Central Europe Thirty Years After the Fall of Communism: A Return to the Margin?

This book examines the politics and international relations of Central Europe (the Visegr墂 Four) three decades after the fall of communism. Once bound together by a common geopolitical vision of returning to the West, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia now find themselves in a more ambiguous position. The 2015 European migration crisis exposed serious normative differences with Western Europe, leading to a collective V4 rebellion against the European Union's migration policies. At the same time, as this book demonstrates--despite this normative rift with Western Europe and despite the democratic backsliding in some of the V4 states--they remain deeply dependent on the West in both symbolic and material terms. Furthermore, ways in which individual Central European states position themselves vis-a-vis the West exhibit notable differences, informed by their specific political and cultural legacies. The author examines these in separate country chapters. This book also contains a chapter that analyzes the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on political discourses in the V4.