ABSTRACT

As across Central and Eastern Europe, membership of the European Community (later the European Union) was a key priority for all mainstream Czech parties and governments after 1989. This goal was finally achieved with the accession of the Czech Republic and nine other candidate states on 1 May 2004. However, despite a widely shared pro-Western orientation, by the mid-1990s European integration and EU accession had become increasingly divisive issues in Czech party politics. This was largely due to the growing euroscepticism of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) under Václav Klaus. The euroscepticism of Klaus and his party has been widely remarked upon, but with a few exceptions (Bugge 2000; Kopecky and Ucen 2003; Kopecky 2004) rarely analysed in detail. More surprisingly, ODS’s shift in the late 1990s to a more strident euroscepticism committed to defend Czech national interests against the European Union, if necessary to the point of remaining outside the EU, has scarcely been remarked upon in scholarly writing. This is surprising, given that ODS does not fit the typical profile of eurosceptic parties in East and Central Europe, which are typically groupings of the far right or left, which remain outside normal coalitionbuilding politics, or traditionalist conservative forces rooted in historical nationalism (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2002). ODS, by contrast, was a relatively new party with a free market vision, a key political actor in Czech transformation politics and a credible contender for office throughout the period since its foundation in 1991.