ABSTRACT
This book has asked how the Czech Republic, as a small and new member state of the European Union, pursues its interest in EU foreign policymaking. While a lot of academic attention has been paid to the content of member states’ policies and the resulting EU positions as well as the success rate of individual member states’ efforts to upload their policy preferences into EU policies, relatively little is known about the methods that member states use to make their points in EU negotiations. By offering a study of the Czech Republic’s interest promotion in EU foreign policy, this book has tried to help fill this gap in the literature and offer new insights into EU decisionmaking. It has done so by grounding the analysis in two sets of literature: on Europeanization and on lobbying. The key point of departure has been the idea that the member states adjust their behaviour in the Council in the long term as they learn the environment and better understand the dynamics of EU decision-making, but they promote their positions rationally in individual cases. In addition, it has been assumed that in their behaviour small member states in the Council resemble advocates for private interest and, as a result, findings from the lobbying literature can be applied to the study of their behaviour in the EU. Three working hypotheses were formulated on the basis of these two sets of literature.
