The Discursive Battle for Europe

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THE DISCURSIVE BATTLE FOR EUROPE The Visegrad Group and the Renegotiation of European identity

Molly Brady-Martin S3193136 [email protected] (+49) 176 7784 9090

Supervised by Dr. Senka Neuman-Stanivukovic

Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis, “The Discursive Battle for Europe”, is my own work and by my own effort and that it has not been accepted anywhere else for the award of any other degree or diploma. Where sources of information have been used, they have been acknowledged.

Name: Molly Brady-Martin

Date: 20/04/18

Signature:

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Abstract This thesis posits that the recent arrival of large numbers of displaced peoples from the Middle East and North Africa to European shores catalysed a crisis of identity in Europe. The EU’s securitisation of the so-called European refugee crisis undermined its liberal, humanitarian self-image, thus triggering a dislocation of the hegemonic understanding of Europe. This opened up a discursive struggle around the meaning of European identity. This thesis posits that the Visegrad Group (also known as the Visegrad Four, or V4) vehicalised this crisis-driven political instability to protest the perceived western-oriented nature of the European Union. The Visegrad Four, constituting of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, rose to (in)fame in 2015 with their defiant calls to secure the external borders of the EU and to reject the mandatory relocation quotas proposed by the European Commission. A Central European alliance that had long felt marginalised within the realm of EU politics, the European refugee crisis engendered a renaissance in the Visegrad Group, soon rendering it a prominent voice of dissent within the Union. Conversely, western European leaders were quick to condemn and orientalise the hard-line migration policy and Brussels-critical stance of the Visegrad Group. It is precisely these complex practices of mutual othering within the European Union that will be examined in this research. This thesis will ask whether the othering of the western-oriented manifestation of the European Union by the Visegrad Group in the context of the European refugee crisis can be understood as an emerging identity divide along security lines.

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Acknowledgments I would like to take this opportunity to thank my supervisor, Dr. Senka NeumanStanivukovic, for the guidance she gave me throughout this academic process. Despite a very demanding schedule, Senka gave her time and energy generously. I am also grateful to those who offered support and proof-reading services along the way, in particular, John Carew and Olwen Smith.

The submission of this thesis concludes my studies at Groningen University. My experience as a MA student of International Security has been exceedingly rewarding. I have learnt to examine the world through a sharpened critical lens and I am grateful to my professors and fellow-students who challenged me to question the answers.

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Terminology

There is a degree of confusion surrounding the terminology used to describe the movement of people across international borders. This thesis will deal extensively with the issue, so the below definitions are intended to lend clarity to the argument.

Refugee

As defined by the UN, this research understands refugees as persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and, as a result, require international protection (United Nations).

Migrant While there is no legal definition of a migrant, and there are even disputes around the term’s usage, this thesis will follow the guidelines of the UN in defining a migrant as someone who changes his or her country of usual residence, irrespective of the reason for migration or legal status (United Nations). Therefore, the umbrella term “migrant” will be used interchangeably with refugee throughout this research.

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Table of Contents Declaration .......................................................................................................................................................................... 1 Abstract ................................................................................................................................................................................ 2 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................................ 3 Terminology ....................................................................................................................................................................... 4 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................... 6 1.1 The European Refugee Crisis and the Visegrad Group ......................................................................... 6 1.2 Western Analysis of the Visegrad Migration Policy ............................................................................... 9 1.3 The Eastern Other ..............................................................................................................................................10 1.4 Research Question and Significance ...........................................................................................................12 2. Theoretical and Methodological Framework .................................................................................................15 2.1 The New Security Agenda and the Securitisation of Migration ......................................................15 2.2 Security and Identity.........................................................................................................................................17 2.3 Security, Identity and Foreign Policy .........................................................................................................18 2.4 Research Design ..................................................................................................................................................22 2.5 Data Collection.....................................................................................................................................................27 3. Analysis ..........................................................................................................................................................................30 3.1 The Migration Policy of the Visegrad Group ...........................................................................................30 3.1.1 A Securitised Discourse ...........................................................................................................................32 3.1.2 Diverging Relations with Brussels ......................................................................................................33 3.2 Spatial Identity ....................................................................................................................................................35 3.2.1 Textual Analysis .........................................................................................................................................38 3.3 Temporal Identity ..............................................................................................................................................42 3.3.1 Textual Analysis .........................................................................................................................................47 3.4 Ethical Identity ....................................................................................................................................................51 3.4.1 Textual Analysis .........................................................................................................................................53 3.5 Discussion..............................................................................................................................................................57 4. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................................62 Bibliography .....................................................................................................................................................................65 Primary Documents.......................................................................................................................................................71

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1. Introduction 1.1 The European Refugee Crisis and the Visegrad Group In 2015 a record 1.3 million migrants applied for asylum in the 28 Members States of the European Union (EU), Norway and Switzerland. This is nearly double the previous highwater mark of roughly 700,000 asylum applications in 1992 following the collapse of the Soviet Union (Connor 2016). Roughly half of these applicants originate from just three countries: Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, where, both emerging and long-standing conflicts have displaced millions of people. This spike in immigration to Europe has come to be known as the European refugee crisis.

However, this political impasse is ineptly named, as the true challenge is not posed by the mass arrival of displaced humans. The real crisis in Europe is one far less tangible and yet, much more challenging to overcome. Namely, a crisis of identity.

Migration has been securitised within the framework of the European Union, with two crucial consequences for the European identity. First, the response to the mass arrival of men, women and children has been military. FRONTEX serves as a physical manifestation of the “Fortress Europe” mindset that governs the migration policy of the EU. This fortified approach and crisis of solidarity jeopardises the liberal, humanitarian identity of the EU (Krastev 2017: 38), within which open borders no longer represent freedom, but rather insecurity.

Second, viewing the mass movement of humans through a militarised security lens invokes the notion of a threatened people and ignites a corresponding identity crusade, as first outlined by the Copenhagen School (CoS) in its investigation of the link correlating security and identity (Waever, Buzan, Kelstrup & Lemaitre 1993). The EU’s securitised and chaotic response to mass migration has produced an excess of new meaning that has destabilised the hegemonic understanding of Europe (Badiou 2005: 179) and catalysed therefore the emergence of identity divisions and dysfunctionalities that were, until now, quietly simmering beneath the shiny surface of the collective European identity. The refugee crisis has therefore changed the face of Europe irreversibly.

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In May 2015, the EU agenda on migration outlined a system of relocation to counter the Dublin Agreement, which was struggling and proving unsustainable under such increased levels of migrant arrivals (Pachocka 2016: 117). The European relocation scheme was adopted by the European Council in July 2015. However, this policy, which calculated a compulsory target intake per Member State based on GDP, population, past asylum intake and unemployment rate (European Commission 2015), was met with sharp criticism from certain European leaders.

Nowhere was this critique more vocal than in the countries of the Visegrad Group, where initial euphoria following the fall of the Iron Curtain was soon replaced with a fetish for border control and wire fencing. This regional alliance, made up of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, quickly adopted a hard-line stance on the issue of migration and declared its unwillingness to accept refugees. For a political union whose raison d’être has ebbed and flowed since the moment of its conception, it is undeniable that the European refugee crisis brought a new cohesion and purpose to the Visegrad Group (Bayer 2017). The uncompromising position of the alliance garnered it more international coverage than ever before, although predominantly in the negative light of criticism from western politicians and commentators (Nič 2016: 282).

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia recognised that regional cooperation would be crucial in distancing themselves from Soviet dominance and the communist legacy, while also winning favour in the West. Grounded equally in a strong belief in the concept of Central Europe, the three states (to become four in 1993 after Slovakia’s independence) signed a Treaty in the Hungarian town of Visegrad in 1991, therewith forming a loose intergovernmental alliance (Schmidt 2016: 118). They quickly set their sights on EU and NATO membership, which they steadily worked towards over a decade, and finally achieved in 2004. After this milestone, their common purpose became less obvious. However, an awareness of overlapping economic, geographic and historical interests justified the continued existence of the Group.

The Visegrad Group is a diplomatic framework for regional intergovernmental cooperation, without institutions or formal structures, bar the International Visegrad Fund (IVF) (Nič 2016: 283). Although there is a high level of socialization among state officials and experts,

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the alliance prides itself on the strength that comes with the flexibility of noninstitutionalisation.

That is not to say, however, that cooperation has been unproblematic. The Visegrad states have unique issue interests and vastly diverging bilateral relations with external partners. Russia is a prime example, and the annexation of Crimea tested the unity of the alliance greatly (Schmidt 2016: 129). Likewise, Poland has a much more historically frayed relationship with Germany than its neighbours. Therefore, as commentators marvel at the renaissance that the European refugee crisis has brought to the group, it would be misleading to imply complete harmony and homogeneity (as will be discussed in section 3.1.2).

However, the overall and continued aim of the Visegrad Group is to amplify the voice and influence of the central European region in Brussels. Increasingly since the beginning of the European refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, this voice has been one of dissent and critique. To define the Visegrad states as eurosceptic would be inaccurate: there are highlevels of support for the EU among Visegrad citizens, and all four states are large benefactors of European funds (Gotev 2017). Brussels-sceptic would be more appropriate terminology. Having only recently achieved political autonomy after a long turbulent history of occupation, the Visegrad four share a common, though granted varying, degree of disdain for EU centralisation. Today’s new generation of leaders are averse to perceived efforts by the European Commission to interfere in sovereign matters, and build their legitimacy around the idea of a national identity, derived in opposition to Brussels (Krastev 2017: 58).

Though not a new complaint (the federalist vs. intergovernmental debate has rumbled on for many decades), the European refugee crisis and the mandatory relocation scheme inflamed the debate in Central Europe and brought about a protest reaction from the Visegrad Group. Migration is considered a threat to the very foundations of the central European states, and therefore a matter of sovereign discretion. Milan Nič argues that Poland and Hungary are therefore striving to construct a regional coalition to counter the Western European vision of integration, championed by the Franco-German engine (2016: 287). This thesis will further his assertion, and argue that the securitised European refugee crisis, and the European identity crisis that it provoked, has been vehicalised by the V4 to re-establish a central European identity in counter-weight to the western-oriented manifestation of the European

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Union, within which the Visegrad Four increasingly feel both politically and culturally marginalised. 1.2 Western Analysis of the Visegrad Migration Policy On a visit to Germany in 2015, Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, criticised Chancellor Merkel for pushing an agenda of “moral imperialism” in relation to the European refugee crisis (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015). Orbán, along with his fellow leaders of the Visegrad Group, maintains that migration is a matter of sovereign responsibility, and that the political choices of Germany should not be imposed on others. This observation reflects precisely the musings of Michał Buchowski on post-socialist orientalism in Europe (2006). He asserts that Eastern individuals are seen as having to be disciplined and re-educated by western powers. In the moral vacuum of socialism, societies need to learn new standards and adapt their mentalities in order to be part of a progressive humanity. If they cannot, then they remain “Easterners”, or, “socially stigmatized” (Ibid: 476).

This practice of moralising and categorising Europeans along behavioural lines has been blatant in the western media coverage of the refugee crisis. An article by the Economist in January 2016 labelled the alliance “big, bad Visegrad” and commented on the “headache” that the illiberal turn in Central Europe will pose to the future of the EU (Economist 2016). The German daily, the Welt, asked if Eastern Europeans have no sense of shame (Schamgefühl) and established an empirical link between the current Polish reaction to the crisis and the antisemitism of Poland during WWII, which the newspaper claims has never been worked through (aufgearbeitet) - in what can be understood as an implicit moral comparison to the success of Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung1 (Welt 2015).

In a particularly cutting article by Jochen Bitter in the New York Times (2017), the Visegrad States were criticised for “turning on the West” and failing to “liberalise their minds” in the process of transformation. Bittner wrote that leading Visegrad politicians “agitate against the European Union” and constantly decline to follow the Western mainstream, concluding that they have “done little to make themselves fit for freedom and ready to be taken seriously by

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A term that can be translated as the struggle to overcome the [negatives of] the past, Vergangenheitsbewältigung refers to social, cultural and political processes in Germany in the late 20th Century that sought to deal with the dark history of the Nazi period (Lawrence 1998).

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the West”. He noted how this intergovernmental group, which once stood as a beacon for post-Communist integration, now symbolised the failure of this very process.

His words were met with vituperative anger in a response penned by Benjamin Tallis and Derek Sayer. These scholars of Pragian political studies concluded that Bittner’s commentary embodied the lingering prejudices and stereotypes of the Cold War era ubiquitous in the European debate today (Tallis & Sayer 2017). The iron curtain may have fallen in 1989, they comment, but you would not know it to read the coverage of the European refugee crisis. Tallis and Sayer scathingly criticise the “western” analysis of central and eastern Europe, which greatly oversimplifies political developments, propagates half-truths and lacks any sense of critical perspective. They comment that it is precisely these kinds of prejudices that are feeding central European resentment towards Brussels. The xenophobic, populist tendencies of Viktor Orbán, Jarosław Kaczyński or Miloš Zeman are indeed worrisome, but they demand serious analysis, rather than patronising critique.

This thesis is therefore an attempt to understand, rather than orientalise, the migration policy of the Visegrad four. The objective is to step outside of the Eurocentric framework for analysis, that too often propagates a westernised view of global politics and governs how we read and understand policy decisions. 1.3 The Eastern Other I aim to build on the musing of Tallis and Sayer, and establish an academic grounding for their impassioned, yet unsupported, argumentation. Their response touches upon crucial elements of the conceptual history of Europe and the struggle to establish a European political and cultural subjectivity. In asserting the existence of a system of deep prejudices that they claim to be at the centre of the critical commentary on Central Europe today, Tallis and Sayer invoke the practices of cultural othering that have played a problematic, yet undeniably central, role in the history of European identity formation. Investigating their claim that such practices continue to shape European consciousness today demands a theoretical examination of the source of this East-West animosity. A brief outline of the conceptual debate around European identity formation and practices of othering will lay the crucial cognitive foundation for comprehending the motivation behind this research.

