Central and Eastern Europe in the EU

Challenges and Perspectives Under Crisis Conditions

Christian Schweiger, Anna Visvizi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138714021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351863698
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

Since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, the EU has been in almost permanent crisis mode. It is witnessing new dimensions of internal differentiation among its member states, and the migration crisis has shown that the Central and Eastern European countries (CEEs) in particular are slowly but certainly transforming themselves from predominantly passive policy-takers towards becoming more active players in the process of shaping the EU's governance agenda.

This edited volume offers the first comprehensive and critical insight into how the CEEs position themselves in the EU's changing internal and external environment, their stance towards the European integration process under current crisis conditions, and what political and economic strategies they prioritize.

1 Introduction

The EU under crisis conditions: Central and Eastern European perspectives

Christian Schweiger, Anna Visvizi

Arguably, since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, the EU has operated in permanent crisis mode. The EU leaders have been preoccupied with managing the eurozone crisis. As a result, although a diversity of novel governance mechanisms has been established these do not uniformly apply to the 28 EU member states. Consequently, the EU witnesses new dimensions of internal differentiation among its member states. The Central and Eastern European countries (CEEs) are particularly affected by the multidimensional horizontal (in terms of membership of different groupings) and vertical (in terms of the level of political integration) differentiation, which has manifested itself both within the eurozone and in the wider EU. The refugee and migration crises have shown that the CEEs are slowly but certainly turning from predominantly passive policy-takers into member states adopting a more active role in the process of shaping the EU’s governance agenda. At the same time, several developments on their respective domestic political scenes trigger earnest questions about the CEE stance towards the European integration process. In light of this, the question of the CEEs’ evolution to policy-makers on the EU scene acquires a new angle.

Over the past few years, the developments in the CEEs have been influenced by a variety of domestic and external challenges. This volume maps these challenges, examines the dynamics that they trigger in the CEEs, and traces the projection thereof on the EU’s internal dynamics in terms of political deliberation at supranational and intergovernmental levels. Specifically, through the lens of the CEEs’ political and economic transformation, the objective of this volume is to examine their quest for more active engagement in the EU policy-making process and its implications.

The global financial crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt crises in the eurozone have had severe economic and political repercussions, not only for the euro area but also for the EU as a whole, the CEEs included. The eurozone crisis exposed a profound leadership void in the EU (Nugent 2017: 183). That void resulted from the fact that all countries in the group of larger member states, with the exception of Germany, suffered severe economic implications from the crisis and, hence, became preoccupied with domestic economic consolidation efforts. Germany was subsequently pushed into adopting the position of semi-hegemonic leader in the EU (Bulmer and Paterson 2013). However, as new crises, including the economic recession and the twin refugee and migration crises, continued unfolding, Germany’s role became increasingly contested, exacerbating the paralysis of political cooperation at the EU level. In those circumstances, existing internal divisions in the EU have become more tangible and – what previously had manifested itself predominantly in the dichotomy between the euro core group and the outsiders – had acquired multiple new dimensions. The CEEs are the most apparent manifestation of that. That is, the sovereign debt crisis has resulted not only in the growing internal division of the eurozone between the creditor and the debtor economies, but it has also made the euro insider-outsider dichotomy more complex (Laffan 2016: 28). This volume attests to that.

The eurozone sovereign debt crisis

The emergence of multiple layers of governance mechanisms in the EU Single Market and the eurozone represents a departure from the traditional community method of collective integration. At present, the coordinative policy mechanisms divide the 28 EU member states horizontally into a eurozone core, including 19 member states, a semi-periphery euro plus group and a small outer periphery (Schweiger 2014: 74–75). Each of these groups are currently characterised by descending levels of vertical policy coordination. The eurozone core group is in the process of moving towards deeper political integration. The eurozone outsiders in the factually dormant Euro Plus Pact and the Fiscal Compact are to a greater or lesser extent associated with this process. The outer periphery group, which is currently represented by the Czech Republic and the outward-bound United Kingdom, remains detached from it. The CEE member states, which are represented in all of the EU’s internal cleavages, have shown that these groups are not static but subject to fluctuations.

