Twenty years of Czech EU membership : between the pragmatic bandwagoning and the ‘Visegrad-effect’

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Czechia has presented itself as one of the leading post-Communist nations regarding Europeanisation. Such an assumption created the platform for the establishment of the Visegrad Group (V4) – the nations who share the same main geopolitical goals – NATO and EU Membership. Promotion of further EU enlargement as well as the importance of an Eastern Partnership became flagships of V4 nations declaring in 2009 their ambition to become the ‘second engine’ of the EU. Nevertheless, such ambitious goals were continually undermined with the transformation of the V4 into the populist cooperation and leader-driven format which presented the most visible internal opposition and challenge to the EU’s mainstream and its values. This analysis focuses on the most important modalities and the oscillation of Czech politics and society between the two ideal types of Europeanisation – the role-model position stressing the need to finalise the catching-up process with the EU-15 and join the ‘core’, and the policies copying the nationalpopulist narratives with an ‘anti-Brussels’ framing, which are labelled the ‘Visegrad Effect’. In the first part of the paper we present the framework for how the East-West cleavage influences the perception of the EU in Czechia and V4 debate. We then examine the economic dimension of EU-membership. In the last part we focus on the growth of Euroscepticism and national populism in Czechia and the V4, including the modalities of Czech European policy related to the differences among the key political actors as well as societal groups.