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The term “Orientalism” was first coined by Edward Said in 1978 as a critical category to define the cultural superiority present in the work and attitude of Western-European scholars (1978). This revolutionary piece, later criticised for accidentally reifying that which it critiqued (Clifford 1988), captures the essence of discursive European identity formation, derived negatively through practices of othering (Strath 2002). Edward Said’s exploration of orientalism catalysed many sequels, from Larry Wolff’s ‘Inventing Eastern Europe’ (1994), to Maria Todorova’s ‘Imagining the Balkans’ (1997), and Iver Neumann’s ‘Uses of the Other’ (1998). Crucially however, these works no longer focused on the distant concept of the Orient, but rather on the Other present within Europe. Namely, in the East. Michał Buchowski postulates that the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the disintegration of the barrier separating the civilised “us” from the uncivilised “them”, provoked this academic interest in European others (Buchowski 2006: 465). However, I side rather with the opinion of Larry Wolff, who declares that the eastern European Other is a powerful idea that has been deeply embedded in the political history of Europe for over two centuries (Wolff 1994).

Wolff traces the origins of this cultural faultline back to second half of the 18th Century, when Enlightenment Europe invented Eastern Europe as its complimentary other half. The barbaric, backward nature of the East, as depicted in this conceptualisation, served to accentuate the civilised, rational nature of the West. He argues that this imagery grew into the Cold War, and that Winston Churchill’s famous Fulton speech, invoking the notion of a “shadow” on the far side of the “Iron Curtain” (1946), further cemented this ideological map in the minds of many Europeans. It was Wolff’s conviction that this psychological cartography would outlive the bipolar international order and continue to shape future cognizance for decades to come. Valeria Korablyova proves this assertion correct. She comments on the “inclusion-exclusion” game of the European project and unearths what she considers to be the fundamental flaw at the very heart of the enlarged European Union. According to her account, the notion of an extended Europe was conceptualised by Western European intellectuals within the parameters of a core-periphery relationship, where the West would remain at the political centre, and the East would constitute its cultural extension (Korablyova 2016: 10). The reunion of the continent of Europe in 1989, which once appeared to be a chance for unity

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based on ideological communality, was in fact designed on an “East-West slope” model2, grounded in the Enlightenment concept of an underdeveloped East.

Korablyova argues that this mentality has therefore facilitated the establishment of a quasiempire, where the European political declaration of equality and justice is darkly juxtaposed with the de facto cultural colonisation of the “East” (2016: 15). This troubling argumentation echoes the sentiments of Attila Melegh, when she claims that the conceptualisation of Europe along a of scale of varying degrees of civilisation “invites a grotesque chain of racisms or orientalisms between different public actors, depending on the position and perspective they adopt on the above slope” (2006: 5). The troubling concept of a European polity grounded in cultural determinism constitutes a primary motivation for conducting this research. 1.4 Research Question and Significance Looking at the migration debate in Europe today, the musings of Korablyova and Melegh certainly resonate. What we are experiencing is a fluid understanding of the term European, as defined by the leading powers of western Europe. When a state is deemed cooperative, it is said to be displaying proper Europeanness. However, disagreeable politics and attitudes are quickly connected with moral weakness, which amounts to failed Europeanness (Dzenovska 2016: 2). In terms of today’s refugee crisis, the central European states of the Visegrad Group, once praised for their successful assimilation into Europeanness, are now perceived once more as post-socialist, defined through historical conceptualisations of the eastern European as unsympathetic and not-quite-European (ibid: 2).

This caricature is juxtaposed with the image of Germany as Europe proper. A political body of morality, where compassion is conceived of as a political virtue. Already dominant as the largest economy in the EU, it has been widely commentated that the European refugee crisis saw Germany establish itself as the moral leader of Europe (Karnitsching 2015). Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open the state borders in September 2015 and the ensuing “wir schaffen das” dialogue, saw Germany take a strong stance in the migration debate and set Willkommenskultur as the moral precedent for migration policy in Europe (Mushaben 2017).

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According to Attila Melegh, the East-West slope is a cognitive mechanism for re-organising the socio-political regimes in the central and eastern part of Europe. It is a scale of merit with regard to former socialist states and their transformation towards westernization, whereby countries identify themselves on a scale from “civilisation to barbarism” (Melegh 2006: 9)

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It is precisely this creative power of crises that this thesis intends on examining. Luuk van Middelaar says that “a crisis is a moment of truth”, that tends to bring to the surface conflicts that have been either dormant or simmering (2016: 496). I postulate that the securitised European refugee crisis triggered a discursive destabilisation of the European identity, which in turn, laid bare a core-periphery divide that has long existed within the union. If Germany is considered to have used the migration debate as a vehicle for establishing moral leadership, this thesis looks at how Central Europe, namely the Visegrad Group, has used the very same crisis to reposition itself within the Union and reclaim Europe in line with its own cultural and political interests. To that end, this thesis asks whether the othering of the westernoriented manifestation of the European Union by the Visegrad Group in the context of the European refugee crisis can be understood as an emerging identity divide along security lines.

There are four primary motivations for my investigation of this topic. First, much ink has been spilt over theorising the poststructuralist link between identity and security. However, in the context of European politics, there has been limited practical application of this theory. The CoS has indeed been revolutionary in its widening and deepening of the security debate and its examination of this new agenda in a European context (Waever et. al 1993). However, the majority of this scholarly collection is over twenty years old and Europe, both as a concept and as a political body, is changing rapidly. The recent political shift to the right has seen a revival of nationalism and a renewed focus on identity politics, producing new challenges to the political project of integration. This thesis should be understood as a contribution to an all-too-small body of literature examining the practical application of the identity-security nexus in Europe and investigating the identity dynamics simmering beneath the narrative of European unity.

Second, the language of security is growing ever more prominent within the European Union, and yet little research has been done into the potential consequences of this for the existence of a European identity. European social and welfare issues, once treated as such, are now framed in terms of crisis, threats and dangers (Huysmans 1999: 3). For a political union, that has placed central importance on the establishment of a European identity, as outlined in the Treaty of Maastricht (signed in 1992), very little research has been done on the consequences of growing securitisation for European identity politics. If, as the CoS tells us, identity and security are inherently linked, it is pertinent to can ask whether the domination of the 13

language of security in European politics will pose a threat to European integration in the form of emerging national and regional identity rifts.

Third, the Visegrad Four are calling for a stronger role in the European Union and demand that their voice be heard (Visegrad Statement 2016a). In the interest of building a strong European polity of equal partners, I believe it is important to give heed to these claims of marginalisation and examine how certain Member States feel less valued than others. This complaint is not unique to the region, and a detailed examination of the Visegrad Group might act as a reflection of Europe’s larger inclusion concerns.

Finally, and most importantly, I am watching with increasing concern the trend of prejudiced, careless analysis that characterises the western debate on central and eastern European politics. One may (myself included) articulate disagreement towards the migration policy of the Visegrad Group in the spirit of political debate. However, when a discourse falls into the traps of condescension and simplification, without a true sense of critical analysis, it is at best morally problematic, and at worst, unconducive to political progress. This thesis seeks to contribute unpartisan academic context to the analysis of the Visegrad migration policy. This quest takes on further importance in the context of these so-called “post-truth” times, where a surge of political populism is taking place globally.3 I am increasingly aware of the need to remain critically alert to all information presented as “fact”. As the great scholars of French post structuralism would assert, meaning is discursively produced, and a material world cannot exist outside of our systems of language (Foucault 1972) (Lacau & Mouffe 1985) (Derrida 1978). This thesis should therefore not be understood as an apologetic account of exclusionary and, at times, racist policies, but rather as an academic bid to unearth the conceptual histories and knowledge formations driving these political choices.

Pulling on Aristotle’s discussion on Rhetoric, Martin Montgomery uses the term “post-truth” to denote the rising political trend that prioritises the logic of ethos (character of the speaker) and pathos (emotion) over the importance of logos (an appeal to argument and evidence). According to Montgomery, political campaigns with questionable relationships to truth were visible in both the UK referendum on the EU and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign (Montgomery 2017: 624). 3

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2. Theoretical and Methodological Framework 2.1 The New Security Agenda and the Securitisation of Migration A field once dominated by the canons of realism, security studies became a centre for existential debate about the very nature and meaning of the subject in the post-Cold war period. The 1980s and 1990s saw scholars of International Relations (IR) contest the military focus of the field, and advocate instead for a broadening of the security agenda (Huysmans 1998: 227). Barry Buzan’s publication in 1991 of ‘People, States and Fear’, catalysed an academic flurry focused on the widening and deepening of the security agenda to include new threats and additional referent objects (McSweeney 1996: 81). Together with colleagues from the Centre for Conflict and Peace Research in Copenhagen, Buzan contributed to a body of literature known as the “Copenhagen School” of security studies (CoS).

Two developments in security studies birthed of the CoS are particularly relevant for this research. Firstly, the outline of how a security threat is recognised as such in a process called “securitization”. Initiated with a speech act and negotiated with a target audience, the CoS outlines how securitization presents an issue as an existential threat legitimating extraordinary measures that transcend the “normal haggling of everyday politics” (Buzan, Waever & de Wilde 1998: 29). This framework highlights the (inter)subjectivity of threat definition and will later help to explain how a certain conceptual understanding of history shapes danger perception.

Secondly, and building on the first development, the inclusion of migration within the security paradigm and the assertion that a society can feel endangered by, and therefore securitise, a non-military threat is pivotal for this thesis. Dissatisfied with the state-centric focus of security studies, the CoS argue that a society can be a referent object of security threats (Waever et. al 1993: 20). Societal security has to do with a community of individuals who feel intrinsically connected, forming a collective sense of “us”, and demarcated from other societies with boundaries. This concept of an “inside” community in need of protection, provides a good basis from which to explore Jef Huysmans’ analysis of the securitisation of migration in Europe.

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Huysmans is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity and the securitization of migration. Huysmans examines modern migration in a European context, and the dominant pattern, apparent since the 1980s, that sees the political construction of migration as a security issue (2000: 751).

In briefly tracing the immigration history of Western European countries, Huysmans highlights the change in perception that took place between the 1950s, when migrants were seen as an economic necessity, and the 1970s, when a changing labour market first saw the introduction of restrictive migration policies (Ibid: 754). It was at this point that political rhetoric started to link immigration with the destabilisation of domestic order. This was further compounded by the growing confusion of asylum with migration, leading to the recognition of both as an economic threat to the state (Ibid: 755). Looking today at the Dublin Convention, the Schengen Agreements and FRONTEX border security, Huysmans concludes that the economic internal market project has developed into an internal security project (Ibid: 752).

In combination with this economic element, Huysmans looks through the societal lens of the CoS to argue further that Europeans have come to view migrants as a threat to the cultural composition of the nation, or “us” composition (2000: 756). In their initial discussion of migration within the security framework, Waever et. al (1993) examine the increased movement of people from the Middle East to Europe at the time that their publication went to print. They note that the threat associated with this migration, when viewed through a traditionalist lens, is at best over exaggerated, as Europe is more powerful and far more integrated than the Middle East (Ibid: 133). However, when framed as a societal security issue, the potential migration of large numbers of ethically and culturally distinctive peoples, quickly becomes an existential threat to the homogeneity of the “inside” community.

Huysmans argues therefore that Security policy is a specific tool for mediating belonging. It draws borders delineating those who do, from those who do not belong (1995: 60). This game of inclusion and exclusion separates a realm of trust and homogeneity, from a realm of fear and difference. Huysmans believes that heightened feelings of insecurity in Europe and the return of racial politics to the mainstream have paved the way for the framing of the migrant as a cultural, societal threat (Ibid: 53).

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Through this analysis of Europe, Huysmans touches upon a central dynamic of security studies. By securitising the migrant (Other) as an existential threat to the inside community, Europe simultaneously defines the essence of that very community (Self). Therefore, Huysmans concludes that state identities are not static, but rather develop within the security dynamic through the definition of threats (1995: 57). With this statement, he uncovers the crucial relationship between identity and security that has been at the centre of the poststructuralist security debate for the past two decades. 2.2 Security and Identity Of all the themes that garnered renewed attention in the post-Cold War field of security studies, there was arguably none more prominently debated than that of identity (Williams 1998: 204). The constructivist turn, combined with the fall of the Iron Curtain, catalysed a renewed focus on identity among scholars of IR, and a determination to theorise the close relationship between the logic of (in)security and the dynamics of identity.

The CoS was one of the first groups of scholars to deal with the identity-security dynamic in a systematic way. Their inclusion of societal security as a sector for analysis necessitated a parallel examination of identity to better understand the feeling of togetherness that constitutes this entity, and to comprehend how threats become perceived as such by the collective Self (Waever et. al 1993: 18). Identity is to a society, what sovereignty is to a state, and therefore danger perceived in cultural terms quickly becomes an existential threat to the community (Ibid.: 25).

This conceptualisation of identity is embraced and furthered by scholars like David Campbell (1998), Eric Ballbach (2015) and Bill McSweeney (1996), who emphasise the necessity of discourses of insecurity for the articulation of identity. Campbell states that danger is not an objective condition, as it does not exist independently from those to whom it may become a threat (1998: 3). Therefore, the utterance of danger simultaneously brings coherence and unity to the endangered Self. It systematically localises a zone of trust (sameness), distinct from a zone of fear (difference). In this way, the security-identity nexus can be leveraged to organise political and social relations through practices of othering.

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Supporting Campbell’s observation on the intersubjectivity of danger, Bollbach outlines that people only learn to fear that which is specifically presented as a danger to them (2015: 15). In this way, he posits that it is impossible to perceive something as dangerous unless it is interpreted as such within the discursive realm that ascribes meaning. McSweeney further explores this intersubjective understanding of identity and threat in his critical review of Barry Buzan’s ‘People, States and Fear’. While commending the progress made by the CoS in elevating the significance of identity in security studies, McSweeney takes issue with Buzan’s positivist conception of identity, that reifies it as a fact of society, instead of a consequence of political process (1996: 85). He argues that this is sociologically untenable. Rather, identities are negotiated within a contextualised, discursive realm that governs what is and is not included in the image of the community.

