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East European Politics &
http://eep.sagepub.com/content/22/3/630
The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0888325408315840
2008
2008 22: 630 originally published online 16 AprilEast European Politics and Societies
Martin Dangerfield
to Postaccession Cooperation
The Visegrád Group in the Expanded European Union: From Preaccession
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630
The Visegrád Group in the Expanded
European Union: From Preaccession
to Postaccession Cooperation
Martin Dangerfield*
This article investigates whether the Visegrád Group (VG) is proving capable
of a successful transition from preaccession to postaccession cooperation
in the expanded European Union (EU). Prior to EU accession, the VG
agenda mainly emphasised political cooperation around strategic goals of
EU and NATO membership, acting as an incubation chamber and the
organising framework for joint policies and actions. The article finds that
pessimistic prognoses for postaccession VG cooperation in circulation
around the time of EU entry rather underestimated the VG’s staying power
and its usefulness as a vehicle for serving some of the requirements and
challenges of the actuality of the “return to Europe.” The postaccession
agenda seems to have opened up many new avenues for cooperation on
both intra-VG and external affairs, including towards the EU, and seems to
have given rise to the kind of substantial practical cooperation agenda that
eluded the VG during the preaccession period.
KKeeyywwoorrddss:: Visegrád Group; subregional cooperation; regionalism; European
integration; European Union enlargement; Central Europe
Preliminaries
Subregional groupings that emerged onto the European
scene after 1989 have to varying extents played useful, albeit lowprofile,
roles in the interrelated processes of constructing the
post–cold war security order and enlarging the EU eastward. For
certain subregional associations the 5th EU enlargement was
East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 22, No. 3, pages 630–667. ISSN 0888-3254
© 2008 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1177/0888325408315840
*This article draws on the findings of a British Academy–funded research project Subregional
Cooperation and the Expanded European Union, which has been investigating the impact of
the 5th EU expansion on various Central European subregional associations. The author is most
grateful both to the British Academy and to the many government and nongovernment officials,
as well as scholars in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia who
kindly provided crucial assistance to this research. The author also wishes to thank the anonymous
referee for helpful comments.
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somewhat of a crossroads since they had been created specifically
to assist their participants’ NATO and EU entry. Could or
should such groupings continue to exist and, if so, what should
the purpose of cooperation be, and what forms should it take to
maintain relevance in the postaccession era? So far, the EU
enlargement of May 2004 has not been followed by dissolution of
any subregional associations, raising the possibility that certain
of them at least—even ones with the closest links to the EU
preaccession process—may be evolving into viable postaccession
groupings able to respond to new agendas that have
emerged as a result of the shift from impending to actual membership
of the EU. This article investigates whether the Visegrád
Group (VG) is proving capable of a successful transition from
preaccession to postaccession cooperation in the expanded EU.
VG, which consists of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and
Slovakia, was one of the first subregional groupings to emerge in
the post–cold war environment. After some thirteen years of
cooperation, NATO membership for all four countries followed
by their EU accession on 1 May 2004 meant that the “fulfilment
of the intentions set out in the (February 1991) Visegrád
Declaration put the participating countries before the question
of how to go on.”1
The first part of the article identifies possible modes of interaction
between subregional cooperation and EU integration. It
ascertains that the VG corresponds with the complement/preaccession
instrument category, in which, as explained more fully
below, the subregional association exists primarily to support
and assist the EU preaccession exercise. It also briefly compares
VG’s EU preaccession role with that of other types of subregional
cooperation initiatives that have been active in post-communist
Central Europe. The next section focuses on the period from the
formation of the VG to the May 2004 EU enlargement, covering
the origins and the main phases in the development of the VG
and outlining the nature and scope of VG cooperation as it progressed
during EU preaccession. The final part of the article
focuses on the role of the VG in the postaccession period. The
runin to the EU enlargement took place against the backdrop of
some serious setbacks for the VG in 2002 and 2003 (in the form
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632 The Visegrád Group
of top-level political spats and inability to maintain solidarity at
critical moments), and this seemed to reinforce predictions
already in circulation that EU entry would mark the demise of
the VG. So far, however, there is evidence to suggest that the pessimistic
prognoses rather underestimated the VG’s staying
power and its usefulness as a vehicle for serving some of the
requirements and challenges of the actuality of the “return to
Europe.” The postaccession period seems to have opened up
many new avenues for VG cooperation on EU affairs. These have
included political cooperation on the big issues (e.g., the recent
negotiations on the 2007–13 EU financial perspective); functional
cooperation around adapting to existing EU policies, especially
Schengen entry; and cooperation to shape certain evolving
EU policies (e.g., on enlargement and “neighbourhood” policy).
In fact, the postaccession period seems to have given rise to the
kind of substantial practical cooperation agenda that eluded the
VG during the preaccession period.
EU enlargement and subregional
cooperation processes
AAlltteerrnnaattiivvee ttyyppeess ooff ssuubbrreeggiioonnaall ccooooppeerraattiioonn
Subregional cooperation has been defined as “a process of
regularised, significant political and economic interaction among
a group of neighbouring states. This interaction takes place
between national governments, local authorities, private business
and civil society actors across a wide range of issues.”2
Although subregional cooperation in Europe was already well
established prior to the fall of communism, with the Benelux
Group and Nordic Cooperation being the main examples, the
proliferation of groupings after 1989 generated the need to
understand the purpose, potential, and limitations of what
Bjurner called “children of the post–Cold war era.”3
Most studies
of the role and effects of this generation of subregional groupings
have stressed their security-enhancing properties, which stem
from the facilitation of top-level political dialogue (especially
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valuable in sensitive contexts) and also from practical cooperation,
particularly in “soft security” fields such as economic development,
border management, environmental cooperation, and
so on.4
Their record as agents in dealings with NATO and the EU
has also been highlighted, both as preaccession support and as
entities that help to relieve potential tensions between the
included and excluded in the process of integration into the
Euro-Atlantic structures.
As far as interplay between EU integration and subregional
cooperation in general is concerned, according to Dangerfield,
postwar experiences suggest four categories of grouping as follows:
pioneer, substitute, complement/preaccession instrument,
and involuntary alternative/substitute.5
Where groupings
act as pioneers, it means that they not only achieve a more
advanced level of integration than other larger regional integration
projects but also exert influence on the integration agenda
of the latter. As Inotai has informed us, the Benelux economic
union is a prime example of the pioneer category.6
This grouping
reached the higher stages of economic integration well before
the larger entity it became subsumed in—the European
Economic Community—and in so doing acted as an important
precursor for the latter.7
The second type, that of substitute,
occurs when states establish the subregional cooperation project
as an alternative to other options and adopt an integration
agenda that could be either more or less far-reaching than that of
other contemporary regional associations. Examples of substitutes
in postwar Europe include the Council for Mutual
Economic Assistance (CMEA); the European Free Trade
Association (EFTA); and its “offspring,” the European Economic
Area (EEA). In practice, the cold war context of the former CMEA
left EFTA and the EEA as bona fide alternative integration projects
for those countries staying out of, or excluded from, the EU.
The third category, the complement/preaccession instrument,
is a model specific to the post-1990 period and to EU candidates
from post-communist Europe. Here, the participating
states aspire to join a larger and more developed regional project,
and subregional cooperation exists primarily to support and assist
this process. Cooperation may take various forms including, for
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example, mutual integration up to limits that are both politically
and practically defined as exemplified by the Central European
Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) and the Baltic Free Trade Area
(BFTA).8
The expectation that the subregional association will
disappear upon EU accession is quite strong. A significant feature
of this type of cooperation is that participants tended to be
somewhat reluctant, at least initially, to engage in subregional
(re)integration because of perceptions that it would affect negatively
ambitions for early EU membership. The fourth and final
category, as yet hypothetical, is that of involuntary alternative/substitute.
This scenario concerns European states whose
fate is to become condemned to a “limbo” of at best semipermanent
association with the EU. At the present time, contenders for
this status include East European states currently denied an EU
membership perspective but earmarked for associate status under
the terms of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) of the
EU.9
The involuntary alternative/substitute fate could also potentially
befall certain South East European states covered by the EU’s
Stabilisation and Association Process (SAP) should they fail to
progress with the accession conditions and/or if current debates
about the “absorption capacity” of the EU and other enlargementrelated
issues undermine their EU membership perspective.10
WWhheerree ddooeess tthhee VViisseeggrráádd GGrroouupp ffiitt??
Which of the above categories are most apt for VG? Clearly, the
pioneer, substitute, and involuntary alternative/substitute models
can be excluded with minimum discussion. The days of pioneer
groups, at least outside of the EU, are over, and VG is
obviously not a substitute of any sort. Its official status as an entity
to support and promote the process of EU accession rather than
an alternative organisation was consistently stressed during the
preenlargement period. Furthermore, the fact that these days the
VG, like other of its subregional contemporaries (e.g., the Central
European Initiative [CEI], which has always combined EU
members, candidates, and noncandidates), is an organisation
consisting of states who are also EU members is further evidence
that it was never in any sense conceived of as a substitute body.
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VG evidently corresponds with the complement/preaccession
instrument category, although compared with other subregional
groupings, there have been key differences in the ways in which
it has supported the EU membership endeavour.11
The VG agenda has mainly emphasised political cooperation
around strategic goals of EU and NATO membership, acting as an
incubation chamber and the organising framework for joint policies
and actions to serve those goals. In the early phase of the VG,
part of its importance lay in the image of an avant-garde group of
post-communist countries worthy of early EU accession. Solidarity
among the VG member states has also been somewhat fluid.
