20th Anniversary of the Visegrád Agreement

The outlines of the four member states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary — alongside the Visegrád Group logo; the inscriptions 'Vysehredská Skupina' and 'Visegrad Group', the date '15.2.1991', and the state name 'SLOVENSKO'; the twelve stars of the European Union, the year 2011, the initials of designer Miroslav Rónai, and the mint mark.

On 15 February 1991, the heads of state of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary signed a declaration of cooperation in the Hungarian town of Visegrád that went down in history as the Visegrád Agreement. The meeting took place at a symbolically charged location: in the Middle Ages, Visegrád had been the site of a summit of the kings of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia, and this historical reference was deliberately chosen. The three countries, which had just left the Warsaw Pact, wanted to coordinate their political and economic transformation and jointly pursue the path into Western structures - NATO and the European Union. With the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, Slovakia entered the group as an independent state, which has since been known as the V4.

The Visegrád Group is not a supranational body with its own bureaucracy but a loose consultative format based on regular consultations at government and expert level. Nonetheless, cooperation in areas such as infrastructure, energy supply, border reduction and, later, EU cohesion policy has had tangible effects. Slovakia, which began as a new state in 1993 and joined the European Union in 2004, regards its V4 membership as a firm component of its foreign policy. On the 20th anniversary of the agreement in 2011, Slovakia honoured the founding of this regional format with its own issue.