This emphasis on the role of discourse, and the parallel criticism of an over-simplified understanding of identity, is central to the so-called post-structuralist, or discursive, turn. Commenting on the inability of constructivism to aptly study cultural identity and its formation, Waever asserts that identity is far less stable and structured than Alexander Wendt implies (2002: 21). According to his post-structuralist account, identity is fragile and unstable, and the linguistic perception of a threat (Other), is formative of that very identity (Self). Post-structuralism highlights the symbiotic relationship of security, identity and foreign policy, where the latter is understood to assign meaning and discursively produce “mental maps of “we” and “they”” (Mansbach & Rhodes 2007: 427). 2.3 Security, Identity and Foreign Policy The post-structuralist turn moves away from the positivist, reified conception of norms and interests, as propagated by Constructivism. Instead, the state is understood to be discursively produced, and reliant on acts of performativity to call it into being (Ballbach 2015: 3). Sets of state practices, like foreign policy, or a security agenda, establish identity and fix difference. Therefore, a re-conceptualisation of the role of foreign policy is required, where it is no longer understood as the bridge connecting established states and their corresponding identities, but rather a boundary producing activity, central to the very production of said states and identities (Ibid: 4).

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In his 1998 publication, ‘Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity’, Campbell considers the articulation of danger in US foreign policy as an identitycreating force (1998). Pulling largely from the revolutionary work of Judith Butler on performativity (1990), Campbell explores the performative nature of political discourse, which presents and represents a national identity, thus constituting the objects of which it speaks. The discourse of danger disciplines and externalises ambiguity, while simultaneously reaffirming domestic identity. Furthering this argument, Ballbach argues in his analysis of North Korea’s relationship with the US, that the inclusion of certain dangers and not others in foreign policy is a deliberate decision, because specific representations of danger are what allow states to establish their legitimacy, and justify actions taken in the name of the national identity (2015: 16). What exactly dictates this inclusion/exclusion decision is explained well by Jutta Weldes’ concept of a “security imaginary” (1999: 10). This is a structure of well-established meanings and social relations belonging to a community, that pre-exist state officials, and condition how threats are framed, and therefore, how foreign policy is written. Campbell also touches on this, speaking of a “narrativizing historiography” that regulates the range of meanings and understandings that fit inside the national mode of thought (1998: 4). He says: “The world exists independently of language, but we can never know that (beyond the fact of its assertion), because the existence of the world is literally inconceivable outside of language and our traditions of interpretation.” (Ibid: 6)

Precisely this Foucauldian understanding of political discourse, and the question of how a certain formation or hegemonic discourse comes to shape collective cognisance, underscores this research. A post-structural approach to discourse analysis will be applied to analyse the conceptual history governing the current migration policy of the Visegrad Group and provoking the simultaneous othering of the Western manifestation of the European Union. Discourse analysis has become increasingly popular in the social sciences since the 1980s. However, it is a concept that has several different definitions and applications (Jorgensen & Phillips, 2002: 1).

Most discursive approaches have in common a criticism of the separation of subject and object, and propagate, rather, a social constructivist emphasis on identity and the role of 19

language in defining social meanings. Namely, discourse analysis is guided by the belief that language is structured by patterns of thought that govern what can and cannot be said. Thus, an analysis seeks out the different representations of the world, constructed by collective perceptions, that govern the thoughts and language in a given discourse (Carta & Morin 2014: 3).

This thesis is guided by the perspective of French poststructuralism, broadly encompassing the work of authors like Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Michel Foucault, and drawing on the understanding of language outlined by Jacques Derrida. This school of thought posits that discourse is constitutive of the social world of meaning. It is an attempt to resist the dichotomous construction of idealism and materialism in explaining the world, and to affirm instead the material grounding of every hegemonic discursive structure (Lacau & Mouffe 1985: 108). However, due to the contingency and fragility of language, this system of meaning can never be permanently fixed. Therefore, it is constantly being created and transformed through a process of “discursive struggles” (Carta & Morin 2014: 28).

The work of Michel Foucault is commonly cited among practitioners of discourse analysis and is of most influence in this thesis. In his 1972 publication, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Foucault first outlines the concept he famously coined as “a formation” (1972: 117). Namely, in defining the parameters of a discourse, he advises: “whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation” (Ibid: 38). Thus, it may be concluded that discourse analysis searches for the rules and systems of understanding that influence and constrain that which is articulated, in what Waever refers to as “a nucleus of meaning” (2002: 29).

According to Waever, this post-structuralist discourse analysis has practical application in foreign policy studies. The difficulty in connecting domestic policy with the succinct cogency of IR theories has long rendered foreign policy analysis a weak sub-discipline of the IR field (Ibid: 27). Waever’s response to this theoretical gap is to provide a structured analysis of the domestic arena, the minimalist nature of which is ironically comparable to Kenneth Waltz’s structuralism. By examining the discourse and structures that organise foreign policy, coherent constraints (which have thus far been overlooked by foreign policy studies) can be 20

identified (Ibid: 18). To do so, he insists that one must stay at the level of discourse, drawing on public texts only. This is because poststructuralist discourse does not attempt to analyse the hidden motives of the actors, but quite the contrary - remaining at the level of public discourse becomes a methodological advantage, as that which is being examined is not the truly held beliefs of decision-makers, but rather the linguistic rules and codes that they adhere to.

Waever concludes that discursive formations not only constrain articulations, but also the policies that are deemed permissible (Ibid: 30). Each political culture has a system of narratives, codes and concepts that dictate the parameters of policy directions. Although not every decision will fit the expected pattern (a certain degree of leniency must be granted for contingency), it is this principle of drawing a few important conclusions from a limited, elegant set of premises, that reflects the powerful simplicity of Waltzian structuralism. Historic concepts become important vehicles of identity production and therefore, understanding these national modes of conceiving the world can offer a new perspective on state policies. In this regard, Waever’s approach to foreign policy analysis follows the logic of Foucault’s governmentality. Foucault investigates the “how” of government, by problematising the relationship between a population, a state and security (Foucault 1977-78). He asserts that to govern is to influence the “conduct” of individuals or groups, thus to “control the possible field of action of others” (Foucault 1954-1984: 341). If governmentality operates to produce a governmentable subject, thus regulating behaviour, then post-structuralist foreign policy analysis, as outlined by Waever, can unearth these practices of government. Here it is timely to turn to the theorising of Waever’s fellow post-structuralist scholar, Lene Hansen, whose framework for foreign policy analysis will form the methodological backbone of this thesis. In line with Foucault’s investigation of how a state exercises control over the body of its populace, Hansen highlights the constitutive role of state security politics in the creation of that population’s very identity (1997: 374). Rather than a strategy for defending the state, she claims that practices of security discursively construct a Self by emphasising difference between it and a constitutive Other.

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In claiming that no realm is outside of discursive meaning, Hansen argues that problems become questions of security when political discourse successfully constructs them as such in relation to a specific depiction of a national identity (2006: 29). Therefore, National security discourse draws upon the politically powerful identity of the national community, while also constructing security threats as objective, de-historicized and decontextualized (Ibid: 30). This is what Waever and Hansen refer to as the national identity-foreign policy-security triangle, which brings together existential questions about the nature and future of the community, in a complex, multidimensional system of analysis (2002: 26). According to Hansen’s adaptation of the principles of governmentality, post-structuralism diverges from constructivism in its assertion that identity does not exist independently of the discursive practices surrounding foreign policy (2006: 1). Likewise, it is my assertion that the establishment of a Central European identity in opposition to a western-oriented EU is a discursive project of the Visegrad political elite. Therefore, Hansen’s framework for analysing discursive security dynamics offers a conceptual vision that aligns fittingly with the research objective of this thesis. 2.4 Research Design Lene Hansen offers a rigorous account of how discourse analysis can be used to study foreign policy. ‘Security as Practice’ can be understood as a methodological handbook, written with the aim of countering the common criticism of poststructuralism that it dwells purely in a theoretical realm, and has little or no practical application (2006: xvi). Her work lends methodology to the identity-security debate at the heart of poststructuralism.

In planning a poststructuralist discourse analysis, Hansen (Ibid: 65) suggests that the following five choices be considered:

1) whether one intends to study official foreign policy discourse, or expand the scope to include political opposition, media and marginal discourses; 2) whether one will examine the foreign policy discourse of one Self or of multiple Selves; 3) whether one particular moment will be selected, or a longer historical development; 4) whether the study will include one event/issue, or a multiplicity;

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5) which material should be selected as the foundation for and object of analysis (see next section, 2.1.5).

This thesis aims to analyse the construction of a regional Central European identity by the Visegrad political elite, articulated via the securitisation of migration in national foreign policy, and derived negatively in relation to the western-orientated manifestation of the European Union. To achieve the desired outcome of this research project, I have chosen to study the official migration discourse of the Visegrad Group during the European refugee crisis (an overview of which will be presented in section 3.1). An official discourse analysis focuses on political leaders with official authority in foreign policy and those who help execute it (Ibid: 53). It includes speeches, interview, statements etc.

The reasons for studying the official migration discourse of the V4 are twofold. First, as the CoS points out, the agents of security are most often political elites (Buzan, Waever & de Wilde 1998). Therefore, an examination of the official discourse of Visegrad political leaders, who securitise migration and in turn, assert a regional identity, is an appropriate choice for my research goal. Second, this thesis considers the project of identity construction in Central Europe a political endeavour, led and choreographed by the Visegrad political elites. Therefore, widening the discursive analysis beyond that of the official narrative would undermine the research.

As for the second guideline, I will focus on one Self. Hansen explains that the triad of the above choices 2 (self), 3 (temporal) and 4 (event), establish the basic structure of discourse analytical research (2006: 66). She outlines that foreign policy implicitly articulates a sense of Self, and in many cases, a discursive encounter juxtaposes that Self with a constitutive Other. Although an aggregate of four states, the goal of this thesis is to establish whether the Visegrad Group’s Othering of the western manifestation of the European Union is an attempt to present and reinforce a unified Central European identity. Towards this end, my research will trace articulations of this single Central European Self across multiple texts. As a loose alliance, flexible due to its non-institutionalisation, my analysis of the V4 can be understood as the sum of its parts, incorporating both state and aggregate positions. It would be misleading to imply that an entire homogeneity of policy positions exists between all four Visegrad states (see section 3.3); however, the migration debate brought a new congruity to the alliance, and this coherent Self will be explored in this thesis. 23

Third, as I have chosen to ground this identity analysis in the recent migration debate of the European Union, this research will centre around one political moment. Namely, the socalled European refugee crisis. My analysis will encompass political discourse spanning from August 2015 until January 2018 inclusive. Ivan Krastev claims that the significance of the European refugee crisis as a political moment cannot be understated (2017:14). Not only has this crisis of solidarity brought about a renationalisation of politics, but it has also laid bare the underlying crisis of identity at the heart of the European project. The multifaceted implications of this European crisis and the centrality of identity politics in the debate, render it a highly relevant point of enquiry.

Fourth, in analysing this political moment, I have made the decision to forgo the inclusion of multiple events as points for analysis. The reason for this is a minor, yet crucial, difference in the focus of the research. Whereas Hansen’s analysis of the Bosnian War seeks to trace the development in the discourse over the course of several events and measure their impact, this thesis focuses rather on the nature of the Central European identity being articulated through the migration debate. To include events as chronological markers and to trace their impact on the discourse, while indeed constituting a worthy academic pursuit, would at best fall outside of the scope of this project, and at worst, distract from the research objective.

In approaching the discourse analysis, Hansen takes as her starting point the identification of a web of signs that articulate identity based on linking and differentiation to one, or multiple, Others (2006: 42). This assertion stems from the Derridean concept of language as a system of differential signs, where meaning is established through a series of juxtapositions and value rankings (Derrida 1978). By combining an analytical concern for degrees of difference (otherness), with dimensions of identity construction, Hansen’s framework produces a theoretical double grip (2006: 45). According to Hansen, the following dimensions of identity construction are articulated and connected in foreign policy to reinforce each other:

1) Spatiality 2) Temporality 3) Ethicality

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Hansen argues that the articulation of an identity always involves boundary drawing, followed by the imbuing of the subjects within those boundaries with temporal meaning and a sense of whom they proclaim responsibility towards (ibid: 33). This assertion stems from the philosophical concepts of space, time and responsibility, through which she claims the nature and parameters of all political communities are negotiated – borders, internal constitution and relationship to the outside world. Methodologically, spatial, temporal and ethical constructions in foreign policy are analytical lenses that uncover the substance of political subjectivity construction. Each has equal theoretical and ontological status, and although a text may emphasis one more than others, the goal of foreign policy is to create stable links between the articulation of all three aspects, so that they draw on and reinforce each other.

Taking each in turn, spatiality highlights how identity is relationally constituted and always involves the construction of boundaries and the delineation of space (Ibid: 42). Foreign policy may immediately imbue a sense of national spatiality by naming other states, however, more complex articulations of territorially bounded identities and abstract political spaces can also occur. Spatial constructions of identity in the context of the Visegrad Group pull on the latter example, evoking a regional coherence. Texts make clear and repetitious references to the territorially bounded political and cultural identity of Central Europe, unified through its communal geographical experience.

This spatial identity is juxtaposed with the image of a European Union that has become grounded both geographically and culturally in the “West”. Spatial patterns of differentiation between the Central European Self and the western-orientated European institutional Other form an unmistakable mental map in the V4 official migration discourse.

Temporality has to do with notions of development, transformation, repetition, permanence and change, for example. This second aspect of identity highlights the importance of understanding a political space and subject as constituted in time (Ibid: 43). Within this chosen discourse, the temporal dimension evokes a complex understanding of Central European history. A theory addressed by an array of scholars, including Timothy Garton Ashe (1986/1999), Milan Kundera (1984) and Rick Lyman (2015), a conceptualisation of Central Europe as the perpetual victim of historical and political developments can be traced in Visegrad migration policy. Central Europe has consistently dwelt along the fault lines of great world powers. From the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottomans, to the Nazi 25

occupation, and the Cold War powers, Central Europe is portrayed as the perpetual victim of historical occurrences and the permanent object of external political powers (Ibid).

In contrast, the western-manifestation of the European Union will in many cases be cast in the role of the external influencer, or the agent of such political decisions. In certain texts, references will be made to individual states of Western Europe and the historical role they played in the political repression of Central Europe. This temporal conceptualisation of the recurring or perpetual victimhood of the Self, juxtaposed with the dominance of the Other, is evident in the official discourse of the Visegrad Group, and provides an interesting analytical springboard from which to examine subjectivity formation.

Ethical constructions of identity invoke questions of morality and responsibility. Within foreign policy, this can be summarised as the (non)responsibility of the Self to the Other/multiple Others. An articulation of responsibility to the national body polity legitimises the government’s position of power before the subjects (bid: 45). In some cases, however, ethicality can be moved outside of the national viewpoint, and be located rather within the higher grounds of the morally good, thus invoking a moral force.

