next Multiannual Financial Framework(MFF)(the EU's seven-year budget) and the Recovery Fund, which was established to confront the recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic because the package included a new rule-of-law-mechanism ⁸. Irrespective of persisting internal tensions when it comes to the interpretation of how all the States benefit from stability, European standards and values, the fundamental question surrounding the topic addressed by the President of the European Council is how the EU, in the words of Charles Michel, can apply this»quiet strength« to rise to the challenges ahead and»have a positive impact on the world«? 5