The prospects for Croatia's co-operation with the Visegrad Group. OSW Commentary No. 116, 02.10.2013

The Visegrad Group gained a new neighbour in the European Union on 1 July 2013. Given the geographic proximity, similar level of development and a number of shared interests, Croatia could become a valuable partner in Central European regional co-operation. Co-operation in the “V4+” format is possible in most of the Visegrad Group’s priorities, primarily in: energy security, transport, neighbourhood policy and EU enlargement. V4 could be attractive for Croatia as a grouping which forms broader coalitions within the EU and is helpful in solving regional problems. However, making use of this potential in practice will depend on the determination to enhance co-operation, and its success may be thwarted by temporary bilateral issues

Constitution for a new Hungary - the domestic and regional implications. OSW Commentary No. 60, 2011-07-29

The new constitution will come into force in Hungary on 1 January 20121. Its adoption is part of the state reform which the Fidesz party led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been implementing since it won the election in April 2010. Fidesz, along with the Christian Democrats which support it, has a qualified majority of two-thirds of the votes in parliament and may introduce solutions to facilitate its rule without support from other groupings and it is taking advantage of this opportunity. One example of this has been the amendment of the constitution ten times followed by a speedy adoption of a new constitution. The next step will be passing dozens of constitutional laws which regulate essential areas of the functioning of the state over the next few months. Both the way and the scope in which the changes have been made have raised controversies both at home and abroad. The regulations reinforce the position of the ruling camp on the Hungarian political scene, assisting it in passing the test of the next elections. Slovakia, which has criticised the practice of granting Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in other countries, is opposing the promise of also granting them electoral rights. The constitutional reinforcement of the state’s ‘responsibility’ for the diaspora linked with the collective concept of national minority rights fostered by Hungary has already led to tensions in the region

A neighbour discovered anew. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary’s relations with Ukraine. OSW Report August 2017

The Ukrainian-Russian war has prompted Bratislava, Prague and Budapest to take a new look at their eastern neighbourhood. Cooperation with Ukraine is gaining momentum, although relations with Russia are still the top priority for the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Diplomatic contacts with Kyiv have been rekindled, and the Visegrad Group has intensified its political support for Ukraine within the EU. The big success in the relationship between the V4 countries and Ukraine has been their booming energy cooperation. However, the pro-Russian gestures made by some leading politicians from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary remain a challenge for relations between Bratislava, Budapest, Prague and Kyiv. Co-operation between Budapest and Kyiv is further complicated by the dispute over the Hungarian minority in Ukraine

Ukraine–Hungary: the intensifying dispute over the Hungarian minority’s rights. OSW Commentary NUMBER 280 | 14.08.2018

For nearly one year relations between Hungary and Ukraine have been plunged in the worst crisis since the collapse of the USSR. The main cause of the tension has been the Education Act passed by the Ukrainian parliament in September 2017 which envisages a comprehensive reform of the education system and at the same time imposes serious restrictions on the use of the languages of national minorities, including Hungarian, in school education. In response to this, Budapest severely criticised Kyiv and took measures to block the establishment of closer relations between Ukraine and NATO, insisting that the act be changed. In turn, Ukraine took steps to soften Budapest’s stance and asked the Venice Commission to evaluate the act and then declared that it would follow the recommendations provided in the evaluation. The deficit of trust which has existed for years and the fact that neither of the parties had taken real steps to reach a compromise prevented them from reaching an agreement that had seemed close in May and June this year. The conflict was escalated further when the Hungarian government appointed a ministerial commissioner for the development of Zakarpattia Oblast (in Ukraine), which met with a harsh reaction from Kyiv and was interpreted as interfering with Ukraine’s internal affairs. The dispute over the Hungarian minority’s rights in Ukraine is about historical and identity related issues that are very important to both sides, and it is highly unlikely that it will be resolved in the coming months. While these issues have always been at the core of Budapest’s foreign policy, especially with regard to the countries where the Hungarian minorities live, Kyiv neglected them until 2014. However, since the Russian annexation of Crimea and the aggression in the Donbass, Ukraine has been taking comprehensive measures aimed at decommunisation and derussification. The consequences of this include on the one hand a Ukrainisation of the public space, the media and the education system, and on the other restricting national minorities’ rights in Ukraine as regards the use of their language in the education system. For those reasons, both sides are likely to firmly stick to their stances and to be looking for current political benefits resulting from the conflict rather than taking action to reach a compromise