Precisely this higher morality, grounded in religious and civilizational terms, is expressed within the Visegrad discourse. The texts clearly express responsibility towards Christian Europe and the duty to protect the Christian heritage of the continent. This is countered by a view of the European Union as neglecting this responsibility and choosing falsely to prioritise (predominantly) Muslim refugees travelling from the Middle East and North Africa. This juxtaposition is a key signifier of differentiation, where Central Europe is positioned as a protecting force, and the western-orientated EU as a misguided Other, incurring regional insecurity.

Hansen adds two important footnotes to her framework which I highlight in relation to my own research. First, there will not always exist a slavish repetition of difference in all texts. However, an implicit construction of the Self is reinforced by an articulation of the Other, and visa versa. Second, Hansen notes that Others will not always be as clearly articulated as in the example of Campbell’s analysis of US foreign policy (2006: 35). Rather, more complex assertions of difference and similarity will often be found, also known as “lessradical-others”. This is particularly interesting for my study, as in many texts I have included, 26

a conflict between a bitter criticism of the European institutions, and yet an emotional feeling of inherent belonging to Europe can be found, making for a fascinating space of identity enquiry. The strength of Hansen’s model is its conversion of conceptual histories into methodological tools for analysis. As a student of IR, it is my task to unearth the concepts that underscore the migration policy of the Visegrad four, and to trace their historical origins. In doing so, I hope to establish which Self is being created through these systems of meaning, and how. On the other hand, it is beyond the parameters of this study to engage in an intricate linguistic analysis of the texts. To embark on a deeper deconstruction of the linguistic signifiers present in my chosen texts would indeed constitute a worthy area of further research for a linguistics major. 2.5 Data Collection When choosing which texts to include in a discourse analysis, Hansen highlights the importance of two considerations (Ibid: 74):

1) The majority of the texts should be taken from the time period under study, but historical material that traces the conceptual history of the dominant representations should also be included; 2) The body of material should include key texts, which are pivotal and commonly quoted, as well as a larger network of general material, that reinforces the identification of the dominant discourse.

Furthermore, three additional criteria should be kept in mind when selecting the texts: the material should include clear articulations of identity markers, be widely read and attended to, and have formal authority. Here, she notes that epistemological and methodological priority should be given to primary texts, for example, presidential statements, speeches and interviews.

I endeavoured to follow these guidelines closely when selecting the texts to include in this study. Having chosen to analyse an official discourse, I then defined the criteria by which I would select which texts to include in this research. On the basis of statements, press releases,

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speeches and interviews available since September 2015, the priorities of the Visegrad Group’s migration policy can be summarised in three main points:

1) Protection of the external borders of the EU and the fulfilment of obligations deriving from the EU acquis; 2) Effective management of the root causes of migration and the management of the crisis outside of EU borders; 3) Rejection of mandatory EU relocation quotas and Germany’s open-door policy.

For a text to be included in this research, it must have contained at least one of the above arguments, and where possible more, to ensure that it did indeed belong to the official migration discourse. I have included a total of 40 texts for analysis in this thesis. 15 texts include one reference to the policy priorities, another 15 texts include two, and 10 texts mention all three. The division of documents between the individual states and the alliance is as follows: Hungary (10), Poland (10), Czech Republic (8), Slovakia (7), Visegrad Group (5).

Official Visegrad statements were insightful for an understanding of the migration policy, however, they were less explicit in their articulation of identity and difference, due to their formal, intergovernmental nature. The explanation for the discrepancy between the number of texts included per state is twofold: 1) relevant material on the Hungarian and Polish government websites is much more expansively available in the English language, than that which is available on the official Czech or Slovakian websites, 2) Hungary and Poland are establishing themselves as the de facto counter-motor of European integration, and are therefore much more vocal in their assertions within the migration debate (Nič 2016: 287).

The selected texts were drawn from five different sources. First, I prioritized the speeches, statements and interviews of Prime Ministers and Presidents from all four countries, due to the position of authority and the scope of the audience, as recommended by Hansen (2006: 75). National differences were to be found here, but in general these sources proved the most fruitful in terms of clear articulations of identity and differentiation. Second, I expanded my search to the speeches, statements and interviews of prominent members of the political elite. This group included party leaders and ministerial heads. Third, I referenced the official websites of Government Ministries, citing press releases and statements. Fourth, I selected

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texts from the official statements and reports of the V4, found on the Visegrad Group website.

Finally, it was my intention to consciously exclude media sources from my material list, as their citations often omit the context of the statement. However, due to the regrettable fact that I do not speak any of the working languages of the Visegrad Group, in a limited number of cases, I had to carefully select relevant material quoted in journalistic articles. I am aware that this is certainly problematic in a discourse analysis, and therefore restricted the inclusion of such media articles to 3.

I would list the above media inclusion as one of the three methodological limitations of this research, the second being the reliance on English or German translations of primary material. Although government websites and journalistic interviews (of which there are a number included in this research) endeavour to retain the essence of the speaker’s sentiment when engaging in translation exercises, a translated text immediately carries the subjective linguistic decisions of a third-party and is therefore a quasi-interpretation of a primary document. I write this thesis with a certain degree of humility, as I am aware of the cultural intricacies that translation can overlook. It would certainly be a highly valuable academic exercise for this research to be continued and expanded by a native speaker.

The third limitation is the unavoidable fact of my educational and social background in a western European environment. The aim of this research is to uncover knowledge formations that govern understanding primarily in Central, but also western Europe. I hope to highlight the prejudices guiding the western analysis of Central Europe, however I do so with an understanding that I myself am subconsciously shaped by a western European view of the world, that is hard to circumvent.

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3. Analysis 3.1 The Migration Policy of the Visegrad Group The Visegrad Group first articulated a common stance on the European refugee crisis in September 2015. The building pressure of refugee arrivals demanded a political response from individual Member States. However, the unified Visegrad statement was primarily in reaction to the decision of the German and Swedish Governments to open their borders - an initiative that the Visegrad Four did not wish to see replicated on a European level. Once established, the position of the Central European alliance was repeated on several occasions, both at an intergovernmental and national level. The migration policy of the Visegrad Group can be condensed into three main priorities:

1) Protection of the external borders of the European Union and fulfilment of the obligations deriving from the EU acquis.

The protection and reinforcement of the external borders of the European Union is a cornerstone of the migration policy of the Visegrad Group. This emphasis stems from a conviction that the internal system of barrier-free movement of people, institutionalised in the Schengen and Dublin Agreements, requires sustained effort from Member States for its continued integrity (Szalai, Csornai & Garai 2017). The refugee crisis placed significant strain on this system, and saw states like Austria, Denmark, France, Germany and Sweden temporarily erect internal borders, thus undermining the notion of a secure European domestic space. The Visegrad Group asserted that the reinforcement of the external borders of the Union was necessary to avoid the outright collapse of the system.

In a statement on 15 February 2016, the Visegrad Group called for decisive action, stating that “the key strategic objective now is to preserve Schengen, which can only be achieved by regaining control over the European Union’s external borders” (Visegrad Group 2016a). A failure to do so “would put the cornerstones of the European integration, especially Schengen and the principle of free movement, at risk”, and this in turn would destabilise “the very foundations of the European Union” (Visegrad Group 2016a).

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2) Effective management of the root causes of migration and the administration of refugees outside of European borders.

The Visegrad Group has repeatedly asserted the need to tackle the root causes of migration in order to slow the arrival of refugees to Europe. They have pledged to work towards this goal by “continuing the support to the international coalition fighting Daesh in Iraq and Syria and providing various means of contribution (political, military and humanitarian) to the efforts of the coalition and to the stabilization of Iraq as tangible” (Visegrad Group 2015). The Group reiterated on 19 July 2017 that “the migration crisis must be primarily dealt with at its roots instead of at its end points in Europe”.

The second element of this argument proclaims the need to manage the refugee crisis outside of European borders. This should include “financial and material assistance” to receiving countries like Turkey, Jordan, Iraq/Kurdistan, Lebanon, and transit countries along the western Balkan route, as well as the management of refugees in administrative camps outside of Europe, to be known as “hotspots” (Visegrad Group 2015). This position was then furthered by declaring that “effective returns” for those unsuccessful in their asylum application in Europe must be improved (Visegrad Group 2017a). The Visegrad Four welcomed the EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan, which they claimed would be “crucial” in “stemming the migratory flows and combating human trafficking” (Visegrad Group 2016a). 3) Rejection of Mandatory relocation quotas and refusal of Germany’s open-door policy.

The political conflict surrounding the mandatory relocation of refugees arose early on in the crisis. In September 2015, the European Member States agreed to relocate 120,000 refugees from Greece and Italy, a decision which was immediately rejected by the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary (Szalai, Csornai & Garai 2017). Poland initially voted in favour of the proposal. However, a change of government in Warsaw in October 2015 saw the conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) takeover the leadership of the state, and Poland soon stood united with its fellow-Visegrad states in rejecting the proposal.

The alliance was therefore also against the Mandatory relocation scheme proposed by the European Commission in May 2015. The group favoured a voluntary approach of flexible 31

solidarity (Pachocka 2016: 118). This common position was stated very clearly in their initial statement on 4 September 2015, in which “preserving the voluntary nature of EU solidarity measures” was listed as a priority, so that “each Member State may build on its experience, best practices and available resources” (Visegrad Group 2015). This stance became central to the Visegrad policy on migration and was repeated on several occasions. In 2017, the Group concluded that “the relocation scheme did not provide the answer we were looking for, it even generates additional pull factor (...). The Visegrad countries are of the view that the general EU strategy has to be reviewed and has to be built on consensusbased actions” (Visegrad Group 2017a). 3.1.1 A Securitised Discourse The official migration discourse of the Visegrad Group very clearly frames the European refugee crisis, and more broadly, migration, as a security threat. In a joint statement of the V4 Interior Ministers on the establishment of a migration crisis response mechanism, it was asserted that “uncontrolled mixed migration movements are a threat to the EU and Member States security. Concerned with the safety of our citizens, we agree that it is a threat that cannot be underestimated” (Visegrad Group 2016b). This position was reiterated in October 2017, when the Interior Ministers once more stated that “migration policies should take into account the changing nature of migration as a phenomenon and its challenges to security” (Visegrad Group 2017b). The existential element of the CoS securitisation theory is invoked by the Group in their pronouncement that “the very foundations of the European Union [are] at stake” (Visegrad Group 2016a).

The rhetoric of the individual state leaders echoes the sentiments of the official Group statements. “The truth is that Europe is being threatened by mass migration on an unprecedented scale”, announced Orbán at an early point in the discussion (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015). He engendered fear that migrants arriving en masse “could occupy Hungary” (Ibid). His assertions are in line with those of the former Polish Prime Minister, Beata Szydło, who spoke of the refugee crisis as “the great security crisis of the European community” (Prime Minister Poland 2017). Czech Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš, referred to migrants as “a security risk (...) whose desire it is not to integrate, but to destroy European culture” (Britské Listy 2016), and Slovakian President, Robert Fico, accused the EU of committing “ritual suicide” with its open-door policy (Euractiv 2016). 32

Furthermore, the official Visegrad migration discourse clearly demonstrates a conflation of migration, terror and crime. Most outspoken in the articulation of this causal link is the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, who stated in no uncertain terms that “undoubtedly, the growing terror wave is connected with migration” (President Poland 2017a). His fellow PiS member and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Witold Waszczykowski, supported this position, stating in January 2018 that the arrival of migrants had “contributed to the development of many negative phenomena, including the development of organised crime related to migration...including terrorist threats” (Foreign Affairs Poland 2018).

This sentiment was echoed by Orbán, who announced in reaction to mandatory quotas from Brussels: “we do not want to - and we shall not - import crime, terrorism, homophobia and anti-Semitism to Hungary. In Hungary there shall be no lawless urban neighbourhood, there shall be no street violence or immigration riots (…) gangs shall not hunt our wives and daughters” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). Orbán also made the controversial assertion that refugees bring “risks of infectious disease” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015). 3.1.2 Diverging Relations with Brussels In the time period from September 2015 until January 2018, the Visegrad Four succeeded in establishing a clear position on the refugee crisis through the repetition and reiteration of the above three priorities. This harmony of policy position has seen the group develop into a strong and united regional voice in Europe. However, it would be misleading to suggest that this consensus is typical of all issue areas. The V4 states occupy varying and diverse positions in their relations to Brussels. Poland has experienced a conservative revolution under the Law and Justice Party (PiS) (Nič 2016: 287). Once praised as the poster child of post-socialist transformation, Poland’s relations with Brussels have deteriorated greatly in recent years, in part due to a conceptualisation of Europe as polycentric, where the periphery needs to balance out the weight of the Franco-German core (Ibid: 287). Bilateral relations deteriorated further after Poland proposed controversial changes to the Constitutional Tribunal, compounded by the victimhood rhetoric of PiS party leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, who is demanding WWII reparations from Germany, and who masterminded the controversial Holocaust complicity bill passed in 2018 (Cuddy 2018). 33

There is undoubtedly overlap between the ideology of the PiS and Viktor Orbán’s vision for Hungary. Under his leadership, Hungary is increasingly parting ways with Brussels. The referendum held on 2 October 2016 against mandatory EU refugee quotas was just another example of his “cultural counter-revolution” fighting the perceived imbalance towards western Europe (Nič 2016: 288). He is establishing himself as the quasi-leader of this protest bloc and paves the way in terms of anti-Brussels, anti-immigration rhetoric.

Very close bilateral ties to Berlin meant that Prague was often (although not consistently) considered the most “western” of the the bloc (Balogh 2017: 199). However, the election of affluent businessman, Andrej Babiš, in October 2017 has seen the country move closer to the position of the “illiberal tandem” of Hungary and Poland (Ibid: 288). Exemplified by President,

Miloš

Zeman,

Czech

populist

rhetoric

leverages

post-transformation

disappointment in Europe (The Economist 2017). Historically, the Czech Republic has always placed great value in its relations to neighbouring Germany, so the next Government will be crucial in deciding how this relationship develops.

Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, although vehemently against the mandatory relocation of refugees, occupies nonetheless a far-more amicable position towards Brussels. As the only V4 state to join the Eurozone, and as a small economy, driven primarily by exports of cars and electronics to other EU Member States, Bratislava’s vital interest is in Brussels (Jancarikova 2017). Notably, the Slovakian President, Andrej Kiska, was the only Visegrad leader to advocate for a more humanitarian approach to the refugee crisis (Spectator 2015). Fico joins his counterparts in criticising the European institutions, however he differs in openly promoting a future for his country in a deeply integrated European core, driven by Germany and France (Jancarikova 2017).

In light of such domestic diversity, and with mind to divergent positions on matters such as Russian bilateral relations, it would be misleading and factually incorrect to speak of a harmonious Visegrad foreign policy. However, while such divisions may render long-term cooperation complicated, it is undeniable that the refugee crisis has brought a renaissance to the group and a remarkable policy coherence around migration. In the following four sections, I will analyse the official migration discourse of the Visegrad Group (outlined above), as expressed during the European refugee crisis, in a bid to unearth articulations of a 34

Central European identity, and the corresponding othering of a western-oriented European Union. In line with Hansen’s methodological framework, the analysis will commence with a discussion of spatial identity, before turning to the temporal and ethical elements of subjectivity formation. 3.2 Spatial Identity Central Europe, as a space and concept, has long been disputed. There exists a plurality of perspectives on the idea of Central Europe as a region, a culture and a political formation. A territory of shifting borders and unfinished political business, it has historically escaped concrete definition (Przybylski 2013). There is no agreement on the geographical confines of the region, and the space has passed through too many political powers to be defined by one alone. Zygmunt Bauman relates the ambiguity of Central Europe to the even greater complexity of defining that which constitutes “Europe” (2012: 1). Is it a geographical, political or cultural space? It is precisely the vague nature of the concept that has rendered it what Ernesto Lacau coined an “empty signifier” (1996): pertaining no indisputable character, the term can be used flexibly towards different political ends. Therefore, the conceptual history of “Central Europe” traces the passing of the term through diverse ideologies and political frameworks.

A Czech historian who became synonymous with the early Czech national movement, František Palacký, was one of the first theorists to invoke the notion of a Central European region. His new interpretation of the collective history of the Bohemian lands told the tale of a dialectic struggle between Germanic and Slavic elements. In his famous letter addressed to the German Parliament in Frankfurt, Palacký (1848) underlined the importance of regional independence in Central Europe. It ought to be a family of equal nations, built on the basis of mutual respect and individuality. Palacký was joined by other statesmen of the 19th Century, like Jozef Pilsudski and Tomas Mawaryk, in formulating a concept of the specificity of Central Europe; a region consisting of several independent nations, rich in their diversity (Czyžewski 2012: 171).

The term took on new meaning under the years of national socialist rule in Germany, when Adolf Hitler took on Friedrich Naumann’s conceptualisation of “Mitteleuropa” (1916) as ground ready for German cultural and economic expansion. According to Nazi ideology,

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Mitteleuropa provided the solution to the Lebensraum problem of the German Volk (Brechtefeld 1996: 53). The term therefore became so heavily entwined with German hegemony, that it disappeared from the European lexicon for over three decades after 1945. It is likely that the discussion around Central European cultural specificity continued to take place in private scholarly circles, however in the public sphere the term died with Hitler (Garton Ashe 1986). The bipolar Cold War order further buried the notion of Central Europe, with all countries East of Germany simply defined and characterised as “eastern European”. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the term experienced a renaissance and scholars reopened the debate on the nature and substance of Central Europe. This discussion unfolded primarily in Prague and Budapest, and was championed by the Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera. His 1984 article published in the New York Review of Books entitled ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, would come to form the core of the scholarly debate around “Central Europeanness”. Kundera asserted that Central Europe was not a geographically definable region, but rather “a culture or a fate” whose “borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation” (1984: 35). With a wistful tone, Kundera speaks of Central Europe as a space tied together by “great common situations”, marking a realm characterised by “the same memories, the same problems and conflicts, the same common tradition” (Ibid: 35). Central Europe has long been the playground of the powerful, and it is the disruptive political fallout from this that has catalysed the formation of such a strong sense of Central European identity in states that were forced to choose between existence and nonexistence.

Kundera claims that in places where identity is threatened with extinction, cultural life grows to be more intense, until it becomes a living entity around which people rally (Ibid: 33). He pertains that, although politically weak and fragmented, the turn of the twentieth Century was a period of great cultural richness in Central Europe. What is often associated with the intellectual salons of Vienna, according to Kundera, makes little sense unless seen against the backdrop of participation and contribution from other cities of Central Europe. In this regard, he considered Central Europe to be a culturally and intellectually homogeneous region, artificially divided by the Iron Curtain and in need of reintegration (Balogh 2017: 192).

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His work is situated within the broader 1980s nostalgic discourse on Central Europe comprised of contributions by authors like Václav Havel (Czech Republic), George Konrád (Hungary) and Adam Michnik (Poland) (Stone 2012: 90). Together, these scholars formed an academic clique focused on the re-establishment of Central Europe as an intellectual tradition, free of Soviet and “Eastern” connotations. The fact that these authors published their works in English speaks volumes about the goal of their endeavours. They sought to achieve something much more profound than an accurate academic definition of Central Europe. This group of scholars wanted to reclaim the western origins of the region and conversely, to present Central Europe to the West as an independent, stand-alone tradition, sewn together with a distinct set of attitudes, ideas and values (Garton Ashe 1986). Konrád expressed succinctly the essence of Central Europe in claiming that it was above all else a “Weltanschauung” (1986: 90). Referring to his 1986 article ‘Does Central Europe exist?’ as “sympathetic but also skeptical” (1999), Timothy Garten Ashe was a self-described proponent of Central Europe, albeit a more realistic one. He may have questioned the idealized account of Central European history as portrayed by the scholars of the 1980s debate, but he advocated for the term’s broader use in social and political discourses. In his later article ‘The Puzzle of Central Europe’ (1999), he voices his concern over the increasingly politicised use of the term. According to Garton Ashe, Central Europe at the end of the 20th Century became a signifier for “civilized, democratic, cooperative”, and refers to those to whom the EU and NATO are on offer. He underlines how this new development has seen “the West” - i.e. policymakers and opinionformers in the United States, Germany, France etc. - take ownership of the concept as a form of cultural determinism. Countries phase in and out of “Central Europe” depending on their behaviour and relations to the West, as defined by the West.

The revival of the term in the migration discourse of the Visegrad Group constitutes an attempt by Central European elites to reclaim the concept of Central Europe and challenge the underlying East-West prejudices that have outlived the Cold War. Championed by Hungary and pulling on the rich conceptual history of the term, the Visegrad Four are attempting to spatially articulate a coherent Central European identity in protest to the cultural and political weight typically attributed to “the West”. Central Europe is expressed as a culturally specific region, connected through intellectual, historical and religious traditions, and geographically juxtaposed with western Europe. 37

3.2.1 Textual Analysis The articulation of a strong Central European spatial identity, as outlined in the official migration discourse of the Visegrad Group, can be broadly ordered into four aspects – intellectual lineage, common situations, reclaiming regional independence and cultural determinism.

First, the discourse invokes the common cultural and intellectual traditions once outlined by Kundera and his fellow scholars of the 1980s debate. Orbán’s Government is particularly vocal in asserting that Hungarians “are in love with the Central European idea” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017c). He invokes the notion of spatial commonality in stating that “Central Europe is the region where we are best understood”, and that Central Europeans “hold Europe’s cultural (...) reserves” (Ibid). President Duda of Poland strikes a similar tone speaking at the College of Europe. He asks if “it is not so that the genuine history of Europe: intellectual, social and also political, has not yet been fully complemented with the output coming from our region?” (President Poland 2017b).

In a speech marking the beginning of the Hungarian presidency of the Visegrad Group, Orbán announces that a focus on “the Central European experience” will constitute a primary goal of the presidency (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017c). “We want young people to experience in a modern way this fraternal feeling, the cohesion that exists here in Central Europe”, he states, invoking the notion of “Central Europeanness” (Ibid). In an explicit reference to Garton Ashe’s famous questioning piece, Does Central Europe exist? (1986), Orbán quotes academic pursuits in Prague, and historic events in Bratislava, to conclude: “so, there is a Central Europe” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017c).

Such explicit articulations of cultural and intellectual lineage are to be found primarily within the Hungarian national discourse, and to a certain extent in the Polish. However, subtle articulations of spatial specificity are found on a more widespread basis among all V4 members under the following elements of the conceptual history of Central Europe. Pulling on Kundera’s assertion that Central Europe is a “fate”, connected through “great common situations” (1984), the V4 official migration discourse is littered with references to shared regional experiences and interests. In reflecting on the management of the refugee

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crisis during its Visegrad presidency, the Czech government comments that “unquestionably, the existence of widely shared interests related to the refugee agenda contributed to the perception of the V4 as a cohesive whole, both internally and in the eyes of the outside partners” (Czech Visegrad Presidency 2016). One such interest was flexible solidarity, and the rejection of mandatory relocation quotas, justified in part through two specific Central European experiences.

First, as clarified by Bohuslav Sobotka, the Czech Prime Minister, in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Iron Curtain ensured that, until recently, “the States of Central and East Europe were very isolated” (2015). Therefore, migration is a new and fearful phenomenon for Central Europeans, whose “societies have not drastically changed”, unlike the open societies of the West (Ibid). Second, the geographical location of the Visegrad Group means that it is “close to the tension zones” of both the refugee crisis, and the Ukrainian crisis (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015). Orbán argues that the former leads to a regional focus on “reality, rather than (...) ideology” (Ibid), and that the latter is an issue at the forefront of Visegrad consciousness, yet often overlooked by western European states. In defending their rejection of mandatory relocation quotas, leaders from all four Visegrad states reference the high numbers of Ukrainian refugees that they have already welcomed into their countries. Examples include Sobotka’s assertion that the Czech Republic has successfully integrated “110,000 Ukrainians” (2015), and Kaczyński’s statement that “Poland already took in over one million Ukrainians, as well as roughly 100,000 Belarusians and ten thousand Chechens” (2016). Orbán asserts that “even if it can’t be achieved in a European context, helping the Ukrainians is something which can be expected at least from the V4” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016b). This can be understood as a criticism of Brussels for neglecting an issue on its Eastern door step, but also as an upending of the typical allegation made by western European leaders that the V4 is lacking in solidarity. Rather, Central Europe is already deeply involved in managing mass movements of displaced peoples, albeit as a result of a different regional crisis that is regrettably overlooked by the western-oriented EU.

As is often the case throughout the migration discourse, it is Slovakia who represents the more moderate voice of the Visegrad alliance. The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of 39

Foreign and European Affairs, Miroslav Lajčák, presents a balanced argument for Central European specificity when he states that “most of the time, our views and positions are the same as those of other EU member states. But sometimes we differ, based either on different interests of the region (...) or based on different historic experiences.” This statement captures the essence of the Central European spatial subjectivity, geographically connected through shared experience.

The third aspect of the spatial articulation furthers the efforts of scholars like Kundera, Havel, Konrád and Michnik to re-establish Central Europe as a spatial identity independent of the West and deserving of its own acknowledgment. No longer merely a recipient of western charity, the Visegrad Group is presented as a dynamic, pivotal voice within the European Union, with growing economic importance.

Throughout the texts, the V4 is consistently presented as a dynamic force of cooperation and progress. Lajčák asserts that “the Visegrad Four countries have never been the cause of a European problem. To the contrary, we have always sought to be a part of the solution” (Foreign Affairs Slovakia 2016). He concludes that a “healthy sense of pragmatism” is what equips the “dynamic” group so well for dealing with contemporary European crises, in what can be understood as an implicit criticism of perceived western political stagnation (Ibid). This argument is seconded by his colleague Robert Fico. In an interview with the Slovakian media outlet, Dennik N, Fico acknowledges that he “may anger [his] colleagues from the western countries” with his assertion that Central European states are “better able to respond to crisis situations” (Fico 2016). Therefore, not only is the V4 useful in terms of promoting “national interests within the European Union and its territory” (Government of the Czech Republic 2017b), but the group’s input is also presented as formative of the European Union and its policies. Sobotka asserts that the V4 “played an important role in the European Union in the debate on the resolution of the migration crisis (...) and [a] constructive role in defining new objectives and new direction for the future of the European Union after Brexit” (Ibid). Hungary’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Péter Szijjártó, furthers this argument by claiming that “the V4 is the strongest and most effective alliance in the EU today” (Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017c), and “a strong EU is impossible without a strong Central and Southeastern Europe” (Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017b). This attempt to reassert the 40

independence and influence of the region is captured in the Czech Government’s assertion about the refugee crisis that “the robust V4 stance highlighted the relevance of the “V4 brand” and raised its perception on the European scene” (Czech Visegrad Presidency 2016).

Furthermore, the texts include repeated articulations of regional dynamicity along economic lines. Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, expresses how “the Visegrad countries constitute a key part of (...) the European Union, as they provide the Union with stable economic growth” (Prime Minister Poland 2018). This assertion is made also by Hungary’s Minister of Human Capacities, Zoltán Balog, in a radio interview with Deutschlandfunk. “The Visegrad countries are important members of the EU”, whose combined economies constitute “a more important economic partner for Germany than France”, he states (Hungarian Ministry of Human Capacities 2017). Szijjártó supports this position, commenting that Central European states are “producing higher growth than the EU average, meaning that we are contributing to a major extent to the strengthening of the EU” (Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017b).

Orbán summarises precisely this articulation of a Central European spatiality that exists independently, and even to the benefit, of the West, in his comment that “the European Union has gained greatly by admitting the countries of Central Europe as Member States, and (...) it can expect plenty more from this region” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017c). Finally, invoking Garton Ashe’s observation of western cultural determinism, Prime Minister Orbán leads the critique against his Western counterparts for what he perceives to be prejudices that they implicitly hold towards Central European states. He asserts that “[Central Europe’s] approach is not one of arrogance and bombast, rooted in feelings of moral superiority - an approach so tempting, and often too popular in the western half of the continent” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). One year on, in speaking before the European parliament, Orbán asks of his audience that they remain “critical of the prejudice” that characterises the current European debates around migration and the future of the Union (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017b).

