The EU as the Other in the Czech and Slovak Culture Wars

Culture wars, defined as political mobilisation and cleavages around controversies over norms, symbols, and values, have redefined the party systems and political identities in East Central Europe since the 2010s. This contribution will argue that the negative politicisation of the EU as “the liberal Other” can be analysed as the result of the integration of culture war projects and right wing discourses on national conservative platforms. This contribution will focus on two lesser-studied cases: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Since the early 2010s, single-issue activism, right-wing groups, religious associations, “alternative media” figures and political start-ups have thrived on controversies and protests about historical memory, Islam, abortion, LGBTQ rights and eventually the EU and Ukraine-Russia. In both cases, culture warriors have emerged and coalesced in counter-hegemonic cultural projects before establishing coalitions for electoral politics, partly on nominally left-wing (socially minded, post-communist), partly on right-wing platforms, and in mainstream right wing parties. Significantly, the EU has been assigned the role of a liberal “other” of the in national-conservative, “patriotic” politics. The contribution will analyse the effects of culture wars in the reshaping of political landscapes and identities in political and discursive respects. It will first briefly reconstruct the trajectories of culture war projects and their transformations in the context of electoral politics. Secondly, it will examine their discursive integration into broader illiberal platforms, with a special focus on the evolution of the political othering of the EU. Thirdly, the contribution will examine the embeddedness of illiberal actors in regional and European networks, their usage of EU politics and their ambivalence on the EU as a liberal normative institution and a political platform.