While separatist attitudes clearly prevailed during the mid-1990s’
VG low point, during the late 1990s priority was given to the
catch-up needed by Slovakia to compensate for the delays in the
Euro-Atlantic integration progress that set in during the Mecˇiar
era. In the VG’s most recent phase there has been growing
emphasis on concrete, including project-based, intra-VG cooperation
in various spheres including culture, education, environment,
tourism, and so on (see second section). The VG’s EU
preaccession role did not therefore have the clear-cut functional
nature of its close relative, CEFTA. As noted above, CEFTA has
been exclusively focused on economic cooperation in the form of
trade liberalisation to achieve mutual market integration in
advance of the more intensive integration now under way in the
setting of EU membership.12
In fact, of the two, VG probably bears
closer connection to CEI than CEFTA. Top-level political dialogue/cooperation
(which includes annual summits of the CEI
states’ prime ministers and regular ministerial-level meetings) has
been and continues to be a key facet of CEI cooperation, although
the current emphasis is on shifting the balance of CEI activities
away from the “switchboard”/talking shop functions towards its
concrete project-based dimension.13
The role of the International
Visegrad Fund (IVF) as a source of funding and promoter of intraVG
projects is also somewhat reminiscent of the project dimension
of CEI activities. The VG has, however, avoided the open
membership and greater dilution of purpose often associated with
the CEI. As a club of (until May 2004) exclusively EU associates/
candidates, VG has in principle been far less constrained than CEI
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in terms of its ability to focus and concentrate energies on EU
preaccession (and these days, postaccession) tasks.
The Visegrád Group: Cooperation
during EU preaccession
OOrriiggiinnss aanndd oobbjjeeccttiivveess
The inaugural VG meeting took place in Bratislava in April
1990. At the instigation of Václav Havel, the presidents of
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland held informal discussions
around the themes of “the ‘coordination of policies’ and ‘synchronisation
of steps’ on the road to Europe.”14
Notwithstanding
the vital importance of this initial move, various factors, including
retention of office by communists that somewhat compromised
the Hungarian and Polish delegations, held up substantive
progress until the second half of 1990 when ministerial cooperation
and further presidential dialogue began to gather pace.
Soviet actions in the Baltic states in January 1991 accelerated the
process, and the Visegrád 3 (V3) presidents, foreign ministers,
and parliamentarians met in Budapest on 15 February for the
signing of the original Visegrád Declaration, which stressed that
“[t]he similarity of the situation which arose in the course of the
past decades compels the three states to work toward the
achievement of identical goals.”15
The current Czech president once famously described the VG as
an “artificial creation of the West.” The emergence of the VG was,
however, arguably more of an autonomous development instigated
by the first post-communist leaderships of Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
and Poland but necessitated and propelled by the imperatives and
uncertainties of the external economic and political dimensions of
the impending transformation.16
As Dwan observed, the “end of
bipolarity in Europe, with its rigid territorial, political and military
delineations, left continental and local power vacuums. This
encouraged states to negotiate new arrangements to provide stability
in a time of profound change.”17
In this context, the three
avant-garde post-communist states found that a common agenda
was thrust upon them. It consisted of disentanglement from the
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CMEA, Warsaw Pact, and Soviet tutelage generally amid signs,
especially in early 1991, that the window for doing so may not be
open for long; the corresponding need to either push for the
creation of new pan-European security structures or attempt to
join existing Euro-Atlantic ones; the pursuit of EU membership;
and dealing with the fact that even the most clearly reformist of
the new regimes in central and eastern Europe were not initially
wholeheartedly embraced by the West. In this environment then,
when it came to the external sphere of their affairs, the V3 had
simply “no alternative to cooperation.”18
TThhee mmaaiinn eevvoolluuttiioonnaarryy pphhaasseess ooff VVGG ccooooppeerraattiioonn
Since 2004 VG cooperation has been relatively stable. This has
been in contrast to the somewhat more volatile EU preaccession
phase during which oscillation between relatively high-visibility/resonance
and virtual extinction fed perennial uncertainty about the
value and viability of the VG. As EU accession approached, the chequered
history of the VG colored expectations about its future
viability. VG optimists believed that it had become a permanent
feature of the new Europe, not always clear to pin down, based
on an inescapable bond between the four countries and dense
networks across them, especially in elite and intelligentsia circles.
Somewhat paradoxically, given its often precarious existence,
the VG was also seen by some as having most claims to a
contemporary representation of Central Europe.19
Indeed, this is
even a goal with official backing these days. According to the May
2004 Declaration of VG Prime Ministers, VG activities are “aimed
at strengthening the identity of the Central European region.”20
On the other hand, VG pessimists perceived VG as an unstable
and unreliable phenomenon, beset by internal contradictions
bound to come increasingly to the fore once the common purpose
of EU and NATO accession had been achieved. In this view,
VG is insufficiently embedded either in compatible national
interests or in elite and popular consciousness to guarantee that
it will endure as an exclusive entity. The alternative perspectives
on the VG are also a consequence of its own history of ups and
downs since its emergence in 1990. In the EU preaccession
East European Politics and Societies 637
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period three distinct phases in VG cooperation are identifiable—
1990–92, 1993–98, and 1998–2004—and they represent not only
episodes of relative activity and inactivity but also evolutionary
stages in the focus and content of VG cooperation.
1990–92: Visegrád 1. By early 1991 immediate mission of the
VG had crystallised, following an initial period of debate on future
integration and security strategies in the context of the “disruptive
effects of the strategic earthquake of 1989.”21
Cooperation
became focused on two key objectives—dissolution of the Sovietera
security and integration structures and accession to the EU
and NATO. The V3 effectively pursued common policies that
served those two goals, and by the end of 1992 the VG brand was
well established within and outside the region. In the initial years
VG cooperation was therefore almost exclusively focused on foreign
policy issues and took the form of intergovernmental cooperation
both between the governments of the V3 and between
the V3 and the major external actors. The success of subregional
cooperation as an instrument to help expedite the key goals of
external policy seems indisputable. As Rusnak notes, the VG had
a “spectacular start in 1991 [with] common success in dismantling
the Soviet legacy in Central Europe [namely, Warsaw Pact and
COMECON].”22
It is also widely acknowledged that the collective
approach to the EU played an important part in the EU’s decision
to sign Europe Agreements with the V3 in December 1991,
thereby granting them a “privileged” status with the EU.
VG cooperation also yielded important complementary security
results as far as the relations of the V3 themselves were concerned.
The successes in this respect included eliminating early divisions
within the V3 relating to alternative concepts of security frameworks
for Europe centred on the (predominantly Czechoslovak/
Polish) idea for an inclusive pan-European solution based on the
Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE;
then CSCE) versus the preference for developing closer relations
with NATO with a view to eventual membership; the general confidence
and security-building process of intense diplomatic activity
and ministerial dialogue and cooperation; and collaboration
on defence reforms to include “a system of regular consultation
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at all levels of the military and examining possibilities for closer
cooperation in military technology, production and procurement
. . . [b]ilateral military cooperation agreements were also concluded
between the three states in the spring of 1991.”23
Given
the way that events were unfolding in the former Yugoslavia, the
way that the V3 managed their own underlying tensions, caused
by minority and other issues, violence-free carried particular
resonance.
Two further outcomes of VG cooperation that were more
broadly related to both Euro-Atlantic and post-communist transformation
goals should be mentioned. First, it played an often
underestimated but absolutely crucial role at this time by providing
an incubator for the Visegrád countries’ economic reintegration
in the form of mutual trade liberalisation. Although
Western—and particularly EU—pressure to push ahead with
subregional integration was a key catalyst, it is unlikely that the
Krakow Treaty that created CEFTA would have been signed in
December 1992 without the VG framework. CEFTA was to play
not only an important role in the economic sphere but (see
below) in the political sphere as well, particularly in the so-called
dormant phase of VG cooperation. Second, VG cooperation
served the important purpose of cementing the external perception
of the V3 as a group. There was “little doubt that the
Visegrád states’ concerted pressure forced the West to address
their concerns more directly”24
and that the West soon came to
treat “the three countries as a group, with Central European
Prime Ministers meeting as a group with EC leaders for the first
time in October 1992.”25
Fawn also concurred, observing that
“Visegrád appeared firmly to exist on an official level. Its activities
were wide-ranging . . . and major international actors treated the
three countries in common fashion. Central Europe now seemed
to be defined by Visegrád cooperation.”26
Before moving to the 1993–98 period, one final point to make
about this early stage of VG cooperation is that it was essentially
an elite intergovernmental affair largely confined to the top-level
political sphere. Extension to the civic and regional levels did not
really progress past the discussion stage. As well as the lack of
priority given to them by the political leaders, these dimensions
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of cooperation failed to materialise “due to the lingering impact
of communism, which engendered both isolationism and passivity
and also the rekindling of nationalism, as well as an overwhelming
emphasis on constructing ties with the West [and] . . .
important bureaucratic and economic obstacles.”27
1993–98: Visegrád in decline (or transition?). As is well documented,
formal political cooperation in the VG framework
waned dramatically after the end of 1992. The division of
Czechoslovakia was instrumental since the leaders of the newly
independent Czech and Slovak Republics were both—for different
reasons—counterproductive for VG cooperation, with the
Czech government becoming most overtly “VG-sceptic.”
Alongside this was the raising of “Slovak-Hungarian tension in
connection with finishing the works on the water construction
on the Danube Gabcˇikovo-Nagymaros and also in connection
with the situation of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia.”28
The
advent of CEFTA at the end of 1992—which some parties and
particularly the neoliberally predisposed Czech government
were inclined to see as the natural and only viable next stage of
the VG project—was also relevant (although, as explained later,
it would be wrong to see CEFTA as a mainly negative influence
on the VG). The deteriorating position of Slovakia in the EuroAtlantic
integration process, and the concomitant reluctance of
other VG governments to be seen as associates of Vladimir
Mecˇiar, further served to undermine the VG logic and purpose.
The mixed message of Western actors’ stance on subregional
cooperation also played a part in the breakdown of cooperative
attitudes, with encouragement and support along with a tendency
to treat the VG as a group in some respects on the one
hand, and stress on individual assessments for EU and NATO
membership readiness on the other.
