Authors

Adéla Gjuričová¹;  ¹ Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia

Discussion

Eurosceptic attitudes have been present in Czech politics since the country began to consider EU membership seriously in the early 1990s. These attitudes have developed not only among marginal political players at both ends of the political spectrum, but also within key political parties, institutions, and figures. Project ParlAge explores whether specific historical reasons for this can be found during the period from 1993 to 2004.
This paper focuses on Czech Europeanisation during the accession process, i.e. prior to the country's entry into the EU. The paper considers the constitutive parts of this process — applying for membership, the course and content of negotiations with EU authorities, and meeting accession criteria — from the perspective of the national parliament.
Firstly, from an institutional perspective, the paper examines the imbalance between executive power and parliament, and describes the instruments Parliament adopted to gain access to the accession process. Secondly, a corpus analysis of parliamentary debates is used to understand the effect that the character and content of the accession talks and conditions had on more general views of European integration. Finally, it considers the degree to which the debate on EU accession was substantial and suggests its long-term effects on how the EU is reflected upon.