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The End of ‘Central Europe’? The Rise of the Radical Right and the Contestation of Identities in Slovakia and the Visegrad Four
Abstract
The article analyses the effects of the migration crisis and the parallel rise of right wing parties on national and regional identities in Slovakia and the broader subregion of the Visegrad Four. It argues that the recent right wing political discourse around migration has been reshaping the meaning of ‘Central Europe’ as a normative project and an identity shared by the V4 countries. The post-Cold War narrative of Central Europe was a story of ‘returning to the West’, which in practice meant that normative conformity with the West was a precondition of membership in key Western institution. The situation has changed visibly after the migrant crisis, as the V4 political elites have now been constructing new identities, in partial juxtaposition with Western European liberalism. These new identities favour a culturalist, conservative interpretation of the nation and reject humanitarian universalism, epitomized by the European Union’s decision to welcome the refugees. This arguably devaluates the previous notion of ‘Central Europe’ as a region that seeks to identify itself firmly with the West. Slovakia is chosen as a case study because of the recent success of the radical right in the 2016 parliamentary elections. The article concludes that although the situation of being structurally locked into the EU does not allow the V4 countries to openly challenge its main principles, the V4 political elites pursue a counter-hegemonic strategy, subverting and resignifying some of its key political notions. One should, therefore, speak not of an end of ‘Central Europe’ but rather of its evolution into a new, hybrid stage, where normative conformity and identification with the West will only be partial. The article makes use of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and related concepts as well as insights from constructivist geopolitics literature to track articulatory practices of the regional establishments. The study relies on evidence from recent political campaigning in Slovakia as well as official Visegrad Group documents from 2015 to 2016.
... The then freshly elected democratic politicians understood the magnitude of this herculean task, which involved having to establish their democratic institutions almost from scratchonly some of these countries had experienced democracy in the early twentieth centuryand to reform their economies, devastated by decades of the Communist command system, in line with the free market model (Lippert et al. 2001). Three CEE countries (Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland) came up with the idea of mutually supporting their main foreign policy goals (Cottey 1999) and set up a "support group" to aid pursuit of their European "dreams" (Kazharski 2018). The Visegrad Group was established in 1991 as an irregular gathering of the leaders of the three, later four countries (following the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1993) with a single agendamembership in Western institutions (Dangerfield 2008). ...
... This literature is of little help to investigations of the Visegrad Group per se; however, there is a growing interest in the functioning and impact of the group. Most existing studies focus on policies in which the Visegrad Group countries present a unified position, for example, foreign and defense policy (Neuman 2010;Töro et al. 2014), migration policy (Kazharski 2018;Pachocka 2016), and Brexit (Brusenbauch Meislova 2019; Göllner 2017). Several papers have examined the cooperation within the Visegrad Group (Dangerfield 2008;Schmidt 2016), including coordination in energy and climate policies (Braun 2019;Oravcová and Mišík 2018). ...
... These previously invisible members of the Union have turned into a strong group capable of pursuing their priorities at the EU level, supporting further integration in some areas and opposing the development of community rules in others. Migration policy is a good example of the latter (Kazharski 2018;Pachocka 2016) and certain aspects of energy policy, especially energy security, are illustrative of the former (Oravcová and Mišík 2018). Consequently, the idea that the Visegrad Group is a unified group with homogenous preferences has emerged (Braun 2020). ...
The Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) is a visible actor at the EU level in several areas including energy security. This chapter argues that the unity the group sometimes presents is the result of ad hoc policy convergence among members, and not the consequence of cooperation within the group. Indeed, as the chapter argues, the Visegrad Group lacks internal structures and is unable to forge compromises or provide a platform for discussion. This contrast is explained using the example of energy security and decarbonization – two closely related issues on which the Visegrad Group members have divergent preferences. While all four countries have similar preferences when it comes to energy security and have utilized the Visegrad Group to push for these at the EU level, their preferences on decarbonization are not always aligned. The chapter provides detailed insights into the main issues connected to decarbonization and examines the similarities and differences between the Visegrad Group countries in this policy area.
... The refugee crisis has clearly exacerbated the East-West differences (Kazharski 2018). The gap in the degree of xenophobia has always been there, as attested by a multitude of surveys, but without the dramatic events of 2015and without the ideological entrepreneurship of the authoritarian elitethis gap could have remained inconsequential. ...
... The anti-immigration argument became integrated into the decline-of-the-West argument. As the Slovak leader, Robert Fico, said, "The idea of multicultural Europe failed and the natural integration of people who have another way of life, way of thinking, cultural background and most of all religion, is not possible" (Kazharski 2018). In this view, avoiding multiculturalism at all costs, is simply common sense, and the Eastern European countries should not be compelled to repeat the mistakes of the West. ...
... Even in Slovakia, a country where progressive forces achieved major successes at the end of the decade, the discursive field was re-shaped by the co-optation of culturalist-conservative anti-migration rhetoric (Kazharski 2018(Kazharski , 2019. Politicians, like the leader of SME Rodina party, campaigned with the idea that Europe is exposed to a "controlled invasion" (Walter 2019). ...
The decline of the quality of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe was facilitated by intellectual, ideological, and organizational innovations of a new authoritarian elite. I this article I discuss five such innovations: a particular combination of victim mentality, self-confidence and resentment against the West, the transformation of neighbor-hating nationalisms into a civilizationist anti-immigrant platform, the delegitimization of civil society and the return to the belief in a strong state, the resurrection of the Christian political identity, and the transformation of populist discourse into a language and organizational strategy that is compatible with governmental roles (“populist establishment”). These factors together point to an overarching ideological fame that I call paternalist populism.
... The importance of the Visegrad cooperation stemmed from the geopolitical ambition of transforming 'Eastern Europe' and its negative connotation, to 'Central Europe', a region closer to Western values and identities. In other words, the political identity of the Visegrad Four proceeded with a normative conformity with the West (Kazharski, 2018). Their scope was fulfilled with the accession to the European Union (EU) in 2004. ...
... Visegrad Four (V4) resurged as one political voice on the European scene, despite a period of scarce activity and noticeable disparities in the members' approach of national and European issues and policies. The V4 political elites constructed not only discourses but also a new regional identity in juxtaposition with promoted Western values (Kazharski 2018). A region that used to portray itself as the 'lost cousin' of Europe, suddenly became the 'enfant terrible' to the West (Kazharski 2018). ...
... The V4 political elites constructed not only discourses but also a new regional identity in juxtaposition with promoted Western values (Kazharski 2018). A region that used to portray itself as the 'lost cousin' of Europe, suddenly became the 'enfant terrible' to the West (Kazharski 2018). Academics argue that the migration crisis served as a catalyst for a preexisting cleavage between 'East' and 'West' within the European Union. ...
Over the past three decades, the Visegrad Four (V4) shifted from normative conformity with the West to pursue a counter-hegemonic strategy in relation to the EU. Explaining the ‘why’s’ behind the non-conformity stance, the paper adopts discourse analysis to explain the rise of modern-day sub-regionalism within the political borders of the EU. The European migration crisis catalyzed a discursive clash between members of the V4 on one hand and actors within the European Institutions on the other. This has led to an identity redefinition within the V4, igniting a process of sub-regional reaffirmation. Other than being a complementary sub-regional grouping, the paper finds and coins a new category of sub-regionalism, ‘opportunistic sub-regionalism’ to explain the dialectic relationship between the EU and V4. We find that this alternative form of sub-regionalist grouping is linked to observable attempts at achieving a level of sub-regional actorship to influence decision making in the EU.
... However, whereas populist parties' influence on some public policies, such as welfare or migration policy has received much attention (Lutz 2019;Röth, Afonso, and Spies 2018), we know astonishinglylittle about their role in making of and their impact on foreign policies. While increasingly picked up in the critical geopolitics literature dealing with post-communist countries (Kazharski 2018;Krasteva 2017), populist parties' foreign policy remains overseen in more mainstream scholarship which is intrigued by the decline of the liberal international order (Ikenberry 2018;Zürn 2018), but has hitherto only rarely looked at the ideas of populist or non-liberal actors. ...
... Previous research on foreign policy in CEE countries has emphasized the role of national ideas or narratives in the region over the last decades (Kazharski 2018;Tulmets 2014). In this context, the role of intellectuals was regarded as being particularly important after the 1970's, when dissidents nourished alternative foreign policy discourses long before officials could even think of them, often even espoused their own alternative version of "critical geopolitics" (Szulecki 2015;Turkowski 2018). ...