The period 1993–98 is usually characterised as, at best, a time of
“weak” VG cooperation with the internal strains compounded, as
Vachudova reminds us, by the fact that even the Czech Republic,
Hungary, and Poland soon lost their monopoly of avant-garde status of
post-communist states. Estonia and Slovenia, for example, got their
invitations to begin EU membership negotiations in 1997 too.29
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During 1993 the VG became increasingly conspicuous by its
absence, and its apparent demise was emphasised in January
1994 when a summit was organised in Prague to confirm U.S.
backing for the V4 in the context of the introduction of NATO’s
Partnership for Peace. While Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia
favoured a “coordinated approach to NATO, Czech Defence
Minister Antonin Baudys refused to attend a meeting with his
Visegrád counterparts to discuss such an approach [and] Czech
Minister for Foreign Relations Josef Zieleniec stated that ‘we
don’t believe in organising lobbies or pressure groups to knock
on doors.’”30
Slovakia’s subsequent exclusion from the invitations
to begin EU and NATO membership negotiations issued to
the other three in 1997 was for many the event that finally
seemed to confirm the “clinical death” of the VG. Yet claims that
the VG was finished proved premature, as its reconvening and
reactivation in 1999 was to show. While 1993 to 1998 was certainly
a dormant time in comparison to the intensity and high
profile of VG cooperation that prevailed in the 1990–92 period,
there is evidence to suggest that the inactivity was not quite as
pronounced as it might seem and, moreover, that it is more
appropriate to see VG cooperation at that time as essentially in a
phase of transformation.
The first factor to mention is CEFTA, which quickly emerged
as a successful case of subregional cooperation in the economic
field and acted as a useful surrogate for the dormant VG. From
1994 onwards the CEFTA machinery included annual summits of
prime ministers, which provided an important vehicle for dialogue
between the VG political leaders. Until CEFTA expanded in
1996 the prime ministerial meetings were Visegrád summits in all
but name.31
Because of this precedent set in CEFTA, after 1998
regular meeting of prime ministers became embedded in the
revived VG process, whereas in the first active phase of the VG it
was a forum for the VG presidents. CEFTA also provided a framework
for various ministerial-level meetings in respect of areas
into which CEFTA business was expanding (Finance, Agriculture,
Public Procurement, etc.) and in so doing laid some foundations
for the ministerial cooperation that would be an important element
of the revived VG. Steady forward progress in the CEFTA
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project also helped to rebuild confidence in subregional cooperation
and allowed Slovakia to maintain regular—but out of the
spotlight—high-level political contact with the other Visegrád
states. Finally, CEFTA played a key role in “bringing about the
reconvening of the Visegrád forum. The 1998 (Prague) session,
when the Czechs suggested that CEFTA could ‘develop some
political dimensions along the lines of the Visegrád Accord’ clearly
paved the way for the first meeting of ‘Visegrád 2’ in May 1999.”32
Second, although there was a distinct absence—other than via
CEFTA and also within the auspices of other subregional initiatives
such as the CEI—of high-level cooperation involving all four
VG partners in the 1993–98 period, partial cooperation was still
in evidence. Bilateral cooperation remained strong between
Poland and Hungary, for example.33
At both the 1995 and 1996
CEFTA summits, for instance, the two used the occasions to
argue (unsuccessfully) for the resuscitation of the VG. Also, even
by middle of 1995 there was evidence that external imperatives
to cooperate were beginning to moderate tendencies for individual
approaches to Euro-Atlantic integration efforts. Pressures
connected to NATO accession in particular stimulated a de facto
revival of VG cooperation albeit ultimately trilateral because of
Slovakia’s exclusion from the process. In May 1995 the VG
defence ministers met in Budapest to discuss integration into
NATO. This was “the first such meeting attended by a Czech minister
of defence.”34
Intense diplomatic activity—including ministerial,
prime minister, and presidential meetings—in early March
1996, in the context of Warren Christopher’s upcoming visit to
Prague, was interpreted as heralding a major revival in CzechPolish
cooperation. According to Pehe, a key reason why Czech
foreign policy changed after 1995 was because “Czech leaders
also began to realise that an individual race against Poland, in
particular, for NATO membership was counterproductive.
Poland, with its size and strategic importance, was clearly a
favourite for early NATO membership. Close relations with
Poland could thus only benefit Czech aspirations.”35
This trilateral
cooperation accelerated as the NATO accession process progressed.
Immediately after the formal membership invitation was
issued on 8 July 1997 the presidents of the three stood together
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to “read a prepared statement of satisfaction to reporters [and]
. . . five trilateral meetings of the countries Prime, Foreign or
Defence Ministers followed by the end of the year.”36
Third, it can be argued that the 1993–97 period was, at least in
part, something of a hiatus in relations with the EU. Following
the achievement of associate status in 1991 and the 1993 EU
Copenhagen Summit decision to give associated Central and
Eastern Europe (CEE) states a membership perspective, the
political cooperation imperative relaxed somewhat or at least
was more easily outweighed by the competitive/individualistic
tendencies. This temporary sidelining of VG cooperation vis-à-vis
EU affairs also reflected the fact that a practical EU preaccessionrelated
cooperation agenda could be, and was, pursued via
CEFTA. For example, in 1995 and 1996, following the release of
the European Commission’s May 1995 White Paper on Eastern
Enlargement, there was a flurry of proposals to further develop
CEFTA in the direction of a common market. This idea of the
1993–98 period as a natural interval in the EU preaccession
dimension of VG cooperation is supported by the fact that, as
noted below, the move in 1998 to the EU membership negotiation
stage began to generate issues of common interest that
could make use of the VG framework. By this time CEFTA had
more or less reached the limits of its development as a EU preaccession
instrument and was therefore becoming less suitable as
a VG surrogate because of the nature of the cooperation needed
and also because CEFTA’s membership had expanded beyond
the “Luxembourg group.”37
Just as with the NATO preaccession
process, cooperation revived when the pragmatic reasons for
doing so manifested themselves.
1998–2004: Visegrád 2. The process of reviving full-blown VG
cooperation took off in the second half of 1998 in the context of
governmental changes in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the
Czech Republic an anti-VG leadership was replaced with a pro-VG
one at a time when the evidence (especially in the realm of economic
performance) for the Czech superiority complex exhibited
by the previous government had evaporated. Meanwhile, in
Slovakia, a government with credentials acceptable to the West
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and the other VG members gained power in September 1998.
As already noted, renewal of VG was also connected to the NATO
accession process of Poland, Hungary, and Poland, which had
already been stimulating considerable cooperative activity
between the three regardless of any top-level political rhetoric.
Added to all this, although what was probably the major theme
of the revived VG—assisting Slovakia to “catch up” in the NATO
and EU accession process—was consistent with the new spirit of
cooperation, there was a pragmatic dimension for the other VG
members too. Separate Slovak entry to the EU posed considerable
problems for the Czech Republic and Hungary. In the case
of the Czech Republic, entering the EU before Slovakia was
bound to cause unwelcome disruptions to the high level of integration
between the two. This not only included the customs
union established upon division but more importantly the free
mobility of people between the two territories. For Hungary the
issue of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia was relevant, and
accession of Slovakia to NATO was also in the Hungarian interest
because “its strategic position, left physically isolated from other
NATO members, would be improved.”38
The first move to formally reconvene the VG was made during
the occasion of the September 1998 CEFTA summit in Prague. A
request that Slovakia take up its empty chair was the key result of
the first meeting of the reconvened VG three in Budapest on 21
October 1998. The revived VG held its inaugural meeting in
Bratislava on 14 May 1999 and produced a framework for significant
expansion of the scale and scope of cooperation. The role of
Visegrád 2 would remain focused on the original agenda of furthering
the EU and NATO membership endeavour, although now
including the catch-up mission of Slovakia as an important task.
Alongside this, however, was a new emphasis on various intra-VG
cooperation activities to develop civic/societal spheres of the VG
project. The substantive elements of the post-1998 VG cooperation
were specified as follows: Foreign Affairs (maintaining VG
image/profile; meetings/consultations/transfer of experience in various
fields but especially in the EU/NATO accession processes);
Internal Affairs (border and immigration affairs; organised crime,
drug/people/weapon trafficking, etc.); Education, Culture, Society,
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Youth and Sport; Science, Technology; Environment; Infrastructure;
Cross-border Cooperation.39
Subsequent protocols signed by the
VG governments have added new areas of cooperation including,
for example, joint actions in tourism development and promotion
in 2002.40
A second key feature of the revived VG was the establishment
of a quasi-institutionalised structure for the intergovernmental
cooperation. This was necessary to serve and facilitate the
expanded range of activities and ensure involvement of the relevant
bodies. It was also needed, given the lessons of the 1993–98
period, to ensure stability via a more permanent basis for VG
cooperation and to try to make it less hostage to the vagaries of
government changes in the member countries. The structure
includes two regular meetings per year of prime ministers; two
regular meetings per year of foreign ministers; meetings of other
ministers as and when needed; regular meetings of ambassadors
in the VG presidency country; meetings of VG presidents; meetings
of VG parliamentary representatives; appointment of national
VG coordinators, meeting at least twice per year; ministerial
cooperation at expert/specialist level; establishment of the rotating
presidency of the VG that has an important role on coordinating
both the external and internal dimensions of VG
cooperation, including compiling the VG work plan and reporting
on the progress of its implementation.41
A major innovation of Visegrád 2 was the establishment of the
IVF, mooted at the May 1999 Bratislava summit and formally
approved by the VG leaders in June 2000. The main idea behind
the IVF was to complement the external dimension of cooperation
with concrete activities in the internal sphere and specifically
to sponsor projects in the education, arts/culture, and
science and technology fields.42
The IVF is a somewhat special
entity in that it is a genuine VG permanent institution with its
own premises, staff, and own resources, and its existence legally
commits the VG member countries to support the internal cooperation
activities via the obligatory financial contributions.