A number of countries from the CEE region have been joining the euro core since 2007, even during the adverse conditions of the sovereign debt crisis. Individual CEE countries have also started to move between the semi-periphery and the outer periphery group, with the Czech Republic in the process of adopting the Fiscal Compact, and Hungary and Poland becoming more detached from eurozone policy coordination. Possibly, their drifting away from the EU’s core may in itself be the direct outcome of the multiple crises that the EU has faced recently. Research suggests that the question of the euro adoption is in fact a matter of political choice rather than a country’s ability to fulfil the Maastricht nominal convergence criteria (Tokarski and Visvizi 2015). Like the rest of the EU, the CEE member states were confronted with the economic implications of the euro area crisis. However, they have managed to steer themselves through relatively intact, with Poland having been the only country in the EU that did not slide into recession during the crisis. The fact that Poland did so outside the main euro core has contributed to the recent weakening of the former Polish political resolve to adopt the euro under the new Law and Justice (PiS) government (Visvizi and Tokarski 2014: 460). This has to be considered in the overall context of the tendency of ‘democratic backsliding’ in the region towards a new form of authoritarianism. This trend has particularly affected countries outside the euro core, especially Hungary and Poland, but also Bulgaria and Romania (Birdwell et al 2013: 20). This is not just the result of the decreasing attraction of the post-crisis eurozone. From the perspective of the outsiders the crisis has turned the euro-19 core into a permanent financial transfer union from the richer to the poorer economies (Haughton 2017: 258), which is symbolised by the institutionalised financial solidarity that current euro members have to exercise under the newly created European Stability Mechanism (ESM). At the same time, there is a growing concern amongst the outsiders that they could be permanently left out from the deepening euro core – firmly under Germany’s ordoliberal diktat (Funk 2015) and end up at the outside periphery of the EU in a ‘two-tier club’ (Visvizi 2012: 32).

Brexit

The CEE countries have traditionally been close allies of the United Kingdom in the EU. Arguably, the CEEs not only share the British emphasis on accelerating the liberalisation of the Single Market and avoiding the return to domestic protectionist policies but also are keen to maintain the principle of subsidiarity (Schweiger, Markovic and Nagy 2016). Consequently, the decision by a slim majority of the British public to opt for exit from the EU in the June 2016 referendum not only took the countries in the region by surprise, but also created a source of profound political and economic concerns. Indeed, the impending Brexit will fundamentally alter the power balance within the EU (Csaba 2016). It is far from certain if, without the UK, the remaining EU-27 will be able to resolve their internal differences and build consensus in major policy areas, such as asylum and migration, security, economic and social reform. The CEE members consequently are in a process of losing an important partner at a time when relations with their so far closest ally, i.e. Germany, for several reasons, have started to turn sour under the leadership of the chancellor Angela Merkel (Schweiger 2017). Brexit, hence, poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the region. On the one hand, the CEEs have the opportunity to fill the leadership gap in the EU that has already emerged as a result of the UK’s preparation for Brexit. Neither will Germany be able to continue its recent increasingly less semi- and more fully hegemonial leadership style in the EU (Schweiger 2016: 120), nor will it be sufficient for the former Franco-German leadership axis to be revived. In the larger EU-27, which is characterised by a multiplicity of interests, only a more comprehensive leadership constellation is likely to be able to achieve tangible results. In particular Poland has the potential to step into this void, either individually, by re-engaging in the Weimar Triangle Cooperation with Germany and France, or as part of the semi-institutionalised cooperation of the Visegrád Group, including, apart from Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. On the other hand, there is a real risk that the tendency towards authoritarian backsliding will deepen and spread across the region if the persistent economic and social peripheralisation of the region is accompanied by a growing political marginalisation. This could occur if the already patchy cleavage between the EU mainstream political agenda, mainly defined by Germany and France, and the illiberal populism of the Orbán government in Hungary and the Szydlo government in Poland manifests itself as a wider feature of a permanent East–West divide.

The refugee crisis and the migration challenge

In this respect the refugee and migration crises, which peaked over the period 2015–2016, and continue to serve as a reminder of the EU member states’ inability to navigate the challenges they inflicted, pose a major challenge for the future of relations within the EU, with the relationship among the ‘old’ members in the West and the ‘newcomers’ in the East becoming particularly contested. As other major players amongst the EU-15 are substantially weakened by domestic economic and political challenges, Germany has emerged as the quasi leader of the EU. A limited input from the economically frail France is to be recognised in this respect, even if France struggles to regain its former confidence under the leadership of the newly elected president Emanuel Macron. The German government’s insistence on the implementation of binding refugee distribution quotas for the whole of the EU has met fierce resistance from the CEE countries. The V4 group became the main advocates for the wider CEE position on this issue, which has been illustrated by their firm joint opposition to the EU distribution quotas. Ultimately the failure to jointly resolve this crucial problem in a cooperative manner tells a lot about the nature of Germany’s increasingly self-centred and uncompromising leadership (Meiers 2015: 49). Similarly, it mirrors the increasingly self-confident and uncompromising stance of the CEE member states who are today less concerned about acting as ‘good Europeans’ (Dimitrov 2012: 308) than during the first decade following accession.

Positioning the CEEs in a changing environment

There has been a tendency in the literature to examine the CEE region by focusing on domestic transformation processes in these countries. In that context, the CEEs used to be seen as passive policy-takers preoccupied with adopting the EU’s acquis. The role of the CEEs as possible agenda-setters in the EU has thus been largely neglected in the literature on the region. This volume seeks to address this issue. More than a decade after their accession to the EU, the categorisation as passive, compliant member states no longer adequately reflects the domestic political developments in many of these countries. Under the persistent crisis conditions in the EU, the CEEs have become more self-assured in defending their national interests. This volume traces and examines these developments in detail. The refugee and migration crises, and the German-influenced way of addressing them, serve as one of the most recent examples of the V4 countries establishing and defending a joint opposition at the EU level.

