There were no harsh words, nor were there frowns between the heads of state of the Visegrád Group at this month’s meeting in Budapest. There was also no joint statement issued at the meeting, which showed little hope for a revitalization of the group.

The neighbors – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland – seem to be more caught up in their past than thinking of future cooperation. A statement that was to have been prepared by Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski was, according to Czech President Václáv Klaus, not signed because a sentence in it supported the Polish-German call to reassess the resettlement and persecution of ethnic minorities in the 20th century.

“During the negotiations I suggested that it might be better if [Hungarian President] Mádl gave a summary of the topics discussed in the meeting rather than to argue about the exact wording of the statement,” Klaus was reported to have said to Czech news agency CTK.

Meager results of the last meeting of the Visegrád Group are not only disappointing, because there was little progress made in what was supposed to be a meeting to redefine the cooperation, but also because the roots of its failure are again planted in the past.

The Visegrád Group may be dissolved unless member countries focus on cooperation

The decrees, passed by the provisional Czechoslovak Parliament in the first year after World War II, contain a number of controversial provisions, including the legal confiscation of German and Hungarian property. The issue almost led to a split in the Visegrád Group in 2002, when former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lashed out at the Czech Republic’s refusal to reassess the decrees, saying they were not in accordance with the imminent EU-membership of the group. Another source of tension was Hungary’s Status Law, which similarly did not go over well, particularly with its Slovak neighbors.

These kinds of spats have often sparked tension within the group, but they were never quite enough to end the basis of cooperation. In the coming months, however, the Visegrád Group will find itself transferred to a completely different dimension, with the approaching EU accession of its members.

The original task of the loosely knit group, founded in 1991, was to facilitate the accession process. It appears, however, that the Visegrád Group will soon have to either find a new role or fade into insignificance. And if no new forms of real cooperation are established, even small outbursts or internal tensions might unceremoniously wear away at the organization.

There is no question that the relatively poor new members of the EU must find allies amongst other member states if they don’t want to be overwhelmed in the negotiations for EU funds – extremely important in much-needed regional development projects.
As Pavol Lukác, analyst of the journal Slovakian Foreign Policy Affairs put it, these relatively “small countries might be pushed from the geographic periphery of Europe to peripheral influence in Europe.” The question is whether they will cooperate with each other only on a case-by-case basis or whether the Visegrád Group might become an enduring alliance similar to that of the Benelux or Scandinavian states.

Tamás Tóth, spokesman of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, thinks the Visegrád Group cooperation within the EU will focus on regional interests such as infrastructure development, environmental issues, and may be joined by ad-hoc members like Slovenia or Austria in specific cases.

“All four members have committed themselves to the continuing existence of the Visegrád Group, but no one is seriously considering making it a formal institution,” he said.

Slovakia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Eduard Kukan professed a similar view in a 2002 speech, saying that the attraction of cooperation with the Visegrád Group is in the fact it is initiated by those involved, and not the result of some obligation or other.

The Visegrád Group has never been big on formal ties. Since its inception, it has only established one institution, the Visegrád Fund, which promotes ties in the cultural and scientific fields – all from a rather limited budget. It was only in 1999 when an effort was made to reinvigorate the organization that a declaration of the group’s aims was signed. It would seem that the politicians’ relatively timid interest is mirrored by the countries’ electorate’s. According to a survey of the Warsaw-based Institute of Public Affairs, conducted in the four member states last year, some 8.2 percent of Hungarians felt there is no need for cooperation between the Visegrád countries at all. Only the Polish interviewees considered ties with the other Central European countries to be closer than with EU members.

Mateusz Falkowski, author of the study, thinks that Poles and Slovaks are the most cooperative. “Hungarians and Czechs are more individualistic,” he says. Many analysts point out that some of the members feel closer to the West than the East.

“A certain disregard toward eastern neighbors persists in some Visegrád countries’ foreign policy,” he said. The Visegrád countries, with a long history of striving to “rejoin” Europe, have kept their focus fixed firmly on current EU-members. Following the systemic changes, and with the development of the EU accession process, the relationship developed into a competitive form, for foreign capital from the start of the transition processes. EU accession talks further enhanced rivalries between the countries. While these are issues keep the countries apart, their economic ties are also too insufficient to pull them together.

Trade between group members is almost negligible, with most countries seeing around 90 percent of their imports and exports going toward other parts of the world. An exception is significant trade ties between the Czechs and Slovaks, but even that shows a downward trend.

Ironically, the Visegrád Group seems merely to be considered an economic unit from the outside. Multinational companies tend to plant their regional headquarters in one of the countries. Few regionally-owned companies, however, envision extensive regional expansion, largely due to a lack of capital.
Slovak analyst Barbara Gábelová, who studied the Visegrád Group, says there are indications that the group was more of a perception from the outside, than from the inside during its history.

“How other countries, including the EU and neighboring states perceived the Visegrád Group, played a big part in bringing together its members and influenced the cooperation greatly.” She says this is also demonstrated by the fact that Slovenia, Lithuania, Austria, the Ukraine and Romania have at times showed an active interest in joining the organization.

However, redefining Visegrád cooperation within the EU might prove more difficult than it seems. The latest unsuccessful meeting, which was expected to deal with the organization’s future, may well be a sign of this. As EU negotiations wind down, each country has pursued its own agenda – occasionally even selling out from established agreements. Shortly before heading off to the Intergovernmental Conference to discuss the future of Europe, the Visegrád Group declined to join forces and lobby as a political entity.

Even when the Visegrád Group fulfills the role it was initially created to play, politicians in the region question its existence. The most notable of these was former Czech Prime Minister and current President Vaclav Klaus, who now claims that the Visegrád Group needs to find concrete projects to justify its continuation following EU accession.

“Pretending that Hungary is a more important partner that two other neighboring countries [Germany and Austria] is a little artificial for me,” he told Gazeta Wyborcza.

Whether the Visegrád countries can transform themselves into an alliance to be reckoned with inside the EU remains to be seen

Yet many analysts insist that the Visegrád Group is a natural grouping. For example, the members are all keen allies of the United States, which also happens to be one of the largest investors in the region. This came to the forefront during the conflict in Iraq when Central European countries took a stance with the US-UK alliance, in the face of the Franco-German led fraction.
There is also no doubt that these countries could together be a force even within the EU: the Visegrád Group together has the same number of votes as the powerful pairing of France and Germany. They could mold the European Commission’s policy toward the next set of potential entrants, the neighbors of Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. It could also act as a bridge between the EU and other post-Soviet countries. Tamás Novák, analyst with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for World Economics, thinks that there is a virtual plethora of beneficial roles the Visegrád Group could take within the EU, but unless the countries resign themselves to long-term cooperation, they will remain mere lost visions.

“All of the countries have consistently placed their short term interests ahead of common long-term goals,” says Novák. “This is possibly because there is a lack of solidarity within the group because of historical and current affairs.”

Novák believes, however, that EU accession might change relations between members of the group more than with the EU.

“Members of the EU have been trading with the Visegrád Group countries for a long time, but there is a great opportunity for growth in Central Europe.”

He says he believes that it will take a few years before Visegrád Group members realize they can gain more support and funds from other European countries if they act as a solid group.

But before their cooperation gets better, it will probably get worse.