Does Europeanisation Fit All?

When Czechia, Hungary and Poland, then known as the Visegrad 3 (V3), joined together NATO in 1999, there was a reasonable expectation that with time they will arrive at a liberal “western” standard of conducting its internal and external affairs. The process of achieving it became known as the “Europeanisation” and it included, apart from the establishment of parliamentary democracy and market economy a reform of the military and civil-military relations. Yet a quarter of century later the V3 countries found themselves in vastly different positions within the Atlantic Alliance. While this situation is customarily attributed to personal characteristics of the leaders of those countries, the paper looks at underlying institutional factors. Those include the legal framework under which the armed forces of the V3 operate, their command structure and strategic documents delineating their mission. It also examines how secondary literature in V3 countries reflects the trust and prestige accorded to their militaries as well as the nature of their involvement in political life – are they seen as politically neutral, or supporting particular political outlooks. To assess how the perception of their country’s position in NATO has changed over time, the results of four series of individual interviews conducted with key V3 military and civilian decision makers and experts were analysed. The results of the study show that apart from the formal legal framework of civil-military relations there may exist, in certain situations, informal networks mediating in its application. It has also revealed that the degree of adoption of liberal norm by democratizing countries depends, to a considerable degree, on historical memory and cultural factors prevalent in their civil societies.