This volume highlights and explains the logic behind this emerging trend and its likely implications for the future of the EU. Considering what has been dubbed in the literature as an ‘illiberal turn’ in certain countries of the region (Ágh 2013; Ágh 2014), this volume identifies the likely sources of that turn and dwells on the question of how it may affect the CEEs stance towards the European integration process under conditions of multiple crises that the EU is faced with. The book presents a comprehensive range of contributions from experts on the CEE region. It is based on a series of conferences and public events which were organised by authors contributing to this volume in the framework of a research network geared towards the examination of the ongoing multidimensional domestic political, economic, social and cultural transformation processes in the wider CEE region.

The selection of chapters offers the most comprehensive analysis on the market of the challenges that the wider CEE region has been facing under the conditions of growing internal and external crisis in the EU. As such, each of the chapters adds to the analysis and, step-by-step, contributes to the construction of an insightful and complete analysis of the CEE region today and its role in shaping the EU’s future. The book offers the first comprehensive and critical insight into how the CEEs position themselves in the EU’s changing internal and external environment and what political and economic strategies they prioritise. The analyses presented here therefore offer a rare opportunity to reflect on the follow-up of the economic, political and social transformation processes that the CEEs embarked on in the early 1990s. Special emphasis is put on the role of the Visegrád Group (V4), i.e. cooperation between the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia and its increasingly dynamic role in the broadly conceived region of East and Central Europe.

The individual contributions included in the volume sketch a picture of the CEE members as (i) representing a region that is full of contradictions with regard to the level of social inclusion, economic growth and performance, political orientation and foreign policy priorities; (ii) a group of countries some of which still have not found their way to sustainable growth and political stability; and still, (iii) a group of countries that have successfully built their presence on the EU scene.

That variability is approached in the volume from three perspectives. The chapters included in the first part of the volume address the broad question of the sources and likely implications of the gradual re-positioning of the CEEs on the EU scene. Here the notion of multiple crises that the EU has endured constitutes an important context of the analysis. In chapter 2 Schweiger examines how the CEE member states have been affected by the growing complexity of the EU’s internal differentiation. The chapter also examines the prospects for these countries to use the opportunity of the recalibration of the EU’s internal leadership constellation after Brexit to emerge from their role as predominantly passive policy-takers. Farkas and Máté-Tóth dedicate chapter 3 to the neglected shadows of the multidimensional transition process in the region through the application of modernisation theories. Both authors detect a distinct CEE model of capitalism in the framework of the varieties of socio-economic developments in Europe. In chapter 4 Visvizi examines how the persistent internal crisis conditions in the EU and the impact of the wider geopolitical framework have resulted in a new ‘normalcy’ which is distinctive for the region. In chapter 5 Farkas analyses whether the recent crises in the EU undermine the political and economic status quo in the region and what this means for the future influence of the CEE countries in the EU.

As if through a magnifying glass, the second part of the volume offers a detailed insight into country-specific developments that have been inflicted by the crisis situation in the EU. Here political, economic and strategic considerations that shape CEEs’ domestic political scene weigh in the analysis. Chapter 6 by Duszczyk considers which route Poland will take in the crisis-ridden EU which he describes as standing at a crossroads. Duszczyk outlines the recent changes in Poland’s European policy under the Law and Justice (PiS) government elected in 2015 and asks what these mean for the country’s future position as a potential regional leader within the V4 and leadership partner for Germany and France after Brexit. This is followed by a three-level game approach to the analysis of Hungary’s position in the Visegrád Group presented by Arató and Koller in chapter 7. The authors examine the threefold dimension of Hungary’s engagement in the V4 in terms of the domestic institutional polity, concrete policy-making and the wider political environment. In chapter 8 Gál and Malová critically examine Slovakia’s status as a predominantly passive policy-taker, which has only recently emerged as a more active force within the V4 in the context of the refugee crisis. The authors emphasise in this respect that Slovakia’s success in terms of economic integration and joining the euro has not been matched by a wider Europeanisation of domestic norms and values. Lindstrom takes a similar approach in chapter 9 with regard to Bulgaria’s and Romania’s positions in the EU. Lindstrom argues that in spite of limited institutional resources Bulgaria and Romania have developed strategies to pursue their policy preferences and explains how this was possible under an asymmetrical relationship with the EU.

In chapter 10 Gudžinskas and Bekišas look at the transformation process in the Baltic states and examine the major objectives of their policies towards the EU in terms of differences and joint interests. Bartlett in chapter 11 considers Croatia as the latest and to this day last country that recently joined the EU. The chapter examines the political dimension of Croatia’s integration into the EU, which has witnessed unresolved chal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: the EU under crisis conditions: Central and Eastern European perspectives
• PART I: Central and Eastern Europe in the EU’s changing internal and external dimension
• PART II: National perspectives: between good citizenship and backsliding
• PART III: The Visegrád cooperation – challenges for a semi-institutionalised regional group
• Index