Business prospects

“The gas crisis in January 2009 showed that energy security is of key importance for the economic development of the region,” Alexander Duleba, the director of the Research Centre of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association (SFPA), told The Slovak Spectator. “There are no regional interconnections of infrastructure for transit of natural gas and crude oil within the V4. If the V4 arrangement is not used to bring about a change, this will cast doubt on the pure essence of regional cooperation within the V4.”
Along with energy security, Krzysztof Szczerski, an expert at the Kosciuszko Institute in Poland, sees as an important challenge for the V4 in not being left outside the core of European integration following turbulence from global crises which threaten to divide the EU into several ‘inner-circles’.
“If we fail in these areas we will become an unimportant part of the EU’s eastern periphery,” Szczerski told The Slovak Spectator.