President Duda of Poland echoes this position in his speech at the College of Europe. He expresses his doubt “as to whether the shadow of Cold War division (...) has been truly overcome in the sphere of consciousness and in the sphere of historical and social 41

sensitivities of all European societies and nations” (President Poland 2017b). With regret he asserts that “there are still many stereotypes and misconceptions about the countries of this region. They are extremely difficult to overcome, and most frequently, they surface in moments of crisis” (Ibid). He suggests that there is “ignorance and lack of empathy towards this part of Europe”, thus concluding that “a true unification of Europe within the European Union structures is still ahead of us” (Ibid). In discussing the regional alliance, Lajčák implicitly criticises western European leaders by claiming that the key to Visegrad cooperation has been “mutual understanding over national stereotypes”, and “solidarity over prejudice” (Foreign Affairs Slovakia 2016). He expresses this opinion again in an interview with CorD Magazine, arguing that Central European states “should be free to express our own view” (Lajčák 2016). However, western partners “fail to see that and take different views from us as a sign of (...) European immaturity” (Ibid). This comment echoes precisely the observation of Timothy Garton Ashe, who notes that countries slide in and out of Central Europeanness, depending on their willingness to cooperate with the West (1999).

Pulling on the rich conceptual history of Central Europe, as outlined by the scholars of the 1980s debate, the political elites of the Visegrad Group are re-asserting the spatial identity of their region through the official migration discourse. This is an attempt to discursively reclaim Central Europe as independent of the West, and yet embedded in European cultural history, and to dispute regionally attributed prejudices and cultural determinisms applied by the western European Other.

The strength of this spatial identity is increased when expressed in conjunction with a temporal identity that frames the region as constituted in time. Namely, the V4 leaders articulate a temporal identity of Central Europe as the perpetual victim of external historical developments. 3.3 Temporal Identity In his critical, yet insightful, account of the Central European response to the refugee crisis, Ivan Krastev posits that the Visegrad states, and in particular Poland, have developed a selfimage as the victims of history (2016). Therefore, while the western coverage of the refugee

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crisis marvels at the “compassion deficit” of a region that has experienced political persecution as recently as fifty years ago, yet erects fences to keep out the casualties of today’s political fragility, Krastev comments that this may be shocking to many, but it should not be surprising (2015). A fragmented, turbulent history, marked by conflict, repression and, eventually, post-socialist/transformation disappointment, has shaped the Central European experience in such a way, that those states feel themselves to be the ones in need of help (Krastev 2017: 47). A temporal identity as the perpetual victim of external historical developments is being articulated by the countries of the Visegrad Group through the refugee crisis. Arvydas Grišinas captures well the essence of Central European victimhood with his term “central marginality” (2017: 68). Central Europe has been the location of a series of overlapping histories, the effects of which are still playing out today (Wandycz 1992: 6). It was the meeting point of the world’s great imperial powers; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia and the Russian Monarchy. Two World Wars began in this region, and it was later transformed into the epicentre of the binary Cold War tensions. As a landlocked territory, Central Europe was repeatedly subjected to the political will of external powers. It has experienced the unfolding of several international crises, but always as a marginal and passive object, rather than an active subject (Grišinas 2017: 68). I argue that this history of marginality and perceived victimhood has been formative of the Central European identity. It frames the way in which regional leaders interpret European politics today, and as a knowledge formation, it governs the policy parameters of the Visegrad Four.

The political cycle of occupation, repression and eventual collapse is an experience that Central Europeans have lived through more than once. The trauma from such political upheaval has left two related, yet distinct, scars on the psyche of Central Europe: firstly, a deep-rooted mistrust of utopian, cosmopolitan/transnational ideas, and secondly, a fear of multiculturalism. A political project prioritising the principles of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, the refugee crisis has shown that Central Europeans feel threatened by the very values that the European Union considers to be at the core of its identity.

Sovereignty has been won at a very high cost in Central Europe. Centuries-long, state leaders had to pledge cosmopolitan allegiance to an extraterritorial idea or power - be it the Church, an empire, or communism (Krastev 2017: 57). After years of occupation and conflict, Central 43

European states have re-established their autonomy since 1991, and are practicing political sovereignty. This victimhood of external political and ideological influence has ignited a deep-rooted suspicion of cosmopolitanism or internationalism, primarily stemming from the half a century spent under communist domination. Having shaken off the yoke of Soviet supremacy, the Visegrad leaders are refusing to once again resign their states to the perceived supranational hegemony of the European Union.

Communism as an organising principle in the Soviet Union demanded a cosmopolitan, internationalist understanding of the world, where one political idea connected people and nations. The collapse of this system in Central Europe has seen a return to what Ulrich Beck referred to as “zombie categories” - family, religion, nation etc. (1992). This narrow view is proving to be ever-more divergent with the cosmopolitan outlook of western Europe. The liberal model has been embraced by the European Union since the end of the Cold War, embodying the internationalist principles of the free movement of people and capital, as well as multi-denominationalism and diversity. This multiplicity of loyalties goes against the attempted ethnic homogeneity and revived nationalism of the post-socialist Visegrad Four. As Krastev puts it, Central Europeans “feel comfortable in their ethnic states and mistrust those whose hearts lie in Paris or London, whose money is in New York or Cyprus, and whose loyalty is to Brussels” (2017: 56).

A distrust of cosmopolitanism also explains why Visegrad leaders are criticizing Brussels and its institutional elites, also known as Eurocrats. Whereas the first generation of Central European leaders like Vaclav Havel dedicated their political careers to the integration of their region into the core of the European polity, the second generation of leaders are starting to revolt against what they perceive to be a newly emerging western-oriented supranational power (Ibid: 58). Visegrad elites interpret the constant pressure to adopt European norms and institutions as humiliation. Most recently, the European Commission’s mandatory relocation scheme was seen as a direct attack on national sovereignty and was met with unified resistance from the Visegrad Group. Likewise, Central European leaders are growing evermore averse to the perceived dominance of certain Member States within the EU. Alongside a resistance to Brussels, the selected texts display a notable discourse of protest against the economic powerhouse of Germany.

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Most recently, Central Europe has declared itself to be once more the victim of a cosmopolitan political development, this time globalisation. The reaction of the Visegrad states to globalisation is not entirely different to the rhetoric of Donald Trump and his white working-class supporters (Ibid: 49). Both sets of peoples believe themselves to be the losers of globalisation, left behind by the capitalist tide that was once anticipated to bring prosperity to all.

There is widespread disappointment and disillusionment in Central Europe with the experience of post-socialist transformation. Citizens and politicians alike believed that membership to the European Union would jumpstart prosperity and end their turbulent history of crises. The vicissitudes and uncertainty inherent to capitalism have come as a shock to the society of Central Europe, and elites are leveraging this disdain towards the neoliberal policies of the Union for political gains. The European Union, once heralded as the saving grace for Central European prosperity and development, is now represented by the Visegrad elite as an external influencer once more victimising Central Europe.

Captive in the Soviet straitjacket for over forty years, nationhood is a relatively new concept in Central Europe. Whereas western Member States have worked through the bloody fall-out of violent nationalism to develop a French-style conceptualisation of the nation (where belonging is defined in terms of loyalty to the institutions of the republic), the states of Central Europe are working rather off the blueprint of nineteenth-century German nationalism, according to which political unity is defined culturally (Krastev 2017: 49). Many scholars argue that this preference for a cultural conceptualisation of the nation stems from the troubled experience with multiculturalism in Central European history (Czyžewski 2012) (Krastev 2016/2017) (Rupnik 2015). This fear of multiculturalism constitutes the second overhang from a lived-experience of political upheaval.

Central European states rose out of the ruins of empires and what ensued was a prolonged period of ethnic cleansing. The Austrian Empire failed to establish a federation of equal states, and that failure has been the misfortune, or “tragedy”, of Central Europe ever since (Kundera 1984). Traditions of statehood were weaker than those in the West, and this fragility and vulnerability ensured Hitler’s conquest and Stalin’s domination. The demographic development of Poland captures precisely this evolution. Pre-war Poland was a multi-ethnic, multi-denominational society, home to German, Ukrainian and Jewish citizens, 45

who made up more than a third of the entire population (Ibid: 48). Two wars later and following the reign and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, Poland is one of the most homogeneous states in the world, containing a population that is approximately 98% ethnically Polish (Lyman 2015). This demographic change did not take place without bloodshed and turbulence on a large scale. As Czyžewski astutely observes, the borderland ethos of Central Europe knows first-hand the difficulty of living with the Other (2012: 174). Whereas western Europeans were gradually introduced to foreign cultures through their history of colonialism, Central Europeans endured a complicated and at times, violent, attempt at coexistence with the Other. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central European states were re-established as nation states that were nothing of the kind, thus catalysing a reorganisation of the ethnic jigsaw puzzle (Rupnik 2015).

The two multi-ethnic countries of the extended Central region - Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia - disintegrated almost instantly. The only remaining multi-ethnic confederation in the region is Bosnia, and this artificial creation of the 1990s would most likely collapse without outside intervention. Therefore, in the eyes of the Visegrad states, a return to diversity is a return to the turbulence of ethnic conflict and the possibility of stately extinction (Krastev 2017: 48). Admitting the migrant Other revives an unsettling fear of national failure, previously hard won, and the resurrection of endless cultural conflicts.

Central Europe is a family of small nations whose vision of the world is based on a deepdistrust of history. From their perspective, they represent the wrong side of historical development: they are its perpetual victims and the object of external political developments (Kundera 1984). The politicisation and manipulation of victimhood and memory is a powerful tool in the process of identity formation (Müller-Hirth 2017: 189). A victimhoodbased identity is a potent, yet highly volatile narrative, that requires iterated articulation for its existence. Grišinas explains: “in a liminal state, where one’s formal presence is continuously compromised and undergoes permanent change, identity and its signifiers become an existential rather than a nominal topic” (2017: 72). The official migration discourse of the Visegrad Group plays with the notion of Central European political victimhood and leverages the turbulent history of the region to justify policy positions, and

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simultaneously articulate an independent regional identity in opposition to the politically powerful West. 3.3.1 Textual Analysis A deep-rooted distrust of utopian, cosmopolitan ideologies is expressed throughout the texts, with various Visegrad leaders rejecting the centralisation tendencies of the European Union and articulating instead a preference for the traditional categories of nation and state. “It is time to discard illusions, sophisticated theories, ideologies and utopian dreams” exclaims Orbán in his 2016 State of the Nation Address. With cynicism he remarks how “in Brussels and some European capitals the political and intellectual elite see themselves as citizens of the world - in contrast to the majority of people, who have a strong sense of nationhood” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). These “lords of globalist politics” allegedly undermine the civic basis of democracy, granting “true power, decisions and influence” to members of the “global network”, rather than citizens of a community (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017a).

Orbán draws a direct parallel between the history of Central Europe as an object of communist internationalism, and the dominant voice of Brussels in the refugee crisis, perceived to be equally as dictatorial towards peripheral states. He emphasises that the “European Union must not be a kind of Soviet Union reloaded” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a), concluding that “we must halt the advance of Brussels” and the political elites who are “contemptuously bypassing and evading the principle of national sovereignty” (Ibid). With a deeply bitter tone, his State of the Nation Address in 2017 contains the following vituperative paragraph: “A common mistake among humanity’s rich and powerful is to believe that they can act like God and be immune from the consequences. They declare supposedly incontrovertible facts; they push utopias onto other countries and peoples; they decide what others can or cannot say, and what they can or cannot believe in; they decide on membership of elite circles and they believe their global power is unquestionable” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017a). Likewise, in an interview with the widely-read German daily, the Bild, Kaczyński is clear in his aversion to a centralised Europe. He asserts that “the national states need to be strengthened and the competences of the Union reduced” (Kaczyński 2017). He attacks the globalised political supremacy of liberalism adopted by western Europe and tells the FAZ: 47

“the liberals always think that if they’re not governing, then it’s not a democracy. In Poland, we want to break down this crooked system of post-communism and post-colonialism” (Ibid). President Duda furthers this party position, musing that “perhaps the concept of freedom is so deeply and firmly anchored at our hearts because we, the Poles, over centuries were being enslaved, we had no state of our own, we had no independent Poland, nor sovereignty” (President Poland 2017b). Such comments from leading PiS leaders feed into the narrative of central European victimhood, according to which, states that were so long denied “freedom and national sovereignty” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a), are resistant to any perceived European institutional attempts to undermine their autonomy.

This demand for decentralisation and a renewed focus on the principles of sovereignty is not unique to the illiberal tandem of Hungary and Poland, but rather it is articulated by all four Visegrad states. Sobotka believes that “the member states should take a more active and powerful role” (Government of Czech Republic 2016), and he argues that mandatory quotas “can damage the European idea” (Sobotka 2015). His Slovak counterpart reminds the European Parliament that the EU is a “Union for the nations of Europe” and not the other way around (Slovak Presidency 2016), emphasizing on another occasion that the Slovak presidency of the Parliament would “give space to a sovereign opinion” (Fico 2016).

Furthermore, the leaders of the Visegrad Four repeatedly reference the perceived inequality that they suffer at the hands of neoliberal globalisation. In addressing the nation, Orbán explicitly invokes the perpetual victimhood of Central Europe with his remark that “instead of finding ways to move beyond a state-planned economy, now we are trying to find ways to move beyond neoliberal economic policy” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). He later speaks about 2016 as the year in which those “who have been pushed aside by the wheels of the global economy” rose up in opposition, referring to Brexit, Trump’s electoral victory and his own government’s migration referendum (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017a).

Orbán and Waszyzkowski question the western viewpoint that Central European states are net benefactors of European membership. Orbán florally describes how “weakened, bled dry, uncompetitive and starved of capital after forty-five years of communism, Hungary opened its doors to western companies. Everyone profited from this: western companies repatriated 48

as much money from Hungary as the European Union sent here” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). Speaking to the Spiegel, Waszyzkowski states that “the EU is the greatest beneficiary of Polish membership! (...) Eighty cents of each euro that comes from Brussels flows back to the West” (2017a). Asserting that the EU is “not a club of altruists”, Waszyzkowski sees “the money from the structural funds as compensation for opening our markets” (Ibid).

In that same interview, Waszyzkowski touches upon a crucial element of this victimhood narrative. Namely, Germany’s leading role within the European Union and more generally, the perceived imbalance of power towards economically strong countries. Having lived over forty years under a communist regime, Central European countries are wary of the dominance of one political power. Waszyzkowski states in no uncertain terms that “Germany should not be allowed to dictate to other EU countries” (Ibid).

