Visegrád central European cooperation marks 20th birthday

Twenty years ago today, a new Central European regional grouping emerged from a meeting of three prime ministers at an historic site overlooking the Danube in Hungary. The immediate goal was to step up cooperation as they moved to hitch their newly freed countries as soon as possible to the European Union and the West. But the Visegrád three, later four, has proved its staying power even after those goals were achieved.

Prime ministers from the Visegrád Four meet counterparts from Germany, Austria and Ukraine in Bratislava, photo: CTK

Czechoslovak president Václav Havel, Poland’s Lech Walesa and Hungary’s Jozsef Antall would not have missed the symbolism of the site as they penned the Visegrád agreement on February 15, 1991. Six hundred and fifty six years earlier the Kings of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland met to discuss pressing issues, including how to bypass a commercial stranglehold exerted by Vienna. But the lesson of the following decades and centuries was that central European cooperation was often at best sporadic and at worst quickly dissolved into rivalry and conflict.

So, the original leaders might well have been surprised by the scene today in Bratislava as prime ministers from the Visegrád Four ―Slovakia and the Czech Republic replacing the former Czechoslovakia― are joined by counterparts from Germany, Austria and Ukraine for what might be termed a working celebration.

After a hesitant and sometimes shaky start, not helped by former Czech prime minister Václav Klaus’ contempt for the new creation, the regional grouping has flourished even after the original goals were achieved with EU and NATO membership.

For Vít Dostál, an analyst with the Prague-based foreign affairs thinktank, the Association for International Studies, the Visegrád coopeation was given a new boost by EU membership in 2004.

“I think that the Visegrád countries have many things to share. The fact that all of the Visegrad Four countries are members of the European Union strengthens its role because the Visegrád four has found its role in European politics and it works now as a kind of lobby or pressure group within the EU.”

He says that the four countries frequently vote the same way when major EU decisions are taken and have come to recognise that union is force when the going gets tough in Brussels. Under the current voting system, the four countries have the same voting weight as the traditional EU frontrunners, Germany and France, though still fall short of being a blocking majority. And they have proved that together they can force concessions from bigger, richer countries.

But does the loose, group of four still have a future or should it seek to widen its membership? Vít Dostál again:

“There were questions whether to accept Slovenia which was willing to join the Visegrád Four or whether after the ‘Orange Revolution’ in the Ukraine whether to accept Ukraine into this cooperation. Well, I do not think this is possible.”

For him, while not a finished work, the Visegrád Four works as it is, inviting other countries from the Baltics, Balkans or immediate neighbours to attend meetings when relevant. With Europe’s reforming Lisbon treaty shifting more power to big countries, he says the central European club will have even more reason to exist in the future.