Can Central Europe Once Again Punch Above its Weight?

For the Poles, the V4 has always had a strong geopolitical and security backbone. When the other three members began, over time, to stop considering security aspects as key elements of the alliance, then the V4 became less important to Poland.

From the Hungarian perspective, the V4 has always been a preferred format for regional cooperation, but some question whether Poland, which has since grown into a regional superpower, with a GDP placing it among the 20 richest countries of the world, has a genuine interest in the reset or would rather play in another league.

One expert, speaking at May’s Globsec Forum in Prague, said Nordic and Baltic cooperation has become more attractive for Poland in security and economic terms. This is exemplified by the deal signed in November 2025 between Poland and Swedish defence contractor Saab to buy three A26 submarines, specifically tailored for Baltic Sea operations, in a deal worth almost 2.4 billion euros. In May, Saab signed a strategic collaboration agreement with Polish state defence group PGZ that will see the two cooperate on naval production, servicing and technology.

Poland is part of other, more significant foreign-policy formats such as the Weimar Triangle with France and Germany, the Three Seas Initiative (Baltic, Adriatic, Black Sea) that encompasses 13 EU states and four non-EU partners, and the Bucharest Nine, which includes the Baltic states as well as Bulgaria and Romania. It is, perhaps, for this reason that Magyar has floated the idea of expanding the V4 to take in other countries, such as “the Nordic countries, perhaps Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania”, or even Western Balkan states that are not part of the EU.

“I think the V4 could really become the core of a larger Central European cooperation,” Geza Jeszenszky, a former Hungarian foreign minister, tells BIRN. “For Hungary, having Croatia or Slovenia, our neighbours, on board would be highly beneficial.”

While Poland’s renewed interest in revitalising the V4 may have surprised some observers, there are several areas in which cooperation could be readily expanded.

One immediate area is the current negotiation over the EU’s next long-term budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2028-2034. There is a tradition in the region of trying to represent common Central European interests in these talks, which mainly revolve around protecting and maximising the budget allocated for regional development.

“As some of the largest recipients of EU cohesion funds, V4 countries could cooperate to preserve extensive support for the bloc’s less developed regions in the next EU budget,” says Teneo’s Tursa.

Another area is nuclear energy, which plays a big role in three of the countries and will do so in the future for Poland as it transitions away from coal. Cooperation could be developed not just in infrastructure but in regulatory terms too, reducing duplication so that a reactor design licensed in one member state isn’t re-litigated and re-designed from scratch in the next.

“The achievable prize is convergence around a small number of designs deployed across borders, for instance several countries coordinating on the same technology so that they can share licensing, supply chains and orders – that’s where the cost savings lie,” Malwina Qvist, Nuclear Energy Program director at the Clean Air Task Force, tells BIRN.

Tursa says regional gas and electricity interconnections are particularly important, given that three out of four Visegrad countries are landlocked and Poland is rapidly expanding its energy generation and import capabilities of liquefied natural gas (LNG) on the Baltic Sea, which could be used to help Hungary wean itself off Russian pipeline gas.

There have also been attempts in the past to cooperate on defence, in joint procurement and production, that could be revived. “The defence sector in Hungary is booming, but it’s a question of whether there will be opportunities for joint collaboration,” says Visegrad Insight’s Przybylski.