
Monika Brusenbauch MeislovaMasaryk University | MUNI · Department of International Relations and European Studies
Monika Brusenbauch Meislova
Professor
Jean Monnet Chair; Associate Prof. at Masaryk University (CZ); Visiting Prof. at Aston University (UK)
About
51
Publications
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Introduction
Welcome! I am an Associate Professor in European studies at Masaryk University Brno (Department of International Relations and European Studies), Czech Republic and a Visiting Professor at Aston University in Birmingham (UK). My main research interests revolve around the study of British politics (especially British European policy and Brexit), Czech foreign policy and political discourse. I am also a co-convenor of the UACES Research Network “The Limits of EUrope”.
Publications
Publications (51)
The article proposes an original conceptual framework that captures the discursive logic of self-legitimation and applies it to the empirical case of European Union soft law and the process of Brexit. Adopting the general orientation of Discourse Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Analysis and working with a dataset of all European Parliamen...
The relationship between populism and free trade has historically been a complex one. This article argues that populism affects trade not by expressing consistent economic preferences, but by operating as a discourse that articulates external policies as a struggle for popular recognition. We analyse trade discourses of Donald Trump and Brexiteers...
This article deals with fear appeals in the Remain campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum, as a prime case of exploitation of anticipative fear in political campaigning. It explores the topic uniquely through the discursive lens, highlighting the need for a more nuanced reading of fear-based discourse in the Remain campaign beyond the broad-bru...
The article presents a model that conceptualizes the discursive construction of post‐disruption dynamics endorsed and reproduced by the affected parties and its potential to (not) contribute to future co‐operation. Conceiving of Brexit as a prime case of a broader phenomenon of post‐disruption contexts, this paper applies this model to the empirica...
Despite their similar contexts, the Czech and Slovak memberships in the EU have developed in fundamentally different ways. Whilst Czechia has cast itself as a somewhat half-hearted, reluctant EU member state, Slovakia’s approach to the union has been more positive, with enthusiasm for deepening integration with the EU. Our analysis reveals that, de...
The paper examines how the radical right parties´ leaders work with emotions while addressing their voters and sympathizers on Twitter/X social media. We focus on the “supply side” on the level of leaders´ discourses. The goal is to demonstrate how they work with emotions, especially those of fear and anger. The context represents Russian aggressio...
This article uniquely illustrates the intricate and complex dynamics between blame and the othering process. It does so by unearthing how the British Conservative government, led by Boris Johnson, systematically used blame to reproductively depict the EU, ex negativo, as the “other” to the British “self” between 1 January 2021 (the end of the trans...
The article analyses the renewed importance of bilateralism for the UK’s engagement with individual EU member states in relation to security and defence policy. By systematically scrutinising the bilateral agreements with 18 EU countries concluded between the EU membership referendum in 2016 and the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership in 2022, we ar...
This article explores and compares the political leadership of two successive British Prime Ministers, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, in their handling of the domestic politics of Brexit. Despite some similar dilemmas at the beginning of their premierships, their leadership delivered very different outcomes. The key argument developed here, using R...
The article provides an in-depth analysis of the various bargaining strategies that the European Parliament (EP) used to leverage its influence over the negotiations of the Withdrawal Agreement and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement. More specifically, it focuses on five bargaining self-empowerment strategies (obstructing, moving first, issue-link...
The article brings together insights from the literatures on policy process, policy legitimation and legitimacy discourse to shed new light on the temporal structure of discursive legitimation of policy processes. It argues that in order to satisfy complex demands on their legitimacy, ongoing policy processes are legitimated not only by referring t...
Between 2016 and 2021, in response to calls for a second Scottish independence referendum, two British Prime Ministers—Theresa May and Boris Johnson—adopted a holding position, at the core of which was the “now-is-not-the-time” argumentative scheme. As a particular expression of strategic ambiguity, this delay discourse was intended to fulfil a spe...
The overarching goal of this article is to investigate the extent to which and the ways in which the Brexit process impacted the policies of Czechia and Slovakia in the security and defence (S&D) domain between 2016 and 2020 and how the two countries positioned themselves in this area during the withdrawal negotiations. More specifically, the study...