Furthermore, the IVF has been perceived as an important tool
for fostering and strengthening the incursion of VG cooperation
into the civic domain and public awareness. At the time of the
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public unveiling of the IVF in August 2000 Radio Prague reported
that “Visegrád has never really captured the public imagination
and that’s one of the reasons why the new fund has been set up
. . . it aims to support regional cooperation at a grass-roots level,
and give real meaning to the rather abstract idea of a regional
identity.”43
The IVF’s contributions have received affirmative
comment within the VG countries. Polish scholar Bukalska, for
example, remarked “how significant the IVF is for the region. . . .
Activities partially financed by the fund, though rarely making
front-page news, are extremely important for increasing our
knowledge about each other.”44
Former IVF Director Urban
Rusnak stresses the IVF’s strengths in “supporting building and
maintaining ties between people of V4 . . . [s]tipulation of cohesion
among peoples is creating more positive public approach to
the whole idea of Visegrád cooperation and making it more difficult
to cut this process in case of less affirmative approach of
political leadership in any of the member states.”45
The effectiveness
and relevance of the IVF also seem to have been recognised
at the top levels if the willingness to expand the finances of it is
anything to go by. In 2005 the IVF was given a budget of 3 million
Euros, which was already three times higher than the initial
amount granted for its first year of operation.46
A further important development was the “V4 plus” formula
that provides the framework for the VG to cooperate, as a group,
with third parties, which can either be individual states, regional
or subregional entities, or international organisations. The various
occasions of V4 plus can come about at the initiative of any
of the VG and can also be a response to requests from the other
actors. V4 plus is obviously in part a compromise solution to
enlargement of VG, which is ruled out at present but something
to which certain VG members are less averse than others. V4 plus
also seems to have resulted in activities that sometimes produce
little except dialogue/gesture (as was the case with, for example,
the meeting of foreign ministers of VG and Ukraine in July 2002
instigated by Poland) and more concrete results at other times. A
good example of the latter is the fairly intensive cooperation
between the VG and Benelux Group, which made useful contributions
to thinking about the postaccession role of the VG and
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has also involved practical postaccession assistance to the VG
countries.
By end 2002, of course, the aim of securing Slovakia’s catchup,
and with it the original objectives of the VG, were fulfilled.
During the period between the closure of the EU accession
negotiations and May 2004, debates about the future role of the
VG—including, at least in some circles, discussions about
whether it was actually going to be needed in the postenlargement
era—were conducted at official, expert, and even media
levels. The aim was to conclude the period of reflection, and if it
proved to be positive about future viability, to agree on a new
framework document for cooperation by the end of the 2004
Czech presidency of the VG.47
The reflection was, however, conducted
against the background of some ominous developments
for the VG in 2002 and 2003.
CCrriisseess iinn VViisseeggrráádd 22 aanndd ppeerrssppeeccttiivveess oonn
ppoossttaacccceessssiioonn ccooooppeerraattiioonn pprroossppeeccttss
Much of the expanded range of VG cooperative activities are
carried out quietly, attracting little publicity. Media attention to
the VG does, however, understandably surge when negative
developments in top-level intra-VG political relations occur. The
year 2002 turned out to be a particularly problematic year for
post-1998 VG cooperation with the first major crisis erupting in
February prior to a VG summit scheduled to take place in
Budapest. Despite the fact that top agenda items included the
EU proposals for farm and regional subsidies for the acceding
states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia opted to stay away from
the meeting in protest at “remarks by Victor Urban, the
Hungarian Prime Minister, suggesting that the Benes decrees
were incompatible with EU membership.”48
These events “gave
many politicians and journalists the reason to speak about the
clinical death of Višegrad or even about the end of Central
Europe.”49
While a change of government in Hungary helped
heal this spat, further doubts about whether VG cooperation was
working properly came when certain VG parties broke ranks at
the December 2002 “endgame” Copenhagen EU summit. This
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was either to unilaterally accept EU bargaining terms on level of
agricultural compensation payments or gain more advantageous
last-minute individual deals. Most notably, there was the late
Polish shift away from pushing for a raise in the 25% level of farm
compensation payments offered to accepting instead lump sum
payments into the national budgets, and subsequent negotiation
of a 1 billion Euros transfer to its exchequer in the guise of what
was called a “cash flow facility.” This disappointed Poland’s VG
partners and was seen by some as serious evidence of the lack of
any genuine alliance of VG countries.
A year later it was Poland’s turn to feel let down by the VG and
doubt its solidarity. During the run-in and immediately prior to
the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on the Constitutional
Treaty numerous V4 prime minister summits took place to
“attempt to coordinate the positions of the four Visegrád
countries before the IGC gets underway in Rome.”50
Yet the final
outcome of the IGC seemed once more to highlight fundamental
divisions and bode ill for postenlargement VG cooperation on
EU affairs. In early 2004 former Polish Foreign Minister Andrzej
Olechowski expressed the view that “the Visegrád Group de
facto disintegrated at the time of Poland’s biggest diplomatic
push in its post-1989 history—the crusade to defend the Nice
Treaty provisions. Not a single Visegrád group country supported
Poland, and some openly voiced their dislike of the Polish posi-
tion.”51
The timing and context of this series of high-level spats
proved insufficient to derail the VG but inevitably raised its profile
and caused some loss of confidence, bringing the issue of its
preaccession usefulness and postaccession purpose very much
to the fore. Although abandonment of the VG was to prove an
unlikely prospect, the discourse of its demise was real enough.
Olechowski also added, “So we are back to square one. We may
continue the collaboration or abandon it and consider it no
longer relevant upon EU accession.”52
Against the backdrop of these apparent VG failures in the context
of NATO membership and impending EU entry, a number of
pessimistic assessments of the future came into circulation. A
common premise of the negative prognoses was that the external
dimension of cooperation had been crucial for sustainability
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and vitality of the VG and that there was little chance for successful
cooperation without the shared agenda of Euro-Atlantic
integration to give it purpose and hold it together. Much of the
analysis centred on a key problem of imbalance caused by the
presence of Poland. In an early prognosis of postenlargement VG
prospects Vachudova foresaw that the VG would become a casualty
of the separation of Central Europe into “two different
groups of states ... Provincial Central Europe and Cosmopolitan
Central Europe will be divided by fundamental differences on
matters of European integration, immigration and security.”53
Vachudova’s view was that divergent interests across the many
spheres of the EU policy domain would prevail and the VG
countries were most likely to “find partners among the other EU
member states that share their own interests, while their shared
origins in East Central Europe will become more and more irrel-
evant.”54
Poland was predicted to form part of Cosmopolitan
Central Europe, eager to play an active part in shaping major EU
policies central to its own interest and ambitions, including the
Common Agricultural Policy (of the European Union) (CAP) and
Common Foreign and Security Policy (European Union) (CFSP)
and also to favour eastern borders being as open as possible taking
a positive attitude towards cross-border movement of traders
and workers. Willingness and enthusiasm to engage its military
outside Europe, indulge a global perspective on security issues,
and attempt to dominate the regional security arrangements
would also distinguish Cosmopolitan Central Europe.55
The other
VG countries were predicted, on the other hand, to be characterised
by a more defensive posture and approach to EU policies,
lack of serious ambition in shaping security policies, and more
inward-looking passive approaches to foreign policy in general.
This, together with the higher profile of Eurosceptic, anti-immigration
right-wing political parties, would lead them into
Provincial Central Europe that would “regroup the small postHabsburg
nation states of Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia.”56
Well-known Czech political analyst Jirˇi Pehe, in a more recent
critique of the VG, highlights Poland’s size, Baltic region/east
European orientation, strong desire for a key role at regional and
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global levels, its part in the Iraq crisis, and early showing as an
uncompromising partner in European Council negotiations as
factors that do not bode well for the VG.57
Pehe suggests
Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia should prioritise
other cooperation initiatives, in particular the as yet underutilised
“Regional Partnership” initiative that combines the V4
with Austria and Slovenia. “Such a regional grouping, whose
members would be connected by the virtue of a long common
history and compatible interests, would be much more organic
than the current Visegrád initiative—an organisation that lumps
together three small states with a country that has more inhabitants
than its three partners put together, plus its own power
agenda.”58
Another variant of this theme is that in the enlarged
EU, Poland will—as a result of its size, key areas of interest
in EU policies, together with its regional and global security
perspectives—gravitate to the larger EU states. Using the experiences
of the VG countries in the Future of Europe convention to
give indirect indications of whether the VG could be expected to
become a compact entity in the EU, Kral envisaged that Poland
“will belong to the ‘Big Six’ in the enlarged EU. It will be [or at
least will try to be] on equal footing with the largest and influential
EU countries like France or Germany which can be witnessed
now (e.g. the so-called Weimar Triangle cooperation).”59
Indeed,
Polish Foreign Minister Cimoszewicz’s address to the Sejm on
Polish foreign policy in 2004 stated that priority will be given to
relations with Germany and France and that the Weimar Triangle
could enhance “understanding of mutual expectations and
contributing to building mutual confidence.”60
The VG in the expanded European Union:
Cooperation or coordination?
TThhee ““nneeww”” gguuiiddeelliinneess
Despite the difficulties within the VG in 2002 and 2003 and the
discourses these events generated, the VG governments decided
that their cooperation vehicle was a valuable one and should be
continued. The declaration of the VG Prime Ministers’ meeting
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held in the Czech Republic on 12 May 2004 was meant to serve
the purpose of redefining and updating the mission of the VG
following the expiry of the original 1991 declaration. The 2004
declaration states that “[t]he cooperation of the Visegrád Group
countries will continue to focus on regional activities and initiatives
aimed at strengthening the identity of the Central European
region. In this context, their cooperation will be based on concrete
projects and will maintain its flexible and open character.”61
Four dimensions of cooperation are specified: cooperation
within the VG area itself, cooperation within the EU, cooperation
with other partners (including individual countries and other
subregional structures), cooperation within NATO and other
international organisations.62
The declaration also affirms the
intergovernmental cooperation mechanisms, based on prime
ministerial, ministerial, presidential, and parliamentary spheres.
