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.

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.