Abstract
This symposium contribution analyzes the trajectories of the Visegrád Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) regionalism from the viewpoint of the crisis of international liberal order. I argue that, although illiberal developments and Euroskepticism in the Visegrád Four (V4) states pose a local challenge to the liberal order, this region is still tightly plugged into the Western liberal order because it is dependent on Euro-Atlantic institutions for stability.
Outsourcing important political, security, and economic agendas to Western institutions allowed the four states to preserve the V4 as an ad hoc regionalist format in which they actively addressed only some issues and crises. This argument is rooted in hegemonic stability theory, offering a new conceptualization of the region, which has now arguably moved into a new period in its history-one that has gone from full normative conformity with Western standards to a hybrid position of embedded illiberalism or even partial revisionism of the Western liberal order, in which illiberal developments are combined with a high degree of dependence on the Western liberal order.
The article uses theories of liberal hegemony and also draws on more recent scholarship on so-called "embedded revisionism," situating the V4 in the current international relations debates on transformations of the world order.