Europe forever? Czech political parties on the orientation of Czech foreign policy

ABSTRACT

The foreign policy orientation of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries has been changing in recent years. Countries which were, since the 1990s, oriented towards structures such as NATO or EU have started to flirt with partners such as Russia and China. Apart from Russian and Chinese interventions into CEE domestic development, little is known on whta can explain these changes. Our article fills this gap by analysing the foreign policy approaches of Czech political parties. We argue that European Internationalism is the preferred direction of Czech political parties. However, changes in the Czech party system and multiple EU crises signal contestation of this direction and a possible turn to the East.

KEYWORDS:

• EU
• foreign policy
• Czech Republic
• political parties
• Russia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Our previous research showed, however, that party manifestos do feed into governmental policies in a substantive way. Even the lack of competence of Czech decision makers can be attributed to the lack of agenda set in party manifestos (Hloušek et al. 2015).

2 Empirically, only the ODS manifestos needed further qualitative interpretation/correction pertaining the particular quasi-sentences coded per108 or per110.

3 There is an assumption, based on the analyses of the narratives and discourses of the Czech debate on EU membership, that the instrumental-pragmatic approaches can prevail over the idealistic motives for many Czech political parties (Braun 2008, Esparza 2010).

4 We used MARPOR Full Dataset 2018b: December 2018 Version (Volkens et al. 2018).

5 We used the CMP variable rile for this measurement.

6 We computed this variable as the sum of various CMP variables dealing with parties’ positions on socio-cultural issues – Equality: Positive (per503), Environmental Protection (per501), Traditional Morality: Positive (per603), Traditional Morality: Negative (per604), Civic Mindedness: Positive (per606), and Multiculturalism: Positive (per607).

7 Let us take the Social Democrats as an example. The Social Democratic manifestos for the elections held in 2006, 2010, 2013, and 2017 were composed typically of general and quite empty phrases about cooperation, which indicate a rather passive approach to most foreign policy issues.

8 The 2017 manifesto of ODS does not explicitly express a pro-American stance, save for the declaration of a tight relationship with NATO.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grantová Agentura České Republiky [grant number GA18-05612S]; Masarykova Univerzita [grant number MUNI/A/1025/2018].

Notes on contributors

Vít Hloušek

Vít Hloušek works as a Professor at the Faculty of Social Science, Masaryk University and as a Head of IInternational nstitute of Political Science ([email protected]).

Petr Kaniok

Petr Kaniok works as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Science, Masaryk University ([email protected]).