Introduction

The Czech government negotiated accession to the European Union for more than three years, before the EU and the Czech entry became the centre of electoral debate for the first time. “The election is also about the country’s relation to the EU,” The Financial Times wrote on electoral day, trying to sum up the positions of the main parties running in the parliamentary elections of June 2002.Quoted in “Média: volby v ČR jsou o vstupu do Unie,” Právo, June 15, 2002, 8.

The accession process was expected to be completed by the end of that year. In the words of the government’s chief negotiator Pavel Telička, it was “characterized by high expectations and hopes, but was also full of anxieties and frustrations.”Pavel Telička and Karel Barták, “The Accession of the Czech Republic to the EU,” in The Accession Story: The EU from Fifteen to Twenty-Five Countries, ed. George Vassiliou (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP 2007), 144–56, quote 144. At this phase, the – fairly advanced – adoption and implementation of the Union acquis was less of an issue than two discriminatory proposals by the EU negotiators, including an intention to temporarily restrict free movement of workers for new members and to limit EU subsidies available to new members. In addition, due to the excessive state share in the banking sector, the Czech Republic also had a problem meeting the criteria of free competition.

No matter how substantial the above issues were, European integration featured in the campaign in an unexpected manner and through topics only vaguely related to EU membership. The following text seeks to characterize the general political setting before the elections. It tracks the highlights and main turning points in the campaign, while relating the respective party strategies and public rhetoric to the election outcomes. Then it applies the concept of Europeanization in an unorthodox way. The earliest definitions perceived as a process through which EU political and economic dynamics become part of the organisational logic of national politics and policy-making.Robert Ladrech, “Europeanization of Domestic Politics and Institutions: The Case of France,” Journal of Common Market Studies 32, No. 1 (1994): 69–88. Political scientists who most frequently employed the concept tended to focus on the effects on political parties, other institutional actors or specific national policies following EU entry. This remained the case even with procedures dealing with the process in East-Central Europe.See e.g., Ladislav Cabada and Alenka Krašovec, Europeanization of National Political Parties (Dobrá Voda: Vydavatelství a nakladatelství Aleš Čeněk, 2004). Petr Fiala, Vít Hloušek, Markéta Pitrová, Pavel Pšeja and Petr Suchý, “Evropeizace politických stran a zájmových skupin: základní problémy a směry analýzy,” Politologický časopis 13, No. 1 (2006): 3–26. Lukáš Linek and Štěpán Pecháček, “Vliv evropské integrace na politické strany, stranický systém a volební chování v České republice,” in Proměny reprezentace zájmů po vstupu do Evropské unie, eds. Zdenka Mansfeldová and Aleš Kroupa (Praha: Sociologické nakladatelství, 2008), 53–78. The present study, on the contrary, opts to employ the concept in a non-normative, historical description of the adaptation process before 2004, which has until now been rare.

The following text is intended as a contribution to understanding how the national institutions of EU membership-seekers transformed during the accession process and what range of sentiments towards the West and the EU arose during that period. A historicisation of various positions within political institutions, exemplified in one election campaign, can reveal how the relationship between the nation states and the EU was imagined, constructed and performed. Besides this, it may also prove helpful to consider some of the latest trends in the Europeanization debate in that context, especially those dealing with the Europeanization of political institutions, their transformation and the shifts in their mutual balance within political systems. The concept of de-parliamentarization, introduced in the concluding part of the article, might clarify some of the institutional contradictions connected with the accession process as well as its aftermath in Czech politics after 2004. Therefore, reflection on Europeanization may offer an explanation for the long-term presence of a contradiction between a generally shared support for EU membership in the country on the one hand and the mutually exclusive views on what the accession would, should and must not involve on the other.

