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Opinion
February 16, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 25
debate on the future of the EU has remained a purely negative one of resistance to a two-speed Europe and any cut in cohesion funds.
In fact it is hard to point to many issues in recent years where the V4 has played a key role in the EU, apart from its negative opposition to migrants. The fact that the V4 made so much of the EU Commission’s agreement to probe the allegedly worse food brand quality in the Eastern member states shows the limited range of its vision.
V4’s two main achievements have been raising the issues of energy security and the Eastern Part- nership, says Vladimir Bilcik of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association, but these are now endangered. “Now we are losing on both fronts,” he told bne IntelliNews. "They are no longer the focus of the EU because of the self-absorption of Poland and Hungary, and the lack of V4 unity to push this agenda.”
This failure is also because of the V4’s second fundamental weakness: its lack of allies. To achieve anything inside the EU it would have to work closely with other countries, and to engage in give and take, something Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s Poland for one seems to have forgotten how to do. It is far easier just to rail against Brussels. This failure could be especially costly as the bloc starts to discuss the next budget framework.
“It is not enough to send bombs to Brussels – it is not enough to be right, you need to persuade them,” Petr Kolar, a former Czech deputy foreign minister, told an Institute for Politics and Society (IPS) seminar in Prague in October. “It is not good to blackmail our partners.”
Central Europe used to be seen as a natural part of a northern free market bloc led by the UK.
However, the UK is currently obsessed with its exit from the EU – its loss is a big blow to the V4 – and even the now largely centre-right Scandinavian and Baltic governments have little to say to Cen- tral Europe’s rightwing authoritarians.
Elsewhere the populist revolution has been halted at the gates, though the Italian general election
in March will represent another big test. Whether there is a great deal in common though between the Five Star Movement of comedian Beppe
Grillo and Kaczynski’s Catholic and authoritarian Law and Justice Party is questionable. Central European populism remains a fundamentally dif- ferent beastfrom its Western European variant.
Even the neighbouring Balkan member states are more interested in moving closer towards the co- reof the bloc – in particular by escaping from the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, entering the Schengen area, and adopting the euro – rath- er than joining together with the EU’s bad boys in a Polish Intermarium naughty corner.
Orban has welcomed Austria as a new ally fol- lowing the entry of the far right Freedom Party into a coalition with the People’s Party. Austria is now likely to take a tougher stance on migration but it is not going to join the V4, as Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache has suggested. If anything cross-border co-operation might dete- riorate because the Slavkov Triangle format be- tween the once Social Democrat Czechia, Austria and Slovakia may wither away.
“It is going to be hard to forge serious co-op- eration between Austria and Hungary despite Austria’s newfound fascination with Hungary’s mafia state,” Christian Kvorning Lassen of the Europeum think-tank told bne IntelliNews at the IPS seminar. “It will be hard for Austria to balance Hungary and its more valuable partners in West- ern Europe, and it will prioritise those.”
People’s Party premier Sebastian Kurz, who has taken charge of EU policy, has reiterated that Aus- tria will remain Western-facing. Germany is likely to remain Vienna’s key ally. He has also backed the EU’s sanctions against Poland for hollowing out democratic checks and balances, and has already stressed that Austria will argue that EU aid to Central and Eastern Europe should be cut in the next budget round.