Anotace
This chapter deals with the pertinent question of how Leavers and Remainers, as opinion-based groups, communicate, share and exchange their perceptions, cognitions and emotions in regard to out-groups. More specifically, drawing on the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies, it investigates which topics, discursive stra...
The article investigates the discourse of two Czech presidents, Václav Klaus (2003–2013) and Miloš Zeman (2013–incumbent), visàvis the salient issue of the Eurozone crisis. Having adopted the general orientation of the discourse historical approach to discourse analysis, and working with a corpus of data on Klaus’ and Zeman’s public utterances on...
The overarching aim of this article is to explore the implementation of democratic innovations in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic. As a first attempt to provide a systematic, detailed and contextualized analysis of this under-researched topic, the study reveals new, important insights into the issue of democratic innovation implement...
The article investigates strategies of blame avoidance in the discourse of the Czech Prime Minister (PM), Andrej Babiš, on the conflict-of-interest case over the misuse of European Union (EU) funds. Taking a critical discursive perspective and working with a dataset of Babiš’s public pronouncements on his conflict of interest during the period of 2...
This article engages in the emerging scholarly debate about the instrumentalization of Brexit for internal political purposes within EU27 domestic contexts. More specifically, it investigates the extent to, and the ways in, which the Czech and Slovak governments conveyed, interpreted and evaluated blame in the context of Brexit. In doing so, due at...
This is the Special Issue published in CADAAD Journal nr. 13/1
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/journals/cadaad/volume-13-2021/
In the triangle of relations between major EU powers, the relationship between Germany and the UK remains historically under-examined. Its implications for the future of European defence cooperation are, however, vital and gradually more decisive. The article examines indices on the direction of this relationship to model the shape and impact of th...
This article introduces the special issue on populism and technocracy in the integration and governance of the European Union (EU), framing these opposing approaches in the context of polarised debate on the (il)legitimacy of the EU. The special issue was conceived as an interdisciplinary approach to questions of the EU’s legitimacy in the aftermat...
The article investigates the main populist and technocratic narratives employed in the campaign in the run-up to the 2016 British EU referendum. Based on a qualitative dataset comprising 40 selected speeches, interviews and other public interventions by prominent Leave and Remain protagonists and adopting the general orientation of the Discourse Hi...
Brexit has been a major crisis facing the European integration process. The paper examines how Brexit was framed and exploited by two EU member state governments, Czechia and Hungary. We conceptualize Brexit as a 'distant crisis' for these two countries: although it is likely to have significant impacts, these are uncertain and not immediate. Build...
The article explores the challenges arising from Brexit for Czech and Slovak
EU policy-making. Based on the insights from literature on Brexit (expected)
challenges and small states’ policy-making in the EU, the primary focus is on
Brexit challenges within two areas of EU policy-making: 1) policy fields and 2)
advocacy capacities. The main argument...
The overarching aim of the article is to investigate the discourse of populist sovereignism as articulated by the leaders and/or leading candidates of four right-wing hard Eurosceptic populist parties in the following countries during the 2019 elections to the European Parliament: the Czech Republic, Italy, Slovakia and the United Kingdom. The poli...
The article investigates how the considerations on higher education and research have been narratively represented in a public domain in the process of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. Having adopted the general orientation of the discourse-historical approach to discourse analysis, the study surveys the narrative (re)presen...
The article researches the performance of the European Parliament (EP) in the Article 50 withdrawal negotiations. Drawing upon insights from the actorness concept, the inquiry assesses the EP’s performance on the basis of Kaunert’s, Léonard’s and MacKenzie’s conceptualisation of actorness, i.e. in terms of the six variables of capacity, legitimacy,...
The article engages in the debate about the extent of the domestic politicization of Brexit in the EU27, and the causes and agents thereof. More specifically, it examines which parliamentary actors in Czechia and Slovakia have tried to de/politicize Brexit, and which strategies they have applied while doing so. By inquiring into the concrete de/pol...