In rejecting the German-backed quota system for accepting refugees, President Duda also expresses himself strongly on the topic: “I won’t agree to a dictate of the strong. (...) I won’t back a Europe where the economic advantage of the size of a population will be a reason to force solutions on other countries” (Moskwa and Skolimowski 2015). Kaczyński emphasises that the dominance of Germany is “not a healthy situation” (2017) and Prime Minister Szydło reiterates that Poland will not “submit to any blackmail on the part of the European Union on accepting refugees” (Prime Minister Poland 2017). This position is supported also by Slovakia, with Lajčák commenting that “the EU is a group of 28 Member States and it is not possible - indeed, it would go against the very idea of the EU - for one single member or even a group of selected states to set and shape the future agenda alone” (2016). Hungary’s Balog, worries that “the interests of the stronger are being increasingly enforced” (Hungarian Ministry of Human Capacities 2017). Sobotka too expresses himself in agreement with this position, warning that countries like France and Germany are striving for faster integration, and that the Czech Republic “cannot and must not allow greater integration of the eurozone to mean that decisions will be made that will impact us and that we will not have the ability to influence them” (Government of the Czech Republic 2017b).

For historical reasons, Poland occupies a particularly complex position in the discussion around Germany’s emerging dominance. Kaczyński synopsizes the German-Polish bilateral 49

relationship in telling the Bild: “I would say: our history does not unite us, rather it divides us” (2016). In the final weeks of this research, Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party doubled down on their efforts to articulate Polish WWII victimhood, passing the “Holocaust law” and releasing a web campaign that reinforced the German perpetrator status under the hashtag #germandeathcamps (Cuddy 2018). A further examination of this initiative falls outside of the selected analytical time frame of this thesis. However, the ruling party’s main arguments are expressed by Kaczyński in the aforementioned Bild interview. “Our people need time for wounds to heal”, he claims (Kaczyński 2016). Emphasising the necessity of “sticking to the truth” in the reprocessing of history, Kaczyński criticises German accounts that “attempt to partially shift blame for the Nazi atrocities onto us Polish” (Ibid).

In asserting the importance of equal footing within the EU, the Visegrad leaders concurrently reassert the precedence of the nation state, and by extension, the cultural homogeneity that is perceived to be challenged by European cosmopolitanism. The texts display a preoccupation with national identity and a conviction that multiculturalism is correlated to chaos, or even national extinction. President Fico has evoked cultural reasoning in his rejection of mandatory relocation quotas, stating that he “can’t imagine how we could integrate (...) 50,000 people with completely different habits and religions” (Euractiv 2016). He fears that “they would end up in a space with its own life and its own rules” (ibid), thus threatening the very existence of the Slovak national identity. Fico garnered much international criticism for his outright declaration that “Islam has no space in Slovakia” (2016). In stating that he does “not want there to be a few tens of thousands of Muslims who will gradually begin to push their affairs”, Fico leverages a historic fear of ethnic conflict and repression (Ibid). If Slovakia becomes multicultural, traditions will change and that is “against the very nature of this country” (Ibid). His thoughts are echoed by the Czech President, Miloš Zeman, who gained international (in)fame in 2015 after delivering a Christmas greeting that warned of a Trojan horse-like organised invasion of Europe by migrants (Jůn 2015). In an interview with the Financial Times one year later, he speaks again of the “full incompatibility of culture” between Islam and Christian Europe (Zeman 2016).

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Likewise, Orbán’s 2017 state of the nation address portrays the refugee crisis as a “wave of fundamentalist migrants assaulting [our] national identities” and discusses how “the era of open societies” in western Europe has undermined democracy by introducing the notion of “political correctness” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017a). Such assertions come from the deep-rooted Central European belief that, seen from a historical perspective, multiculturalism is a doomed endeavour, responsible for much unrest in western European states today. “The reality is that the European nations have been unable to integrate even the masses who arrived from Asia and Africa gradually, over a number of decades”, according to the Hungarian Prime Minister (2016a). A fear that “migrants could occupy Hungary” prevents Orbán and his fellow V4 leaders from opening their borders (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015). In asking “whether we should yield to covert foreign attempts to exert influence”, Orbán synopsises the entire discourse on Central European victimhood (2017a). The Othering of the western-oriented manifestation of the European Union is shaped by a narrative that depicts the Visegrad Four as the perpetual victims of external political influence. The refugee crisis presented an opportunity to protest the perceived power imbalance within the union, and to reassert the temporal, spatial identity of Central Europe. Compounding this articulation, is the resulting notion of non-responsibility towards Muslim migrants that comes as a product of a securitised migration discourse. By contrast, the Visegrad States, located on the eastern Border of the EU, establish themselves as the quasi-protectors of the Christian European civilization, invoking a higher moral force outside of the national outlook. 3.4 Ethical Identity Unlike the aforementioned distrust of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, formed of a temporal victimhood identity and also frameable as ethical convictions in their own right, when invoked within the context of a foreign policy discourse, an ethical identity refers rather to the responsibility or non-responsibility that a state expresses vis-à-vis a particular Other (Hansen 2006: 97). Through the refugee crisis the Visegrad Group articulates a responsibility first and foremost for national citizens and Christian Europeans, therewith implicitly freeing itself of responsibility towards the predominantly Muslim asylum seekers hailing from the Middle East and North Africa. Crucially, this is juxtaposed with an articulation of the European Union as neglecting, or failing in, its responsibility to protect European citizens,

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and falsely prioritising the interests of the aforementioned refugees. The conceptual history facilitating this framing of political developments is based on the concept of the antemurale Christianitatis.

Dating back to the 15th Century, the idea of the antemurale Christianitatis (translated as the bulwark of Christendom) delineates a geographically defined Christendom, protected at its borders by the gallant efforts of the regional peoples, particularly the Poles and the Hungarians (Knoll 1974: 382). Invoking Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996), the borderland bulwark supposedly protects civilized Europe from the barbaric Other, thus demarcating the boundaries of civilization and wilderness, Europe and non-Europe (Gyarfasova & Liebhart 2014: 133). It is a flexible concept, the geographical bounds of which have changed over time. There is a long tradition of the discourse in the Balkans and Central Europe, where countries use it as a tool to establish their European heritage and to prove that they protected Europe and its culture from “the Turks” or Islam.

The Visegrad Four, and most specifically the governments of Poland and Hungary, have revived the antemurale Christianitatis discourse in the context of the refugee crisis. The myth is explicitly marthrological and suggests that the region of Central Europe, located on the borders of the larger European community, has chosen to sacrifice itself in order to save the broader civilization. The idea of ethical responsibility towards Christian Europe instead of Others, is not devoid of care and responsibility, as is claimed, but rather preoccupied with a responsibility for the safety of “our” people, citizens and religion (Hansen 2006: 97).

This identity articulation is juxtaposed with an image of the western European powers as irresponsible and failing in their duty to protect European citizens. The Visegrad Group repeatedly criticizes Brussels for neglecting its duty of care towards Europeans and misguidedly prioritising the needs of incoming refugees. The failure of the European Union to secure the borders and formulate a coherent plan for joint action is contrasted with the decisive, effective actions of the Central European alliance. The construction of the Visegrad Group’s non-responsibility towards migrants, and yet utter responsibility to Christian Europeans has been made possible through the application of a security framework. The stability of this identity can only be upheld as long as migration is defined as a security issue, as a humanitarian framework would bring forth a different 52

political discourse on human and legal responsibility (Hansen 2006: 98). The securitisation of an issue elevates the question beyond normal political debate, alleviating customary international norms and pressures, and activating extraordinary rules.

The securitisation of the European refugee crisis has created a discursive space, unencumbered by any responsibility towards migrants, where Visegrad foreign policy decisions are guided by the parameters of a classical security discourse - national interests and military action (Ibid: 97). It is this conceptualisation of the crisis that has allowed the Visegrad Four to negatively derive its identity as a secure, responsible actor in opposition to the western-oriented European Union. 3.4.1 Textual Analysis References to the Christian heritage of Europe are numerous: Hungary is “devoted to the Christian values of Europe” ((Hungarian Prime Minister 2017b), Poland is attached to the western sphere of European culture through “Christianity” (President Poland 2017b), “our Europe is built on Christian foundations” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). Poland’s President Duda is the most explicit in invoking the Antemurale Christianitatis. “Two of the most important battles fought in defence of Europe go to our credit”, he says to the students of the College of Europe (President Poland 2017b). The first of those was the Battle of Vienna, which succeeded in “defending Europe’s civilisation heritage” and “stopped the advancing force of the Ottoman Empire” (Ibid). The second was the “Polish victory over the Bolsheviks of 1920 [which] put an end to the plans of spreading the communist revolution upon western Europe” (Ibid).

This historic tale of civilizational survival shapes the portrayal of the role played by the Visegrad Four in the refugee crisis. “We defended Hungary - and with it, incidentally, Europe”, states Orbán, saying of the Visegrad alliance that “the four of us have succeeded in defending not only the borders of Hungary, but also the southern borders of Europe” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017c). This assertion is repeated by Szijjártó, who claims that “the countries of the Visegrad Group (V4) alone have been capable of stopping the wave of illegal migration” (Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017a). If Central Europe had not worked to “mitigate tension on the eastern flank of the European Union” (Prime Minister Poland 2018), then “hundreds of thousands [of migrants] would still be charging, unimpeded, towards the safe life of the European peoples” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017c). 53

Although declaring himself to be sympathetic to the plight of the refugees, the majority of whom “are also victims”, simply doing “what they see as being in their own interests”, Orbán fears that “we Europeans are not doing that which would be in our own interests” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). Likewise, Sobotka reminds Brussels that the source of the tragedy is “not located on the shores of Europe, but beyond them” (Government of the Czech Republic 2015). These statements show a clear relinquishment of responsibility to non-European asylum seekers; a position that is repeated and amplified by Babiš of the Czech Republic. In an impassioned oration, he declares: “Our primary responsibility is to make sure that our own citizens are safe. The Czech Republic has enough of its own problems (...). The West European politicians keep repeating that it is our duty to comply with what the immigrants want because of their human rights. But what about the human rights of the Germans or the Hungarians?” (Britské Listy 2016).

When challenged on the hypocrisy of a political party that promotes Christian values, yet refuses asylum seekers, the Head of the PiS, Kaczynski, responds: “there is such a thing as “Ordo Caritatis”, which in the first instance means care for your family, your community and your people” (2017). He asserts that there are presumably over one billion people in the world whose lives could be improved by reaching European shores, but that this mass arrival would cause “the liquidation of the civilisation that emerged from Christianity” (Ibid). Sobotka neatly packages the Visegrad position in stating: “It is obvious that Europe is helping and can help. But it cannot help at the cost of its own endangerment or the destruction of its economic and social systems” (2015).

The strength of this ethical identity is ensured through its construction in sharp opposition to the political elite of western Europe. The decisive, secure actions of the Visegrad Four are juxtaposed with the allegedly weak, naive and negligent policies of the European Union. A finger-pointing exercise on three levels serves to further free the V4 of responsibility to solve a crisis that they perceive to have been fueled by Brussels and Berlin.

First, the V4 leaders express frustration at the irresponsible rhetoric of political elites in Brussels and Berlin, which they believe to have increased migration towards Europe. “Brussels has started to encourage those living in the poorer and less fortunate parts of the world to come to Europe”, claims Orbán (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a), criticising also 54

EU statements that imply that illegal migrants have a “good chance” of receiving asylum (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015). In an inflammatory statement that correlates eurocrats with criminals, Orbán says that the refugee crisis has brought together “the world’s most bizarre coalition of people smugglers, human rights activists and leading European politicians” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017a). The V4 leaders believe that quotas are “an invitation” (Lajčák 2015a), and rather, the “morally responsible” approach (Ibid) is to inform prospective migrants that they will be turned away. By extension, the political elite of the V4 articulate their disapproval of Chancellor Merkel’s Willkommenskultur, which is interpreted as having propelled the entire crisis. “Germany itself announced that it would offer special, preferential procedures to asylum seekers from Syria: this is what has created the trouble in Hungary” states Orbán early on in the crisis (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015). Sobotka agrees with this position, asserting that “Germany sent out a signal (...) that stimulated illegal migration to Europe” (2015). Babiš expresses himself in a similar vein: “Merkel has just invited these people to come (...). If some countries still want to accept refugees, they should fly them into their own countries” (Britské Listy 2016).

Second, the approach of Brussels to the refugee crisis is portrayed as slow and ineffective, in contrast to the decisive, dynamic response of the alliance. The Visegrad leaders express their frustration with the inaction of the Union in a clear and iterated manner. Orbán declares that “the impotence of Brussels is causing increasing chaos” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a), while Syzdło demands of Europe: “rise from your knees and from your lethargy or you will be crying over your children every day” (Prime Minister Poland 2017). Fico warns that “if it takes until 2016 or 2017 for Europe to set up its planned border and coastguard force, the EU will have killed itself” (Euractiv 2016). The quota system, described by the Slovakian Prime Minister as “a complete fiasco” (Ibid), is condemned by all V4 leaders as ineffective and “unimplementable” (Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017c). While in contrast: “we here in Central Europe have proved that illegal migration can be stopped” (Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017b). Third, as opposed to the leaders of the Visegrad Group, who assert that “nothing is more precious than the security of homeland and our citizens” (Prime Minister Poland 2017), the leaders of western Europe and the Brussels elites are perceived to be neglecting their responsibility to “ensure the safety of citizens of European countries” (Government of the 55

Czech Republic 2017a). Orbán contends that “the year 2015 brought to an end an age in which, believing that it was under Europe’s control, we took the protection and safety of our continent for granted” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a).

His Minister of Foreign Affairs seconds this conviction, claiming that an increase in terrorist attacks proves that “the Brussels institutions have been incapable of handling the security risks that go hand-in-hand with migration” (Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2017a). Were it not for the strength of the Visegrad Four on the Eastern border, he continues, the EU would be “defenceless” (Ibid). Similarly, Sobotka claims that Brussels is prioritising quotas “instead of putting [the] safety of our citizens first” (Government of the Czech Republic 2017a), and Szydło pins the escalation of the refugee “security crisis” on the “madness of the Brussels elites” (Prime Minister Poland 2017). As a result, all four Visegrad governments believe that the European citizens are “quickly losing trust in the EU” (Slovak Presidency 2016). “They feel that the leaders they have elected are not in control of the situation”, says Orbán (Hungarian Prime Minister 2015), describing the scenario as “a ship’s captain heading for collision, who instead of wanting to take avoiding action, is more interested in deciding which lifeboats should be non-smoking” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a).