Comparison of the preexisting VG cooperation guidelines—
and particularly with the Contents of Visegrád Cooperation 1999
that had already gone some way toward updating the VG terms
of reference—with the provisions of the May 2004 declaration
reveals that the latter was more of a political document affirming
the ongoing viability and role of the VG rather than heralding a
substantive departure from what was already in place. Of course,
the new guidelines served the purpose of adapting the VG
agenda to the updated context of actual EU membership, and
the aim of “cooperation within the EU” was to some extent a
move into uncharted territory. A key question was whether the
environment of the enlarged EU (with a more disparate membership
and an assumed set of shared interests for new members
that are both inexperienced in operating within the EU and that
also share certain economic characteristics) would combine with
the cooperative tendencies already established and enable a distinct
subregional entity within the EU to emerge. Or would the
new environment mainly serve to bring the centrifugal forces to
the fore and leave VG to remain at best a vehicle for furthering
internal cooperation in the future with the possibility that the
downgrading of the external agenda will gradually cause the
VG to lose profile and relevance as per the gloomy scenarios
discussed above? Vachudova and Pehe, together with other
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pessimistic assessments of the future of Visegrád cooperation,
were correct to identify some of the key risks and contradictions
that the postenlargement VG would face. However, these analyses
underestimated the resilience of the VG and, in part because
of them being rather centred on geopolitical issues (and according
to Vykoukal in Pehe’s case also seriously overestimating
Poland’s capacity to act as a big power63
), failed to consider the
demands for cooperation that would arise as a result of the
postaccession phase of EU entry and how the VG cooperation
culture and established structures/mechanisms would respond
to the new opportunities. For sure, views such as the one
recently expressed in The Economist that “[s]ince those aims
[NATO and EU membership] were achieved a year ago, Visegrád
has been falling, if not quite apart, then at least into insignificance”
are well wide of the mark and guilty of a lack of any
proper investigation into the topic.64
NNeeww aavveennuueess aanndd iinncceennttiivveess ffoorr ccooooppeerraattiioonn
Although it is still very early to judge, there is already enough
evidence to support the view that the VG members will have an
above-average close relationship through which to pursue
shared interests in the EU and will be able to maintain some kind
of group identity within it. First, as noted earlier, the quasiinstitutionalised
structure of VG cooperation entails regular
meetings at various levels of government. The scheduled meetings
that take place as a regular part of the VG process provide
the opportunity to debate EU affairs and establish whether or
not common positions exist, which can then be pursued collectively.
VG leaders have also held extra meetings before key EU
sessions, both on occasions just prior to them or on the fringes
while the EU gatherings are taking place. While this framework
carries no guarantee of collective positions—or even that the VG
countries will always be able or inclined to use it—it does mean
that an important mechanism to identify and act upon group
positions is available and has become incorporated into the policy-making
process to some degree. That this process of consultation
was working was in evidence throughout the period
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running up to the May 2004 EU enlargement. Despite the ultimately
insurmountable obstacles at the December 2002 and
2003 EU summits, the VG leaders and key ministers held many
meetings in which they arrived at coordinated positions, prepared
joint statements in opposition to some key aspects of EU
bargaining positions in the negotiations, and so on. Even after
the apparent low point of the 2003 IGC negotiations, the VG
soon seemed to be bouncing back strongly when in March 2004
the “Visegrád Four countries signed an agreement on coordinating
their approach to applying for European Union structural
and cohesion funds after they join the Union on May 1.”65
More
recently, the VG prime ministers meeting held on 10 June 2005
in Kazimierz Dolny, Poland, produced a Joint Declaration in the
aftermath of the French and Dutch referenda on the EU
Constitutional Treaty. The common position was that “the process
of ratification should continue. . . . All Member States should
express themselves on the Treaty. They should proceed with ratification
at the pace they consider most appropriate in their individual
circumstances.”66
The subtext to this joint position may
well have an attempt to prevent the ratification crisis spilling over
negatively into the EU budget negotiations, but either way, it was
clearly VG cooperation on their mutual interests.
Second, the section of the guidelines on the future areas of
Visegrád cooperation that specifies the spheres of cooperation
within the EU makes reference to a number of policies in which
the VG countries expect to find common ground and that various
analysts within the VG countries predicted.67
They include an open
section that provides for consultations and cooperation on current
issues of common interest; active contribution to the development
of the CFSP, including the “Wider Europe–Neighbourhood”
policy and the EU strategy toward the Western Balkans; consultations,
cooperation, and exchange of experience in Justice and
Home Affairs, Schengen cooperation, including protection and
management of the EU external borders; creating new possibilities
and forms of cooperation within the European Economic
Area; consultations on national preparations for joining the
Economic and Monetary Union (EMU); and active participation
in the development of the European Security and Defence Policy
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(ESDP), as a contribution to strengthening of relations and dialogue
between the EU and NATO.68
In addition to the official VG
list, other aspects of the regular business of the EU (e.g., on budgetary
size and structure debates, resistance to issues such as
moves to tackle alleged “tax-dumping” and attempts to close off
Western European markets to service providers from the new
member states, etc.) offered scope for cooperation, in many
cases in tandem with other EU new members and less prosperous
states of the EU15. Furthermore, several commentators have
pointed to one clear shared strategic interest on the ESDP front:
to try to ensure that development of EU military capability does
not occur at the expense of the role and relevance of NATO,
which the VG states continue to regard as their prime security
guarantee and framework.
Third, some extra comments about the policies set out in the
guidelines should be made. Several of them are preexisting components
of EU integration that the new members are aiming to
be incorporated into—Schengen, EMU in particular—and illustrate
the key point that the day in which any new member joins
the EU does not mark the end of the transition to full application
of the acquis. Rather, it signifies the commencements of the
postaccession phase of the EU in which the new members not
only adapt to working within the EU but also look to progress to
the innermost core of the integration they have joined. Although
there is no synchronised policy for EMU, on Schengen preparations,
however, moves to initiate enhanced cooperation had
already been agreed at a meeting of VG interior ministers on 11
September 2003. This included the establishment of the V4
“Working Group for Schengen Cooperation” with the brief to
“check conditions and modalities for the joint submission by VG
states of an application for participation in the Schengen coop-
eration.”69
There were more than ten VG meetings at either minister,
deputy minister, or expert level during the 2003–4 Czech
VG presidency as well as ongoing IVF projects and cooperative
activities in the V4+ framework.70
At their meeting in July 2004
Ministers were able to “declare that the degree of compatibility
among V4 National Schengen Action Plans achieved so far as well
as the progress made in their implementation by each State will
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enable V4 countries to submit an application for full participation
in the Schengen cooperation at the same time.”71
Fourth, even in the case of those policies where some claim that
the V4 will have dissimilar or opposite interests, closer scrutiny of
the situation indicates that this is not necessarily the case. A typical
case of this is agriculture, which, as Danˇková, for example, assumed
“is an issue particularly for Poland and it is therefore logical that its
position on this issue will be radically different from that of the
other Visegrád members.”72
Yet when policy spheres such as agriculture
are disaggregated into the multitude of issues they actually
comprise in reality, the idea of incompatible interests does not
always hold true. In the case of agricultural policy issues, three
areas where the VG countries have been cooperating intensively,
often in the “V4 plus” format and with Slovenia in particular, are as
follows: serious loss of export trade to Russia in food products
experienced by VG producers immediately after the May 2004
enlargement because of problems with the need for certificates of
approval of hygiene/sanitary standards to be issued by the Russian
authorities (these certificates were not needed prior to EU membership);
the debate over the need to harmonise the EU customs
code, especially for food/agricultural products; and reforms to the
CAP sugar regime. To give another example, also on the agenda of
cooperation is the need to ensure that the interests of VG producers
are represented in the agricultural market access deal to be
struck with Croatia as part of the latter’s accession negotiations.
Fifth, the need to disaggregate policy areas and focus on alternative
levels of policy is also relevant for CFSP. While the issue of
an early membership perspective for Ukraine and future strategic
concepts for EU relations with Russia, Belarus, and Moldova
are linked to high politics/strategic considerations and make
common VG positions rather complicated, the VG countries can
cooperate at lower level practical dimensions of EU Eastern policy.
Contributions to the broader Europeanisation processes for
Eastern neighbours, including economic opening and other
issues connected to business/economic and soft security concerns
of all the VG countries all became possible and also afford
the VG countries an opportunity to bring their expertise and
experience, as well as interests, to bear on this EU policy sphere.73
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As Gromadzki et al. wrote on the potential role of the VG vis-àvis
Ukraine: “The Visegrád countries, because of vested interests,
could facilitate a more flexible implementation of the Schengen
regime to the benefit of both parties . . . thanks to their unique
perspective they have insightful ideas for supporting democracy
and civil society in Ukraine. . . . In addition to assistance provided
by the EU, Visegrád countries should consider using their own
resources to maintain and expand cooperation and encourage
people-to-people contacts in their respective countries and
Ukraine. This could take place bilaterally or through joint efforts,
for instance through the International Visegrád Fund.”74
Recent
pronouncements and actions seem to be matching this prognosis.
In June 2005 it was confirmed that the VG countries will
exchange information on [and coordinate where beneficial] bilateral
assistance projects and the engagement of Visegrád countries in the
twinning cooperation when it is finally offered to Ukraine later this year.