With the looming reality of Brexit drawing closer, it is the intention of this article to explore Theresa May's post‐referendum communicative behaviour on Brexit—the very issue that came to define her premiership agenda—and uncover what legacy it has left behind. Building upon, extending and updating the emerging literature on May's discourse, the...
The article is based on a core assumption that talking about the relationship between the UK and the EU does not merely describe a given (or envisioned) reality; it also constructs it. As such, it identifies, classifies and examines prevailing discourses used by the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, in his speeches from 2010 to 2016, to...
2019 marks an especially important year for British-Czech bilateral relations. As a year of both centenary celebrations of opening of the British Embassy in Prague and Brexit, it makes for a fascinating paradox: a symbol of a century-long continuity on one hand and a year of serious disruption on the other hand. Against this background, the overarc...
Anotace
The article explores the role played by the Visegrád Group—a multilateral platform of four Central and Eastern European states (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia)—in the Brexit process. It surveys the group’s performance during two distinct phases of the Brexit process: first, David Cameron’s EU renegotiations and, second, th...
The aim of the article is to explore how the Czech bicameral parliament has reacted to the process of the United Kingdom's (UK's) withdrawal from the European Union (EU). Drawing upon insights from the theoretical expectations of parliamentary power, the inquiry researches the ways that Czech legislatures have developed in terms of engaging with an...
The article provides a qualitative in-depth analysis of Czech Brexit policy (that is, a Czech policy on Brexit). There are many reasons why one might expect Brexit to be a high-profile, politicized issue in Czech politics. Yet, as the article shows, this has not been the case. Rather, the issue of Brexit in Czech politics has been characterized by...
Both France and the United Kingdom (the UK) occupy a stable position in the Czech Republic’s foreign relations. Both countries have had asymmetrical and pragmatic relationships with the Czech Republic in the last decade, which were mostly influenced by the multilateral context of European integration. The recent developments on the British politica...
The chapter researches the role of the European Parliament (EP) in the politically charged Brexit process and outlines the opportunities and challenges that it implies. The EP’s role is explored within four specific dimensions: (1) constitutional dimension, (2) procedural dimension, (3) party-political dimension and (4) national-interest dimension....
The article researches an interesting phenomenon of the fall of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – the most successful populist right-wing party in British history. After soaring relatively high in British politics, in 2017 general election UKIP suffered a sharp drop from its electoral peaks. The inquiry explores UKIP’s 2017 electoral r...
Ferguson líčí historii Britského impéria od 16. do 21. století. Impérium,které v době svého vrcholu ovládalo čtvrtinu světové populace, čtvrtinuzemského povrchu a téměř všechny oceány, se příznivě podepsalo na vývojiSpojených států a Kanady, Indie, Afriky, Austrálie, Nového Zélandu,východní Asie a Číny. Podle Fergusona impérium neožebračovalo národ...
As it stands now, a consensus has been, more or less, established that the 2016 British referendum on the United Kingdom's continued membership in the European Union was held primarily due to the steadily increasing pressure of the Conservative parliamentary party's hard Eurosceptic wing that had demanded it. This article deals with agenda setting...
With its profound implications, Brexit is set to be the defining issue for the United Kingdom (UK) and one of the most unique challenges that the European Union (EU) and its member states have ever faced. It was under the premiership of the former Prime Minister David Cameron that Britain's relationship with the EU took such a dramatic turn. As it...
Karine Tournier-Sol, Chris Gifford (eds.): The UK Challenge to Europeanization: The Persistence of British Euroscepticism. 1st Edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 259 s., ISBN-10: 1137488158, ISBN-13: 978-1137488152.
The main research objective of this article is to explain the motives behind the British political elite's decision to hold nationwide referenda on continued membership in the EC/EU in 1975 and 2016. In order to do so, the author applies her own analytical framework using a theoretical model of dichotomous logics of appropriateness and consequentia...
Th is study deals with one of the integral parts of the Czech foreign policy — foreign development cooperation — and its role in the Czech Republic's 2010 general elections. Th e paper conducts an analysis of seven relevant Czech political parties' election manifestos and programmes in relation to the agenda of foreign development cooperation. It a...