A neighbour discovered anew. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary’s relations with Ukraine. OSW Report August 2017

The Ukrainian-Russian war has prompted Bratislava, Prague and Budapest to take a new look at their eastern neighbourhood. Cooperation with Ukraine is gaining momentum, although relations with Russia are still the top priority for the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Diplomatic contacts with Kyiv have been rekindled, and the Visegrad Group has intensified its political support for Ukraine within the EU. The big success in the relationship between the V4 countries and Ukraine has been their booming energy cooperation. However, the pro-Russian gestures made by some leading politicians from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary remain a challenge for relations between Bratislava, Budapest, Prague and Kyiv. Co-operation between Budapest and Kyiv is further complicated by the dispute over the Hungarian minority in Ukraine

Closing the gap? Military co-operation from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. OSW Report, December 2012

The contracting defence budgets in Europe, the difficulties in developing the EU’s security policy, NATO's transformation, the reorientation of US security policy and the problems experienced by European defence industries – all together have in recent years created an increased interest in political, military and military-technological co-operation in Europe.It has manifested itself in concepts of closer co-operation within NATO and the EU (smart defence and pooling&sharing), bilateral and multilateral initiatives outside the structures of NATO and the EU (such as the Nordic Defence Co-operation or the Franco-British co-operation) and debates about the prerequisites, principles and objectives of bilateral, multilateral and regional security and defence co-operation. The present report aims to analyse the potential for security and defence co-operation among selected countries in the area between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, i.e. the Nordic states (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden), the Baltic states (Lithuania Latvia and Estonia), Poland's partners in the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia) as well as Romania and Bulgaria. The authors were guided by the assumption that those states are Poland's natural partners for closer regional military co-operation. It may complement ‘the Western’ direction of Poland's security and defence policy, i.e. relations with the partners from the Weimar Triangle and the US. Its goal is not to replace the existing security structures but rather to strengthen military capabilities in the region within NATO and the EU

The Advanced LIGO Photon Calibrators

The two interferometers of the Laser Interferometry Gravitaional-wave Observatory (LIGO) recently detected gravitational waves from the mergers of binary black hole systems. Accurate calibration of the output of these detectors was crucial for the observation of these events, and the extraction of parameters of the sources. The principal tools used to calibrate the responses of the second-generation (Advanced) LIGO detectors to gravitational waves are systems based on radiation pressure and referred to as Photon Calibrators. These systems, which were completely redesigned for Advanced LIGO, include several significant upgrades that enable them to meet the calibration requirements of second-generation gravitational wave detectors in the new era of gravitational-wave astronomy. We report on the design, implementation, and operation of these Advanced LIGO Photon Calibrators that are currently providing fiducial displacements on the order of $10^{-18}$ m/$\sqrt{\textrm{Hz}}$ with accuracy and precision of better than 1 %.Comment: 14 pages, 19 figure

The long shadow of the Treaty of Trianon Hungary's struggles with the past. Point of View 2020-06-01.

The 1920 Peace Treaty of Trianon, which sealed Hungary’s loss of two thirds of its territory, is regarded as the country’s greatest national tragedy. The disintegration of the multinational Kingdom of Hungary, which left large Hungarian populations in neighbouring states outside Hungary, was a key event in shaping Hungarian national identity, as well as the country’s internal and foreign policy in the century that followed. While Hungary responded to the Treaty of Trianon by developing various concepts aimed at reclaiming its former territories, it also strived to build good relations with its neighbours and develop policies towards the Hungarian minorities in other countries. While territorial revisionism as a political agenda plays a marginal role in Hungary today, Viktor Orbán has nonetheless raised the profile of the Treaty of Trianon commemorations, and the idea of the nation’s unity across state borders, since coming to power in 2010. The growing acceptance of revisionist symbols, which has been particularly apparent during the Treaty of Trianon’s centenary year, has been fuelling controversy in Hungary’s neighbours and may destabilise regional co-operation in Central Europe. Andrzej Sadecki has worked as an OSW analyst in the years 2012–2018. Currently he conducts research on the Hungarian politics of memory as part of an international project at the University College London and the Charles University in Prague

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far