In particular, joint Visegrád Group efforts will concentrate on institutional
development, regional co-operation and development, and implementation
of selected reforms. The Visegrád Group countries will work
towards closer co-operation between the EU and Ukraine in the area of
CFSP, JHA as well as development of economic co-operation, with
respect to facilitation of Ukraine’s accession to the WTO as well as start
of negotiations on free trade agreement between the EU and Ukraine.75
Sixth, intergovernmental cooperation and micro-level cooperation
via the IVF and other processes are not the only modes of
VG cooperation at work. VG cooperation can also be found working
“invisibly” in intra-VG networks at the nongovernmental level,
for example, within pan-European sectoral associations/lobbies
seeking to influence the relevant aspects of EU trade and agricultural
policies. Representatives of the national VG country federations
of food and drink industries have been working
intensively as a group (also in a “V4 plus” equivalent with other
new members) in pressing and negotiating with the European
Commission in matters of concern to their members. This level
of VG cooperation has been especially proactive and involved in
the case of the agricultural and trade policy issues noted above.76
Evidence that VG cooperation is working at the business network
level shows that to restrict the discussion of the relevance
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and operation of VG to intergovernmental cooperation within
the EU does not reveal the full picture. It also shows that it would
not be straightforward and perhaps not even possible for government
to terminate V4 cooperation in the highly unlikely event
there was any political reason to do so.
CCooooppeerraattiioonn rraatthheerr tthhaann ccoooorrddiinnaattiioonn
It seems fairly convincing that, for the time being at least, there
is room for collective VG approaches to an array of EU-related
issues and policies and that the necessary mechanisms for exploring
and acting upon common ground exist. At the same time, the
reasons to suppose that the VG will not become an automatic
platform for coordinating positions and speaking with one voice
on the EU stage seem irrefutable. First, there is no intention for
this to happen, and nowhere in official pronouncements on VG
cooperation can one find such an aspiration. The watchword in
VG is flexibility, and the idea is that VG cooperation mechanisms
are available to identify common interests and policy preferences
and collectively pursue them but not to start from the premise that
the VG exists to produce common positions, either in EU business
or other areas. This state of affairs reflects the lessons of the final
stages of the EU accession negotiations and differences over the
contents of the EU Constitutional Treaty, both of which played an
important role in shaping decisions and expectations how the VG
would operate in future. Since the events bred disillusion about
the reliability of VG cooperation generally and cast doubt therefore
on whether the VG countries would even constitute a coherent
group in the enlarged EU, they prompted a more thorough
reflection and assessment of the state of the cooperation than
might otherwise have been the case. Subsequently, this reflection
process prevented the VG from drifting into the postaccession
phase without a firm and realistic agenda on the one hand and
potentially damaging overinflated expectations on the other.
Timing was also important as Falkowski et al. correctly predicted
in their late 2003 call for a pre–May 2004 review of the postenlargement
role of the VG: “This is a good moment for another
quiet reflection on the possible future of the Visegrád Group, on
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the purpose of regional collaboration between our countries in
an enlarged Union. It is better to do it now than during the initial
hectic months and years of EU membership.”77
In addition, as
mentioned earlier, in the course of their own reflection on the
postenlargement future of the VG, the member countries studied
the experience of other subregional groupings in the EU, and
“working contacts were established with the structures of the
Nordic Council of Ministers and Benelux, from whom the Visegrád
countries drew inspiration in questions concerning the functioning
of regional cooperation within the European Union.”78
Although cooperation with the Benelux Group has been more
intensive during the past two years, the Nordic Council experience,
which successfully combines countries with varied interests
and approaches to the EU and which strongly focuses on cooperation
with other subregions as well intraregional cooperation, is
viewed as a particular interesting example as far as future trajectory
of the VG is concerned.79
Second, it is well established that a pattern of shifting alliances
prevails in both the intergovernmental and supranational domains
of EU governance, and this will apply to the VG countries too. To
take one relatively recent example, on 8 February 2005 EU member
state officials met to discuss whether to “write into EU law a deal on
train drivers conditions and hours signed in early 2004 between the
Community of European Railways and Infrastructure Companies
(CER) and the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF) . . .
representatives of the Netherlands, Denmark, United Kingdom and
Slovakia argued that the impact of proposed legislation on drivers
hours had been insufficiently thought through.”80
It is normal for
states to have varying interests and circumstances, as well as
instinctive attachments to sovereignty/independence that affect
their approaches to, and positions in, international organisations
and particularly in the EU where sovereignty issues are especially
resonant. The VG countries may have strong networks, a cooperation
culture, and specific collective interests as new members that
give the VG a measure of group identity in the EU, but a healthy
degree of divergence in many cases would be expected.
Third, not only is it unrealistic to expect that the VG actors
would concur on the myriad issues arising in EU business, but
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there is also the peculiar governance structure of the EU to consider.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), ostensibly
operating independently from their home governments/parties,
tend not to organise in regional or even national clusters.
Furthermore, in the present European Parliament (EP), for certain
VG states, the MEPs predominantly represent parties currently
in opposition, most notably in the case of the Czech
Republic, although all VG sitting governments fared relatively
poorly in the June 2004 EP elections. On the occasion of the early
2005 EP vote on the EU Constitutional Treaty, both the Czech and
Polish representations were negative. Of twenty-four Czech
MEPs, just seven voted in favour, while a majority of Polish MEPs
either abstained or voted no.81
The EP vote shortly afterward on
whether Ukraine should be given a EU membership perspective
was passed by 467 to 19, yet “in contrast with the European
Parliament, the European Council representing EU members
states and the European Commission, the EU executive, remain
reluctant to accept that Ukraine could eventually join the EU.”82
Notwithstanding the nonbinding nature of these EP votes
(although, of course, the EP has very real powers to exercise in
areas of EU business) and differences within the VG on how
exactly and within what timescale the EU should proceed in
enabling Ukraine to draw closer to it, these examples serve to
illustrate the essential point that the issue of the VG acting
together in the EU is complicated by the EU governance context.
Fourth, potential shortcomings of the VG intergovernmental
cooperation procedures need to be acknowledged. There is the
permanent risk that the individual government leaders will opt
not to use or even boycott the VG consultative framework. This
is clearly most likely to occur in the context of any high-octane
political conflicts or as a result of indiscretions that create serious
tensions, as per the Czech and Slovak boycott of the scheduled
February 2002 VG summit following the Urban outbursts on the
Benes Decrees. This episode also showed that the post-1999 VG
cooperation procedures and commitments have not shielded it
from such disruptions since Urban “effectively suspended the
cooperation in 2002 for the sake of domestic electoral politics and
allying with the Austrian and Bavarian governments . . . [conveying]
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the impression that the intensity of cooperation among the four
states is susceptible to the changing preferences and priorities of
political leaders.”83
Bypassing the VG framework can also occur
in times of normal relations as shown by the case of the (failed)
Polish attempt at the December 2004 EU summit to “agree to
give Ukraine special status.”84
The other VG countries did not
support Poland’s position, and although this may have been the
case anyway, any chance of a common VG position was ruled out
because the Polish government did not consult the other VG
countries on its proposal prior to the summit. Go-it-alone instincts
or preferences carry the risk of missed opportunities for positive
application of the VG framework and can generate bad publicity in
media and official circles and also send negative signals to the
others about how certain parties perceive the group concept.
Because of perceived underlying frailties of even the post-1999
bolstered framework for intergovernmental cooperation, there
have been calls to further institutionalize the VG, including creation
of a secretariat with the ability to independently formulate and propose
(although, of course, not impose) possible VG policies, initiatives,
joint positions, and so on. The hypothetical VG secretariat
could also have an important role in the direction, coordination,
and promotion of the VG actions at the concrete, intraregional
cooperation level, especially as regards the activities of the IVF. At
present the opposition to creating such institutions for VG is firm,
and the creation of a VG secretariat in the foreseeable future should
not be expected.85
Apart from cost issues and the argument that
such a secretariat is unnecessary anyway because the rotating VG
presidency carries out the proposed functions, resistance to institutionalisation
of subregional cooperation initiatives in Central
Europe has been constant throughout the post-1990 period.86
Despite many proposals that surfaced, particularly in the 1995–96
period, and mainly at the instigation of Poland and Slovakia, CEFTA
remained institution-free even though some proposals had a practical
logic. Imbalance in the V4—mainly to do with the relative size
of Poland—has always been a key factor, and it remains the case
that suspicion that certain parties will, when it suits them, look to
use the VG to gain influence in their specific matters of concern will
be hard to eradicate.
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In sum, whether looking at the content or the mechanisms for
the VG’s activity, it seems fairly safe to predict that for the immediate
future, the relationship will be based on cooperation and
acceptance of the principle that coordination is to be the norm
only in cases where it suits all parties and where the EU governance
system allows. Each VG member “has its own priorities
and will, above all, look out for them in the EU . . . this does not
exclude cooperation in areas where the Visegrád Group’s interests
are concurrent, as was the common goal of integration into
NATO. The V4 should be viewed in a realistic, not maximalist,
manner. It should not set too high expectations and must be
elastic in its adjustment to various situations.”87
Conclusions
Although the EU enlargement was certainly a landmark for the
VG, any debates about whether it meant that time could be
called on Visegrád cooperation were premature. The fluid and
evolving nature of Visegrád cooperation, though hinging always
on the Europeanisation process, meant that unlike some other
subregional groupings based purely on functional preaccession
activities—for example, CEFTA, which the VG members were
compelled to leave upon EU accession—the VG was not bound
to reach a natural conclusion of its activities upon accession to
the EU. The advent of actual membership of the EU coupled with
a high-profile failure of VG to achieve coordinated stances at crucial
times in the negotiation end game and in the 2003 IGC raised
the need to debate and reflect on what the VG might and might
not be able to achieve but not whether it could continue. Those
lessons revealed that the VG would not be a platform for a consistent
group position in the EU, and acceptance that postaccession
cooperation in the EU, and indeed on other international
issues, would be essentially flexible.