... The critical geopolitics literature has in particular emphasized the importance for foreign policy of "experts" and especially "intellectuals of statecraft", i.e. "those intellectuals who offer normative and imperative rules for the conduct of strategy and statecraft by the rulers of the state", and that own their influence to "layers of interlocking institutions", such as universities, private research institutes, think tanks, the media and government agencies (Ó Tuathail, Dalby, and Routledge 1998, 7-10;Crampton and Ó Tuathail 1996;Coleman 2016). Several studies have emphasized from this perspective the role of regional elites (Kazharski 2018) and in particular the role intellectuals in post-communist Europe in promoting the idea of Central Europe as a "cultural entity" to guide foreign policy (Kuus 2007;Moisio 2002;Szulecki 2015) vis-à-vis Western Europe but also vis-à-vis the countries to the East (Zarycki 2014). ...
Ruling right-wing populist parties in Europe have significantly changed foreign policies and advanced criticism against core values of liberal democracy, including dismissive stances vis-à-vis the European Union. This paper argues that the reorientation of foreign policies in Hungary and Poland is consistent with ideas developed by incumbent populist right-wing parties and intellectuals of statecraft in the wider conservative movement supporting them. The contribution studies the foreign policy conceptions of right-wing forces and builds on critical geopolitics to trace these back to ideas shaped in broader right-wing networks that have played leading roles in developing a right-wing ideological alternative to liberalism.
... Visegrad Four (V4) resurged as one political voice on the European scene, despite a period of scarce activity and noticeable disparities in the members' approach of national and European issues and policies. The V4 political elites constructed not only discourses, but also a new regional identity in juxtaposition with promoted Western values (Kazharski, 2018). A region that used to portray itself as the "lost cousin" of Europe, suddenly became the "enfant terrible" to the West (Kazharski, 2018). ...
... The V4 political elites constructed not only discourses, but also a new regional identity in juxtaposition with promoted Western values (Kazharski, 2018). A region that used to portray itself as the "lost cousin" of Europe, suddenly became the "enfant terrible" to the West (Kazharski, 2018). ...
... Provided the general acceptance of these conceptual understandings, the Visegrad Four has been solely cited as a complementary formation until the countries' accession in 2004 (Dangerfield, 2004). Recent studies merely contend that the Visegrad Four experiences a transition and evolution into a new, hybrid stage (Kazharski, 2018). ...
Over the past three decades, the V4 shifted from a normative conformity with the West to pursuing a counter-hegemonic strategy in relation to the EU following the adoption of the Council Decision on resettlement quotas. What becomes apparent in this context is that questions regarding the European migration and refugee policies became a defining issue for EU’s politics as well as its future. Thus, explaining the “why’s” behind the stance of the Visegrad Group and by extension that of Central and Eastern Europe is relevant to understanding the particular sensitivity associated with the issue and its impact on the further development of Europe. The study argues that there are evident inconsistencies in the theoretical approaches proposed for the study of the relationship between macro-entities such as the European Union and meso-level formations such as the Visegrad Four. Hence, as part of the argument, this study suggests that events such as the migration crisis have served as a catalyst for a discursive clash between members of the V4 on the one hand and actors within the European Institutions on the other. In turn, this led to an identity redefinition within the V4, igniting thus a process of sub-regional reaffirmation. In addition, following the same line of argumentation, this study suggests that the V4 evolved into a new form of sub-regionalism. Regarding the latter, this study argues for a new category of sub-regionalism, namely that of “opportunistic sub-regionalism”. This alternative form of sub-regionalist grouping implies that there are observable attempts at achieving a level of actorship without formal institutionalization. Lastly, it is suggested that (sub)regional groupings such as the Visegrad Four can be sui generis and exist outside normative arguments of convergence and formal institutionalization.
... Following Richardson's suggestion, this Research Colloquium contributes to academic debate regarding the enduring salience of geographical and geopolitical imaginations in shaping practices of statecraft. There exists a rich literature on the histories of Central European geopolitical thinking, such as Hungarian Turanism (Akcalı and Umut 2012), Polish Jagellonianism (Ištok, Kozárová, and Polačková 2018), or Czech anti-geopolitical traditions (Drulák 2006;Kazharski 2018) which continue to be mobilized in contemporary contexts. However, these framings need to be understood in the light of broader shifts in geopolitical thinking and competing conceptualizations of EU-Europe as a political space. ...
... These issues emerge, for example, in the question of promoting greater regional cooperation within Central Europe. As is well known, the nearly unequivocal opening toward the West, and thus the process of EU integration, has been accompanied by more modest, but nevertheless regionally significant, processes of cooperation involving initiatives such as the Visegrád Four and the Central European Free Trade Area (Kazharski 2018). Up until the early 2010s, the latter were largely subordinated to "East-West" political orientations and lacked political substance. ...
This article introduces a Research Colloquium that investigates relationships between the production of Central European geopolitical imaginaries and processes of European integration. Specifically, we interrogate the ways in which Central European geopolitical imaginaries have involved the recasting of old and the emergence of new framings of regional identities, regional cooperation and geopolitical orientations. Our specific focus on Hungary is not coincidental; since 2010 the Hungarian government has pursued a strident and rather noisy ”geopoliticization” of its relations with the EU, its Central European neighbors and beyond. Together with Poland, Hungary has been an active producer of scenarios of national and European destiny according to conservative and often reactionary notions of identity and illiberal values. Contextual background explaining the rise of EU-skeptic imaginations of national purpose is provided and suggests that economic disparities as well as unresolved national tensions between liberalism and conservatism have been major drivers. As we will argue, stubborn reliance on fixed geopolitical ideas as a source of influence and power can lead to rigid commitments to identity politics that can both thwart more effective regional cooperation and harm national economic and political interests.
... This is reflected in a significant body of scholarly research that has sought to decipher the V4's apparent shifts away from EU core values as well as raise important questions regarding the reasons for and potential consequences of illiberal tendencies. Aliaksei Kazharski (2018) has suggested that the V4's lack of normative conformity with the European Union mainstream might signify a process by which Central Europe is in the process of transforming the EU into a more heterogeneous space of political and cultural norms. Kazharski has also suggested that the V4's move toward illiberal politics might represent a new form of regional cohesion based on social conservatism and national interests. ...
... Indeed, no single event has evoked the specter of East-West divisions more than reactions to the plight of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war. As Nič (2016) argues, 2016 was a turning point that signaled the V4's move away from a coherent regional platform; events such as the refugee issue not only supported radicalism in Visegrád Four countries but revealed already existing normative divides in terms of values and political cultures (Kazharski 2018). ...
This paper discusses the significance and potential consequences of illiberal politics for the Visegrád Group’s (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) role as a regional integration platform. Moreover, links between Europeanizationand V4 geopolitical identity will be explored as part of investigating discursive framings of Central Europe’s “illiberalism.” I suggest that illiberal regionalism is a useful concept in that it problematizes political and popular narrations of East-West difference as competing projects of Europeanization. I will also argue that instead of a fundamental regional illiberalism what we find is an unstable, temporally limited and contingent constellation of political and social agendas. Illiberal regionalism can thus be read as strategic, aguably opportunistic, contestations of EU policies that reflect economic, political, and social uncertainties. Tensions involved in this regionalist shift are exemplified by “revolutionary” Hungarian and Polish national conservative agendas and their interaction with the more measured pragmatism of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is also clear that illiberal regionalism reflects the reciprocal and interdependent nature of the V4’s political relations within the EU. Benefits of EU membership, such as leveraging and enhancing national status, continue to act as powerful counter-currents to more radical projects that would, for example, contest Euro-Atlantic alignments.
... According to Pirro (2019), the ĽSNS is an example of a "far-right movement party" (788) which draws on prior activities of the Slovenská Pospolitosť movement and maintains ideological link with it, thus merging political protest (rallies, street demonstrations, riots) with electoral mobilisation (788). Discarding their paramilitary image and adapting their nationalistic and xenophobic rhetoric to active criticism of the Roma, immigrants, the establishment, the EU and NATO, the ĽSNS mobilised enough support to make a breakthrough as a legitimate, if extreme political party (Kluknavská and Smolík 2016, 336;Kazharski 2017). ...
... In post-communist Europe "the socio-cultural division remains central to political party competition, and not socio-economic division as is the tendency in Western Europe" (Kazharski 2017, 14-15) which accounts for the continuing politicisation of ethnicity. Nationalism is not confined to the far right, but constitutes the mainstream itself (Minkenberg 2015, 39;Kazharski 2017) which explains why in Slovakia, a socio-economically left-leaning leading governing party Smer engages in the rightwing nationalist rhetoric (Mihálik and Jankoľa 2016, 10). ...