An Explosive Year

It is difficult to forget Central European politics which were in place at the beginning of 2002. In Austria, a petition against the completion of the Temelín nuclear power plant in South Bohemia gained mass support. It implied that a former Communist country could not run safe nuclear technology. While the issue of Temelín's safety was ventilated in the European Union, historical topics gained prominence, especially the so-called Beneš decrees. They were a special part of legislation issued by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš during WWII and in 1945 that deprived Czechoslovak German and Hungarian speaking citizens of their citizenship and civil rights, took away all their property and ordered their deportation. The abolition of these decrees became associated with, or rather to condition, the Czech Republic's EU accession. This was first articulated by the nationalist-populist Freedom Party of Austria (at that time, a fresh member of the government coalition) and by some German and Austrian expellee organisations. Yet after Czech Prime Minister Miloš Zeman, in an interview with the Austrian weekly Profil in January 2002, described the German population of Czechoslovakia as the fifth column of the Nazis, as “traitors who would otherwise have qualified for the death penalty” and the Austrians as Hitler's first allies,Quoted in Adam Drda, “Strategie provokatéra,” BBC Česká redakce, January 25, 2002, https://www.bbc.co.uk/czech/koment/020125.shtml. leading Austrian and German politicians joined the protest. At the end of January, the Austrian parliament passed a resolution by the votes of the coalition People's Party and the Freedom Party calling on the Austrian government to have the decrees repealed.Adéla Gjuričová, “Obhajoba národních zájmů v čase východního rozšíření EU: 2002 – ‘nacionální epizoda’ ODS?,” in Kapitoly z dějin české demokracie po roce 1989, eds. Adéla Gjuričová and Michal Kopeček (Praha and Litomyšl: Paseka, 2007), 116–31.

In mid-February, when questioned about the Beneš decrees, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated in the European Parliament that he found it "very difficult to imagine a country becoming a member of the European Union, while retaining in its legislation norms that are in stark contradiction with the legal principles of the Union."Ibidem, 116. Slovakia, the Czech Republic and then Poland cancelled their participation at the Visegrad summit in Budapest.

On a visit to Israel in February, Prime Minister Zeman managed to compare not only Jörg Haider, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, but also Yasser Arafat, to Hitler, and recommended the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel should they not accede to Israeli demands for a peace settlement. Czech diplomacy desperately extinguished the resulting interstate disputes and uncertainties about the Czech Republic's foreign policy positions. Meanwhile, NOVA, private television, reported that there were regions where "people were afraid of the revocation of the decrees."Ibid., 117. One of the few harmonious moments on the Czech political scene was on 24 April 2002, when the Czech Chamber of Deputies, with votes by all parties approved a resolution on the presidential decrees of 1940 to 1946, and claimed the legal and property relations resulting from them to be "unquestionable, inviolable and unchangeable". Společná česko-slovenská digitální parlamentní knihovna [Common Digital Czecho-Slovak Parliamentary Library], Chamber of Deputies 1998–2002, Resolution No. 2235, Usnesení Poslanecké sněmovny ze 49. schůze 24. dubna 2002 k dekretům prezidenta republiky, https://www.psp.cz/sqw/text/text2.sqw?idd=35824. Several MPs from various parties spent the day in the Chamber wearing T-shirts with the words To je naše vlast, to je naše chalupa (This is our homeland, this is our cottage).

What started as calls from former refugee organisations and local Bavarian politics, developed into a political agenda watched by national media in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Yet this escalation of conflicts and a general radicalisation of all Central European politics was only one of the effects. The other important consequence was expressed by an article in The Guardian titled “Sudeten ghosts threaten[ed] Czechs' EU aims.”“Sudeten ghosts threaten Czechs' EU aims,” The Guardian, February 26, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/feb/26/johnhooper. The novelty was that the complex phenomenon of EU accession conditionality was transferred to bilateral relations. Accession conditionality referred to specific financial, legal, anti-discriminatory and other criteria set collectively by the EU that membership seekers had to meet. Yet there were individual members who declared not to agree with some of the potential members’ adoption in the Union, unless they fulfilled a condition set by the member. For example, Austria demanded that the Czech Republic should not be allowed membership, before it discontinued the construction of another bloc of Temelín and unless it explicitly struck the Beneš decrees from Czech law. Even Michael Leigh, the European Commission’s chief negotiator with the Czechs, wrote in a cool-headed ex post report that the Czech Republic had some really serious problems standing in the way of accession, such as institutional reform or market distortions. “While Temelín was not one of them, Austria was one.”Michael Leigh, “The Czech Republic as an EU candidate: Strengths and weaknesses,” in The road to the European Union. Volume 1: The Czech and Slovak Republics, eds. Jacques Rupnik and Jan Zielonka (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 87–97.

