This is an independent reference site about the Institute for Central-Eastern and Balkan Europe (IECOB) and its network. It is not the Institute's website and has no link with IECOB or the University of Bologna.
Balkan & East European Studies Notes

The Visegrád Group explained: origins, how it works, and the Visegrad Fund's grants for researchers

Published 2026-11-04

Anyone who studies Central Europe meets the Visegrád Group sooner or later: in news reports about "the V4", in the acknowledgements of a thesis written on a Visegrad scholarship, in the name of a conference series. Yet it is neither an international organisation with a headquarters nor a formal alliance. This article explains where the group comes from, how it works, why it is often described as divided, and what its one permanent institution, the International Visegrad Fund, offers to researchers and organisations, including in the Balkans.

A meeting in a castle town, twice

On 15 February 1991, the President of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, the President of Poland, Lech Wałęsa, and the Prime Minister of Hungary, József Antall, met in Visegrád, a small town on the Danube bend north of Budapest, and signed a declaration on cooperation. The place was chosen for its symbolism. In 1335 the kings of Hungary, Bohemia and Poland had met in the same castle to settle disputes and agree on trade routes, an early example of the three crowns acting together.

The aims of 1991 were concrete. The three countries had just left the Soviet bloc; the Warsaw Pact and Comecon were being wound up that year. They wanted to dismantle what was left of the communist system, build democratic institutions and market economies, and, above all, "return to Europe" by joining the European Communities and, later, NATO. Acting as a group gave them more weight in Brussels and Washington than each would have had alone. The choice to call themselves Central European rather than Eastern European was part of the same project, as explained in our article on what the regional names mean.

When Czechoslovakia divided peacefully on 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia both remained in the group, which has had four members ever since: hence "V4".

What the four achieved together

The group's first practical result was economic. In December 1992, in Kraków, the three founding states signed the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), which removed tariffs between them and prepared them for the EU's single market. CEFTA later took in Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia; once its members joined the EU, the agreement lived on as a free-trade framework for the Western Balkans and Moldova.

The strategic goals followed. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO in 1999; Slovakia, whose path had slowed in the mid-1990s, joined in 2004. All four became members of the European Union on 1 May 2004. Less than two weeks later, at Kroměříž in Moravia, the prime ministers adopted a new declaration stating that the cooperation would continue inside the Union, with new purposes: coordinating positions in EU negotiations, supporting the neighbours to the east and south that wanted to follow the same path, and developing exchanges between the four societies.

How a group with no secretariat works

The Visegrád Group has no founding treaty creating an organisation, no permanent staff of its own and no seat. Its work rests on regular meetings and a rotating presidency: each country presides for twelve months, from July to June, and sets out a programme for its year. Prime ministers meet at least once a year at a formal summit, often also before European Council meetings; ministers, state secretaries and experts meet in many sectoral formats, from transport and energy to culture and defence.

This light structure has advantages. It costs little, needs no ratification to change, and lets the four cooperate where they agree and stay silent where they do not. The group also invites others to the table in so-called V4+ formats, for example with the Western Balkans, with the Eastern Partnership countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and, formally, Belarus), or with individual states such as Germany, Austria or Japan. In this it resembles the Central European Initiative, another regional forum of the same period that works mainly through presidencies and projects.

Unity and divisions

Because the V4 has no binding procedures, its visibility depends on how far its governments agree. In the 2010s it was best known outside the region for a common stance in the European migration debate of 2015, when the four governments opposed mandatory relocation quotas for asylum seekers. That episode gave the group a reputation, in Western European media, as a bloc defined by opposition to Brussels.

The picture has never been that simple. The four have long had different positions on energy, on the euro (Slovakia uses it, the other three do not), on relations with Russia and on the rule-of-law disputes between some of their governments and the European Commission. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought those differences to the surface: the governments in Warsaw, Prague and, for a time, Bratislava took markedly different lines on military aid and sanctions from the government in Budapest. Researchers who write about "the Visegrád position" on any question should check whether a joint statement actually exists, and who signed it.

What has been most stable is the less visible layer: cross-border projects, academic exchanges, and the institution that funds them.

The International Visegrad Fund

The International Visegrad Fund, established by the four governments in 2000, is the only permanent body of the Visegrád cooperation. Its secretariat is in Bratislava and is staffed by people from all four countries. The Fund states that its annual budget is €11 million, provided by equal contributions of the V4 governments, and that it also administers contributions from other countries for projects with non-V4 partners. Its governing bodies are the Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, which approves the budget, and the Council of Ambassadors, which approves projects.

The Fund's support falls into three families: grants for organisations, scholarships and fellowships for individuals, and residencies for artists. Its focus areas cover culture, education, innovation, democratic values, public policy, the environment and tourism, and social development.

Grants for organisations

Scholarships and fellowships for individuals

For readers of this site, the individual programmes matter most. At the time of writing, the Fund lists:

Calls, amounts and eligibility rules change from year to year, so read the current call text before planning anything. A Visegrad scholarship can also complement other regional schemes: CEEPUS funds semesters, thesis stays and teaching visits within its university networks, while the Visegrad programmes are open to individual applicants. If you are weighing a longer stay, our guide to choosing a university city for a PhD or postdoc covers the practical side.

Why it matters for the study of the region

For three decades, the Visegrád Group has been both a subject of research and a source of research funding. Its declarations document how post-communist governments imagined their place in Europe; its divisions are a case study in the limits of informal regional cooperation; and the Fund has quietly paid for a great many exchanges that never make the news. Treat "the V4" as a format the four governments use when it suits them, not as a single actor, and look past the summits to the networks underneath.

Sources