Constructing Foreign Policy vis-à-vis the Migration Crisis: The Czech and Slovak Cases

Abstract

The study examines contemporary discourses in two small Central European states, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The aim is to analyze how key domestic political players discursively construct foreign policy vis-à-vis the migration crisis. Securitization, a concept developed by the Copenhagen School, serves as an analytical framework for revealing the kinds of discourse being produced in the two countries. The analysis of the discourse of the Prime Ministers from 2015 to 2018, indicates that in the Czech Republic and Slovakia foreign policy is being constructed around the issue of Europeanness (belongingness) and accommodation in the core-periphery spectrum. The article shows that the construction of external threats is done in different security sectors in each country, but in both it seems to promote the in-group coherence needed to affirm their belongingness to Europe, and it no longer happens on grounds of ethnically defined nations, but on grounds of the broader idea of civilizational Europe.