European discourse: what difference does it make in the national coordination of the European agenda?

ABSTRACT

Coordination systems of the European agenda in EU Member states have been mostly examined thought three traditional neo-institutional approaches. Historical, rational choice and sociological institutional approaches greatly vary in explaining what causes changes in EU affairs coordination structures. We propose that such disagreement is caused by their focus on exogenous static changes, not paying sufficient attention to the role that daily communication of EU affairs may have on the way they are coordinated. Our article fills this gap by analysing the impact of communicative discourse of EU issues in the Czech Republic. Using discursive institutionalism as a point of departure and using critical discursive analysis, we found that the case of a coalition with pro-European discourse did not confirm the expectations about the decentralization of coordination system. On the contrary, the coordination system moved back towards a centralized system.

KEYWORDS:

• Discursive institutionalism
• European communicative discourse
• EU coordination systems
• centralization
• decentralization
• Czech Republic

Notes

1 Kassim named four types of systems: comprehensive centralizers, selective centralizers, comprehensive decentralized systems and selective decentralized systems (Kassim, 2003, p. 103).

2 For example, Jørgensen and Phillips (2002) look for similarities between there approaches (all derived from social constructivism) – discourse theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology.

3 ODS’s attitude towards the EU has been formed in documents such as the Manifesto of Czech Eurorealism (Zahradil et al., 2001) and the Manifesto for the elections to the European parliament in 2004 (Braun et al., 2011, p. 49).

4 The competition dispute was resolved in autumn 2011 by the conciliation procedure and the signing of the Agreement on Cooperation between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Office of the Government (Lægreid et al., 2004, p. 25).

5 From 2011 to 2014, there were two State Secretaries for European Affairs in the coordination system.

6 The note on ‘exceptions in the areas falling within the competence of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs’ was drawn from the Government’s Rules of Procedure.

7 Composed of non-members and members KDU-ČSL.

8 In June 2017, Prouza was replaced by Aleš Chmelař.

9 Example was the posture of the Minister of the Interior against EU quotas for the redistribution of refugees (Beneš, 2015, p. 55).