Bottom Line
- As 2024 began, the Visegrád 4 (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) was totally bereft of consensus on the most important European security challenge of the past eighty years.
- The Russian invasion of Ukraine exacerbated existing tensions and created new fissures within the group, particularly between Warsaw and Budapest.
- Absent a major change of policy by Hungary regarding the war, Visegrád 4 unity will remain in tatters for the foreseeable future.
When the Russian army rolled into Ukraine in late February of 2022, it was clear that the invasion would create serious political and security repercussions for countries across the region. In addition to the immediate threat to Ukraine’s independence, leaders in the West worried, rightly so, about the potential for Russian aggression against other allies in Central and Eastern Europe, including several North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) frontline states.
While Western fears of expanded Russian military adventure have yet to be realized, the Kremlin’s “special military operation” against its western Slavic neighbor has created other unforeseen consequences in the center of Europe. Chief among these reverberations is growing disunity in the Visegrád 4 (V4) group comprising Poland, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Hungary. Because of starkly divergent views on how to respond to Moscow’s revanchist policies, substantive collaboration among the V4 states is now at an historic low.
Three Decades of Visegrád
The group’s founding declaration, signed in February of 1991 in Visegrád, Hungary, by the presidents of the then Czechoslovak Federal Republic, Poland, and Hungary, explicitly called for these states to collectively jettison their totalitarian past and obligatory obeisance to the Kremlin. Thus, in the early 1990s the group embarked on joint efforts to “return to Europe” as future members of both the European Union (EU) and NATO.
One of the founders of the group, Czechoslovak President Václav Havel, planted the seeds for the V4 in a speech to the Polish Sejm on January 25, 1990, in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 revolutions that toppled communist governments throughout the former Warsaw Pact region. In his remarks,
Havel proclaimed:
Emerging from the poisonous social, economic, moral, and political detritus of forty years of communist rule, the group expanded to four with the birth of the Slovak Republic in 1993. Despite fits and starts caused by sometimes contrastive politics, the V4 successfully collaborated during the 1990s to achieve the core raison d’etre of its founding fathers, membership in both NATO in 1999 (the Slovak Republic joined in 2004), and the EU in 2004. The irony, therefore, is particularly poignant that this Central European coalition of states, founded on a desire to collectively break with their Moscow-centric politics of the post World War-II era, now finds itself fraying at the seams over opposing views on Russia.
Common Ground in Defiance of the European Union
Since joining NATO and the EU, the Visegrád countries frequently found common ground in resistance to mandates from Brussels. In response to the European migrant crisis of 2015, the V4 manifest strong opposition to the EU’s common immigration policy, channeling the ethnocentric, often xenophobic rhetoric espoused at the time by many of the regions’ leading politicians. Furthermore, during 2010–2020, the group found common ground in their seeming disdain for many of the EU’s rule of law norms, particularly regarding judicial independence, freedom of the press, support to the LGBTQ community, and respect for the rights of political opponents. Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS), Hungary’s Fidesz, Slovakia’s Smer, and the Czech Republic’s ANO party all actively opposed well-established EU rule of law standards, resulting in the
denial of massive funding by Brussels to both Warsaw and Budapest in 2022.
During the same decade, two of the four Visegrád members were on generally good terms with Moscow, with only Warsaw holding a consistently strident, anti-Russian view. Bratislava, under an earlier administration of the current populist prime minister, Robert Fico, broadly pursued a middle course between Moscow and Brussels. Nevertheless, Fico’s populist rule from 2012 to 2018 ended with massive anti-government street demonstrations as a result of the murder of a young journalist and his partner, who were investigating corruption at the highest level of the prime minister’s party.
In Prague, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, by and large, maintained positive working relations with the Kremlin while the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, unapologetically pandered to Moscow, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence of Russian military intelligence involvement in the
2014 sabotage of an arms depot in Vrbe’tice. Despite the overwhelming evidence of Russian malfeasance in the case, Zeman sided with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence services.
Further south along the Danube, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán and his Fidesz party used the 2015 migrant crisis to strengthen the regime’s control over the courts, education, and the press, in the process following Putin’s autocratic playbook to the letter. Along the way, much like in Slovakia and Poland, Fidesz clamped down on the LGBTQ community and “otherized” immigrants and non-Hungarians as part of populist efforts to “cleanse” society. Furthermore, Orbán made a strategic choice to tie Hungary’s energy security to Moscow.
War Highlights Strategic Differences
The Kremlin’s attempted blitzkrieg on Kyiv in 2022 sent political shockwaves, as well as millions of Ukrainian refugees, westward. This provided ample impetus for a more cohesive Central European stance. Much to Brussels’ chagrin and Moscow’s delight, the conflict has instead escalated tensions within the group.
Warsaw, Prague, and Bratislava all shouldered significant financial and social burdens in their respective embrace of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict. In fact, the three countries have been among the leaders, along with Germany, the Baltic states, and Scandinavian countries, in the amount of
bilateral aid to Kyiv, including the costs of supporting refugees. Noticeably absent from the list of nations sacrificing for the benefit of Ukraine is Hungary, where, as of September 2023,
fewer refugees had settled than in Montenegro.
When considering V4 military aid to Ukraine, the chasm between Hungary and the rest is even much deeper than on the humanitarian side. According to statistics from the
Kiel Institute for the World Economy, between January 24, 2022, and October 31, 2023, Poland (3 billion Euros), the Czech Republic (1.1 billion Euros), and Slovakia (700 million Euros) provided critical military support to Kyiv. Conversely, Hungary did not make the list of top thirty-one donors.
As the war progressed, populist and pro-Kremlin forces throughout the region used the conflagration to sow discord within the V4 states. These internal political struggles played out in recent elections in all four member countries.
Recent Elections Deepen Fissures
The first post-invasion polls in the region occurred in April 2022 in Hungary where the incumbent Fidesz party cruised to an impressive victory, cementing Orbán’s fourth term as prime minister. Critical to Orbán’s campaign was his stance on the war, painting Fidesz as the “peace” party and refusing Hungarian military support to Kyiv. Orbán went so far as to mock Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in his victory speech. In effect, Hungary
chose cheap energy from Russia—at the time of the elections Russia was providing 90 percent of Hungary’s gas and 65 percent or its oil—over solidarity with his V4, NATO, and the EU colleagues.