Well-reasoned Radicalism

No matter how little connection the above topics, especially the Beneš decrees, had with the accession criteria and how absent they were from the formal membership negotiations, it was exactly these issues that were presented as European Union accession requirements in the forthcoming election campaign. The paradox of the pre-election combat was that while all potential parliamentary parties supported EU entry, the campaign was more aggressive and dividing over the issue than ever before. Yet in this respect, internal politics were to blame.Cf. Pavel Šaradín et al., Volby 2002. Analýza programů a výsledků ve volbách do Poslanecké sněmovny (Olomouc: Periplum, 2002), 15–20. In the previous term the country had been controlled by a hidden grand coalition of two proclaimed archenemies. The Social Democrats (ČSSD) formed a minority government, while the right-wing Civic Democrats (ODS) were bound by the so-called Opposition Agreement to support the government in exchange for guaranteed positions in parliament and key public stakeholder organizations. Later, in what they called Patent of Toleration, the two parties even stipulated legal and constitutional steps that they would jointly adopt, including an amendment of the electoral law that strengthened the winners in translating election outcomes into mandates and made electoral contest much less accessible for coalitions.

All this implied that the two allies needed to find differentiating positions in the campaign, but so had their common opponents, the Coalition (a centre-right alliance of former partners of the ODS, an alignment based on opposing the opposition-agreement system) and the Communists. Radicalism of both the rhetoric and the creative aspect of the campaign was the only possible outcome.

The governmental Social Democrats showed a double-faced performance. On the one hand, the party congress elected a new, more liberal chairman who would replace the offensive, gender-blind and troublesome Miloš Zeman, and a party expert team conceived the ČSSD Euromanifesto, a document which seriously considered the benefits and costs of EU membership. Yet on the other, even the new progressive leader Vladimír Špidla, who had opposed the previous deal with the right-wing Civic Democrats, was forced by PR advisors to kick off the campaign by an “address to the nation” delivered from the peak of Říp hill in Northern Bohemia, the centre of a Czech nationalist foundation myth. He emphasised it was both a human and a national interest to preserve “the existing post-war establishment and property setting.”Silvie Blechová, “Do boje za národní zájmy jdou i socialisté,” Lidové noviny, April 8, 2002, 1. This undertone and the focus on celebrities starring in the social democratic “megaparties”Institut politického marketing, “Kampaň k volbám do poslanecké sněmovny,” in Glossary, https://politickymarketing.com/glossary/kampan-volby-poslanecka-snemovna-2002 overshadowed all their social-policy proposals as well as substantial comments on the Union administration based on findings and experience in the negotiation process.

The ČSSD Euromanifesto combined integration optimism with a pragmatic attitude required by the public. It advocated the social-policy aspects of European integration, which “make it a dynamic and powerful project outmatching a mere free-trade zone.”ÚSD, Contemporary Documentation collection (hereafter SD), fond Volby do Parlamentu ČR 2002 [Elections to Parliament of the Czech Republic, 2002], PV 02/8, carton 2, folder 9, Euromanifest ČSSD, 4. It called the entry “an unrepeatable opportunity” which would extend to Czech nationals the same rights as those of EU citizens and “help the country solve problems beyond its power or capability.”Ibid., 7. It also analysed the costs – the fees, limitation of sovereignty in some areas, increased competition from stronger economies, even expected rising prices of some products,Ibid., 10–12. but concluded that the benefits outweighed the costs. Being this reasonable and substantive, the document remained unnoticed in the campaign itself and did not leave any deeper mark in the political memory or the history of political marketing.

In both the above aspects, i.e., the rationality and visibility of the argument, the opposite was true for the campaign of the opposition-agreement partner, and the main contestant of the Social Democrats, the ODS. The Civic Democrats countered with a kick-off rally in Liberec, once the Sudeten German capital, now a regional centre bustling with the fear of a German comeback. In a campaign opening address, party leader Václav Klaus depicted the ODS as the only party for which “the defence of national interests is not an issue that was purposefully discovered before the elections.” He made it clear they were opting for a dramatic and warning tone: “We are facing pressure to change the post-war establishment in Europe both symbolically and in property and legal terms, at the expense of our country,” he stated, urging voters to keep a close eye on “who is giving in to pressure from outside.”Jindřich Šídlo and David Steiner, “Začíná ‘národní’ týden české politiky,” Mladá fronta Dnes, April 6, 2002, 2.

The party had taken advantage of the time in opposition and the internal ideological disputes. Now it came up with a clear programme and the most professional campaign of all. The visuals and events revolved around a short text consisting of ten chapters entitled The Electoral Decalogue. It suggested there were ten important topics in Czech politics, in which the ODS “opted for” (in Czech the same word as “vote”) the only correct choice, from “low taxes”, through “safety for the elderly” to “fresh air into bureaucracy”.ÚSD, coll. SD, f. Volby do Parlamentu ČR 2002, PV 02/8, carton 3, folder 17, Vstříc novému osudu. Volební desatero ODS 2002. Its structure and the formulation of slogans were used throughout the campaign, which fully focused on Václav Klaus and the concept of national interests, the party’s political invention from many years ago, was adopted and responded to by all other parties.

