GERMANY has long considered itself a bridge between east and west Europe. Karel Schwarzenberg, a Czech former foreign minister, recalls Helmut Kohl telling him in the 1990s that, having tethered itself to the West during the cold war, his country now had to tether itself to its east, lest it “slide about like loose ballast on a ship”. Kohl’s point was that a Germany alienated from its eastern neighbours, particularly the “Visegrad” (V4) states of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, would destabilise the European vessel.
But its relations with the V4 have recently hit a low. The picture is not uniform. From Berlin, the Czech Republic and Slovakia look friendlier than Hungary or, particularly, Poland. But there is a sense that the region is drifting away. “People here are seeing that they have taken the Visegrad for granted for too long,” says Milan Nic of the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Germany’s size is part of the problem. The V4 felt (literally)...Continue reading
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