In 1991, as they transitioned from communism, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland formalized their cooperation as the Visegrad Group. Since the four central European countries (as they became after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993) joined the European Union as part of the \u201cbig bang\u201d enlargement in 2004, they countries have sought to use the group to amplify their influence within it. But the V4 have generally struggled to cohere as a group and failed to have a significant impact on the EU\u2014until the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, when they joined forces to oppose a German plan to \u201crelocate\u201d refugees between member states on the basis of mandatory quotas. So, is the V4 most cohesive and effective as a veto player in opposition to Germany?<\/p>\n
The idea that the vocation of the V4 could be as an anti-German coalition seems particularly surprising because of the way the four countries are dependent on Germany in economic terms. Germany is the most important trading partner for each of the V4. In the last decade in particular, central Europe has become \u201can assembly plant for German companies,\u201d as Konrad Pop\u0142awski puts it. Some analysts have seen a \u201cgreater German economy\u201d emerging through the increased economic interdependence between Germany and central Europe. Others have even written of the re-emergence of a \u201cGerman-dominated Mitteleuropa\u201d in which \u201centire industries\u201d in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia are \u201coffshoots of German companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The German automobile industry plays a particularly important role in the economies of the V4. From the 2000s onwards, German car companies increasingly outsourced production to countries like Hungary and Slovakia in order to lower production costs\u2014a major and often underrated factor in the increased \u201ccompetitiveness\u201d of the German economy in the second half of the decade.6 The presence of the German automobile industry in Hungary and Slovakia is particularly strong. Audi, a subsidiary of Volkswagen, is the biggest investor in Hungary. Volkswagen is also one of the biggest employers in Slovakia, which produces more cars per capita than any other country in the world.<\/p>\n
However, the V4\u2019s response to each of the three major crises the EU has faced in the last seven years\u2014the euro crisis, the Ukraine crisis, and the refugee crisis\u2014illustrates that how states act is not always determined by economic interests, at least not in the way economic interests are defined by liberal economists. In the euro crisis, the relationship of the V4 to Germany did seem to be largely a function of its integration into, and dependence on, the German economy. In the Ukraine crisis, however, economic interests were subordinated to security concerns shaped by history and threat perceptions. In the refugee crisis, issues of culture and identity were decisive\u2014even when German politicians threatened to cut EU structural funds to the V4 if they did not agree to take their \u201cfair share\u201d of refugees.<\/p>\n
The V4\u2019s response to the three crises also illustrates the difficulties they face in acting collectively. Sometimes in the last seven years, the four countries have simply defined their national interests in heterogeneous ways and have therefore been unable to cohere as a group. Even when their interests have been aligned, they have generally pursued them separately rather than together. In particular, as Germany has emerged as the de facto leader of the EU since the beginning of the euro crisis, they have\u2014like other member states including even the United Kingdom\u2014increasingly gone to Berlin to pursue their interests in the EU. Thus the temptation of a bilateral \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with Germany has undermined the coherence of the V4 as a group.<\/p>\n
In the euro crisis, the EU was divided between north and south as member states adopted a mixture of bandwagoning and balancing in relation to Germany, the largest creditor\u2014and therefore the most powerful\u2014country in the eurozone. The eurozone \u201cperiphery\u201d seemed to be under pressure to form what George Soros called a \u201ccommon front\u201d against Germany. The breakthrough in the euro crisis in 2012 was the product of exactly such an anti-German coalition of France, Italy, and Spain. Meanwhile the countries of central Europe seemed to be forming what I described as \u201ca kind of geo-economic equivalent of a German sphere of influence.\u201d In short, the south seemed to be balancing and the east seemed to be bandwagoning.<\/p>\n
The V4 were generally sympathetic to the thrust of German eurozone policy. In particular, despite, or perhaps because of, the difficult economic transformations they had themselves been through, they supported the imposition of austerity on \u201ccrisis countries\u201d in the eurozone. Slovakia was particularly vocal during the renewed discussion around bailing out Greece in 2015.11 Nevertheless, the V4 was structurally inhibited from playing a role in the euro crisis as a group because out of the four countries only Slovakia was a member of the single currency. There were also differences of policy. In particular, the Czech Republic opposed the Fiscal Compact and became the only EU member state apart from the United Kingdom to refuse to sign it in 2012 (though it changed its position under Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and signed it in 2014).<\/p>\n
In the Ukraine crisis, meanwhile, the V4 were deeply divided. Although all four countries are to some extent economically dependent on Russia, particularly for energy, their responses were determined by the different threat perceptions they had. While Poland under the Civic Platform government of Donald Tusk was among the most hawkish countries calling for a tough response to Russia\u2019s annexation of the Crimea and to their destabilization of eastern Ukraine, Hungary under Viktor Orb\u00e1n was the most pro-Russian. Slovakia under Robert Fico was also opposed to economic sanctions against Russia. As a result of these differing interests, the V4 was again largely irrelevant as a group in the Ukraine crisis\u2014though Poland initially played an important role in diplomacy with Russia through the Weimar group and co-operated with the Baltics and even the UK on security.<\/p>\n
In the refugee crisis, however, a new dynamic emerged between Germany and the V4\u2014all members of the Schengen area.12 If in the euro crisis the EU was divided between north and south, in the refugee crisis it was divided between east and west. In this context, the V4 played an analogous role to the one played by the eurozone \u201cperiphery\u201d in the euro crisis: it balanced against Germany rather than bandwagoning with it. The V4 became \u201c a kind of central European awkward squad,\u201d as Neil Buckley and Henry Foy of the Financial Times put it. Orb\u00e1n\u2014who emerged as Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s biggest critic even though his party, Fidesz, belongs to the same grouping in the European Parliament as the German Christian Democrats\u2014accused Germany of \u201cmoral imperialism,\u201d an echo of accusations of \u201cfiscal imperialism\u201d from the eurozone \u201cperiphery\u201d in the euro crisis.<\/p>\n
Initially, in the refugee crisis the V4 were divided: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia voted against the European Commission\u2019s plan to \u201crelocate\u201d 120,000 refugees from Greece and Italy in the Justice and Home Affairs Council in September 2015, but Poland voted in favor of it, though it too was opposed to mandatory quotas for refugees. Still, after\u00a0PiS won the parliamentary elections in Poland in October and formed a new government, the V4 countries were united against Germany. While Prime Minister Tusk had acted as a conduit between the V4 and Germany that facilitated co-operation, the PiS government sought instead to join forces with other central and eastern European countries in order to form a counterweight to German power.<\/p>\n
Of the three crises the EU has faced since 2010, the V4 was clearly most effective as an anti-German coalition. In the euro crisis, the V4 had roughly aligned interests, but, partly because of the way the V4 intersects with the variable geometry of the EU, they pursued them bilaterally rather than as a group. In the Ukraine crisis, they had different interests and therefore again failed to cohere as a group. It was only in the refugee crisis, in which the V4 had aligned interests that were directly opposed to Germany\u2019s, that they formed a coherent grouping. This is perhaps not surprising: it is logical that the V4 countries would generally seek to pursue their interests bilaterally with Germany and join forces when they need allies to oppose Germany-like the eurozone \u201cperiphery\u201d did in the euro crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the refugee crisis a new dynamic emerged between Germany and the V4\u2014all members of the Schengen area. If in the euro crisis the EU was divided between north and south, in the refugee crisis it was divided between east and west.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[111,173,93,174],"class_list":["post-9384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-eu","tag-german-domination","tag-politics","tag-visegrad"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10437,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9384\/revisions\/10437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}