Cooperation among the countries of the Visegrád Group is directly dependent on the current political situation in each country. In recent years, the alliance has attracted attention for its criticisms of Southern European countries and its anti-immigration rhetoric. While the more liberal of the Visegrád countries tend to blindly imitate the West, the nationalists dream of a conservative Central Europe.
The text was published in the biweekly magazine A2 in an issue titled "Central European Dreaming about Europe," created with the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Prague office.
At the point of signing the declaration establishing the Visegrád Group (also known as the Visegrád Four or V4) in 1991, swift accession to the European Union and NATO was the primary goal for the presidents of what was then Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. Ever since all the V4 member states achieved these goals between 1999 and 2004, the group has been searching for its raison d'être. However, despite frequent condemnations of it, especially on the part of liberal commentators, cooperation among these Central European countries, with their shared semi-peripheral status within the global economy, does make sense – as long as it focuses on topics of importance rather than on culture wars.
It is worth noting that Visegrád cooperation is not institutionalized in any way. In practice, it mostly consists of regular meetings between the countries’ prime ministers and lower-level government officials. The only organization functioning under the group’s name is the International Visegrád Fund. Without a Visegrád bureaucracy or institutional memory, the functioning of the alliance is derived first and foremost from the constellations of governments in Prague, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest. As we will show later, these governments’ interest in collaborating is highly volatile. By looking at the chain of crises which started shortly after the V4 countries’ accession to the EU, we can see not just which topics have resonated within the group, but also where its members were and were not able to collaborate. Unfortunately, the issue of their dependent, semi-peripheral status has been ignored all along; the V4 has not defined its opposition to the West along economic lines, but rather on the conservatism-liberalism axis.
The mythical quotas
The economic crisis at the turn of the 2000s and 2010s primarily revealed the low levels of solidarity between the central and southern wings of the European Union. Instead of attempting to understand their shared lot – having equally experienced life under authoritarian regimes throughout the second half of the 20th century, a late integration into the EU, and economic dependence on Germany – Visegrád leaders warned their voters of a “Greek scenario” and criticized Southern Europeans’ “lavishness”. The subject of merit (as in: unlike Southern Europeans, Central Europeans are hard-working, avoid taking on debt, and overall are better-functioning members of the global capitalist order) periodically resurges in debates on the allocation of EU funds, the latest example being the post-pandemic recovery plan debates in 2020.
Even more than the economic crisis, the V4 was welded together by the migration crisis of 2015-2016. At the time, the alliance stood firmly against the EU’s decision to distribute 120,000 refugees from various wars among the EU Member States, based on the by-now mythical “migration quotas”. This was the crisis that transformed this region of imitators who did nothing more than adopt Western European solutions into a region of rebels. Strong regional players, especially Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, took to depicting Central Europe as a bastion of “true” European and/or Christian values, standing up against western decadence, leftist experiments, and Muslim hordes. Orbán’s claims of a “rational” Central Europe resonated strongly in Hungary and beyond. In the Czech context, they were echoed (with varying degrees of radicalism) by Andrej Babiš, Miloš Zeman and prominent members of most political parties.
It's us, once more
The peak of Visegrád collaboration could be placed somewhere in the vicinity of the year 2018. “Yeah, it’s us, the Visegrád Four once more,” then-Prime Minister Andrej Babiš bragged on social media, posting about how he and his buddies were aligning their European Council strategies. Nonetheless, the V4 brand was seen as fairly toxic within the EU, even more so due to the European Commission’s clashes with Hungary and Poland over their infringements of the principles of the rule of law, as well as women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. The Babiš administration took neither side in these specific disputes, showing his ability to approach the V4 alliance pragmatically. Meanwhile, the more liberal segments of Czech society urged a complete disavowal of the V4 brand.
In 2022, the war in Ukraine showed that the V4 member states don’t necessarily agree even on key identity issues. Shortly after the breakout of the war, Poland and the Czech Republic (then holding the Presidency of the Council of the EU) gained international respect and a strong position thanks to their support for Ukraine, a notable feat given their economic standing and Poland’s long-term pariah status. By contrast, Viktor Orbán cemented Hungary’s role as the black sheep of the EU by threatening to veto support for Ukraine and Russian sanctions. In the Czech Republic, Orbán’s pro-Russian stance cost him the favorable standing he had built up among Czech conservatives and Eurosceptics over the previous decade.
Following last year’s elections, the new Slovak government under Robert Fico joined this maneuvering between Russia and the EU, causing a significant cooling of relations between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, among other things. However, we should not expect this Ukraine-related estrangement within the V4 to be permanent. Rather, we should ask in which ways the group can work to create a constructive, progressive identity.
The middle-income trap
The post-communist Central European elites are split in their attitudes. The “self-colonizing” liberal group sees Western European societies as more advanced than ours, meaning we should continue imitating them, while the nationalists claim an autonomous, conservative Central Europe should be constructed instead. These attitudes are then extended to the V4: The first group distances itself from the alliance, while the second wants to enhance its role as the stronghold of conservative Central European interests.
Due to the absence of left-wing politics in the Central European debate, the mainstream generally lacks a third perspective to point out Central Europe’s shared economic problems and to propose solutions. Most prominent among these issues is the region’s struggle to escape the middle-income trap. After the fall of communism in 1989, the Visegrád countries bet their money on an economic development model which relied on cheap labor and geographical accessibility as the main incentives to attract foreign investments. This model ceased to promote economic and especially salary convergence already during the 2008 economic crisis. International rankings show that until this day, our region has not learned to innovate – there is a marked absence of company headquarters, patents and added-value businesses. Hundreds of billions in profits are sailing off to the west, contributing to a prosperity the V4 cannot replicate. So far, the ongoing green transition shows no signs of improvement on this front: Within the EU, green technology patents are again concentrated in Germany, Western European businesses massively subsidize their industries, and their edge over Central Europe is growing larger, not smaller, over time. The dependent status of Central European industry, along with the lower wages that come with it, naturally provoke feelings of inferiority for which many tend to compensate by supporting far-right politics that can – at least on a rhetorical level – offer a feeling of superiority over the West.
Poland has been the most active in trying to extricate itself from the middle- income trap, but its results have been ambivalent and a clear vision for the future is lacking. Meanwhile, the nationalist Viktor Orbán, despite his rhetoric, did not refrain slashing Hungarian workers’ rights in favor of corporations (the 2018 “slave law” being the most infamous example). The Czech government, its constant talk of “brains over bolts” notwithstanding, has also done little to extricate the country’s economy from its dependent status or to alleviate its citizens’ economic distress. On the contrary: Government spending on science, research, education and public services has been cut time and again.
Despite all this, the issue of dependent development, or the fact that the V4 is missing the boat again with the green transition, have not yet started to inform the V4’s agenda. Nor has the group tried to initiate collaboration with Southern Europe or the global South, which has plenty of experience with dependent development. Instead of clearly communicating issues and reservations while negotiating with their western counterparts, Visegrád politicians focus on culture wars around migration or LGBTQ+ rights. The V4 revolt is thus entirely misdirected, leaving the potential for Central European cooperation unfulfilled.
