International development policies in Central and Eastern Europe since EU accession: increasing divergence?

The contribution discusses how the international development policies of four Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) evolved following their accession to the EU. The four states started these policies in the run-up to accession, driven by pressure from the EU. The policies put in place were underfunded and received little political attention, resulting in functionally similar approaches. In the past 10 years however, these policies began to diverge in practices and motivations. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the four policies, focusing on strategies, aid volumes and allocation. The analysis reveals that while Hungary’s approach has diverged the most from the other three, all four are now developing distinct donor profiles. International development policy has become relatively politicized in Hungary and Poland, where governments have used it to promote economic nationalism, ideology and security goals, and have resisted socialization pressures arising from membership in the EU and the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia however, the policy had little political salience, leaving space for aid bureaucracies to shape it according to the norms promoted by these organizations.