Focusing on the People's Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS), the article systematically explores the political environment in Slovakia in order to best explain the parliamentary breakthrough of this extreme right party that is hostile to representative democracy and is ideologically rooted in wartime authoritarianism. It is argued that the success of the ĽSNS ought to be viewed from the perspective of persistent ethno-nationalist trend in Slovak politics which runs through Slovakia's national development from precommunist times to the present. While migration crisis was an additional catalyst, ethno-centricism and illiberalism have a longer tradition in post-1989 Slovakia than the ĽSNS.
... In Slovakia, like in other states of the Visegrád Four, the backlash was stimulated by the European migration crisis of 2015, and the V4 taking joint opposition to the proposed EU system of migration quotas. One implication of this was a co-optation of culturalist-conservative anti-migration rhetoric into the discourse of mainstream parties, which significantly re-shaped the discursive field (see also Kazharski, 2017). In general, researchers have admitted that the radical right in Eastern Europe has been functioning in a much more 'permissive environment' and was often admitted to mainstream party coalitions (Buštíková, 2018). ...
... self-sufficiency in food security and energy security or can clash with established mainstream perceptionssuch are the ideas of taking Slovakia of the EU and NATO which, as of 2018, only the fringe right could afford to preach. Other themes, such as opposition to multiculturalism and the EU system of migration quotas resonate with attitudes of the ruling and mainstream opposition parties as well as those of the broader public (see Kazharski, 2017, on the effects of the 2015 European migration crisis on the Slovak society and politics). The strategy of conspiracy theory minded attacks on NGOs and civil society that ĽSNS have also been echoed by the mainstream. ...
The article examines political strategies of the Slovak extreme right by drawing on theories of populism developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It performs an analysis of the discourse of the far-right People's Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS). Its key finding is that ĽSNS discourse constructs an array of radical borders (frontiers) between the so-called ‘decent people’ and the multiple, but often unrelated, alleged threats, such as foreigners, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, the political establishment or the clandestine ‘global elites’. Multiple frontiers are woven together into an overarching conspiracy-minded narrative of the ‘system’ threatening the ‘people’, thus making the ĽSNS strategy an intrinsically populist one. © 2019
... These countries decided that it would be easier for them to negotiate terms with their Western counterparts acting together. However, in recent years, there have been growing differences of opinion among the Visegrad countries, including on such issues as energy policies and strategies [3][4][5][6][7]. These differences are due to different structures of the energy sector as well as some political issues [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. ...
The European Union (EU) is a global leader in renewable energy, and it is working to maintain this position through setting high standards for itself as well as for its member states in this field. Among the goals set for 2030 in Directive (EU) 2018/2001 and changes published on 14 July 2021 is a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (compared to 20% in 2020). The targets for individual countries vary and depend on the current level of development of renewable energy. This article focuses on evaluation of these targets in the Visegrad Group (V4) countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). These are post-Communist countries that have undergone systemic transformations but still face challenges related to sustainable development in renewable energy. This article analyzes the 2030 goals and the prospects of their implementation. Evaluated criteria include greenhouse gas emissions, the share of renewable energy in energy consumption, energy consumption, energy efficiency, and energy intensity. The analyses in this article are based on a literature review, the current energy situation in each country, European climate and energy targets, comparative analyses, and our own forecasts. Our results show that V4 countries would need to revise their policies and funds allocated for green transformation, which, in turn, might change their projections of the EU climate package targets for 2030. These findings might be useful for the EU stakeholders and policymakers responsible for climate policies and implementing renewable energy targets.
... Due to this trend, the Visegrad bloc is said to be harming EU values and putting the EU at risk of disintegration (Morillas, 2017). Kazharski (2018), in his article "The End of Central Europe…" argued that the rise of right-wing parties as an effect of the migration crisis has shaped a normative project juxtaposed to western Europe's liberal values. As a distinct type from Euroscepticism, Heinisch (2017) conceptualizes this as Europragmatism-a different type from Euroscepticism that is apparent as the party is still benefiting from EU integration yet rejecting EU rules and values on specific issues at the same time. ...
The rise of authoritarianism and European Union (EU) skepticism in Central Europe has raised concern about the EU Integration project. Populist movements in Visegrad Group countries, consisting of four Central European states, have been deemed threats to the Integration project and the EU enlargement process. This paper attempts to revisit and rethink the role of the Visegrad Group in EU integration policy and process using a case study of the role of V4 cooperation with six Western Balkan Countries (WB6) through the socio-constructivist lens. This paper finds the potential of socio-constructivism in explaining the aspect of norms, values, and identities, not just material interests. Moreover, the V4 countries also support WB6 as an example of sub-regionalism as a means to EU membership. In the end, this paper attempts to map out the characteristics, prospects, and impediments of V4’s role in supporting the WB6’s path to the EU.
... 11 Such representation of Poland's identity marks a significant departure from the 'Return to Europe' narrative, which had constituted both an ontological and geopolitical project for Poland and other Central European countries, leading policy-makers to emphasize their state's Western identity and reject any associations with the 'East' (hence the insistence on 'Central Europe') (Cadier 2012;Szulecki 2015). In that sense, PiS foreign policy practice reflects and feeds into a broader trend in Central Europe, namely the partial rejection of normative conformity and identification with the West in the context of a regional counter-hegemonic strategy (Kazharski 2018). In Poland, the formalization of this strategy is grounded in the political orientation of the current government and notably relies on populist articulations of historical references to Germany in foreign policy discourse. ...
This article analyses how, in Poland, the populist political orientation of the ruling party (Law and Justice—PiS) has coloured the historical discourse of the government and has affected, in turn, its foreign policy and diplomatic relations. We argue that the historical discourse of the PiS government is a reflection of the party’s reliance on populism as a political mode of articulation in that it seeks to promote a Manichean, dichotomic and totalizing re-definition of the categories of victim, hero and perpetrator—and of Poland’s roles in this trinity. The article details the direct and indirect repercussions of PiS populist-inspired historical posture on Poland’s foreign policy by analysing its policies towards—and relations with—Ukraine and Germany. As such, the article sheds light on the under-explored links between populism and historical memory and makes a contribution to the nascent scholarship on the foreign policy of populist governments.
... Also, the Sovereignty coalition was based on a long practice of reciprocal cooperation. 29 Poland and Hungary (which, together, represent more than half the population of eastern European member states) started their cooperation in the context of the Visegrad group (constituted also by the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the V4) since 1991, first for preparing the enlargement's negotiations and then, after 2004, for coordinating their position before the meetings of the EU intergovernmental institutions (European Council, particularly) (Kazharski 2017;Copeland 2013). However, it was the mid-2010s migration crisis that led the national leaders of the two countries to give their cooperation a clearer policy rationale. ...
The article aims to explain the 2020 approval of ‘Next Generation EU’, the program for helping the EU member states to go beyond the pandemic. The approval of NG-EU is interpreted in the context of a confrontation between three distinct interstate coalitions, coordinating a group of countries from the north (the Frugal coalition) against the core of continental countries (the Solidarity coalition) and then a group of countries from the east (the Sovereignty coalition) against the previous two coalitions allied together. Based on the discursive institutionalism’s approach, the article reconstructs the policy discourse shared by the members of each coalition, coherently utilized along the fault lines which conceptually structured the 2020 policy-making process. The policy coherence and the organizational consistency of the three coalition cores affected the EU policy-making process more than the inter-institutional relations between the Commission and national governments. The article concludes advancing arguments for interpreting the sub-regional segmentation of the EU.
... Its entrance into institutionalised politics presented a challenge for the democratic regime. The second major challenge to democratic values and liberal understanding of democracy was the reaction of political elites to the refugee crisis, characterised by the discourse of rejection of fundamental rights of most political elites (Kazharski 2018). The Slovak convergence of discourse on migration and terrorism (Zvada 2018) resulted in the adoption of counter-terrorism measures, which extended the authority of the state to limit basic rights and freedoms. ...
Slovakia’s democracy has faced intensified challenges from both far-right political actors seeking to gain a parliamentary majority and mainstream political actors engaging in various forms of anti-minority rhetoric. This chapter provides an overview of mainstream measures conventionally associated with Slovak neo-militant democracy, as well as of the institutional landscape that put them into practice. It utilises the concept of militarisation of democracy as a process of defending democracy via rights restrictions, which may backfire and trigger the deterioration of democracy. The first five sections evaluate the rationale and implementation of particular measures from the perspective of their capacity and limitations to contribute to democratisation. The results present a mixed picture, with some measures lacking clear justification, and hence contributing to a tension between militarisation and democratisation. As most of these measures are dependent upon courts interpreting their scope and limits, the chapter presents how the judiciary engages with the process of militarisation of democracy, concluding that the Slovak judiciary has the necessary resources to contribute to the compatibility of militarisation with democracy, though it has not utilised them to their full potential.