Although the long-term role of the VG remains uncertain,
there is evidence that for the time being at least it has a relevant
part to play in the expanded EU. The actual points of admission
to NATO and the EU were stages in an ongoing process rather
than some kind of finality, and the postaccession phase of EU
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membership in particular gives scope for cooperative activity. In
fact, it can be argued that whereas cooperation in the EU preaccession
phase was essentially one-dimensional around the membership
issue itself and often compromised by competitive/
individualistic instincts and country-specific aspects of the negotiations,
actual membership and the postaccession phase have
been giving rise to numerous avenues and themes for cooperation.
Some of these were in motion (e.g., cooperation around
Schengen entry) even before the actual accession. Areas where
cooperation is particularly realistic are highlighted in the VG May
2004 declaration, and even for those EU policy areas most commonly
flagged up as ones that would undermine VG cooperation,
the discourse has tended to focus on the macro level and failed
to take into account the disaggregated actuality of EU policies.
Close VG cooperation on EU matters has also been taking place
at a nongovernmental level, and of course, there is the emphasis
on intraregional cooperation that has important contributions to
make, for example, in the promotion and development of areas
particularly useful for the VG economies such as in tourism.
A VG group identity remains discernible and looks set to continue
for the time being. On the basis of the preliminary evidence,
it certainly seems feasible that the VG will be able to
maintain an above-average degree of interaction and consolidate
as a discernible brand joining the family of established groupings
within the EU. The fact that the VG looked to the Benelux Group
and Nordic Cooperation as examples of possible ways forward in
the postenlargement context and continues to actively cooperate
with those groupings has increased the likelihood of a successful
transition from preaccession to postaccession cooperation.
The integrity of the VG will be challenged by individual tendencies,
and whether these and new networks that will become
established in the wider EU, including at the nongovernmental
level, will erode the V4 brand remains to be seen. The essential
message of the May 2004 VG Declaration was, according to
Jaromír Plíšek of the Czech Ministry of Affairs, that the VG has
“passed the test, and it has a future.”88
The next few years should
reveal whether the VG has a chance of developing into a genuine
manifestation of Central European identity or will turn out to be
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just a fixed-term phenomenon dependent after all on common
goals peculiar to the EU and NATO entry.
Notes
1. Report of the Czech Presidency of the Visegrád Group, June to May 2004. Henceforth
abbreviated to “Czech VG Presidency Report 2004.” http://www.visegradgroup.org.
2. Renata Dwan, “Subregional, Regional and Global Levels: Making the Connections,” In G.
Herolf, ed., Subregional Cooperation and Integration in Europe (Stockholm:
Utrikespolitiska Institutet, 2000), 81–100, 81.
3. Anders Bjurner, “European Security at the End of the Twentieth Century: The Subregional
Contribution,” In Andrew Cottey, ed., Subregional Cooperation in the New Europe
(Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1999), 8–20, 8.
4. See especially A. Cottey, ed., Subregional Cooperation in the New Europe (Basingstoke,
U.K.: Macmillan, 2000).
5. Martin Dangerfield, “Regional Cooperation in the Western Balkans: Stabilisation Device or
Integration Policy?” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 5:2(2004): 243–72.
6. Andras Inotai, “Correlations between European Integration and Sub-Regional Cooperation:
Theoretical Background, Experience and Policy Impacts” (Working Paper No. 87 of the
Institute for World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 1997).
7. The Nordic Council is another case of a pioneer group. For example, since 1954 Nordic
citizens have had the right to travel between Nordic countries without passports and also
the right to reside in other Nordic countries without permits.
8. It is important to note that although the complement/preaccession instrument and the
substitute types of regional cooperation can be distinguished in terms of intent, where
economic integration has been the main focus of activity, there has been a commonality
in terms of the form of integration developed and limits that apply. The usual pattern has
been the formation of a free trade area, and although there is potential for intensification
into a single market as the example of those countries that opted for the EEA shows, the
essential point is that the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), the Baltic
Free Trade Agreement (BFTA), the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA), and the
European Economic Area (EEA) are all what Inotai calls follower groups (Inotai,
“Correlations Between European Integration and Sub-Regional Cooperation,” 66). This
means that the level of mutual integration is equivalent to, though does not exceed, what
they already have in place with the EU and therefore integration with the EU has been the
driver of the content of these regional integration exercises one way or another.
9. In the case of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, the development of
an involuntary alternative/substitution subregional cooperation project presupposes
the emergence of some genuine attempts at economic integration or other substantial
forms of multilateral cooperation. Also, the December 2004 electoral triumph of President
Victor Yushchenko in Ukraine, together with the new dynamics on the EU eastern policy
that the May 2004 enlargement has imparted, opened up the debate on Ukraine’s EU
membership prospects despite the apparent limitations (see below) of the European
Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).
10. Apart from the membership perspective already offered by the EU and the relatively
advanced positions of Croatia and Macedonia, the “Wider Europe/New Neighbourhood”
concept proposed by the European Commission in March 2003 and accepted by the June
EU Thessaloniki summit, is instructive here in that the most obvious negative interpretation
of this initiative is that a key purpose of it is to identify those European countries
whose relations with the EU are going to fall short of full membership, even in the longer
term. The “Wider Europe” does not “therefore apply to the Union’s relations with the
remaining candidate countries—Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria—or the Western Balkans”
(European Commission 2003, Com 2003, 104 Final, Brussels, 11 March. http://europa
.eu.int/comm/external_relations/we/doc/com03_104_en.pdf, 4). On the other hand, the
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likely hurdle of EU member state referenda on Turkish accession, as on the agenda in
France, for example, means that Turkey’s status is not so clear-cut, of course.
Furthermore, even the assumption about inevitable Western Balkan entry to the EU may
not be watertight. Deteriorating support for EU membership in West Balkan countries was
becoming more and more evident in 2005, even in Croatia where “the EU increasingly
came to be seen as a bully because of the Gotovina affair, which resulted in a decline of
popular support for EU membership. By late August, only 39 per cent of Croats were in
favour of joining the bloc” (Patrick Moore, “End Note: Is There Life outside the EU for
Western Balkans?” RFE/RL Newsline, Part II, 9:176, 16 September 2005). It will be interesting
to see whether the EU’s October 2005 decision to open at last Croatia’s membership
negotiations will revive popular support in Croatia.
11. See Dangerfield (2002, see note 32, “Subregional Cooperation in Central and Eastern
Europe”) for a detailed analysis of the varied roles of subregional groupings in post–cold
war Europe.
12. CEFTA has generated useful political by-products, however, which were especially valuable
during the “dormant” (1993–98) period of the Visegrád Group (VG). See below for
further discussion of political dimensions of CEFTA cooperation.
13. The Central European Initiative’s (CEI) much looser links to the EU integration process
have not featured direct preaccession activity. CEI’s role has been more one of contributing
to the baseline “Europeanisation” activities laying the foundations for integration
proper, and CEI has also followed the principle that the benefits of the cooperation
should mainly accrue to those states lagging behind in the twin processes of postcommunist
transformation and integration with the EU. A key mission of the CEI has been
to help prevent new dividing lines emerging in Europe as a result of EU and NATO
enlargement processes.
14. Andrew Cottey, “The Visegrád Group,” In Andrew Cottey, ed., Subregional Cooperation
in the New Europe (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1999), 69–89, 70.
15. Declaration on Cooperation between Czech and Slovak Federal, the Republic of Poland,
and the Republic of Hungary in striving for European Integration, Krakow, 15 February
1991. Henceforth abbreviated to “VG declaration 1991.” http://www.visegrádgroup.org.
16. Not forgetting the important role of dissident-intellectual networks during the late communist
era that translated into political cooperation in the post-1990 regimes in which
many of these former dissidents held office.
17. Dwan, “Subregional, Regional and Global Levels: Making the Connections,” 82.
18. Milada Anna Vachudova, “The Visegrád Four: No Alternative to Cooperation?” RFE/RL
Research Report, 2:34(27 August 1993): 38–47.
19. See, for example, Rick Fawn, “The Elusive Defined? Visegrád Co-operation as the
Contemporary Contours of Central Europe,” Geopolitics, 6:1(2001): 47–68.
20. Declaration of prime ministers of the Czech Republic, the Republic of Hungary, the
Republic of Hungary, the Republic of Poland, and the Slovak Republic on cooperation of
VG countries after their accession to the European Union, Prague, 12 May 2004, 1.
Henceforth abbreviated to “VG Declaration 2004.” http://www.visegrádgroup.org.
21. Adrian Hyde-Price, European Security beyond the Cold War (London: Sage/RIIA, 1991), ix.
22. Urban Rusnak, “One Year Experience of the International Visegrád Fund Activities,”
Central European Political Science Review, 2:5(2001): 244–51.
23. Cottey, “The Visegrád Group,” 75.
24. Cottey, “The Visegrád Group,” 74.
25. Cottey, “The Visegrád Group,” 77.
26. Fawn, “The Elusive Defined?” 54.
27. Vachudova, “The Visegrád Four,” 39.
28. Pavol Lukácˇ, “Regional Co-operation in Central Europe at the Beginning of the 21st
Century—New Forms and New Challenges,” in Yearbook of Foreign Policy of the Slovak
Republic (Bratislava: Slovak Institute for International Studies, 2002). The fact that it was
necessary to anchor Slovak-Hungarian relations in an EU-sponsored bilateral treaty
showed the limits of the VG as a security community incubator.
29. Milada Anna Vachudova, “The Division of Central Europe,” The New Presence (Autumn
2001), 12–14, 12.
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30. Cottey, “The Visegrád Group,” 78.
31. Slovenia became a CEFTA member on 1 January 1996.
32. Martin Dangerfield, “Subregional Cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe: Support or
Substitute for the ‘Return to Europe?’” In Cameron Ross, ed., Perspectives on the
Enlargement of the European Union (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2002): 95–118, 106.