The articulation of an ethical identity is the most explicit of all three identity constructions in othering the western-orientation of the European Union. The western leaders are criticised on an ethical and moral level, accused of negligence and irresponsibility. Orbán’s assertion that “those who do most to endanger the future of Europe are not those who want to come here, but the political, economic and intellectual leaders who are trying to reshape Europe against the will of the people of Europe”, expresses well the sentiment of the Visegrad elite (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a). Sobotka succinctly summarises the frustration of the alliance in stating that “the migration crisis and, in my opinion, the failure of the EU institutions to manage it (...) all lead to the fact that Europe must change” (Government of the Czech Republic 2017b). This relationship of being Brussels-critical, yet very much embedded in Europe, characterises the identity articulation of the Visegrad Group.

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3.5 Discussion The official migration discourse of the Visegrad Group expresses a clear articulation of a Central European political subjectivity, derived negatively in relation to the western-oriented manifestation of the European Union. A contextualised analysis of this discourse, pulling on historic and conceptual modes of understanding, unearths the discursive articulation of a regional Self, expressed in terms of a spatial, temporal and ethical identity.

Geographically grounded in Central Europe, the selected texts contain a clear and repetitive articulation of a spatially defined identity. The Visegrad political elite assert the cultural heritage of the territorially bounded region in an attempt to establish Central Europe as an autonomous entity, attached, yet independent to the West, and pertaining its own intellectual and historical lineage.

Aware that subjectivities are connected through a sense of time (Hansen 2006: 43), this spatial polity of Central Europe is concurrently expressed through a temporal frame, to portray the region as coherent and unified through its experience as the perpetual victim of external historical and political developments. Conversely, the westernised EU is depicted as a globalised, cosmopolitan hegemon, marginalising the political voice of the Visegrad states and posed to exert its will on the region, in a manner similar to that of previous empires.

Finally, the understanding of the Visegrad identity as both spatially grounded in Central Europe, and repeatedly victim to turbulent, violent developments at the hands of external powers, justifies the articulation of a responsibility towards Christian Europeans, and a nonresponsibility to (primarily) Muslim asylum seekers, hailing from outside of Europe. Too many times in history “the evil” came from outside of Central Europe, thus providing the impulse for Central Europeans to keep their minds locked in the narrow confines of their immediate environs, be it family, community, parish, or nation (Koran 2015).

The ethical articulation of a Central European identity is the most explicit in its othering of the western manifestation of the EU. In contrast to its own actions, perceived to be decisive and strong, the Visegrad Group condemns the migration response of Brussels and Berlin as irresponsible and unsafe. In doing so, it invokes the Antemurale Christianitatis, thus de facto

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positioning itself as the saviour of Europe, and the only political entity that champions the true interests of European citizens.

Although each in turn an individual identity articulation, the three layers of subjectivity overlap and reinforce each other to create a coherent Central European Self. Each aspect is reliant on the successful articulation of the other two for its discursive realisation. The strength of this tri-part identity is ensured through is negative derivation in opposition to the spatial, temporal and ethical identities associated with the western-oriented European Union and the leading western powers that are perceived to constitute it.

The securitisation of the European refugee crisis set the stage for this centre-periphery identity debate. The strain that the crisis placed on the European unified and humanitarian self-image, combined with the focus that the language of security places on identity, meant that a fertile ground for the renegotiation of identity in the European Union was prepared. No longer satisfied with the account of the European Self being projected on the international stage, the Visegrad Group vehicalised this securitised crisis to other the westernmanifestation of the European Union in juxtaposition to a diverging Central European identity. Crucially for this finding, Hansen emphasises that identity must not always be constructed through radical otherness (2006: 35). She names David Campbell’s account of US Foreign Policy vis-à-vis North Korea as a clear-cut case, but insists that more complex constructions of difference also exist, where the Self integrates elements of the Other into its own image. She calls these the “less-than-radical Others” of foreign policy (Ibid: 36).

The discourse analysis conducted in this thesis has shown that the Visegrad othering of the western manifestation of the European Union is an example of such a complex case. Whereas the refugee is presented as a radical Other in Central European foreign policy, relations to the Brussels Other paint a more multiplex picture. The Visegrad Group identifies itself in opposition to the current institutionalisation of Europe, while simultaneously articulating a strong sense of belonging to, and ownership over, Europe.

This conceptualisation of belonging stems from a historical understanding of the European continent as connected through a shared heritage, later to be artificially separated by the 58

erection of the Iron Curtain. As outlined by Milan Kundera in the 1980s, Central Europe was understood to be politically in the East, but culturally in the West (1984: 33). After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the concept of a “return to Europe” became increasingly propagated by the countries of Central Europe (Tulmets 2014: 1). After more than forty years of communism, the discourse called for political reintegration with the West via EU and NATO membership, and a cultural return to western European heritage. After 1989 this pro-Western, assimilatory idea of Central Europe became the dominant discourse in the countries of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (Browning 2009: 124).

This identity-based euro-optimism in the lead up to EU membership left no room for preaccession scepticism. Not because this was irrelevant, but rather because the primary impulse for European institutional integration was driven by the fear of remaining the outsider (Riishoj 2010: 52). However, this angst that artificially subdued critical analysis prior to 2004 was dispelled with membership, paving the way for a more questioning, interest-based relationship to the EU in later stages and today.

The process of post-socialist transformation and simultaneous integration into the democratic and liberal economic system of the West has been challenging. Membership to the EU has come at a price that Central Europeans under-estimated. The blanket application of a strategy of “catch up”, with little attention to local peculiarities has caused scholars like Korablyova to liken European enlargement to cultural colonisation (2016: 10). The list of economic and political requirements demanded of the candidates served to strengthen an “outsider” feeling and led to a situation that Korablyova describes as “in Europe yet outside of it” (Ibid: 5). Central European countries have therefore emerged as the objects, rather than the subjects of the enlarged European integration project (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2008: 103). This position of marginality in European politics has increasingly become a bone of contention among the Visegrad states. For a region that once heralded its great reunification with western Europe and return to its perceived cultural heritage, Central Europe now finds itself on the periphery of decision-making in the EU.

However, while articulating the specificity of Central Europe and protesting the perceived attempts by Brussels to interfere in sovereign domestic matters, the Visegrad Four continue to believe steadfastly in the concept of a united Europe and most certainly see the future of their 59

states embedded within a European polity. Central Europeans see themselves as descendants of European lineage, as well as contributors to Europe’s future.

Led by Slovakia and the Czech Republic, there is little doubt in the official V4 migration discourse as to the commitment of these countries to the European political project. “My government supports European integration”, say Sobotka, emphasising that his people take membership as a given and couldn’t imagine it any other way (2015). Likewise, speaking before the European Parliament, President Fico calls the EU “an extraordinary and unique project”, and praises the initiative that has “brought peace, prosperity and security to a continent that has suffered from centuries of hatred and bloody wars” (Slovak Presidency 2016).

Although commonly recognised as the more critical voices of Central Europe, both Poland and Hungary too articulate their commitment to the European project. President Duda fondly remembers the May 2004 “break-through” that saw Poland join the EU, thus ending the division of the continent that he claims was “imposed on Europe by force” (President Poland 2017b). The current Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki proclaims that “we believe in Europe, we believe in European values” (Prime Minister Poland 2018), and even Kaczyński, known for his outspoken criticism of the EU, supports this stance, stating that “we Poles are, and will remain, convinced Europeans” (2016). Orbán has also been heard in support of the European project, claiming that the commitment of Hungary to the EU is unquestioning, and that “we shall not abandon it, despite its current bout of vertigo” (Hungarian Prime Minister 2016a).

This sentiment encapsulates the position of the Visegrad group towards the EU. While asserting their loyalty to the European project, the V4 is insistent that the Union needs to change. “We all agree that the European Union needs a new vision (...) which sensitively takes into account history and diversity”, Fico tells the European Parliament (Slovak Presidency 2016). Orbán explains that Central Europeans are “dissatisfied with the functioning of the European Union”, and criticism is being levelled in order to “correct mistakes” and “reform” the EU (Hungarian Prime Minister 2017b).

In an interview published on the website of the Polish Foreign Ministry, Waszczykowski boils the debate down to its crux. “It is not a sin to differ in opinions, but it is unconvincing to 60

present one’s own opinion ex cathedra as the only right vision of Europe and Europeanness”, he says (Foreign Affairs Poland 2018). This captures the Central European disillusionment with the project of European integration, that, once glorified as an inclusionary project of unity through diversity, no longer appears to represent the interests or identity of the Visegrad region. An analysis of the V4 migration discourse has shown that the othering of the westernmanifestation of the EU should not be understood as a rejection of Europe and Europeanness, but rather as a renegotiation of that very European subjectivity and an attempt to re-assert the regional identity of Central Europe, perceived to have become lost within the institutionalised framework of Europe.

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4. Conclusion This thesis began with the assertion that Europe is undergoing an identity crisis. The arrival of large numbers of displaced peoples to European shores has undoubtedly amounted to a political and humanitarian challenge. However, I argued that the true crisis of the situation lies in the Union’s inability to act coherently, resulting from a deep confusion as to what constitutes the very nature of Europe. Luuk Van Middelaar says that “a crisis is a moment of truth” (2016: 496), which brings to the open conflicts that are either dormant or simmering beneath the surface. A major event outside of European borders, the effects of which rippled into a crisis on the Union’s political stage, opened a void at the core of the European identity.

Against a backdrop of widespread political unrest in the Middle East, the Syrian civil war catalysed the displacement of millions of peoples, a large percentage of whom journeyed to Europe, in what came to be known as the refugee crisis. The EU’s securitisation of this humanitarian emergency brought to the fore a deep sentiment of ontological insecurity in the European Self. It separated the institutionalised EU from the notion of Europeanness, as the liberal, humanitarian principles of the latter were slowly eroded by widespread fear of the culturally-defined, migrant Other. The refugee crisis, in response to which the EU could not muster a unified approach, made visible the emptiness and flexibility of the term “Europe” (Leek & Marazov 2018: 10). Therefore, this significant political event triggered a dislocation of the hegemonic understanding of European identity, making room for a renegotiation of the conceptualisation of the European Self.

Although all four states were not directly affected by this political moment, the Visegrad Group vehicalised the identity crisis of the EU to protest the hegemonic discourse on Europe. The official migration discourse of the Visegrad alliance displays a clear belief on the side of its four members, that “Europe” as an empty signifier (Lacau 1996) has been occupied by a western interpretation of what the European Union should embody. No longer feeling represented by the European Self being articulated by the EU in opposition to the migrant Other (an identity based on the principles of liberalism, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism), the Visegrad Group saw the perceived existential threat of mass migration as necessitating the articulation of a specific Central European identity, that simultaneously contested the stable meanings and hegemonic narrative on “Europe”.

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Using Lene Hansen’s framework for analysis, an examination of the official migration discourse of the Visegrad Group unearthed a clear articulation of a Central European subjectivity, defined in terms of overlapping and mutually reinforcing spatial, temporal and ethical identities. The foreign policy of the Visegrad Four negatively derives a regional identity in opposition to the western-oriented manifestation of the European Union and the western leaders and eurocrats that are perceived to steer the European political project.

According to a Foucauldian understanding of discourse analysis, the European Union and its corresponding identity have no naturally-occurring ontological presence, but rather are created through a knowledge formation governing discursive practices (Wiener and Diez, 2009: 9). Furthermore, Lacau asserts that all identities are created hegemonically (1990: 33). If hegemony is understood to be unstable, it can be dislocated by an event, which produces an excess of new meaning, thus challenging and rendering inept the former framework for understanding (Badiou 2005: 179). Therefore, the European identity is only partially sedimented and therefore vulnerable to contestation.

The refugee crisis was one such political event that opened up a hegemonic struggle and simultaneously highlighted the complex position of Central Europe within this European identity system. Although not yet admitted to the “inside” community of the EU, perceived to be occupied by moralising western European powers, the Visegrad Four can also not be defined as radical, outside Others, because of their status as European Member States. Conversely, the Visegrad Group “others” the western manifestation of the European Union, but simultaneously evokes a common European heritage with fellow western Member States. Therefore, one can assert that both East and West engage in practices of complex, mutual othering that constitute the multiplex identity mosaic of Europe, which cannot be simplified or condensed into the preamble of a political treaty.

It is my assertion that the European identity is not an ontological certainty that can be defined along cultural or historical lines. Rather, it is a space of discursive debate, in which the shape and nature of the European polity is constantly being renegotiated. It is the ability of the European Union to facilitate and reconcile this debate that forms the specificity and strength of institutionalised Europe. However, if the European Union should fail to provide a platform for equal discussion, and instead allow economic prowess or geographical location to dictate the weight attributed to a given national voice, I fear that Krastev’s prediction may well be 63

correct, and the “disintegration train” will indeed leave the Brussels station (Krastev 2017: 10). The Visegrad Group’s renegotiation of the hegemonic understanding of institutionalised Europe symbolises the desire of peripheral states that Brussels acknowledge the complex and contested nature of European identity construction. If an identity is inscribed in a hegemonically established signifying system, within which every element is defined through its relations to other elements (Leek & Marazov 2018: 23), the attempt of the Visegrad Group to protest the current manifestation of the European Union can also be understood more broadly as the rejection of an entire European political system that organises itself along complex practices of orientalism.

In a political climate that is slowly becoming dominated by the language and logic of securitisation (de Zwaan et al. 2016: 2), an application of the identity - security nexus to European politics is an exercise that the field of International Relations cannot afford to overlook. The case of the Visegrad Group, and its corresponding protest articulation of a regional Central European identity, should be heeded as a warning for the European Union. It is not too late to re-conceptualize the notion of European identity and problematise practices of othering within the European polity. Progress is only linear in academically impoverished textbooks. If crises are indeed moments of great opportunity, then perhaps the rifts left behind by the refugee crisis will in turn become the scars around which the European Union will begin to heal.

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