Let’s Not Abandon Central Europe

Czech foreign policy needs less talk about the Visegrad Group and more bold relations with its Central and Eastern European partners.

After Viktor Orbán’s landslide victory in the Hungarian parliamentary elections and his torpedoing of Western efforts to help Ukraine, calls for leaving the Visegrad Group have intensified in the Czech Republic. But this is not enough. We need more than just a decision on whether to be part of a group with Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.

In recent years, Czech Central European politics has been very much reduced to the existence of the Visegrad Group. During the last migration crisis, some politicians fell in love with it. They saw it as a bulwark against both refugees and the efforts of European institutions to redistribute them among member states. Critics and supporters of Visegrad cooperation have exaggerated its importance. Either the V4 was seen as an omnipotent battering ram against the ‘Brussels dictate’ or, on the contrary, as a union that would push us somewhere into the steppe or Siberia. Neither was true.

In fact, the interests of the four countries in this alliance have become increasingly divergent. Moreover, at the highest political level, Visegrad lacked a proper positive agenda, but there was always plenty of hurtful talk.