Agnes Batory

Consistency and diversity? The EU's rotating trio Council Presidency after the Lisbon Treaty

The Lisbon Treaty introduced significant changes to the Presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU). The new Treaty combines a permanent chair with the principle of rotation based on three member states collaborating during an 18-month period, without specifying the responsibilities of trio groups. This left wide scope for the first post-Lisbon trio to establish new working mechanisms. By discussing the joint Presidency of Spain, Belgium and Hungary, this article interprets the trio model and its combination with the permanent chair model as an attempt to re-adjust the balance between consistency and diversity. Rotation remains a key instrument for ensuring the representation of the diversity of member states in an enlarged Union. At the same time, the EUs ever more complex policy agenda and a greater need for collective leadership motivate the search for new forms of co-operation to enhance policy consistency over consecutive Presidency terms.

Populists in government? Hungary's “system of national cooperation”

This article considers Hungarys political system from 2010 to 2014 with Fidesz in power and domestic and international actors’ responses to the challenge of populists-in-government. The article argues that domestic responses were weakened by Fidesz’ use of its supermajority for a partisan redrafting of the countrys constitutional order, but also by its mainstream competitors’ failure to offer a contrasting yet positive vision for the electorate. External actors, and the European Union (EU) in particular, may therefore have emerged as the main bulwark against the effects of populists-in-government. However, the EU was relatively ill-equipped to deal with systemic violations of the common values of the Union with respect to its member states, and arguably even the available measures were not used to their full potential. The main explanation for this lies in Fidesz’ origins: rather than starting its life on the fringes of the electoral space, the party had been the major, mainstream centre-right alternative. This position in Hungarys party system had in turn endowed Fidesz with strong transnational links which outlasted the partys own transformation and continued to act to dampen EU action.

Uploading as political strategy: the European Parliament and the Hungarian media law debate

Using the 2010 Hungarian media law as a case study, this article traces the process in which an issue in the domestic politics of a (“new”) EU member state is transformed into a transnational political conflict. How and why do political actors “upload” issues from the domestic to the EU level, specifically into the European parliamentary arena? How do others with conflicting interests resist such a change? The analytical framework is based on venue shopping, a concept hitherto mainly utilised in the context of interest group behaviour. Contestation around the Hungarian media law illustrates that a number of conditions related to the existing links of the uploading political actor with the new venue and the nature of the issue itself are necessary to make uploading a viable strategy.

Monitoring Committees in Cohesion Policy: Overseeing the Distribution of Structural Funds in Hungary and Slovakia

Abstract Under European Union (EU) law, Monitoring Committees (MCs) are charged with overseeing the implementation of Operational Programmes. Despite their potential to influence the process of fund disbursement, relatively little is known about the Committees’ operation and their impact in the new member states. This article is an empirical study of how three MCs actually work in Hungary and Slovakia. We find that whilst these bodies have relatively limited oversight capacities and are characterised by a primary concern with procedural compliance with EU requirements, nevertheless, they have an important role in providing significant opportunities for learning, information exchange, expert input and networking.

The Dog that Did Not Bark? Assessing the Impact of the EU on Party Politics in Hungary

The literature on the impact of the EU on parties and party systems has not resolved the debate on how we should measure the scale or significance of changes in domestic politics, and indeed what sort of changes should be seen as EU-induced. Applied to the Hungarian case, existing indicators suggest that while, given the need to contest European elections, some inevitable adaptation occurred on the level of the parties, on the level of the party system the impact of European integration has been rather limited. Although an EU connection is detectable in a number of important political developments in recent times, these EU-related factors at most added to the cumulative impact of a range of other influences. A broader implication is that research strategies that start from an assumption of the existence of a link between changes in domestic politics and European integration may well overstate the case for Europeanization.

Trial and error: Policy experiments, failures and innovations in Central and Eastern Europe: Beyond Accession in Central and Eastern Europe

In the early part of the last decade, a new European Union funding programme was introduced for rural areas in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Originating in 1980s France, the LEADER programme was widely seen by the EU as a central policy tool for bottom-up innovation and growth, especially in areas struggling to adapt to out-migration and the decline of agricultural employment. Project funding was available for implementing local territorial development plans, which would be overseen by ‘Local Action Groups’ (LAGs) made up of representatives from businesses, civic groups and local authorities (Macken-Walsh 2009). The policy goals were ambitious: sustainable development, mitigating climate change, countering social exclusion and promoting economic revival in the countryside. Yet there was a problem which both confused and frustrated the implementing agencies: the actual amount of project funding available was relatively modest, particularly in the light of the scale of rural problems in the regions. Rather than helping maintain strained public services and creating widespread opportunities that could halt out-migration, the LAGs sponsored projects that appeared more modest and marginal, even eccentric, such as reviving local dance festivals, erecting public notice boards, establishing wildlife trails and publishing local recipe books. Despite the slightly bombastic rhetoric of the programme, in a number of areas of Central and Eastern Europe LAGs came to be understood locally as a kind of folk preservation society, familiar from socialist times, which would help preserve local cultural traditions but would be almost wholly irrelevant to more pressing questions of rural development. Thus LAGs were reinterpreted as something similar to old socialist era institutions that ran so-called ‘cultural houses’ – state sponsored village halls