Just twenty years ago still members of the Warsaw Pact, having been locked against the popular will within the Eastern Bloc, with restrictively limited sovereignty to act in international relations, the countries from Central and Eastern Europe had a long way to go before membership in NATO and the EU. Nowadays active players in the European foreign policy (EFP) and strong promoters of developing common European defence structures, the countries are a fascinating object of analysis. In terms of both international systemic reality and the domestic political setting for formulating foreign policy the CEE countries are in a different world today.

As Chris Brown has observed, foreign policy connects two worlds: the world of domestic bureaucracy and administration and that of international relations (2001). These worlds are of a different nature, but in Central and Eastern Europe both have undergone significant changes. One of the major tasks of the newly independent CEE states was to secure their existence via a redefined and reformulated new foreign policy. A predominantly existential foreign policy was drafted by the CEE states, with the main goal of securing the survival and later wellbeing of each nation in an environment which is ever changing and extremely difficult to predict. The major decisions on the fundamental orientation of foreign policy were, for the first time after the long communist period, based on the national interest.