The Rise of the Competition State in the Visegrád Four: Internationalization of the State as a Local Project

Abstract

An era of rapid internationalization in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) came to a close in the mid-2000s. A variety of foreign-led economies emerged in the region in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Myant, 2003; Greskovits, 2005; Vliegenthart, 2007). State economic strategies in the Visegrád Four (V4)¹ region have converged towards a distinct model of the competition state, aiming at upgrading the industrial base in the region by attracting high-value foreign investors (see Drahokoupil, 2007a, 2007b). The ‘outsourcing hotspot’ has seemed to cool down as the investors have started to complain about wage increases.² Yet Eastern European politics is hotter than ever. Politicians mobilizing by appealing to xenophobic and nationalist sentiments were brought right into the political mainstream and governmental offices. In Poland, the Kaczynski ‘terrible twins’, as foreign journalists would have it, rediscovered Polish national interests and aggravated relations with both Berlin and Brussels. For Kaczynski’s ‘pig-headed government’, ‘liberal traitors who want to allow foreign companies to exploit innocent Poland’ became the bogeyman of choice.³ In Hungary, Viktor Orbán, the leader of the Hungarian opposition party Fidesz, rails against ‘luxury profits and rapacious foreigners’ and calls for ‘a national government in Hungary, which sees the world through Hungarian eyes, thinks with a Hungarian mind and senses in its heart a Hungarian beat’.⁴ In Slovakia, the nationalistic Movement for a emocratic Slovakia (HZDS) was brought back to government as a minority coalition partner.