Central Europe is a region whose very name encodes a political argument. For much of the Cold War, the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were referred to in Western policy circles as “Eastern Europe” — a designation their inhabitants resented as geographically imprecise and politically loaded, implying that proximity to the Soviet Union was their defining characteristic. The reassertion of the term “Central Europe” in the late 1980s and 1990s carried a claim: that these were European societies temporarily displaced from their natural position by Soviet power, and that their future lay in the Western liberal order rather than in the Russian sphere. Three decades after the revolutions of 1989, the outcomes of that claim are mixed in ways that illuminate some of the deepest tensions in contemporary European politics. Poland has become one of NATO’s most capable members and a force for Western solidarity on Ukraine. Hungary under Viktor Orbán has become the European Union’s most persistent internal adversary, cultivating ties with Russia and China while collecting Brussels funding. Between these poles, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have navigated the post-2022 world in ways that reveal the fragility of the Visegrád solidarity once touted as Central Europe’s distinctive contribution to European politics.
The Geography of the “Lands In Between”¶
The concept of Central Europe as a geopolitical space rests on a geographic reality: these territories lie in the flat lowlands between the German west and the Russian east, with no significant natural barriers to the mass movement of armies in either direction. The North European Plain — which extends from northern France across the Low Countries, through Germany, and across Poland to the Russian steppe — has been the highway of European military history. Napoleon marched east along it; Hitler’s Wehrmacht and then the Red Army moved in both directions; today, NATO’s eastern flank runs roughly along its eastern edge.
Poland is the keystone: a country of 38 million people and approximately 312,000 square kilometres bordering Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, and Lithuania and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the north. The Suwalki Gap — a roughly 100-kilometre strip of land on the Polish-Lithuanian border between Kaliningrad and Belarus — is NATO’s most discussed potential chokepoint, the one place where Russian forces could theoretically sever the Baltic states from the rest of the alliance by land.
Hungary and Slovakia border Ukraine to the east, giving their governments particular salience in the debate about Western support for Kyiv. The Czech Republic’s position, landlocked in the centre of Europe with no direct exposure to the eastern frontier, has historically allowed it greater strategic latitude — the Czechs can afford, in a narrow security sense, a less urgent posture than the Poles or Balts. This geographic variation in risk exposure goes some way toward explaining the variation in political responses to the Russian threat.
Historical Position: The Weight of the Centuries¶
The defining experience of Central Europe is the experience of being contested. For most of the early modern period, the region was divided between the Habsburg Empire in the south (Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Croatia) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the north — a vast multi-ethnic state stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea that, at its seventeenth-century peak, was the largest country in Europe. The Commonwealth’s eventual destruction through the three partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) by Prussia, Austria, and Russia erased the Polish state from the map for 123 years and bequeathed a trauma of partition and dismemberment that continues to shape Polish strategic culture.
The brief interwar period of sovereignty (1918-1939) was followed by Nazi occupation, Soviet liberation (and its replacement of one occupation with another), and then the People’s Republic systems imposed under Soviet supervision. The difference from Western European experience during these decades cannot be overstated: while France and Germany were building post-war prosperity and the institutions of European integration, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were living under totalitarian systems that imprisoned, executed, and deported millions and systematically destroyed civil society. When these systems collapsed in 1989, the societies that emerged were scarred by decades of enforced passivity and institutional dysfunction that Western liberal models did not fully accommodate.
NATO Accession and the Post-Communist Settlement¶
The accession of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO in March 1999 represented the formal incorporation of Central Europe into the Western security order — and the repudiation of Soviet-era assurances to Moscow (disputed in their interpretation) about NATO’s eastern expansion. The accession was driven by three interconnected logics: the Central European states’ own security needs and identity claims; the Clinton administration’s assessment that NATO enlargement would stabilise democracy in the region; and NATO’s institutional interest in expanding rather than contracting its membership base in the post-Cold War environment.
All three states had to meet entry criteria — civilian democratic control of the military, defence spending commitments, interoperability with NATO standards — that drove significant military and political reform. The process of accession was more important than the moment of accession: the requirements for membership shaped domestic politics and institutional development across the region for most of the 1990s. Slovakia, excluded from the first round due to Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar’s authoritarian governance, completed reforms and acceded in 2004 alongside the Baltic states, Romania, and Bulgaria.
EU membership, achieved in 2004 for all four Visegrád states, brought economic transformation. EU structural funds channelled hundreds of billions of euros into Central European infrastructure, higher education, and enterprise development. The result was sustained convergence toward Western European income levels: Poland’s GDP per capita, at purchasing power parity, grew from roughly 40 percent of the EU average in 1989 to approximately 80 percent by the early 2020s. The transformation was real but also generated winners and losers — peripheral regions and less-educated workers faced deindustrialisation and emigration pressures, creating the socioeconomic conditions for the populist politics that emerged in the 2010s.
