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Introduction
The Czech Republic represents a deviant case among the new European Union (EU) members (Drulák and Sabic 2010; Drulák 2013). Unlike its Central and Eastern European peers, who try to align their policies with Brussels or at least pay lip service to Brussels, Czech leaders have been seeking open confrontations with the EU in recent years.1 The Czech Republic was the last country to ratify the Lisbon Treaty after much foot-dragging and without being able to explain its reluctance to the others. Also, it does not want to join the Eurozone despite the fact that the EU accession treaty obliges it to do so. Finally, the Czech government has been challenging the measures that the EU has taken when dealing with the crisis in the Eurozone despite the fact that the neoliberal logic of these measures was in line with the domestic agenda of the government. All this has been taking place while the Czech Republic has been hugely benefiting from the EU funds and has not faced any intrusive measures on the part of the EU, which could raise public concern, unlike, for example, some countries in Southern Europe.
This raises several related questions. How can we account for this? What alternative image of Europe is hidden behind the Czech criticism of the EU? What makes the Czech Republic different from other CEE countries? To what extent do Czech policies result from one-off factors, and to what extent do they reflect long-term, structural factors? Even though this article cannot give full justice to all of these questions, it points to an answer that has not been properly examined so far. It does so by investigating the metaphors that Czech leaders use when talking about Europe.
This article argues that the peculiarity of the Czech EU policy can be linked to an important cleavage in the Czech society. There is a rich body of literature which recognises that Czech attitudes and policies towards the EU are related to domestic cleavages between those who support a deeper European integration and those who are against it (Benes and Braun 2010). A host of studies analyse party attitudes (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2001; Kopecký and Mudde et al. 2002; Kopecký and Ucen 2003; Beichelt 2004; Hanley...