... War-related metaphors provide a salient knowledge structure involving a fight between opposing and differentiated sides: the good 'us' and the evil 'them' (Flusberg et al., 2018). This militarized structure overlaps with the populist discursive practice developed in the countries under analysis associated with migration (Kazharski, 2018), gender and LGBT issues (Grzebalska & Pető, 2018), and even corruption (Pirro, 2015), being narrated in absolutist terms. ...
The aim of this paper is to fill the geographical gap in the literature about the militarization of COVID-19 through a comparative exploration of how the pandemic was handled in militarized ways in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Drawing from official government and military statements, media articles, and expert interviews with defense intellectuals, we examine two interconnected areas-that of discourse and that of military domestic assistance. By viewing the developments through the lens of militarization and military-society relations scholarship, we argue that rather than serving as a 'portal' for civilian resilience, the pandemic constituted an unprecedented 'return of the troops' to Visegrad states and societies in terms of its size, scope, and duration, thus strengthening the pressure for re-militarization in the region that has been recorded in the last decade. The paper presents a number of analytical findings: first, it identifies the emerging gap between right-wing populist rhetoric that relied on warspeak and the human-centered communication of the armed forces; second, it reveals that military domestic assistance functioned as a military 'band aid' on systemic vulnerabilities, as well as incidentally converged with illiberal patterns of governance; third, it shows how the pandemic aided re-militarizing pressures, resulting in a significant boost to the defense sector, a positive public opinion about the armed forces, and military-society relations.
... It crystallized certain divisions into entrenched polarizations, between South and North (along lines already drawn by the euro crisis), and more acutely between East and West. While it has failed to maintain cohesion and have a decisive imprint at the EU level on foreign policy dossiers of importance to central Europe (such as Russia or energy security), the Visegrad Group found its unity and negatively emerged as a political force in Europe around the rejection of refugee relocation schemes, which they saw as being forced upon them by western Europe (Kazharski, 2018). The migrant crisis has, indeed, "laid bare a widespread perception across central and eastern Europe that western Europe (and hence the EU) is trying to force on them a multicultural model of society which in their eyes has 'entirely failed'" (Rupnik, 2016). ...
The European Union’s (EU) foreign policy softwareneeds updating: it appears to be increasingly out ofsync with the operating system of international politics.At the turn of the millennium, many had hopedthat the EU’s internal model and institutional nature– as a transnational multilateral governance platformbased on international law and soft power – wouldmake it well prepared for, and even a potential leaderin, the world to come (Howorth, 2010). Yet, postmodernEurope has not seen the advent of the kindof post-Westphalian international system it had hopedfor. Instead, the EU finds itself rather ill-equipped inthe new era of great-power competition. Its distinctiveapproach to foreign policy, which has mainlyconsisted in the export of democratic governanceand economic standards, is increasingly under strainat a time where it is both tested externally and contestedinternally...
... the Self as an underdog in a down-up political antagonism. In that sense, populist discourse serves as a template for expressing long-standing grievances about unequal and exploitative centre-periphery relations in Europe (Zarycki 2000) and for articulating, in that context, a counter-hegemonic strategy rejecting normative conformity with the West (Kazharski 2018). ...
This article characterizes and analyses variations in Poland’s foreign policy under the Law and Justice (PiS) government with a view to shed light on the distinctive influence of populism. I argue that this influence has mainly to do with the ‘politics of representation’, understood both in the sense of meaning production and of theatrical performance. Building on the discursive and stylistic approaches to populism as well as on the post-structuralist literature in Foreign Policy Analysis, this article conceptualizes populism as a set of representational practices in domestic politics that spill over, and affect, foreign policy. By promoting distinct representations of Self and Other in international affairs and by investing foreign policy making as a site to perform a rupture with technocratic elites, populist practices contribute to enable or constrain certain policy choices and mode of diplomatic actions. In Poland, this has translated into a securitization of the EU, a partial de-Europeanization of the national interest and a re-shuffling of partnership prioritizations, as well as in disruptive and ‘undiplomatic’ comments on the part of the PiS foreign policy executive.
... Their research finds that people in affluent locations are more likely to vote anti-EU, which eliminates large swaths of the eastern part of the Union. Similarly, analyses focused on the spectre of populism (Havlík and Hloušek 2020;Kazharski 2018;Varga and Buzogany 2020) assess the developments in CEE as an anti-liberal trend that enforces an either-or dichotomy that is anathema to the attempts of critical geopolitics to theorise place, space, borders, identity, and power in Europe. Wodak (2007), who sought to identify and analyse processes of identity construction within Europe and on its periphery, found four different options for Europe: Constitutional Europe, Free-Trade Europe, United States of Europe, and Multi-Speed Europe; the last could arguably account for Intermarium but is somewhat condescending in its implication the region is lagging behind. ...
The Three Seas Initiative was launched in 2015 by Croatia and Poland; today, it brings together 12 European states located in the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Seas basins. To understand the rationale behind this seemingly precarious regional project, this paper employs the optics of critical geopolitics, which shifts the focus away from the exclusive concerns of great powers machinations, counters the dominant narrative by emphasizing the multiplicity of voices in the geopolitical spectrum and stresses the emancipatory nature of the whole project balanced by its heterarchical characteristic. This angle allows us to capture the full complexity of this geopolitical design characterized by two phenomena: ‘being in between’ (monolithic powers, areas of domination, or at least domination, one religion and one language) and ‘fragmentation and multinationality.’ The analysis demonstrates that Intermarium is an attempt to break away from everything that prevents the region ‘between Berlin and Moscow’ from being a subject, not an object of political affairs, and shows how Central and Eastern Europe fits into the post-liberal international order.
... In all cases, these are themes that are fundamental for contemporary European politics (of both European countries individually and the EU as a whole). At least in the context of V4 countries, we can observe the success of the extreme right (although with differing intensity among countries) (Kazharsky 2017); strong anti-migration stances of a significant portion of the political representation and in some cases the regime as such (Kalmar 2018); criticism of European politics (Kaniok and Havlík 2016); and a swing on the part of the political representation towards Russia (Benazzo 2017). The majority of these topics is also linked with the ongoing discussion on the possible decline of liberal democracy in Central Europe (Bustikova and Guasti 2017). ...
This paper focuses on the ways in which political actors make use of historical legacies to present their own determination to sustain their country’s national security. We use the example of the annual celebrations of the anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising (SNU) to demonstrate the ways in which similar celebrations can become a platform for political actors to express requests and address their audience. Using semi-participant observation, we have analyzed six years of these celebrations (2015–2020) and the securitizing strategies and moral panic creation strategies contained in the speeches of participating politicians. Our analysis shows that securitization is taking place, and labels of threat sources are being given not only to topics that are naturally linked to the celebrated event, but also topics that are in no way related to SNU. Despite this fact, politicians use the legitimacy of the event to manifest their own attempts at sustaining security.
... The paradox of the 'imaginary migrant' lay in the fact that Slovak political elites had been 'reproducing a Western-like anti-Muslim discourse in the absence of Muslim immigrant communities comparable to those in Western Europe' (Tabosa, 2020). Both mainstream and extreme right parties capitalized on the anti-migration rhetoric, and the migration crisis marked a breakthrough for right-wing politics in Slovakia as well as in the broader Visegrád Four region, suggesting a new normative, axiological rift between Central and Western Europe (see Balogh, 2017;Braun, 2020;Kazharski, 2018). ...
The article examines discursive framing of Muslims during the 2020 Slovak parliamentary campaign, putting it in the broader context of the four-year period since the previous 2016 elections, which took place in the shadow of the European migration crisis. We adopt a social constructivist framework to argue that, despite very low numbers of Muslims in Slovakia, Islam remains a politically divisive issue. Competing discourses strive to redefine Islam for their own political purposes, making use of politicized symbols such as the 'kebab' or the 'minaret' in the process. This makes Islam a floating signifier of Slovak politics to which multiple meanings can be attached. In the absence of actual problems with Muslim minority integration, axiological conflicts over Islam can be seen as representing broader struggles between more culturally conservative and liberal-multiculturalist forces.
