https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8581-4000
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ABSTRACT
The article engages in the debate about the extent of the domestic politicization of Brexit in the EU27, and the causes and agents thereof. More specifically, it examines which parliamentary actors in Czechia and Slovakia have tried to de/politicize Brexit, and which strategies they have applied while doing so. By inquiring into the concrete de/politicization moves by different agents within parliamentary arenas, we attempt to open up the black box of the de/politicization processes associated with Brexit. Empirically, the article relies on original data from a large-scale quantitative content analysis of parliamentary deliberations on Brexit between 2016 and 2019. We argue that Brexit is largely depoliticized in Czech and Slovak Parliaments, with many factors intimately interlinked and jointly at work in its de/politicization. At the same time, we show that the lines of conflict on Brexit run in multiple directions and that the government/opposition status, left/right scale placement and the pro-EU/anti-EU approach appear to be important factors of parliamentarians’ tendencies to de/politicize the Brexit issue. As such, our findings help explain a key puzzle in the withdrawal process, namely why Brexit and its repercussions have not matured into a political issue that is being politicized within EU27 domestic politics.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The term ‘national parliaments’ is used in this paper to connote EU27 national parliaments.
2. To contextualize the study, let us provide briefly basic information about Czech and Slovak politics. At the time of the British in/out referendum, the Czech government was led by PM Bohuslav Sobotka and consisted of the centre-left Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), the centre-right populist ANO party and the Christian Democrats. In October 2017, Andrej Babiš, a billionaire media tycoon, and his ANO party won the general election and formed a minority coalition government with the ČSSD, which relies on the tacit support of the Communist Party (KSČM). ANO’s populism has been termed as ‘technocratic’ (Bustikova and Guasti Citation2018), ‘centrist’ (Havlík and Voda Citation2018) or ‘managerial’ (Císař Citation2017). Recent Czech EU policy has tended to be ‘reactive, pragmatic, non-ideological, and very transactional’ (Dostál and Nič Citation2018, 4), with Babiš valuing especially the single market and Schengen. In Slovakia, the last parliamentary elections were held in March 2016 (and then only in February 2020, i.e. after the end of the analysed period). The ruling left-wing populist Direction – Social Democracy (SMER–SD) party headed by Robert Fico remained the strongest party, but lost its majority after having fallen from 44.4% to 28.3% of the vote. As a result, a four-party coalition government – led by Robert Fico was formed, holding together 85 of the 150 seats and comprising Smer–SD, the Slovak National Party, Most–Híd and Network. It was a rather unlikely alliance, as it brought together centre-left and right-wing parties, nationalists and a Hungarian party (Gabrizova Citation2016). The government pledged to stay firmly on a ‘pro-European’ and ‘pro-Atlantic’ course, with Robert Fico memorably declaring in August 2017 that the foundation of his policy was ‘being close to the [EU] core, close to France, to Germany’ (Ehl Citation2017).
3. The only exception seems to concern the Polish Sejm, where debates on Brexit fuel existing politicization of the European issue and both governing and opposition parties exploit the issue for their own particular reasons and political benefits (Borońska-Hryniewiecka Citation2019).
4. There are a few accounts that deal with the Slovak perspective on Brexit (for instance, Szent-Iványi et al. Citation2018) but they do not focus solely on the Slovak Parliament.
5. Both in Czech and Slovakian parliaments, it is predominantly EU affairs committees that deal with EU issues (and hence, also Brexit). This practice differs from, for instance, German or Scandinavian parliaments where EU affairs are deliberated on across various committees.
6. For the sake of lucidity, we have decided to refer to all committees as EAC(s).
7. We used, 1999–2014 1999-2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey trend file, 2017 CHES (Polk et al. Citation2017) and 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Bakker et al. Citation2020).