The Visegrád Group: Solidarity and Its Limits¶
The Visegrád Group (V4) was established in February 1991 at a meeting in the Hungarian town of Visegrád, convened by the presidents of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia to coordinate their approaches to European integration and NATO accession. The group’s initial rationale was entirely instrumental: by presenting a unified front, the three states could achieve more in Brussels and Washington than by negotiating individually. After EU and NATO accession were achieved, the group’s purpose became less obvious, and it entered a period of relative dormancy.
The V4 experienced a striking revival during the 2015-2016 European refugee crisis, when the four member states — by then including the separate Czech Republic and Slovakia following Czechoslovakia’s 1993 “Velvet Divorce” — united in opposition to the EU’s mandatory refugee relocation scheme proposed by the European Commission. The bloc refused to accept the quotas, defied European Court of Justice rulings ordering compliance, and framed its resistance as a matter of national sovereignty and cultural identity — the right of democratic majorities to determine who lives in their countries. This position earned the Visegrád governments enormous domestic political rewards and established their collective reputation in Brussels and Berlin as the bloc’s most troublesome members.
The unity of the V4 around migration resistance concealed growing divergences that became unmistakable after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Poland immediately positioned itself as Ukraine’s most important supporter — opening its borders to over 3 million refugees, channelling military equipment, and pushing the hardest within NATO and the EU for stronger support. Hungary, by contrast, refused to transfer weapons to Ukraine, blocked multiple EU aid packages for months, maintained energy ties with Russia, and cultivated a bilateral relationship with Putin that placed Orbán in a category apart from every other EU leader. Czech and Slovak responses fell between these poles, though Slovakia’s trajectory shifted sharply when Robert Fico — who had framed the war as caused by NATO expansion and opposed military aid — returned to power in September 2023.
Poland’s Emergence as NATO’s Eastern Anchor¶
Poland’s transformation since 2022 from a significant but not leading NATO member into the alliance’s most consequential eastern pillar has been one of the most dramatic shifts in European security politics. The Polish government under first the Law and Justice party (until late 2023) and then the coalition government under Donald Tusk has pursued the same military buildup with similar intensity: defence spending at 4 percent of GDP, the largest percentage in NATO; orders for American F-35 and Korean FA-50 fighter aircraft, K2 Black Panther tanks, and K9 howitzers; and a stated ambition to field an army of 300,000 — the largest ground force in NATO Europe.
The US military presence in Poland has grown substantially. The 5th Corps headquarters was established in Poznań, and a permanent US armoured brigade combat team is stationed at Camp Kosciuszko, the first permanent — not rotational — US combat unit in the country. The Aegis Ashore site at Redzikowo, part of the US ballistic missile defence system, became operational in 2024. Poland has also positioned itself as the primary logistics hub for Western military support to Ukraine, with Rzeszów airport handling the bulk of equipment transfers.
Poland’s strategic calculation is not purely about deterrence. Warsaw has argued consistently — and not without historical justification — that appeasement of Russia has been Europe’s consistent mistake, and that the only language Moscow understands is force. The Polish position is partly shaped by lived memory: no other NATO member state has the combination of size, shared border with Russia-aligned Belarus, and historical experience of partition that makes Polish threat perception so acute. But it is also a bid for strategic significance — Poland aims to be the indispensable eastern pillar of NATO, the state without which the alliance cannot defend the eastern flank, and to use that position to claim a degree of influence in European security decisions previously dominated by France and Germany.
Hungary’s Divergence: Orbán and the “Illiberal” Project¶
Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party has governed Hungary continuously since 2010, winning elections with increasing majorities partly through genuine popularity and partly through systematic manipulation of the electoral system — redrawing constituency boundaries, media consolidation under loyalist oligarchs, and the use of state resources for party purposes. The European Union has engaged in protracted legal and political battles with Budapest over rule of law, press freedom, and judicial independence, eventually withholding billions in EU funds through conditionality mechanisms. Orbán has responded by blocking EU decisions requiring unanimity — on sanctions, on Ukraine aid, on budget packages — using Hungary’s veto as leverage to extract concessions.
Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” is not merely a rhetorical position but a worked-out ideological project. He has explicitly rejected the liberal conception of individual rights as the foundation of democracy, arguing instead for a “Christian democracy” that prioritises community, family, and national identity. His government has engaged in systematic ethnic nationalist politics — targeting the Budapest Central European University (founded by George Soros), passing anti-LGBTQ legislation, and building a political mythology around Magyar national destiny.
