Hungary, the EU and Russia’s War against Ukraine: Hostage-Taking of EU Foreign Policymaking

The EU’s as well as NATO’s internal cohesion and their capacity to act is crucial to meet the security challenges due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The paper builds and advances the notion of political hostage-taking and applies to Hungary’s threats to veto vital EU sanctions against Russia as well as NATO enlargement to gain EU concessions in unrelated policy areas like the Article 7-procedure or the COVID-19 recovery funds. Distinguishing between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ hostage-taking, we argue that Hungary relies on a soft hostage-taking strategy that aims to articulate its veto threat in a credible way, but at the same time tries to minimize the associated reputational costs. To date, Hungary has succeeded in obtaining selective concessions from the other EU member states without derailing the sanctions policies against Russia or the NATO enlargement process.