Constructing Foreign Policy vis-à-vis the Migration Crisis: The Czech and Slovak Cases
- Clarissa Tabosa
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.
Keywords
Czech Republic, European Union, migration, securitization, Slovakia
Author Biography
Clarissa Tabosa
Clarissa Tabosa, PhD. is a researcher at the Institute of European Studies
and International Relations at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences,
Comenius University in Bratislava. She is also an adjunct lecturer at the
Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA). Her research interests
include migration policies and policy diffusion in the Central European
countries, European Union foreign policy, and populism.