Although the Civic Democrats had an influential Eurosceptic wing,They composed the famous Manifesto of Czech Eurorealism in 1999–2000, in which they combined the Czech prejudice against the EU with anti-German sentiments. It depicted the Czech political thought as inherently close to the Anglo-Saxon tradition and distant from provincial Central European neighbours as well as from the prevailing West European left-wing, led by the Germans. See Jan Zahradil, Petr Adrián, Miloslav Bednář and Petr Plecitý, 10 let Manifestu českého eurorealismu [10 Years after the Manifest of Czech Eurorealism] (Brusel: Skupina Evropských konzervativců a reformistů, 2011). they tried to keep them in the background and stick to the Decalogue. Three of the ten commandments dealt with foreign policy and relations, yet in practice brought the European Union forward as the main motive. In the first of the ten chapters, “ODS votes for the EU”, it called for a fast entry into the Union, yet endorsed a pragmatic perspective, mentioning for example, how much the country had so far invested into accession. Meanwhile, it dropped little notions of the European “super-state” and “ruthless conflict of interest”.ÚSD, coll. SD, Vstříc novému osudu, 4. Images of the European Union also remained the central theme in the chapter “ODS votes for national interests,” in which the programme called for “not letting ourselves be shouted down”, refuse to “give in to pressure” and “eat humble pie”. The Czechs should achieve EU entry “with a straight back, not on their knees”.Ibid., 14, 15. Following up on the EU note, the statement of self-confidence was extended as far as the topic of the Beneš decrees and the expulsion of Germans: “The past must not be changed. A public defence of legitimate Czech interests is not nationalism.”Ibid., 15. In a smartly composed mix of economic and political pragmatism on the one hand, and Eurosceptic stereotypes and aggressive rhetoric on the other, the national interests included “our history, way of life, customs, traditions, culture, economic and political interests, property and legal stability and security, everything that our children will inherit from us.”Ibid., 14.

In the Civic Democrats campaign, the national interests completely overshadowed other agendas, and as a result, some of the party's traditional themes were not addressed at all. The authors of the campaign were right in that this structuring allowed the concentration on – previously problematic leader – Václav Klaus and his simplistic identification of who/what is right and who/what is evil. As one of the leaflets inserted in the Právo daily shortly before the elections, “ODS stands here as the only bastion of defence, as a line of resistance against the future made by Špidla [the chairman of the Social Democrats], made by Grebeníček [the Communist leader]. It is the only hope for those who don't want to live the next generation in some kind of Špidloland, full of old socialist junk that is already being thrown away in the rest of developed Europe where it belongs: in the garbage dump." Právo, June 13, 2002.

And yet, rather than bringing electoral gains, this strategy changed the general dynamics of the campaign. The liberal Coalition took a radical stance in favour of EU entry. In a booklet published by one of the members of the alliance, the Freedom Union, and titled With the Union to the Union, the party depicted integration into the EU as a guarantee of modernization and labelled its critics “Euronegativists and Euroignorants, two mutually feeding sterile attitudes.”ÚSD, coll. SD, f. Volby do Parlamentu ČR 2002, PV 02/8, carton 5, folder 23, S Unií do Unie. Evropská vize Unie svobody, 10, 19, 20. The leaflet titled We live in Europe ended with a cartoon in which two men wearing office suits and using a pickaxe and a jackhammer were knocking down a wall blocking passage to an EU signboard. The slogan “ODS protects national interests” was written on the broken wall.Ibid., Žijeme v Evropě.

Generally, it is difficult for such an intellectual style to become visible in a campaign, and all in all, the alliance failed to highlight EU issues completely. Most representatives, frustrated by the previous years of the opposition agreement, which deprived them of any influence in key institutions, focused on internal political and legal issues.

