Band of Brothers: Projection of Power Centralization in Times of Crisis in Central European countries

The global crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected the activities of governments in the vast majority of countries. Most of the leading political officials adopted restrictive measures in an attempt to reduce the risk of transmission of the dangerous virus and thus prevent the disease from spreading uncontrollably in the population. In order to increase flexibility and speed up the decision-making process, national governments established temporary crisis teams, whose members were usually selected government officials. In some countries, it was subsequently possible to observe how the awareness of the newly charged power over the decision-making process intensified some politicians’ idea of permanent centralization of powers and the limitation of democratic principles. Such tendencies occurred in minor variations in the case of the Central European countries, which at the time were examined for their problem of the decline of liberal democratic governance. Using the qualitative process-tracing method, the study identifies the causal mechanism of the chain of events from the causes to the given outcome leading to attempts to permanently centralize the executive power of governments in the cases of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Moreover, the author is interested in what chain of events led PM Viktor Orbán to successfully strengthen executive powers, as well as what factors caused PM Andrej Babiš to fail in a similar effort. In this case, the process-tracing method should not even help to find and establish a generalizable model of the causal mechanism, the validity of which is not limited to only three Central European cases. The method also helps to identify factors that caused a different result with a very similar causal mechanism. Moreover, the author strengthens the ambition to find a generally applicable causal mechanism by taking into account the regional aspect entering the process. In the case of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic – countries united in the format of the Visegrad Group – the regional context of common history and the spill-over of historical events and experiences between the countries cannot be ignored. The study explains this behaviour model using the neo-functionalist effect of positive spill-over, introduced in economic discourse by Ernst B. Haas in 1958.