The Russian dimension is the most geopolitically significant aspect of Orbán’s governance. Hungary maintained normal energy relations with Russia — including the Paks nuclear power plant expansion contract signed with Rosatom — after the 2022 invasion. Orbán met Putin in Moscow in February 2025, becoming the first EU leader to do so since the invasion, in what he presented as a peace mission but which NATO partners read as providing legitimacy to the Russian war effort. Hungary also blocked Ukraine’s formal NATO membership path, insisting that a bilateral agreement with Ukraine about Hungarian minority rights in the Zakarpattia region be resolved first.
Czech Republic and Slovakia: The Diverging Twins¶
Czechoslovakia’s peaceful separation in January 1993 — the Velvet Divorce — produced two states that shared a common political culture, institutional inheritance, and geographic vulnerability but diverged significantly in their political trajectories. The Czech Republic has followed a broadly liberal democratic path, with several peaceful transfers of power and a generally pro-Western orientation on foreign and security policy. The Czech government under Petr Fiala has been among Ukraine’s most consistent supporters, channelling significant military aid and taking the political risk of initiating the 155mm ammunition procurement coalition for Ukraine.
Slovakia’s experience has been more turbulent. Robert Fico’s SMER party has oscillated between social democratic and increasingly nationalist populist positions, with Fico’s governing style attracting comparison to Orbán’s. Fico’s assassination attempt in May 2024 — he was shot five times by a gunman after a government meeting in Handlová — added a violent dimension to Slovakia’s political polarisation. Fico survived but the attack underscored the depth of domestic political conflict over Slovakia’s direction. His subsequent positions on Ukraine and NATO have created a de facto bloc with Orbán within the EU’s eastern member states, complicating alliance solidarity on Ukraine.
Germany as the Defining Question¶
Poland’s foreign policy thinking is structured around a deep anxiety about Germany. The fear is not of German military aggression — Poland is a NATO ally and EU member alongside Germany — but of German-Russian accommodation over Polish heads. The Nord Stream pipeline projects, built to carry Russian gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany while bypassing Poland and Ukraine, were for Polish policymakers the concrete evidence of a structural German interest in economic integration with Russia that could, in extremis, lead Berlin to accept a settlement in Ukraine that Poland found unacceptable.
Nord Stream 2 was never completed — the Biden administration’s sanctions, Germany’s own suspension following the invasion, and the physical sabotage of both pipelines in September 2022 ensured that — but the episode left Polish-German relations complicated. Poland’s support for the Trump administration’s positions on NATO burden-sharing during the first term reflected a calculation that Washington’s hard line on European defence spending served Polish interests in ways that German resistance to those demands did not.
Germany’s own rearmament following Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech of February 2022 — the creation of a €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr and a commitment to 2 percent GDP defence spending — represented a historic shift that Polish and Baltic states had advocated for years. The pace of implementation has disappointed expectations, but the direction is established.
The Three Seas Initiative¶
The Three Seas Initiative, launched by Poland and Croatia in 2016 and supported by the United States under both the Trump and Biden administrations, is an infrastructure and energy connectivity programme linking the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Sea regions — a north-south corridor to complement the east-west German-dominated networks. The initiative covers twelve EU member states and aims to develop gas interconnectors, road and rail links, digital infrastructure, and energy diversification projects that would reduce dependency on Russian energy and German transit routes.
The strategic logic is straightforward: Central and Eastern Europe’s infrastructure was built under Soviet direction on an east-west axis, moving Soviet energy and goods to the Iron Curtain frontier. The Three Seas aims to build the north-south connectivity that would knit the eastern EU member states into a more cohesive economic and security space. The LNG terminal at Świnoujście in Poland and the Baltic Pipe connecting Norway’s gas fields directly to Poland — completed in 2022, just weeks after the Russian invasion — are examples of the energy diversification dimension that the initiative promotes.
Sources & Further Reading¶
- “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999” by Timothy Snyder — Essential historical foundation for understanding Central European national identities and the long shadow of partitions, occupations, and ethnic cleansing that shapes contemporary politics.
- “The Light That Failed: A Reckoning” by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes — Intellectual analysis of the populist turn in Central and Eastern Europe, arguing that the post-1989 imitation of Western liberal democracy generated resentments that populism has mobilised.
- “Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman” by Paul Lendvai — The most authoritative biography of Hungary’s prime minister and analysis of the Fidesz system, by a Hungarian-Austrian journalist with decades of access to Hungarian politics.
- “The New Iron Curtain: Russian Information Warfare in the Cold War and Beyond” by Flemming Splidsboel Hansen — Analysis of Russian hybrid warfare targeting Central and Eastern European societies, with specific attention to election interference and disinformation operations.
- “Poland: A History” by Adam Zamoyski — Narrative history of Poland from the medieval period through the post-Communist transformation, providing the historical depth necessary to understand Poland’s contemporary foreign policy instincts.