The last important contestant, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), represented an artful position of a different kind. It interpreted the current EU as a capitalist, and in that respect an undesirable project, yet it did not reject integration completely, saying it would wait for the negotiations to be completed, and then make a decision and recommendation for a referendum. In Who We Are and What We Want, a booklet structured along smartly formulated FAQs, it suppressed the questions of EU entry, and instead referred to the ideals of full employment, fairer taxation and housing for everybody. It suggested that the Communists knew the solutions to the most pressing issues of ordinary people, while not trusting the social dimension of EU policies: “KSČM is aware that integration processes can bring greater economic efficiency and cultural enrichment. However, we do not overlook (…) the EU's efforts to reduce social security, to increase bureaucracy and to increase the profits of large multinational corporations at the expense of broad sections of the population.”ÚSD, coll. SD, f. Volby do Parlamentu ČR 2002, PV 02/8, carton 6, folder 42, Kdo jsme a co chceme. Odpovědi na nejčastěji kladené otázky, 59. This means that the Communist Party joined some of the notorious Eurosceptic themes usually associated with the right wing – such as bureaucracy or the weakening of national economic policies and a detrimental effect on local agriculture. Yet their massive campaign around the slogan “With the people for the people” focused on the traditional electorate, working-class people in small towns and villages, which produced notions of traditional Czech industries and agriculture, the need for “the development of the countryside” and also populist anti-German rhetoric, rather than any mention of the EU.Ibid., carton 6, folder 50, S lidmi pro lidi.

In summary, the 2002 campaign saw the question of “national interests” and of their position vis-à-vis the European integration prevail over any technical debate on the gains and losses resulting from Czech membership. This was true not only among party contestants but also for mainstream media and public discourse in general. Shortly before the election, even the liberal daily Lidové noviny published an interview with the French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, titled “Czechs, EU is a trap!”Quoted in Jakub Patočka, “Nové české zájmy,” Neviditelný pes, May 14, 2002, https://neviditelnypes.cz/. When the popular public-service radio station ČRo Radiožurnál invited two experts to discuss nationalism and national interests, virtually all listeners, who were able to ask questions via telephone in the live programme, did one thing in common. They criticised the liberal critic of the national-interest campaign and sided with the ethnocentric, Eurosceptic and anti-German statements by the other speaker, a notorious radical commentator and advisor to the Chairman of the Chamber of Deputies Václav Klaus.“Radiofórum: Nacionalismus a národní zájmy (Jiří Pehe, Ladislav Jakl),” ČRo Radiožurnál, May 15, 2002, https://radiozurnal.rozhlas.cz/zvukovy-archiv-poradu-radioforum-6327905.

And yet, the election results showed the effects of the campaign as ambivalent. All parliamentary parties lost mandates, except for the Communists who reached their post-1989 maximum of 18.5 percent of the ballot. Although six months before the election, the polls suggested a victory by the Civic Democrats, the aggressive campaign led to their defeat (24.5 percent) by the Social Democrats (30.2 percent). Political participation seemed to be the chief loser though, with a turnout of 58 percent being the lowest ever at the time and representing a dramatic fall in comparison with the previous two national elections (76.4 percent in 1996 and 74 percent in 1998).

Europe Both Present and Absent

Central Europe experienced a far-reaching radicalization of politics during this period, including addressing a number of historical and ethnonational issues, a process that George Mink described as “a revival of the symbolic past in the context of EU enlargement”.Georges Mink, “Revival of the symbolic past in the context of EU enlargement,” in Patters of Europeanisation in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Zdenka Mansfeldová, Vera Sparschuh and Agnieszka Wenninger (Hamburg: Reinhold Krämer Verlag, 2005), 133–43. The material presented from the 2002 election campaign documented two contradictory inclinations: The Czech political parties rejected the Austrian Europeanization of Temelín, while at the same time Europeanizing any piece of the national agenda. In other words, while EU accession was omnipresent, the campaign reduced it to two topics that everybody in the country agreed on, namely Temelín and the Beneš decrees, which were unrelated to actual entry into the Union. Yet it completely omitted three issues that were essential for negotiation with the EU, while consensus over them was missing and really difficult to reach.

The free movement of workers, one of the fundamental principles of the EU, was the first of the crucial issues fiercely negotiated before the Czech entry. The reason was that Austria, Germany and Spain feared an inflow of cheap labourers from East-Central Europe as a result of which the talks included real pressure to keep West European labour markets temporarily closed for new members. The compromise reached by the negotiators consisted of a transitory period on free movement, while the Czechs succeeded in banning EU citizens from buying real estate in the country during that time. Second, the state of competition as well as institutional reform was the object of EU criticism. Insufficient protection of fair competition was a leftover of the economic and institutional transformation as carried out by the ODS in the 1990s, when its negative effects were cushioned through state intervention and subsidised credit. And third, there was a discriminatory financial proposal from the EU that in the first year, new members would only receive a 25-percent fraction of the direct subsidies they were entitled to, with the share slowly increasing until 2013. The final deal saw the inequality offset by more funds being made available through projects financed from structural funds.