... Mamadouh (2012) signals the upscaling of invasion metaphors, while this European element is also present in the European discourse of the Front National before the Maastricht Treaty (Perrineau, 2017). Once they are in office, like the Hungarian party Fidesz, led by the charismatic Viktor Orb� an, their border representations are even more consequential (as with Slovakia-see Kazharski, 2018). The complexity of Orb� an's border rhetoric is particularly notable for its combination of seemingly contradictory elements: building fences while maintaining open borders in Schengen; closing the border for migrants while keeping it open for co-ethnics living outside the EU (Lamour & Varga, 2017;Crawley's intervention in McConnell et al., 2017;Varga, 2017;Scott, 2018). ...
Research on populism is animating academic debate in light of the growing global relevance of populist parties and ideologies as well as of the recent events that have radically affected the conceptualization of the border, security, and politics nexus. Until recently, the contribution of political geography and border studies to the analysis of populism has been limited, although borders, sovereignty, globalization, and inequality are crucial elements mobilized by the current populist wave. In this contribution we seek to initiate an exploration of bordering processes and walling, both metaphorical and concrete, as central features of populist agendas in the European context and beyond. The interventions provide a dynamic picture of the spatialization of fear at a time when various successive “emergencies” – the rise of populism, the alleged closure of Mediterranean ports, Brexit, and Covid-19 – have pushed previous concerns into the background, with the result that the spatial aspects of identity, our relationship with the other, and the political articulation of threat are continuously re-elaborated.
... Orbán seeks to transform the EUto decouple the EU itself from liberal democracy, and to disrupt internal and foreign policy decisions as part of trading favours with strongmen as far afield as Russia, the US, Israel and China (Meunier and Vachudova 2018). He has already transformed the Visegrad Four grouping of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia into a bloc known for rejecting humanitarian universalism and refusing to accept any EU plan to share the burden of providing safe harbour for refugees (Kazharski 2017;Szelényi 2019). ...
Ethnopopulism is an elite strategy for winning votes and concentrating power – a common playbook for the erosion of liberal democracy that is empowered and justified by a companion playbook of ethnopopulist and majoritarian appeals. Ethnopopulism is flexible with the truth, and flexible in identifying friends and enemies of “the people”. Ethnopopulist parties manipulate opposition to neo-liberal economic policies and racialize the immigrant threat. Democratic backsliding has unexpectedly taken hold in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, and the very factors that seemed to augur well for liberal democracy may have contained the seeds of its degradation at the hands of ethnopopulist leaders.
... 11 Such representation of Poland's identity marks a significant departure from the 'Return to Europe' narrative, which had constituted both an ontological and geopolitical project for Poland and other Central European countries, leading policy-makers to emphasize their state's Western identity and reject any associations with the 'East' (hence the insistence on 'Central Europe') (Cadier 2012;Szulecki 2015). In that sense, PiS foreign policy practice reflects and feeds into a broader trend in Central Europe, namely the partial rejection of normative conformity and identification with the West in the context of a regional counter-hegemonic strategy (Kazharski 2018). In Poland, the formalization of this strategy is grounded in the political orientation of the current government and notably relies on populist articulations of historical references to Germany in foreign policy discourse. ...
This article analyses how, in Poland, the populist political orientation of the ruling party (Law and Justice—PiS) has coloured the historical discourse of the government and has affected, in turn, its foreign policy and diplomatic relations. We argue that the historical discourse of the PiS government is a reflection of the party’s reliance on populism as a political mode of articulation in that it seeks to promote a Manichean, dichotomic and totalizing re-definition of the categories of victim, hero and perpetrator—and of Poland’s roles in this trinity. The article details the direct and indirect repercussions of PiS populist-inspired historical posture on Poland’s foreign policy by analysing its policies towards—and relations with—Ukraine and Germany. As such, the article sheds light on the under-explored links between populism and historical memory and makes a contribution to the nascent scholarship on the foreign policy of populist governments.
... Many scholars acknowledge that this development has strengthened the position of the Group within the EU (Pachocka, 2016, p. 102). The V4 has become a 'significant collective actor' (Cabada & Waisová, 2018, p. 10) that has evolved from a 'policy taker' to 'policy shap-er' (Bauerová, 2018, p. 132;Nič, 2016, p. 285) and even a 'maker' (Geddes & Scholten, 2016, p. 200;Kazharski, 2018;Schweiger & Visvizi, 2018, p. 1) of the EU's governance agenda. As a crucial tool for diplomacy and amplifier for the promotion of shared interests in the EU (Bauerová, 2018, p. 121;Dangerfield, 2014, p. 87;Neuman, 2017, p. 66;Nič, 2016, pp. ...
Despite the decrease in the number of members in European political parties, they still have an important role to play. In this paper we introduce the concept of high-quality membership (HQM) and show the potential of the party grassroots in organizational and communicational dimensions. We distinguished factors to be taken into account in order to build the HQM by parties. Only then can the organizational and communicational potential of party membership be used to the full. We argue that high-quality membership is valuable for parties because: it helps them to establish and maintain links with voters, and therefore elect representatives into local, regional, and national governments; it helps to collect information, understand problems and seek solutions important to local communities and to society in general; finally, it helps to improve the image of the party in society.
The questions we raise in this article do not concentrate entirely on the above functions of party members since we advance that if a party would like to benefit from high-quality membership it must first obtain basic knowledge about its members, their needs, expectations and judgements. So, we discuss in this article what kind of knowledge is necessary for parties to achieve the goal of HQM, and how the role of members is now understood and assessed by party leaders.
Key words: party membership, high–quality membership, party organization, strategic political communication, relationship between party and its members
... Furthermore, the political crisis of 2018, when the murder of the investigative journalist Kuciak forced the 'Euro-enthusiast' Prime Minister Fico to resign, raised a question of whether a country with high levels of political corruption is capable of meeting the normative and institutional standards of the Western 'core'. In sum, the posture of marginality or 'partial identification' (see Kazharski 2017) with the 'bigger Other' is likely to be the region's future. However, the social constructivist takeaway from this research could be that strategies and policy preferences of the respective small states in the region tend to be situated in geopolitical imaginaries with specific cultural roots, which need to be studied more systematically. ...
The article critically examines Czech and Slovak discourses on the so-called ‘core‘ of the European Union. It argues that despite their similarities as small Central European states, Slovakia and the Czech Republic exhibit significant differences in how the geopolitical imagination of their political establishments re-presents the countries‘ position in the center-periphery relations. The article does a two-step analysis. First, it discusses the cultural roots of the contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, tracing them back to formative periods of national history. Then, it analyzes present day establishment discourses on the ‘EU core‘, concluding that the Czech foreign policy debate demonstrates a much stronger tendency towards deliberate self-marginalization and is characterized by competing securitization discourses, one of which warns of the danger of marginalization outside of the ‘core‘ while the other attempts to securitize European and German ‘hegemony‘. The Slovak discourse, on the other hand, is characterized by an underlying constitutive fear of the Self, related to past experiences of anti-Western authoritarianism. This stimulates a much more Euroenthusiast Slovak attitude towards the ‘core‘. The article contributes to the social constructivist debate by arguing that small states can display different attitudes towards European integration based on their identities and historical experiences.
This Epilogue brings the themes addressed in the book up to date and orients them to the future. It specifically addresses the challenges, opportunities and issues raised by Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, including for international ordering, the EU as an actor in international affairs and for its (future) bordering. The chapter traces the development of bordering issues related to security and mobility, including the 2017 liberalisation of Schengen visa requirements for Ukrainians, through the EU’s repeated migration crises and the refugee flows generated by Russia’s assault. The Epilogue looks at the development of the EU as a security and geopolitical actor in this period and the journey of CEE states back to the periphery of the EU and, then, back to the core again thanks to their support for Ukraine. Finally, it reflects on possible futures for the EU, Ukraine and CEE—including in light of the emergence of ‘Neo-Idealist’ approaches to geostrategy in the region. Overall, the Epilogue thus provides one of the most innovative and up-to-date summaries of security and mobility issues as well as of EU and CEE (geo)politics over the last decade.
Nationalist arguments justify contemporary border walls around the world. But what happens when nationalism defines the border as a dividing line and mandates its openness to link with ethnic kin beyond the state’s borders? In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government built an anti-immigration fence along the southern border, separating the country from a large Hungarian community in northern Serbia. To avoid the clash with Hungary’s transborder nationalism, Orbán advanced a new geopolitical storyline that explained the border/migration crisis of 2015 as a ‘Muslim invasion of Christian Europe’. The narrative shifted the border’s meaning from a dividing line of the transborder Hungarian nation to a defensive line and civilisational rampart of ‘Christian Europe’. This discursive-analytical study of Orbán’s geopolitical reasoning captures how the border’s meaning changed over several months. The paper represents a critical geopolitical contribution to the border studies literature.
