After the downfall of communism, the region of Central and Eastern Europe re-emerged on the international scene as Europe’s “Atlanticist” voice. This paper attempts to establish what role, if any, normative considerations played in motivating this foreign policy course. The argument posits that Atlanticism – and its gradual decline after 2008 – can be attributed to the relative influence of specific elite configurations, bound by shared norms, on the process of foreign policy-making in the CEE region. To demonstrate this, the paper focuses on the dynamics of foreign policy-making in two CEE states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. As a case study, it uses one of the most important "Atlanticist" foreign policy outcomes in the region''s post-communist history: the Iraq War. In the theoretical section, the paper first discusses the shortcomings of the dominant neo-realist perspective in explaining the CEE states’ stance on Iraq. This discussion, in turn, justifies the choice of a corrective set of analytical tools, rooted in the constructivist school of thought and the theory of norm enterpreneurship. Next, the paper identifies the framework of US-inspired foreign policy norms relevant for CEE policymakers during the Iraq crisis, which are conceptualized here as “Atlanticism”. In the empirical section, it proceeds to analyze the discourse and the decision-making in the run up to the Iraq War in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, capitalizing on more than 100 interviews with elite actors and multiple foreign policy documents, public speeches and media reports. The paper seeks to draw attention to the understudied role of non-material factors in the foreign policies of small states in the post-communist region, as well as make a timely empirical contribution to the literature on transatlantic relations, which have hitherto focused on “old”, rather than “new” Europe.
