Framing Foreign Policy Through an Illiberal Lens: A Large Language Model Driven Analysis of Slovak Political Discourse

While a growing body of scholarship working with ideational definition of illiberalism identifies anti-globalism, opposition to migration, or anti-Western sentiment among its core attributes, empirically grounded studies of how illiberal ideas shape foreign policy discourse remain relatively scarce. Existing research has primarily focused either on domestic regime transformation or on the openly revisionist foreign policies of consolidated illiberal or authoritarian powers. Less attention has been paid to illiberal actors embedded within liberal multilateral orders who, due to various context-specific constraints, cannot openly reject, or coherently replace them. This article addresses this gap by introducing the concept of illiberal framing of foreign policy: a performative and strategic mode of interpretation through which political elites operating in competitive democracies contest the liberal international order as a part of their highly ambivalent discourse on foreign policy. Combining framing theory (Benford & Snow 2000) with debates on ideological illiberalism (Laruelle 2024) and illiberal frames (Sebők et al. 2026), the article introduces the notion of ‘illiberal framing of foreign policy’ as a distinct interpretative strategy that selectively activates illiberal ideas to redefine enemies, allies, responsibilities, and moral hierarchies in international politics. In the Central and Eastern European context (CEE), this strategy is characterized by pronounced ambivalence. Unlike openly anti-liberal regimes such as Russia or China, CEE illiberal actors operate under strong structural constraints stemming from their continued embedment in the EU, NATO, and other frameworks rooted in the liberal international order. As a result, illiberal foreign policy discourse in the region is marked less by coherent rejection of established multilateral initiatives, but rather, by symbolic confrontation, selective compliance, and calls for reform. Conceptually, the article argues that such ambivalence and ideological incoherence constitute a defining feature of illiberal foreign policy framing in a post-liberal setting. Political leaders such as Viktor Orbán, Robert Fico, or Andrej Babiš deploy illiberal frames in periods of heightened geopolitical uncertainty, drawing on longstanding grievances among the CEE public toward globalization and the collective West. They do so by presenting the liberal international order as ineffective, externally imposed, or alien to domestic needs, while simultaneously advocating selective reforms of international structures on which their states remain dependent in the economy and security area. Phenomena such as Orbán’s well-documented ‘peacock dance’, Fico’s opportunistic critique of the EU and Western European countries, or Babiš’s illiberal swerve observed in the last few years exemplify this highly ambivalent foreign policy-related communication. Methodologically, this article leverages state-of-the-art LLMs to analyze political discourse of elites in Slovakia – a country deeply integrated into transnational structures yet increasingly characterized by the normalization of illiberal positioning. Our conceptualization of illiberal framing of foreign policy as a dynamic communicative strategy used to contest the liberal international order advances literature on CEE illiberal manifestations. We do so by highlighting how, in the post-liberal context, the opposition to the liberal status quo in international politics is translated by elites into instruments of political contestation within the so-called liberal-illiberal divide rather than blueprints for systemic rupture of the current multilateral system in Europe.