While a growing body of scholarship using the ideational definition of illiberalism identifies anti-globalism, opposition to migration, and anti-Western sentiment among its core attributes, empirically grounded studies examining how illiberal ideas shape foreign policy discourse remain limited. Existing research has focused primarily 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 context-specific structural constraints, cannot openly reject or coherently replace them. This article addresses this gap by introducing the concept of the illiberal framing of foreign policy: a strategic and performative mode of interpretation through which political elites operating in competitive democracies contest the liberal international order within an ambivalent foreign policy discourse.
Drawing on framing theory (Benford & Snow 2000) and recent debates on ideological illiberalism (Laruelle 2022; Sebők et al. 2026), we conceptualize illiberal foreign policy framing as a distinct communicative strategy that selectively activates illiberal ideas to redefine enemies, allies, responsibilities, and moral hierarchies in international politics. In the Central and Eastern European (CEE) context, this strategy is marked by pronounced ambivalence. Unlike openly anti-liberal regimes such as those of contemporary Russia or China, CEE illiberal actors operate under strong structural constraints resulting from their continued embedment in the EU, NATO, and other institutions rooted in the liberal international order. Consequently, illiberal foreign policy discourse in the region is characterized less by coherent rejection of multilateral initiatives than by symbolic confrontation, selective compliance, and calls for reform.
Conceptually, the article argues that ambivalence and ideological incoherence are defining features of illiberal foreign policy framing in what Laruelle (2022) terms a 'post-liberal' setting of CEE. Political leaders such as Viktor Orbán, Robert Fico, and Andrej Babiš deploy illiberal frames in their foreign policy discourses during periods of heightened geopolitical uncertainty, drawing on longstanding grievances within CEE publics toward globalization and the collective West. They present the liberal international order and its components as ineffective, externally imposed, or misaligned with domestic interests, while simultaneously advocating selective reforms of international structures on which their states remain dependent. Well-documented phenomena such as Orbán’s 'peacock dance,' Fico’s opportunistic critiques of the EU and Western European governments, and Babiš’s recent illiberal turn illustrate this ambivalent mode of foreign policy communication.
Methodologically, the article leverages state-of-the-art large language models to analyze elite political discourse in Slovakia, a country deeply integrated into transnational institutions yet increasingly characterized by the normalization of illiberal positioning. By conceptualizing illiberal foreign policy framing as a dynamic communicative strategy, the article advances the literature on CEE illiberalism. It demonstrates how, in a post-liberal context, opposition to the liberal status quo is translated into instruments of domestic political contestation within the liberal–illiberal divide rather than into coherent blueprints for systemic rupture of Europe’s multilateral order.
