Tag: Visegrad Group

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George Friedman
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
New York: Anchor Books, 2009

George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years is an intriguing forecast of how the twenty-first century will play out. Friedman gets a lot of things wrong, but there is nevertheless a method to his analysis, and we have much to learn from what the broader center-Left, of which Friedman is a part, gets right. It’s also interesting because glowing reviews in the mainstream media suggests that the book has been guiding the establishment’s thinking, and thus explains some of their odd decisions. (more…)

Janez Janša in Karpacz, Poland. Photo: Visegrád Post / Nicolas de Lamberterie

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Janez Janša has been one of the main figures in Central European politics since the fall of Communism in the region. He played an active role in winning Slovenia’s independence from Yugoslavia, and has been Prime Minister on three occasions (2004-2008, 2012-2013, and 2020-2022). (more…)

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The following is the text of the speech that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered at the 31st Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp in Tusványos (Băile Tuşnad in Romanian), Transylvania, Romania last Saturday, July 23. The text is reprinted, with some added annotations, from the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister’s official website. The title is editorial. A video including the English text in subtitles is also linked below. (more…)

Rodrigo Ballester

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The following is an interview with Rodrigo Ballester, Director of the Centre for European Studies at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary, which is an institution that has established close ties with Viktor Orbán’s government in recent years. Rodrigo Ballester is a former European civil servant from the College of Europe, and was notably a member of the cabinet of the Commissioner for Education and Culture from 2014 to 2019. He has been teaching at the Sciences-Po Paris (Dijon Campus) since 2008. (more…)

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This Sunday, April 3, Hungarian voters will go to the polls to decide whether or not to give Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party a fourth consecutive term in office (which would be Orbán’s fifth term overall counting his first in 1998-2002; his present term has made him the longest-serving Prime Minister in Hungary’s history). (more…)

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Part 1 here

Those who want a quick refresher on the basics of game theory may wish to review my first article on the subject, which applied game theory to race relations. Game theory is even better suited for describing international relations, and can be used to make sense of the complicated border crisis between Poland and Belarus and how it fits into a broader geopolitical conflict. (more…)

Tereza Hyťhová. Photo: Facebook / Tereza Hyťhová

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Interview by Alimuddin Usmani

Tereza Hyťhová has been a member of the Czech Parliament since 2017, first with the SPD (Freedom and Direct Democracy) party, and since July 2020 as a member of Trikolora (Tricolor Citizens’ Movement), the new patriotic and Euroskeptic party of Václav Klaus, Jr., the son of former President Václav Klaus. (more…)

Salvador Dalí, The Phoenix, 1975.

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I have believed for some time that the only way the white West can be saved is disaster. I appreciate that we seem to be in the middle of one, but I will be more specific. 

The West, from the eastern borders of Finland and the Visegrád 4 (V4) countries to the Californian coast, needs financial collapse in order to continue. (more…)

Map demarcating the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty

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To understand Central and Eastern Europe as they are today, we must go back an entire century to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. As old empires collapsed, newly independent nations fought numerous conflicts for territory culminating in the Polish-Soviet War. (more…)

Ruuben Kaalep

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At the end of summer, Ruuben Kaalep came to Hungary at the invitation of the Hungarian nationalist party Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland). Ruuben Kaalep is one of the main advocates for the Intermarium project, a political and geostrategic plan aiming to regroup the Baltic countries, the Visegrád 4, Ukraine, Croatia, Slovenia, Belarus, Moldova, and Romania, forming a kind of a triangle between the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the Adriatic Sea. (more…)

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó

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The Visegrád Group, or V4, is a Central European political union representing the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. It has been attracting a great deal of attention in recent years due to its member states’ resistance to the migration policies of the European Union. (more…)

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Translated by Greg Johnson

Brexit was a shock to some, especially in the soft and capricious West. But in Central Europe, living historical events from the inside has almost become a common thing. All the current Central European leaders remember or even took part in the regime changes that happened a quarter-century ago. These men and women lived under communism and worked to end it. And this experience is useful today as Europe faces a major turning point.  (more…)