The soft hostage-taking of EU foreign policy: Hungary’s rule of law conflict with the EU and Russia’s war against Ukraine
提出'软性人质挟持'概念，分析成员国如何利用否决权威胁在欧盟决策中获取让步，并以匈牙利为例说明其有效性随条件变化。
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.