Populism and Foreign and Security Policy in Central and Eastern Europe: Czech and Slovak Approaches to the Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA)

Why are some populists on the opposition benches willing to jeopardize strategic relations with a major superpower and others not? This article offers a comparative analysis of Czech and Slovak foreign and security policy and attempts to bring new empirical evidence to the debate between populism and foreign policy in Central and Eastern Europe. Specifically, this article analyses the Czech and Slovak approaches to the Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) with the United States of America. Narrative analysis is used to identify the main narratives of the two leading populist actors in both countries, Smer-SD and ANO 2011, which lost their last parliamentary elections and joined the opposition benches. As the results of the analysis show, the parties took different positions and used different narratives around the debate and the approval of the agreement. The left-wing populist Smer-SD, led by R. Fico, strongly opposed an agreement, weaponized rhetoric against supporters of the agreement (the Slovak government, President Čaputová and Slovak MPs) and made this issue a centripetal point of its political agenda for a few months. On the other hand, ANO, the technocratic populist movement led by A. Babiš, voted in favour of the agreement, and overall, the political discourse around the DCA in the Czech Republic was clearly moderate. In this way, Smer-SD's behaviour fully co-opted the rhetoric of the populist radical right parties of both countries, such as the Slovak K-ĽSNS, the SNS or the Czech SPD. To understand these different approaches, I will argue that these differences can be traced back to the different foreign policy trajectories of the two countries' bilateral relations with the US after 1989. While Euro-Atlanticism, primarily represented by the personality of Václav Havel, was not challenged by the main political parties in the Czech Republic after 1989, Smer-SD instrumentalized strong anti-Western sentiments rooted in the long history of the twentieth century to specifically revive the strong anti-American rhetoric of Vladimir Mečiar in the 1990s or the later anti-American sentiments of the Slovak Nationalists (SNS) or the Slovak far-right (K-ĽSNS).