This article critically describes and compares intraregional geopolitical imaginaries as they appear in the official discourses of two groups of states in EUrope: Soft Eurosceptic discourse of Hungary and Poland vs. Europhile discourse of France and Germany. The analysis is carried out through application of pragmatic analysis and language games analysis of official speeches of the leading politicians of these states delivered in the year 2018 on the theme of ‘Future of Europe’. The theoretical framework of Rule-oriented Constructivism and the analytical framework of Critical Geopolitics guide this research. This research complements existing literature on geopolitical imaginaries highlighting the importance of linguistic practices, spatial understandings and intersubjective spaces in EUropean integration.
There are perhaps few terms that are used so frequently in the study of migration yet have as little definitional clarity as ‘governance’. This is perhaps not surprising, for, as the political scientist Claus Offe (2009) has observed, governance might best be understood as an ‘empty signifier’. What he meant by this was that governance acquires meaning through the ideas, processes, and practices that become associated with it rather than through a prior independent meaning that it possesses. For example, if migration governance is described as ‘multilevel’, as it often is, then this tells us that it occurs in lots of different places across ‘levels’ (local, national, international), whilst the actual meaning of governance remains unclear. This is a useful observation to take forward for the analysis that follows.
The migration crisis of 2015/2016 deepened a major fault line inside the EU, the one between its Western part and its new members from Central and Eastern Europe. Analysing the case of Czechia this article points to the role of politicisation and technocracy in this split. It is argued here that technocratic ideas and practices are deeply rooted in the Czech public life and that a technocratic symbiosis existed between the EU and Czechia. However, this symbiosis was disturbed by the way the European Commission was politicised before and during the crisis while it clashed with Czech technocratic positions.
During the past decade, China has rapidly emerged as a major player in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Will it divide Europe? Might these formerly communist countries align themselves again with a communist superpower to their east? Or does their past experience of Russia and communism generate suspicions of China? This article explores what public opinion data from a fall 2020 survey of six CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia) can teach us about the drivers of CEE attitudes toward China. It suggests that China has become a “second Eastern power” beyond Russia against which many people in the CEE have come to define themselves. Although there are large differences between CEE publics in their views of China, individual-level self-identifications with the East or West, and attitudes toward the communist past and communism today consistently shape views of both Russia and China. Russia looms large for all in the CEE, but especially for Latvia and Poland, whose views of China appear to be almost completely mediated through attitudes toward their giant Russian neighbor. We conclude with thoughts on the implications of these findings about the structure of CEE public opinion toward China for the future of the “16+1” mechanism and CEE-China relations more broadly.
The perception of the Visegrád Group has changed since the beginning of the migrant crisis in 2015. For some the group now represents a sort of “united front against a common European narrative”. This paper challenges the superficiality of such a notion by identifying the ideological components of a “united V4” narrative and examining the extent to which both the ruling parties and the citizens of member countries agree with them. The main finding is that ruling political parties cluster into distinct two groups, the Czech and Slovak bloc being more moderate than the Polish and Hungarian group. The citizens of these countries can neither be clustered in a similar way, nor are they homogeneous in their views, except to some extent on immigration matters. Also, citizens do not on average hold the same positions as their current governments
Radical-right populism has become a structural political phenomenon in the European Union in recent years. This ideology, the core principle of which is based on a nurtured antagonism between the ‘people’ and the ‘elite’, combined with a parallel promotion of authoritarian and nativist ideas, is generally associated with the nation state and its core territorial ideology: nationalism. However, populism can also be scaled at the regional level, within or across European state borders. This article, which is based on critical discourse analysis, aims to investigate what might constitute the meaning of cross-national regionalism according to a radical-right populist leader in Europe. More precisely, my objective is to research the antagonism this type of leader can structure to organize territorial, symbolic and institutional claims associated with a specific cross-national region. This research is based on the discourse Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán produced in relation to the Visegrád region. My analysis helps to reveal the types of power geometries articulated by populist leaders beyond state borders.
What was behind the Visegrád Group’s (V4) pursuit of its anti-migration policy (2015–2020), despite the adverse effects on the Group’s image and position within the EU? Through the framework of role theory, the article argues that this development stems from the Visegrád Group’s self-created and performed role of ‘sovereigntist’. The objective of this role is to minimise the threat of ‘illegal’ migration as well as to diminish Brussels’ supranational influence, which the V4 perceives as threatening to the particular national identity and sovereignty of its members. The article examines the internal contradictions of this role and how it clashes with the V4’s primary integrational role within the EU structures as a ‘follower’.
Working at the intersection of political geography and international relations, this article does two things. First, it theorises the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety. Second, it uses this conceptual lens to analyse and critique the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’. The conceptual part draws on Lacanian political theory and contributes to critical geopolitics, ontological security studies, and the literature on politics of anxiety. It is built around the notion of anxiety geopolitics, which denotes a discourse that promises to deal with social anxiety by providing geopolitical fixes to it, yet also ultimately fails in doing so. We then move to argue that ‘hybrid warfare’ is a prime case of such discourse. Using examples from the Czech Republic, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ successfully connects different sorts of anxieties together and creates a sense of ontological security by linking them to familiar East/West civilisational geopolitics that points to Russia as the ultimate culprit. Yet, at the same time, the discourse simultaneously subverts itself by portraying ‘hybrid threats’ as too insidious, invisible and constantly shifting to be ever possibly durably resolved. We conclude that this makes ‘hybrid warfare’ self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical.
The European Union (EU) is often hailed as one of the most successful peace projects in the history of humankind. Indeed, since its inception more than 70 years ago, the EU has made unparalleled contributions to the advancement of peace and reconciliation on the European continent. Despite these successes, the EU integration process faces increasing challenges, including the unprecedented departure of one of its members. Further, one of the greatest tests to European cohesion has proved to be the refugee and migrant crisis, which has revealed fault lines over not only migration but also broader issues of identity, norms, and values. In the wake of this crisis, the Visegrad Group— comprised of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—presented viewpoints that deviated from those held by most Western European states and EU institutions, thus prompting debates about the emergence of a new East–West divide within Europe. Intrigued by whether the notion of solidarity has a different meaning for those who were present at the birth of the EU as opposed to those who joined more than half a century later, this study strives to uncover the Visegrad countries’ understanding of and approach to European solidarity. Making the case that states’ behavior is a result of varying national characteristics deeply rooted within their national identities, it develops an analytical framework for investigating the nexus between identity and solidarity. Applying this framework to the Visegrad states’ responses to the refugee and migrant crisis and their positions and preferences regarding further enlargement of the EU yields three pivotal conclusions. First, the Visegrad states’ identification with the European project as well as their interpretation of the EU’s norms and values, such as that of solidarity, are contingent upon their respective national identities and historical experiences. Second, the particular composition and interaction of identity elements activated in political discourse can explain varying solidarity profiles among different states as well as possible variances in a single state’s behavior across multiple policy areas. And third, the Visegrad states share a great number of similar identity elements, yet often differ in their manifestation or degree of expression. By taking a more nuanced look at the Visegrad cooperation, this study challenges the widespread impression of the Visegrad Group as a homogeneous bloc. The findings make clear that even the same identity element with a slightly different manifestation can lead to different decisions. At the same time, geographical proximity, cultural similarities, and shared historical experience function as a “magnet” that draws the Visegrad states closer together, unites them in their policy preferences, and ensures the continuation of the Visegrad cooperation. In sum, the present study advances the understanding of the process of European integration and the Visegrad Group’s multifaceted role in it.
The present article tracks the evolution of Japan’s engagement with Central Europe after the end of Cold War. More specifically, it looks into the development of V4+Japan partnership within the context of post-Cold War foreign policy of Japan. The main argument revolves around two questions. First, in light of democratic backsliding in Central Europe, the article enquires into the basis of strategic relevancy and rationality behind the V4+Japan partnership. Second, it looks into the potential for future evolution of the relationship in the context of the post-Brexit EU-Japan relationship. The major conclusion rests on the premise that V4+Japan partnership, although weakly institutionalized and asymmetric in nature, retains meaning as long as it remains contingent on the values and principles of the EU-Japan strategic dialogue.