Bringing the whole episode within the context of Europeanization studies, it naturally draws our attention to the period preceding actual accession, a phase we earlier characterized as almost completely disregarded by literature on Europeanization. Robert Ladrech’s Europeanization and National Politics is an exception in this respect. His was a solitary voice trying to re-direct the discussion and included membership seekers as well. Ladrech noted that “much of the domestic change occurred before actual membership, so we are, strictly speaking, discussing Europeanization during the pre-accession process.”Robert Ladrech, Europeanization and National Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 38. The cautious formulation of the argument proves how unconventional such a perspective is within the approach. Ladrech further argued that in the accession process, candidate states remained to be, for the most part, only “downloaders” of themes, concepts or policies, and were in no position of influence or power to “upload their preferences in a meaningful way.” At the same time, widespread conditionality was exerted on them: having applied for membership, they had to face the Union re-focusing on the evaluation of the efforts made by the candidate’s government to meet the conditions and rules of the acquis. Adoption in the EU was meant to “reflect a sort of ‘official’ acknowledgement of success in transformation.”Ibid., 38, 39.

These views are relevant for a reflection on the agenda-setting within the 2002 election campaign. The documented shift in Czech public debate on the EU, towards Temelín and the Beneš decrees, presumed its adaptation to a specific bilateral conditionality set by the neighbouring countries, Austria and Germany and dealing with equally specific, EU-unrelated issues.

The fact that no party focused on the actual pressing issues of accession, namely the prospect of not gaining free movement of workers or full EU subsidies, manifests a different important trend in the debate as well as in changing the institutional setting. There are occasional notions of “de-parliamentarization” as resulting from Europeanization, in the sense of an erosion of parliamentary control over executive office-holders and a broader impact on the constitutional balance between executive and legislature.John O’Brennan and Tapio Raunio, “Introduction. Deparliamentarization and European integration,” in National Parliaments within the Enlarged European Union: From ‘Victims’ of Integration to Competitive Actors? eds. John O’Brennan and Tapio Raunio (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 1–26. Cf. Ladrech, Europeanization and National Politics, 71–74. Yet the trend was even more significant among candidates for membership. It was the national governments that became the prime interlocutors between domestic interests and policy-making on the one hand and the EU on the other. The candidate status strengthened narrow government teams even further, making them responsible for downloading the acquis communautaire. The states needed legislative ratification of imported legislation by parliaments, but the details were “fast-tracked” to the institutional benefit of the executive. Furthermore, most parliaments themselves agreed to remove EU-related issues from normal partisan debate and competition. They understood themselves to be weak because they could not guarantee absolute party discipline in these issues of prime importance. Since any domestic innovation on the adoption and implementation was very limited, parliaments – as dominantly national institutions – lost a substantial degree of sovereignty.Cf. Ladrech, Europeanization and National Politics, 87–89. Thus in a relatively short amount of time, Europeanization had a great impact on the institutionalization of the entire political system.

This proved perfectly true in the studied campaign: the parties were fighting about what the previous government did and what would the following government have to do, but nobody ever mentioned the role of the parliament nor did they require a translation of party positions into the negotiations with the EU. John O’Brennan and Tapio Raunio studied the question of institutional shifts in detail in their book National Parliaments within the Enlarged European Union. They found that bringing EU policy issues into parliamentary debate or electoral campaign is of no use, once we mean party tactic or re-election. They also described parliaments’ strategies of turning “from ‘victims’ of integration to competitive actors” – one of them being the Europeanization of election campaigns, involving both avoiding real EU politics and replacing it with subliminal Euroscepticism.John O’Brennan and Tapio Raunio, “Conclusion: National parliaments gradually learning to play the European game?” in National Parliaments within the Enlarged European Union, 272–86.

And so, as the Financial Times election day articleQuoted in “Média: volby v ČR jsou o vstupu do Unie,” Právo, June 15, 2002, 8. stated the Czechs had been offered two different visions of the EU, it was right to stick to metaphors, rather than mentioning elaborated political positions. According to the news article, the Social Democrats and the Coalition presented it as the holy grail that the country had been searching for since the fall of Communism, while the ODS described it as a bitter pill that has to be swallowed.

Ostensibly, the content of national politics became Europeanized, while the positions towards the EU grew more national in the sense that actors were reacting to one another, rather than relating to actual trends in the EU. The dramatic, polarized and aggressive campaign of 2002 combined a wild Europeanization of domestic politics with an equally unacceptable bilateralization of the European Union.