33. See Cottey, “The Visegrád Group,” for further details of ongoing bilateral cooperation during
the VG’s inactive phase.
34. Prague Post, 7 June 1995. http://www.praguepost.com.
35. Jirˇi Pehe, “Post-Zieleniec Policies Offer Hope for Change,” Prague Post, 12 November
1997. http://www.praguepost.com.
36. Matthew Rhodes, “Post-Visegrád Cooperation in East-Central Europe,” East European
Quarterly 23:1(1999): 51–67, 59.
37. By 1998 Romania had joined CEFTA, and Bulgaria was on the verge of doing so. Along with
Slovakia, both of them had been excluded from the first group of post-communist
countries to open EU accession negotiations in 1998.
38. Fawn, “The Elusive Defined?” 62.
39. For obvious reasons it is not possible to go into detailed description of the cooperative
activities, meetings, sessions, and so on, but interested readers can easily access more
detail by consulting any of the recent VG presiding countries’ annual reports via
http://www.visegradgroup.org.
40. See Contents of Visegrád cooperation as approved by the prime ministers summit in
Bratislava, 14 May 1999. Henceforth abbreviated to “Contents of Visegrád cooperation
1999.” A budget of 240,000 Euros exists for joint promotion of the Visegrád territory as a distinct
tourist area. Marketing activities include joint presentations at overseas tourism fairs in
the main target markets—currently the United States, Japan, China, Brazil, and India.
41. The annual VG work plan sets the agenda for the year ahead and plans the schedule for
VG ministerial meetings and expert consultations.
42. Early projects included, for example, “International Film Festival for Children and Youth,”
“Seminar of the Multiregional International Business Program—Central and Eastern
European Countries,” “Improvement of Biomedical Engineering in V4 Countries,” and
“The Conference of Visegrád Youth.” Scholarships to cover the cost of intra-VG student
mobility were introduced in 2003.
43. David Vaughan, “Central European Cooperation Goes into a New Gear,” Radio Prague (8
August 2000). http://www.radio.cz/en/article/101698, 1.
44. Patrycia Bukalska, “A New Visegrád Group in the European Union—Possibilities and
Opportunities for Development,” Centre for Eastern Studies Policy Briefs (June 2003), 3.
45. Rusnak, “One Year Experience of the International Visegrád Fund Activities,” 249.
46. The annual budget was increased to 3 million Euros at the suggestion of the 2003/4 Czech
VG presidency. Each VG member contributes 750,000 Euros.
47. The V4 each take turns to hold the rotating annual presidency of the VG that runs from
June to May. The current presidency (2005–6) is held by Hungary.
48. Financial Times, 23–24 February 2002.
49. Lukácˇ, “Regional Co-operation in Central Europe,” 72.
50. Rob Cameron, “Visegrád PMs Meet in Czech Republic Ahead of Crucial IGC Meeting in
Rome,” Radio Prague, 1 October 2003, 1. http://www.radio.cz/en/article/45821.
51. Piotr Koslewski and Pawel Krzeczunowicz, eds., Poland’s foreign Policy: Continuation or
a Break with the Past? (Warsaw: Stefan Batory Foundation, 2004), 21. Lack of VG consensus
was also evident on the question of whether the Constitution preamble should
include reference to Christianity, again with Polish preferences not getting VG back up,
and also on the question of minority issues as per Hungarian views.
52. Koslewski and Pawel Krzeczunowicz, Poland’s Foreign Policy, 21.
53. Vachudova, “The Division of Central Europe,” 12.
54. Vachudova, “The Division of Central Europe,” 14.
55. Poland’s engagement in Iraq and taking of the lead in the EU’s mediation in the Ukrainian
2004 presidential election crisis would be seen as evidence of these “cosmopolitan” ten-
dencies.
56. Vachudova, “The Division of Central Europe,” 14.
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666 The Visegrád Group
57. A long-standing suspicion has been that Polish motives toward subregional cooperation
initiatives in central Europe have mainly been less to do with ideas about the intrinsic
value of such cooperation and more about using subregional groupings as instruments to
“amplify” Poland’s voice and influence abroad.
58. Jirˇi Pehe, “Is the End of Visegrád in the offing?” 18 February 2004. http://www.pehe.cz/
Clanky/2004/02-18-visegrad.htm.
59. David Kral, Profile of the Visegrád Countries in the Future of Europe Debate (Prague:
EUROPEUM Institute for European Policy, September, 2003), 2. http://www.europactiv.com?
Article?tcmuri=tcm:29-117205-16&type=Analysis.
60. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, “Government Information on the Polish
Foreign Policy in the Year 2004 Presented at the Session of the Sejm on 21 January 2004 by the
Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz” (2004), 21.
http://www.msz.gov.pl/Government,information,on,the,Polish,foreign,policy,in,the,year,2004,
presented,at,the,session,of,the,Sejm,on,,January,21,,2004,by,the,Minister,of,Foreign,Affairs,of,
the,Republic,of,Poland,,Wlodzimierz,Cimoszewicz.,2140.html
61. 2004 VG Declaration, 1.
62. Full details of the dimensions of VG cooperation as set out in the May 2004 VG Declaration
are available at http://www.visegradgroup.org.
63. Jirˇi Vykoukal, “The End of Visegrád Cooperation, or ‘Don’t Kill the Messenger,”’
Visegrad.info, 27 March 2004, 2. http://www.visegrad.info/index.php?ID=nazor&IDt=12.
64. The Economist, 16 April 2005.
65. Radio Prague, 3 March 2004.
66. Joint Declaration of the prime ministers of the V4 countries on the EU, Kazimierz Dolny,
10 June 2005, 1. Henceforth abbreviated to “VG Joint Declaration June 2005.” Available at
http://www.visegrádgroup.org.
67. For example, Kral, Profile of the Visegrád Countries in the Future of Europe Debate, and
Bukalska, “A New Visegrád Group in the European Union.”
68. VG Declaration 2004, 3.
69. Declaration of Visegrád Ministers of the Interior, 19 July 2004, 1. Henceforth abbreviated
to “VG Interior Ministers’ Declaration 2004.” Available at http://www.visegrádgroup.org.
70. Schengen issues are one of many areas of cooperation between the VG and the Benelux
Group, including the transfer of experience and know-how from the latter to the former.
For details, see “Fields of cooperation between the Visegrád countries and the Benelux
(List of decisions for the meeting in Bratislava on the 15–16 February 2005)”.
71. VG Interior Ministers’ Declaration 2004, 1. The joint submission commitment is subject
to certain conditions—for details of them, see VG Interior Ministers’ Declaration, 2004.
72. Hana Danˇková, “Regional cooperation in the European Union—Benelux and Visegrád,”
VISEGRÁD.info, 2003. http://www.visegrad.info/tisk.php?tabulka=clanek&ID=30.
73. Use of the V4 cooperation structures to formulate policy inputs to the intra-EU debates
on Eastern policy has included not only regular consultations between foreign ministers
and other foreign ministry officials but also major V4 seminars on this topic (e.g., in
Bratislava in November 2004) involving experts from the major foreign policy research
institutes/think tanks. On the International Visegrád Fund (IVF), the internal sphere of VG
cooperation should be consolidated by the 2003/4 Czech Presidency’s instigation of discussions
and proposals to adapt and upgrade the IVF to the new conditions of EU membership
which will make access to EU funds to support and extend the scale of IVF
projects more possible and extend IVF projects more into cross-border cooperation
between the V4 and East and South East European neighbours. For example modest contributions
to development of relations with countries in the EU’s new border zone are
being made by the fact that VG scholarships are now available to incoming students from
South East and Eastern European countries including Belarus and Ukraine.
74. Grzegorz Gromadzki, Oleksandr Sushko, Marius Vahl, Kataryna Wolczuk, Roman Wolczuk,
eds., More Than Neighbours: The Enlarged European Union and the Ukraine (Warsaw:
Stefan Batory Foundation, 2004), 16.
75. Joint Declaration of the Prime Ministers of the V4 Countries on the Ukraine, Kazimierz
Dolny, June 10, 2005, 1. Henceforth abbreviated to “VG Joint Declaration Ukraine 2005.”
http://www.visegrádgroup.org.
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76. This lobbying activity has been via the auspices of the Confederation of the Food and
Drink Industries of the European Union (CIAA). I am grateful to Lladislav Cervenka, vice
president of the Federation of the Food and Drink Industries of the Czech republic, for
advising me of this.
77. Mateusz Falkowski, Patrycia Bukalska, Grzegorz Gromadski, “Yes to Visegrád,” Analyses
and Opinion, 16 (November 2003): 2.
78. VG Declaration 2004, 7.
79. The Nordic Council also includes some non-EU members, for example, Iceland, Norway,
and Greenland.
80. Financial Times, 16 February 2005.
81. Financial Times, 13 January 2005.
82. Financial Times, 14 February 2005.
83. Martin Brusis, “Prospects of Visegrád Cooperation in an Enlarged European Union,” in
Marek. Št’astny, ed., Visegrád Countries in an Enlarged Trans-Atlantic Community
(Bratislava: Institute for Public Affairs, 2002): 67-84, 67.
84. Financial Times, 19 December 2005.
85. Although some VG members—Hungary most notably in the post-1999 period—have
been ardently more anti-institutionalist than others, the author conducted interviews with
several of the national VG coordinators in the course of this research, and this was the
basic message coming from of all of them.
86. With the exception of the CEI, which has a secretariat in Trieste financed by the Italian
government.
87. Bukalska, “A New Visegrád Group in the European Union—Possibilities and Opportunities
for Development,” 18.
88. Jaromír Plíšek, “Visegrád has passed the test, and it has a future,” Visegrad.info, 21
October 2004. http://www.visegrad.info/index.php?ID=nazor&IDt=30, 1.
East European Politics and Societies 667
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