Conference Agenda

The EU has shown remarkable unity in responding to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine despite some expectations to the contrary. It has adopted unprecedented sanctions against Russia and provided enormous support for Ukraine since the early days of the war. However, divergences among member states’ policy positions have persisted. It has raised the question of whether and to what extent member states’ national policies have been influenced by the EU’s foreign policy. By defining Europeanisation as changes in the substance and conduct of member states’ national policies due to their participation in the EU and adopting a rational choice approach, this article problematises Hungary’s and Poland’s national foreign policies towards Russia since 2022 to examine how the EU’s influence operates in two different cases. It treats the EU’s Russia policy as the least likely case of Europeanisation and relies on a maximum variation case selection strategy by choosing the two countries with significantly different policies towards Russia since the outset of the war. I posit that a government’s definition of its high policy preferences plays a determining role in a country’s reaction to the EU policies, informing its EU-level strategies, the mechanisms of policy change and Europeanisation outcomes. By arguing that national policy change can happen without member states’ strict adherence to traditional CFSP norms and principles, this rationalist perspective challenges constructive approaches to Europeanisation. The article draws on semi-structured interviews with EU diplomats, policy-makers and diplomats from Hungary and Poland, policy experts and extensive secondary data. It aims to make a modest generalisation and complement the existing Europeanisation literature by offering a perspective that puts the government’s national foreign policy objectives at its core.

Worldwide, there has been increased attention towards the Indo-Pacific region. The concept has been introduced largely as a reaction to China's increasing geopolitical and economic influence, leading regional and global powers to develop formal strategic frameworks to counterbalance Chinese assertiveness. Several EU member states have also published an official Indo-Pacific strategy. While France’s and Germany's strategies have received substantial attention, smaller states have attracted only limited notice, especially the Czech Republic and Lithuania, which are the only CEE states to publish such documents. Given their geographical distance and traditionally limited engagement in the Indo-Pacific, Lithuania and Czechia’s decision to publish such strategies raises important questions about their motivations, especially in the context of their evolving relations with China.

For Lithuania and Czechia, the Indo-Pacific strategy is not merely about engaging with the region but is also a direct response to their changing relations with China, which have prompted them to seek alternative partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, reinforcing the broader European trend of integrating China policy into a wider regional strategy. While the EU institutions and member states' approaches towards China have shifted significantly and often approach China more cautiously, the topic remains highly divisive within the EU. Thus, understanding why some member states have opted for full-fledged public strategic documents provides valuable insights into the evolving European approach toward China and the Indo-Pacific, illustrating the complexities of balancing national interests and EU cohesion in an era of geopolitical uncertainty.

This paper aims to offer a comparative framework of the approaches of Lithuania and Czechia in order to analyse the driving forces behind the publication and formulation of their strategic approaches to the Indo-Pacific. Besides focusing on the content of the strategies, through discourse analysis and interviews, this paper will also seek to analyse the drivers for adoption, the perceived role of the strategies in practical policy terms and the place of other actors within the strategies, namely the EU and China. Besides presenting new empirical data on national foreign policymaking and the agency of CEE states within the EU, this research is also a step forward in understanding the divisions within the EU as recent research suggests that although the EU has a common strategy with Indo-Pacific and China, different actors within the member states interpret them differently, not only in terms of the content but also in the overall role and purpose of the documents.

EU-China relations do not take place in a geopolitical vacuum but are affected by international events and major power actions such as US isolationism, and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Similarly, the nature of interactions that the EU or China have individually with major powers like the US and Russia influence EU-China relations, as in turn EU-China relations affect the roles of major powers and regions of the world.

It will be the task of this chapter to explore how China and the EU are responding to geo-economic and geopolitical challenges and how their response to these challenges will affect their positions on the role of global governance, especially regarding the future roles of international organisations, such as the UN, the G-20, the IFS and the WTO, and the role of multilateralism. In parallel, attention will be paid to the unfolding of bi-lateral and trilateral relations (USA-China-EU, EU-Russia-China, and EU-Japan-China) in the context of geo-economic and geopolitical challenges, and the position the EU and China take with regard the Indo-Pacific region, where growing instability affects safe passage of commercial shipping and cable communication networks. The paper will draw primarily on official EU and secondary sources.

Hungarian foreign policy has been in the international spotlight, raising doubts about its direction. This presentation tries to highlight the contradictions between an interest-based and a value-based foreign policy. A theoretical introduction if followed by a brief analysis of the elements of pragmatic foreign policy in accordance with the problem how Hungarian government is seeking its position in CEE region, what kind of challenges it should face together with the rethink of its position being the founding member of the Visegrad Cooperation, the formal leader of transformation and Euro-Atlantic integration. As the instability of the CEE region, the cleavage of East and West is frequently referred by the Hungarian governmental politicians, we would like to use the analysis of the government’s documents to strengthen our argumentation. In the scope of the analysis, we would put the Western Balkan region to the centre of our investigation, in particularly the changing standpoint in the Hungarian relationship towards Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnian Serbia. It is also our intention to deal with the reshaping of the Hungarian interest and the core of the conflicts highlighted in “occupying Brussels”, or “attacking Brussels” as this aim appears in the Hungarian diplomacy’s narrative. Apart from the analysis of the current conflict, we would also loke to give some geopolitical and historical overview in the Hungarian and CEE relations with a special focus on such issues as “Christian defence wall”, or “traditional values”, how these phenomena appear in Hungarian foreign policy.