How the EU Lost the East

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, November 16, 2025

 

Earlier this month, Viktor Orbán talked Donald Trump into exempting Hungary from planned U.S. sanctions on European countries that continue to buy Russian gas and oil. Days earlier, an adviser to Orbán revealed that Hungary would attempt to form a new anti-Ukraine bloc inside the EU together with the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This initiative has been welcomed by Ľuboš Blaha, deputy chairman of Slovakia’s governing party, Smer.

 

It is hard not to see the irony that these three nations — plus Poland — once formed the Visegrad Group, an alliance founded in the early 1990s with the explicit goal of aligning its members with the West and joining the EU and NATO. As unbelievable as it may seem today, Viktor Orbán himself was a vocal advocate of Western and European integration during this era. As prime minister, he led his country into NATO in 1999 and set the stage for it to join the European Union five years later.

 

From an economic viewpoint, this was a great move: Ex-Soviet satellites that joined the West have vastly outgrown those which, like Belarus and Ukraine, remained tethered to Moscow’s orbit. Ukrainians have watched as Romania and Bulgaria, which at the time of the breakup were even poorer than them, now have multiple times their GDP per capita. It should come as no surprise that this has been a source of growing pro-EU sentiment in Ukraine.

 

Yet despite economic growth, the pro-EU fire in much of Central and Eastern Europe has long since burned out and left behind a growing sense of resentment.

 

There’s an old joke: Men marry women hoping they’ll never change; women marry men hoping they will — and both end up disappointed. This has certainly been the case with the EU and the eleven Eastern nations that have joined the union since 2004.

 

Part of the problem lies in the dual nature of the EU: On the one hand, the EU is an economic union, responsible for maintaining the largest free trade area in the world. Within the union, there is free movement of goods, capital, services, and people. Access to the single market can make or break a developing European economy, especially as the EU has never been afraid to slap brutal tariffs on outsiders. In addition to access to the market, EU membership means access to billions in annual cohesion policy funds, and generous agricultural subsidies.

 

On the other hand, the EU is also a political union that has been gradually infringing ever more on the sovereignty of its member states with every new treaty since the Treaty of Rome that first established the European Economic Community in 1958. Under the principle of primacy of European Union law, whenever EU legislation contradicts national legislation, the EU’s rule prevails.

 

Most new member states, especially those in the East, joined the EU largely for the economic union, anticipating no increase in the union’s political scope or interference. They were sorely mistaken.

 

The EU, on the other hand, expected the political culture of the new members to shift in the direction of European liberalism once they were “in the club.” They, too, were sorely mistaken.

 

At the time when the Visegrad countries joined, cultural issues such as abortion and LGBT rights were considered the exclusive domain of the member states, as were (non-EU) immigration policy and issues related to the domestic judiciary.

 

Over the past decade, however, the EU has frozen €137 billion in funding for Poland over judicial reforms that it argued undermined the rule of law (the money was later released). Hungary, too, has faced financial penalties not just over judicial reforms, but also over LGBT rights (and Slovakia may soon follow). On abortion, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2023 that Polish law violates the rights of women.

 

Finally, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were all convicted by the Court of Justice of the European Union for their refusal to accept asylum seekers during the 2015-16 refugee crisis, though the EU ultimately backed down from imposing financial penalties.

 

While it can be argued that the criticisms of the judicial reforms of Poland and especially Hungary had some validity, the overarching picture that emerges is one of a power-hungry union suffering from a serious case of mission creep. When Eastern countries complain that Brussels is not abiding by its own rules on national sovereignty, they tend to receive a Darth Vaderesque response: “We are altering the deal. Pray we do not alter it any further.”

 

Yet while culture wars sting, irresponsible climate policies draw at least as much ire in the East. The 2035 ban on internal-combustion-engine vehicles risks devastating the Czech economy, which has been likened to Michigan’s because of its reliance on the auto industry that makes up 10 percent of its GDP (same as Michigan).

 

All but one of the eleven Eastern member states have criticized EU plans to expand its cap-and-trade scheme to include road transportation and heating. This expansion in the emissions trading system, set to take effect in 2027, will hurt colder and lower-income member states the most as the cost of fuel and heating is driven up. And while the EU has pushed hard to phase out coal, going so far as to levy daily fines on Poland in 2021 over its refusal to close a coal mine, it has — thanks to Germany’s nuclear phobia — simultaneously mostly refused to embrace and allocate climate transition funds to support nuclear power.

 

It should come as no surprise that Eastern Europe, being far more dependent on manufacturing than the West is, has come to resent the EU’s efforts to transition at the expense of economic competitiveness.

 

To the East, Brussels increasingly appears to be not just deceitful and arrogant, but downright baffling: on the one hand attempting to cosplay as a superpower, picking fights with everyone from Russia and China to Elon Musk, yet at the same time strangling the very industries (steel, cars, tech) it needs to compete on the world stage. Its green edicts gut manufacturing, while its red tape smothers start-ups.

 

Unlike the U.K., no Eastern country is large enough to be able to leave the union without facing economic collapse. The prospective creation of an “anti-Ukraine alliance” should arguably be viewed first and foremost as an attempt by countries that cannot credibly threaten to leave to nevertheless force concessions from Brussels. Since the war began, Hungary has successfully leveraged its national veto over aid and sanctions packages to force the EU to lower penalties and unfreeze some funds. It should not come as a surprise if other countries decide to follow suit.

 

Yet while tactically clever, this strategy remains morally bankrupt. While the European Union is in dire need of constitutional reform that replaces eurofederalism with eurorealism, Russia is a greater and more urgent threat to the sovereignty of the nations of Europe. Every stalled aid package and conversation about anti-Ukraine alliances serves to encourage the Russian war effort.

 

While Viktor Orbán may well sincerely believe that he is safeguarding his nation’s independence by “playing both sides,” his political gamesmanship endangers the independence of neighboring Ukraine.

 

The Visegrad dream was NATO flags and EU cash, not Gazprom pipelines and Kremlin winks. The EU, for the sake of the coalition itself, must remember that its core purpose is to be an economic union rather than a cultural or environmental crusader — and the East would do well to remember who the real enemy is.