During some decades, Europe was separated because of the iron curtain that Churchill has identified from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, and only after the fall of Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union many of the Eastern and Central European countries succeeded to recover their complete political independence. For these countries, the moving from the Soviet State planning model to the western open-market type was a rough but necessary journey for joining the European Union. In 1991, three of these countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland decided to establish an informal political and cultural alliance aiming at a close cooperation, the so-called Vise grad Group (VG), designed to foster their integration into NATO and EU structures. However, after achieving these goals, in 1999 and in 2004, this group, already counting on the separated participation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic (V4), was not dissolved because the four countries consider that they needed a new type of cooperation allowing them a stronger common position towards European integration because the consensus-based decision-making of some European decision-making bodies allows V4 populist leaders to influence the communitarian decisions while internally presenting themselves as the moral guardians of the European civilization and diabolizing Brussels authorities accusing them of betraying European heritage. This paper shows that the Euroscepticism of V4 leaders is opportunistic, and that they are just pretending while complaining about Brussels because they know that they cannot leave the European Union also due to the increasing cooperation with other EU sub regional organizations. However, this populist alliance will be well worth watching as it can be the germ of transnational populism.
Despite the growing literature on populist radical-right parties (PRRP), the relationship between turnout and populist voting remains understudied, especially for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In this article, we analyze the individual-level factors that differentiate between those choosing voice (voting for PRRP) and exit (abstention) in the 2019 European Parliament elections. We estimate pooled logistic regression models for twelve PRRP from six CEE countries. Our findings show that anti-immigration and Euroskeptic attitudes—but also, unlike in Western Europe, trust in the national elites and satisfaction with democracy—increase the odds of PRRP voting instead of abstaining.
This paper is focused on the evolution of the ideology of Smer-Social Democracy (Smer-SD) party and its positions on European integration before the political elections in Slovakia in February 2020. As the 'social-democratization' of Smer-SD was the result of party's Europeanization, the article explores the dimensions of de-Europeanization in the politics of this party in 2017-2020. Since 2006, Smer-SD has occupied a dominant position among political parties in Slovakia. However, a substantive decline in the electoral support of the party took place after 2016. Smer-SD faced a significant political challenge during the political crisis after the assassination of the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová in February 2018. The result was the resignation of Prime Minister Robert Fico. The appointment of party vice chairman Peter Pellegrini as Prime Minister created a new situation within the party, as for the first time the positions of Prime Minister and head of the party were separated. The political crisis in 2018 revealed the presence of internal conflicts within the party and the weakening of the authority of its chairman, Robert Fico. The establishment of two centres of power within the party resulted in competition between Fico and Pellegrini and, finally, in June 2020, a split, as Pellegrini announced the founding of a new political party.
«Russisk informasjonskrig» er et begrep benyttet i vestlige medier og organisasjoner i dag. Forskningsfeltet jeg redegjør for i denne oppgaven, hviler på en forutsetning om at det foregår en kremlstyrt informasjonskampanje. Oppgavens bidrag er å undersøke denne forutsetningen, og å videreutvikle teori som beskriver russisk informasjonskampanje, med utganspunkt i Mark Galeottis kategori, state capture.
For å undersøke forutsetningen, kartlegger jeg prorussiske og antivestlige narrativ i fem postsovjetiske stater i området mellom Russlands og EUs innflytelsesfære. Det gjør jeg ved å undersøke forskjeller mellom kremltilknyttede og kremluavhengige russiske aviser. Jeg finner at enkelte kremltilknyttede aviser i høyere grad inneholder prorussiske og antivestlige narrativ. Undersøkelsen gir ingen entydig indikasjon på en kremleffekt.
For å videreutvikle teori innenfor feltet russisk informasjonskampanje, studerer jeg kremltilknyttede medier i Moldova. Det empiriske grunnlaget for teoriens viderutvikling styrker jeg ved å ettergå NATO StratComs forskning på hvilke narrativ som produseres i kremltilknyttede russiskspråklige medier i Moldova. Mine funn bekrefter tre av fire narrativ vist i tidligere forskning. Disse benytter jeg til å videreutvikle teori om hvordan informasjonskampanjene utspiller seg i Moldova og i land i kategorien state capture. Jeg fant basert på funnene fra Moldova at det viktigste narrativet i denne kategorien er prorussisk, og består i promoteringen av sovjetisk nostalgi og idéen om en felles russisk verden. De to andre narrativene er i hovedsak antivestlige. Det ene fremstiller USA og NATO som aggressive. Det andre narrativet hevder EU går i oppløsning, og vinkler dollaren og euroen negativt. Oppgavens empiriske grunnlag produseres gjennom kvantitativ tekstanalyse på 14.000 russiske avisartikler gjennom strukturerte emnemodeller (LDA).
Avisartiklene samt vedlegget kan deles per e-post: odasma@student.sv.uio.no. (Offentlig deling av avisartiklene samt deler av vedleggene kan være potensielt bryte med lover som regulerer opphavsrett.)
R-scriptene er tilgjengelige på
min githubkonto: https://github.com/odamarchand
This report focuses on the imaginaries and practices that demarcate space at the international and supranational scale. I will first review political geographic scholarship on region-making and regionalism, using the studies of Europe and the Belt and Road Initiative as examples, and I will then highlight some central themes in the current research on international borders. The report highlights the flexibility of bounding practices and the polymorphic character of borders. It underscores the resilience of state power and the transformations of sovereignty currently under way. It concludes by underscoring the interdisciplinary character of the relevant work.
This paper elaborates on the development of the Visegrad Group (V4) including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia in relation to the broader European integration process in the aftermath of its multiple crises. The paper suggests that the so‐called migration crisis that started in 2015 for the V4 countries constitutes a situation which in previous literature has been described as a postfunctionalist moment. However, in the V4 countries a postfunctionalist moment does not merely suggest reluctance to agree to further integration and in general a turn to EU criticism, but a strengthening of the four countries' shared V4 identity as well. To elaborate on how the V4's handling of the migration issue contributes to V4 identity building the paper argues that the postfunctionalist literature needs to be supplemented by insights from social constructivism. The paper utilizes a narrative analysis to examine how a V4 identity is under construction.
Following the ‘European refugee crisis’, European states have initiated different migration and integration policies that often perpetuate and reinforce nation-state otherisation, capitalist exploitation, colonial legacies, and gendered and racialised oppression. Using an interdisciplinary approach based on decolonial theory, world-systems research, Marxist analysis, critical state theory, critical race theory and feminist critiques, this article finds that a rigorous investigation of a complex world-system and its deep structures, including modernity/coloniality, capitalism, the nation-state, racism and sexism, can shed light on the formation of a global mobile labour force that manifests itself in place- and context-specific ways. Based on this assertion, this article analyses processes of migrant integration in Germany’s domestic work force and points to its colonial, gendered and racialised dynamics. The article concludes by reviewing Napuli Langa’s account of and involvement in the migrant resistance movement in Germany which began in 2012. This resistance movement highlights alternative ways of living together in and against the modern/colonial world-system that goes beyond (neo)liberal inclusionism.
Policy Brief: The paper analyses the impact of migration on the regional Visegrad cooperation, which is one of the instruments of Czech foreign policy. Visegrad’s join position towards migration has a dual impact on the cohesion of the Visegrad Group, moreover, it directly influences the European policy of Czechia and its position in the EU. In the context of searching for a link between regional and European policy dimension, it is in the Czech interest to push this regional cooperation towards stronger ideological unity, and active policy that would be beneficial to the EU.
This essay contextualises Hungarian antipolitics of Europe as an element of radical conservative nation-building and as a reflection of the strategic use of borders. Two concrete examples of border politics will be elaborated that document shifts from EU-conformity to EU-contestation and the increasing political significance of culturalist arguments. These cases, moreover, are exemplary of the dual nature of then nationalist-conservative agenda which involves: 1) the implementation of an ethnopolitical and thus extraterritorial, de-bordered notion of nation and 2) the unilateral securitisation of Hungary’s borders, for example with Serbia, in a self-proclaimed defence of European integrity. The research that informs this essay is based on a review of media sources, academic and policy-focused literature. The essay begins with a discussion of links between Hungarian euroscepticism and the radical conservative nation-building project and continues with an analysis of post-1989 border politics with regards to the areas mentioned above. Considerable attention will be devoted to the Hungarian government’s politics of borders and contestations of European Union within the context of the so-called refugee crisis and wider debates regarding immigration and asylum.
In Central and Eastern Europe, radical right actors significantly impact public debates and mainstream policy agenda. But despite this high discursive influence, the electoral fortune of radical right parties in the region is much less stable. It has been suggested that this may be due to the fact that mainstream competitors increasingly co-opt issues which are fundamental for the radical right. However, the extent to which such tactics play a role in radical right electoral success and failure is still a subject for debate.
This book is the first to provide a systematic theoretical framework and in-depth empirical research on the interaction between discursive influence, party competition and the electoral fortune of radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe. It argues that in order to fully explain the impact of mainstream party strategies in this regard, it is vital to widen the analysis beyond competition over issues themselves, and towards their various legitimizing narratives and frame ownership. Up-to-date debates over policies of collective identity (minority, morality and nationalizing politics) in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia serve as best cases to observe these under-researched phenomena. The analytical model is evaluated comparatively using original, primary data combined with election studies and expert surveys.
