Visegrad Group

The Visegrad Group (Slovak: Vyšehradská skupina; Hungarian: Visegrádi Együttműködés; Polish: Grupa Wyszehradzka; Czech: Visegrádská skupina), also known as V4, is an alliance of four Central European countries —Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic— in force since 1991.

History

Chairmen of the Visegrad Group in Budapest (2003).

The Visegrad Group has a historical precedent in the Visegrád Pact of 1335, when King Charles Robert of Hungary called a meeting in the Visegrad Palace (Hungarian: Visegrád) to the king Casimir III of Poland and the Czech King John I of Bohemia. Back then, the three kings agreed to a non-aggression pact and mutual collaboration for a better political and economic relationship.

The modern V4 group originated at a summit of the heads of state and government of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland on February 15, 1991: Václav Havel, for Czechoslovakia; Lech Wałęsa, the President of the Republic of Poland; and József Antall, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Hungary. The meeting took place 656 years after the one organized by Carlos Roberto of Hungary in the same city of Visegrad, in order to establish cooperation between these three States (four, with the subsequent division of Czechoslovakia in 1993) to accelerate the process of European integration, advancing as a group towards the westernization of their economies and their institutions after decades under the influence of the Soviet Union.

Three ideas characterize these countries:

1. I reject the European Union as the embodiment of a bureaucratic entity that denies the sovereignty of the member States; in the face of European integration, they defend a strengthening of the nation-States.
2. I reject immigration as they act as a lobby for more restrictive community migration policies. Following the 2015 migration crisis, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria and Hungary formed a “anti-immigration”rejecting and even failing to meet the quotas for the distribution of refugees established by Brussels.
3. I reject the full functioning of the rule of law. The European Commission led Poland to the European Union Court of Justice to protect the independence of the judiciary. Hungary has developed legislation on very restrictive foreign NGOs and both Poland and the country have legislation that runs counter to the rights of the LGBT community. The ideology they share is the national-populism that includes traditionalist elements and accentuated Catholicism.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has led to the greatest discrepancies between the member countries of the group, mainly due to the position of the Hungarian government of Víctor Orbán, which practices economic and political closeness with Putin.