Abstract
ABSTRACT This article advances the concept of ‘soft’ hostage-taking and examines its effectiveness in EU policymaking. Hostage-taking relates to situations where an individual member state (the hostage-taker) combines its veto-power in intergovernmental domains with a strategy of tactical issue-linkage to extract concessions in a not functionally related negotiating context. Soft hostage-taking does so whilst simultaneously denying issue-linkage in public communications. We argue that the effectiveness of (soft) hostage-taking depends on the credibility of a hostage-taker’s veto-threat, the cost of complying with hostage-taking demands by the other side, as well as the latter’s mitigating capacity. Empirically, we explore the relevance of our theoretical claims for the role of Hungary’s Populist Radical Right government in EU policymaking, which has increasingly relied on veto-threats on key EU foreign policy decisions to gain concessions in its rule of law conflict with EU institutions. We show that whilst Hungary’s soft hostage-taking strategy initially benefited from favourable conditions, its effectiveness has become more circumscribed in line with an altered context.
Published Version
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