Advancing an innovative, fine-grained approach on the mechanisms and effects of party competition between radical right and mainstream parties, this book will be of interest to students and scholars researching the far right and European party politics, as well as political contestation and framing.
Political geographers have significantly contributed to understandings of the spatialities of Europeanization. We review some of this work, while also highlighting research themes where further political-geographic research would be insightful. We note the importance of work that captures both the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to Europe, European integration and ‘European power’ in different places within and beyond the EU, and the variegated manifestations of ‘Europeanizing’ processes across these different spaces. We also suggest that political-geographic research can add crucial input to reconceptualizing European inte- gration as well as Europeanization as it now unfolds in a time of ‘crisis’.
This article is about changing regional understandings in Europe and how those changed understandings reflect and shape contemporary geopolitical arrangements in the context of the eastward enlargement of the EU. It is argued in the article that two interrelated questions form the basis of the identity assumption of the eastern enlargement of the Union. First, where Europe's eastern boundary lies, and, second, how the eastern boundary is connected to the region-building, identity formation and moral language within the EU both at national and supranational scales. Special emphasis is given to a national moral language rather than to a supranational one, since, as argued in the article, national and European identities do not need to be mutually exclusive phenomena, but can bolster each other. The boundary between the EU and the 'East' is formed particularly through the national identity politics of the post-communist states applying for membership, and boundary drawing is a result of the 'European criteria' set down by the EU as well as the communist experience of the applicant states. It became a spatial strategy for the post-communist applicant states to locate themselves in historical and geographical Central Europe - the imagined moral heart of Europe - by separating themselves from the signifier 'East' in order to gain recognition as European in the early 1990s. This new narrative is argued to be particularly important for the post-Cold War national identity projects of the applicant states.
The end of the Cold War demonstrated the historical possibility of peaceful change and seemingly showed the superiority of non-realist approaches in International Relations. Yet in the post-Cold War period many European countries have experienced a resurgence of a distinctively realist tradition: geopolitics. Geopolitics is an approach which emphasizes the relationship between politics and power on the one hand; and territory, location and environment on the other. This comparative study shows how the revival of geopolitics came not despite, but because of, the end of the Cold War. Disoriented in their self-understandings and conception of external roles by the events of 1989, many European foreign policy actors used the determinism of geopolitical thought to find their place in world politics quickly. The book develops a constructivist methodology to study causal mechanisms and its comparative approach allows for a broad assessment of some of the fundamental dynamics of European security.
The quality of political competition at the moment of transition explains the divergence in the domestic trajectories of East European states, steering Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic towards liberal democracy, and Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia towards illiberal democracy after 1989. From 1989 to 1994, the European Union (EU) exerted only passive leverage on its democratizing neighbours, reinforcing liberal strategies of reform but failing to avert illiberal ones. After 1995, the EU exerted active leverage on the domestic politics of credible future members through the enlargement process. The benefits and requirements of EU membership, combined with the structure of the EU’s pre-accession process, interacted with domestic factors to improve the quality of political competition and to accelerate political and economic reforms in candidate states. The enlargement of the EU has thus promoted a convergence towards liberal democracy across the region. I unpack the consequences of the pre-accession process for the quality of democracy in the new members, the dynamics of the negotiations between the old members and the candidates, and the impact of the 2004 enlargement on the future of European integration. I conclude by exploring the usefulness of the EU’s active leverage in promoting liberal democracy in other prospective members such as Turkey and the states of the Western Balkans, and the trade-offs of further enlargements for the EU itself. The most successful tool of EU foreign policy has turned out to be EU enlargement—and this book helps us understand why and how it works.
This article argues that there is a difference in what constitutes the sources of recognition prior to countries' membership in the Euro-Atlantic community represented by NATO and after countries become its members. While prior to membership, countries are recognized for their compliance with NATO standards and policies, upon membership countries get the opportunity to promote specific interests legitimately and may seek recognition via non-compliance with NATO mainstream.
The paper explores this dynamic of recognition on the issue of Kosovo independence where Slovakia went from supporting NATO in its effort to protect civilians in Kosovo in the late 1990s to non-recognition of Kosovo in defiance of the majority of NATO member states less than a decade later. The crucial point proposed here is that there was a shift in how recognition by NATO worked prior to Slovakia's membership and upon membership in these frameworks. While prior to membership recognition was achieved by compliance and identification with NATO standpoints, policies and actions, upon membership, recognition is achieved by differentiation from these patterns. More generally, the study shows that NATO membership is a powerful source of conditionality in relation to future members and a powerful source of legitimacy in relation to current members' actions. While this has been discussed in the literature, the point here is that recognition in its various forms is an important driving force in these conditionality processes.
Societies have historically sought to spatialize difference—to other—even within the boundaries of supposedly unified polities. Drawing on previous scholarship on the spatialization of difference in published case studies, we examine the dialectical relationship between the formation and institutionalization of regions, on the one hand, and the nation-building process more broadly on the Other. Certain regions become repositories for undesirable national traits as part of a dialectical process of nation and region building. The processes of othering are rarely as linear and tidy as proposed in some current formulations of the theory; rather, othering involves a host of concomitant processes that work together to produce economically and culturally differentiated regions. The processes by which particular places or regions become “othered” are not only interesting in the abstract but also carry with them enduring material consequences. To demonstrate this effect, we visit two historical case studies that examine the formation of internal Others in nineteenth-century Europe (Italy and Germany).
The problem with traditional explanations of relations between states is that they focus on matters of interests and pay insufficient attention to matters of identities. This article seeks to improve on this situation by providing a formal discussion of the role of recognition. World politics is best described as a recognition game rather than as a prisoner's dilemma. To prove the applicability of this argument, an analysis is made of the relations that obtained between Soviet Russia and the West. From the perspective of the alternative, identity-based, model, a number of the most important events of the twentieth century are explained in quite a new fashion.
This article examines how EU and NATO enlargement is framed by the dichotomy of Europe versus Eastern Europe, and how the enlargement process simultaneously transforms that dichotomy. I argue that the double enlargement is underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of Europeanness. I suggest that in order to expose and undercut this reinscription of otherness, research on East-Central Europe should engage with postcolonial theory in a more direct and sustained fashion.
Europeanization, defined as a multidirectional process that entails changes in the rationales and structures of state action, involves the diffusion of distinctive forms of political organization and governance and the promotion of “European” solutions outside of European Union territory. I examine Europeanization in the context of international region building in the Mediterranean and demonstrate how geopolitical narratives for Europeanization are constructed by state and European political actors. These narratives serve as an instruction for the sociopolitical mobilization of states in their search for new economic and geopolitical advantages. Through a rigorous empirical analysis, I seek to meld narrative-based political geographies and state space regulation and show how international region building is a messy, problematic, and highly contested activity for parceling, regulating, and representing geopolitical space.
This paper looks to the role of geographical metaphors in the ‘battle of words’ to describe Europe and its presumed identity. The facile adoption of banal cartographies such as those of a ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Europe highlights two concerns: first, that despite the imperial and isolationistic temptations of the current American administration, its geopolitical imagination remains firmly wedded to – indeed, cannot but define itself by – its relationship with the ‘Old Continent’. Secondly, it reveals an astonishing distance between such cartographic abstractions and the variety of non-territorial metaphors – in particular, those of mediation and translation – that are increasingly being invoked to inscribe possible futures for the European project.
Europe Undivided analyzes how an enlarging EU has facilitated a convergence toward liberal democracy among credible future members of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe in some areas. It reveals how variations in domestic competition put democratizing states on different political trajectories after 1989, and how the EU's leverage eventually influenced domestic politics in liberal and particularly illiberal democracies. In doing so, Europe Undivided illuminates the changing dynamics of the relationship between the EU and candidate states from 1989 to 2004, and challenges policymakers to manage and improve EU leverage to support democracy, ethnic tolerance, and economic reform in other candidates and proto-candidates such as the Western Balkan states, Turkey, and Ukraine. Albeit not by design, the most powerful and successful tool of EU foreign policy has turned out to be EU enlargement - and this book helps us understand why, and how, it works.
Examines identity politics in the context of international relations.
The field of international relations has recently witnessed a tremendous growth of interest in the theme of identity and its formation, construction, and deconstruction. In Uses of the Other, Iver B. Neumann demonstrates how thinking about identity in terms of the self and other may prove highly useful in the study of world politics.
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