Page 56 - bne_Magazine_March_2018

56 Opinion
bne March 2018
up to, in areas such as fossil fuels, nuclear power production, weapons manufacturing or projects where significant human rights violations are possible.
Reporting on which projects ECAs finance and why, as well as the results of monitoring project implementation, is another step towards ensuring the best value for money from these investments. While ECAs in central and eastern Europe argue that they are obliged to report to their governments and the European Commission, these reports are in practice more
a formality with no real bearing on future operations.
There is however real potential in reporting to make ECAs improve their operations. The European Commission should
VISEGRAD:
Europe’s axis is shifting West not East
Robert Anderson in Prague
Viktor Orban, the Hungarian strongman, has hailed 2018 as the year Central Europe will start to finally punch above its weight inside the European Union.
He has claimed that the region’s growing economic and political self-confidence is attracting admirers across Europe, shifting the EU’s axis eastwards so that cooperation between Germany and the Visegrad Group is now becoming at least as important as cooperation between Germany and France. In particular he has welcomed Austria’s new government as an ally and as a possible harbinger that the tide against Western European federalists is turning.
This fantasy firstly ignores the widening division between Czechia and Slovakia on the one hand, and Hungary and Poland on the other. 2018 is likely instead to be the year the Visegrad Group becomes more and more moribund, preventing Orban’s crusade against Western Europe’s out of touch liberal elite from even getting off the ground.
At a panel debate in Prague in early December on the future of Central Europe organised by the Aspen Institute, the gaping fractures in the V4 were impossible to ignore.
www.bne.eu
for example revise the reporting areas and assess whether the activities of ECAs are in line with EU policy objectives in other areas, such as foreign policy, development and climate change. The commission will need to be more active in this respect. A complaint from civil society organisations to the European Ombudsman is pending about the lack of oversight by the commission of ECAs. There are hopes that a positive ruling could mean improvements across the board, for ECAs and the exporters they support.
Dan Heuer is project co-ordinator at the Centre for Transport and Energy/CEE Bankwatch Network based in Prague, Czech Republic.
New premiers Andrej Babis (left) and Sebastian Kurz (right) will prioritise links with the EU's core.
Moderator Michal Zantovsky, head of the Vaclav Havel Library and a former Czech centre-right politician, challenged Fidesz deputy Zsolt Nemeth to justify Orban’s hollowing out of Hungarian democracy, asking “Are we still on the same side?” Nemeth at first refused to answer and then brushed off the question with cold disdain. Representatives of Fidesz or Poland’s ruling Truth and Justice party are already a rare sight at Prague conferences – it is not hard to see why.
The united front of the V4 was always exaggerated
anyway, both by Hungary and Poland (to bulk up their own significance), and by Western media, which as always prefer to hype a sexy story rather than tease out the little known region’s complexities.
Just because Orban regards himself as the V4’s spokesman does not mean he is. The Hungarian leader speaks good English and is witty, and therefore tends to overshadow his fellow V4 premiers. Czech and Slovak leaders could help themselves by beginning to voice their differences with their neighbourhood populists at V4 press conferences, rather than shuffling their feet or nodding along, as they did at their Budapest summit last month.