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The roots of today’s Visegrád cooperation
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According to GLOBS Magazine, the cooperation of the Visegrád countries, looking back on great traditions, is probably one of the most interesting partnerships in the world.
Even the name is special, since it was purposely named after the city lying on the coast of the Danube, north of Buda. This was the place where the Hungarian, Czech and Polish kings met in 1335. (In that time, Slovakia’s territory was under the control of the Kingdom of Hungary, meaning that the meeting covered all the four present member states). The Roman Catholic countries located between the Baltic Sea and the Adrian Sea agreed that they would communicate their economic and political needs together to the western powers (primarily to the neighbouring Holy Roman Empire) and eastern Orthodox or Muslim powers, which mostly signified the framing of a joint trade and customs policy in practice. So we already agreed back then that we would go together without separate deals with outsiders. Following the change of regime in 1989-1990, the leaders of the Central European region (József Antall, Václav Havel and Lech Walesa) had exact visions about how they wanted to lead out their countries from the institutional fetters of the Soviet rule, so they wound up the Warsaw Pact in the 1990s and quit the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Moreover, the states who once cooperated in Visegrád knew that besides introducing the market economy model in their countries, they also wanted to change their economic relations with the rest of the world based on the European principles and practices. They initiated so called Europe Agreements – more specifically, it is a type of free trade and economic cooperation relations – with the EU and signed agreements about the withdrawal of the Soviet troops. (When evaluating their result, it must be taken into consideration that the communist regime – then yearned to be reformed by the Soviet Union and Gorbachev – only collapsed in the second part of 1991.) That was when the three great statesmen decided to re-establish the historic Visegrád cooperation to achieve joint goals in the economic and geopolitical vacuum – since they could only join the EU and NATO later.
The memorandum of association was signed in February of 1991 – at that time the countries were still hosted the Soviet troops – and the institutional cooperation was launched immediately. Since the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993, the Visegrád Group has four members.
The power and attractiveness of the cooperation is demonstrated well by the fact that many of the neighbouring, west-oriented countries wanted to join them, but it was always turned down by the founders. At the same time, the so called Visegrád+ political cooperation is focused on a more and more extended cooperation – most intensely with the countries of West Balkan and the Eastern Partnership. Therefore, the Visegrád Group fought arm-in-arm for their integration goals, such as a strong cooperation with NATO – as part of the Partnership for Peace programme until the admission in 1999 (Slovakia was only admitted in 2004) – and the accession to the European Union following the successful partnership agreements to the start of the negotiations in 1998 and the accession in 2004.
The Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) was worked out and enacted right in the beginning of the cooperation in order to boost the failed trade between the member countries.
This didn’t only have a good influence on the traditionally state-owned or nationally owned companies’ product and service trade, but it also launched prosperous trade and production cooperation between the regional subsidiary companies of the foreign direct investments (FDI) and their other interests in the countries. This was accompanied by a quick visa-liberalisation in the EU for the citizens of our countries – free flow of labour wasn’t established at the time – which resulted in outstanding growth in trade turnover and touristic performance with both the EU and each other from the 2000s. A curiosity about CEFTA is that it was open to other countries of the region as well, and after the Visegrád countries joined the EU in 2004, it became a living heritage of the 1991 foundation through the states waiting to be admitted. Even though the Visegrád countries joined the Schengen zone in 2007, the integration pace is very different regarding the admission to the euro zone. They all accepted the introduction of the joint currency with the signature and ratification of of the Accession Agreement, but the date is not defined and neither Hungary, nor Poland and the Czech Republic seem to be ambitious to set a concrete date. Slovakia gave up its own currency, the Slovak corona in January of 2009. It’s hard to decide whether Slovakia – who wanted to strengthen by this its European determination – or the other three partners took the right step, but I think it says a lot that Slovakia’s economic growth has fallen back to the Hungarian level since her entry in the euro zone – just at the time if the financial crises in Europe. Economists discuss whether this is the result of the introduction of the euro in Slovákia or the lack of it in the other three Visegrád countries.