THE POWER OF SMALL EU MEMBER STATES AFTER BREXIT: HOW POWERFUL IS THE VISEGRAD GROUP?

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Tomas Kajanek

Abstract

The power of individual EU Member States has been changing over the past decades as a result of revisions to the voting systems and the enlargements of the European Union. The present article analyses the development of the voting power of individual Member States in the Council of the European Union before and after the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union. We use the calculation of the standardized Banzhaf power index to calculate the legislative power of the Member States. The calculations recorded in the table point to changes in the weights of national votes caused by Brexit. The article pays special attention to the Visegrad Group, which we define within the European Union as an informal group consisting of four Central European states - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic. The results indicate a significant growth of the voting power in Poland and more moderate growth in the other three Visegrad Group countries which contributes to the shift in the voting equilibrium within the ordinary legislative procedure of the European Union.

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How to Cite
Kajanek, Tomas. 2022. “THE POWER OF SMALL EU MEMBER STATES AFTER BREXIT: HOW POWERFUL IS THE VISEGRAD GROUP?”. Journal of Liberty and International Affairs 8 (1):170-91. https://doi.org/10.47305/JLIA2281170k.
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Author Biography

Tomas Kajanek, PhD(c), Faculty of International Relations, University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovak Republic

Ing. Tomas Kajanek, PhD Candidate at the Faculty of International Relations, University of Economics in Bratislava in the field of International Relations. Author finished master studies at the University of Economics in Bratislava and completed several study and research stays in the European Union countries. His dissertation thesis focused on the political and economic aspects of the Visegrad Group countries´ membership in the European Union. The main areas of the author´s research are the European Union, the Central and Eastern Europe region with special interest in the Visegrad group. Given current trends of the international relations literature, he incorporates the programming languages and algorithms in his research in order to explain relationships and dependencies of modern international relations. He attended considerable number of international conferences aimed at the European integration issues and published and co-published dozens of scientific and other professional contributions. Currently he is the member of several international and domestic projects concerning the European union focused mainly on migration and asylum policy, digitization and the Covid-19 crisis in Europe. Recently, he leads seminars focused on the World Economy, European Union, Negotiations in Diplomatic Practise. Apart from other professional experience he was a member of the foreign representative office where he gained practical experience in political and economic diplomacy. He is the co-author of the strategic document of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Relations of the Slovak Republic: Economic Diplomacy in the Field of Bilateral and Multilateral Relations with a view to 2025where he conducted a forecast of bilateral trade between the Slovak republic and individual countries of the world economy.