10. 09. 2002
by David Vaughan
If you don't know anything about the Visegrad Group and which countries it represents, you can be forgiven. When I asked people in the streets around the building here in Prague whether they had heard of Visegrad, almost all gave the same answer: a very firm "No". I asked around fifteen people, and only one, a smartly dressed young man from Slovakia, gave me the precise answer.
"It's a grouping of Central European countries," he said: "Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic."
The Visegrad Group is not one of Europe's better known political blocks. It was set up eleven years ago on the initiative of President Havel and emerged from the euphoria of the period just after the fall of communism, when Mr Havel and many other European politicians felt that a whole new political order in Europe was possible. Visegrad was to be an important focus for common Central European interests representing the goals and concerns of a block of over 60 million Central Europeans. Today, President Havel's assessment of its achievements is upbeat.
"Throughout its existence, this grouping has played an important role in building a new peaceful Europe with a new order, and it has helped in the process of European integration." But the grouping has never really captured the imagination either of politicians or the public. It has often given the impression of being a talking shop, with little real substance beyond occasional meetings of the four countries' presidents. But the Czech political commentator, Jan Urban, thinks that Mr Havel's positive assessment is not completely out of place:
I see the best achievement of Visegrad as coming from the field of political culture. We have started to think about our countries as a region. Luckily we all have one goal which is first NATO membership and then European Union membership, and this shifts the focus or attention to real things like infrastructure, especially transportation, economic cooperation, in which we were not very successful. Slowly but steadily the governments needed to coordinate their accession talks. So I think it's a learning process more than anything else.
I can't really think of a single concrete achievement of the Visegrad Group. Are there any?
I don't think so. This is why I call it a learning process. If, ten years ago, the governments had been more adventurous, they would have been able to fulfill the expectations and to coordinate their accession talks from the very beginning, and that would give the region a much better negotiating position.
So in effect, if the Visegrad Group has worked at all, it is not really as a formal structure, but as a way of giving a name to a process of regional cooperation, that has sometimes blossomed and sometimes stalled. The group faced its toughest test earlier this year, when the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia all boycotted a Visegrad meeting in Hungary after a row with the Hungarian Prime Minister over the post-Second World War expulsion of Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia. Similarly Visegrad only just managed to survive the period when Vaclav Klaus was Czech Prime Minister. Mr Klaus openly opposed the concept of any such political grouping, preferring instead to focus exclusively on economic cooperation. But Visegrad has survived, and at a meeting of Visegrad Presidents a few weeks ago, all four countries asserted that the group did have a future... [read more from Central Europe Today at
http://www.radio.cz/en/article/32172]
