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By the end of December 2002, the Czech EU Council presidency came to an end. Czechia was holding the rotating Council presidency for the second time and like in 2009 its presidency trio was rounded out by the preceding French presidency and the following Swedish one. The key difference between the two Czech presidencies was the changed institutional context. While the 2009 presidency took place on the verge of the entrance into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the Treaty nevertheless only came into effect in December 2009, a couple months after the Czechs passed the presidency baton to the Swedes. The 2022 Czech presidency was thus the first that the country held under the Lisbon rules. These rules curtailed the role of the rotating presidency in terms of presiding over the European Council as well as the Foreign Affairs Council. Most importantly, the practicalities of the Czech presidency were affected by the suddenly changed international context following the Russian aggression against Ukraine. The Czech presidency as well as the presidency trio had to revise their priorities and the entire EU was primarily focused on the war in Ukraine and its consequences. This special forum containing seven articles provides an early analysis that engages the existing scholarly literature on the performance of Czechia at the helm of the EU.

The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. At no time in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so insecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault by Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades have led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. This book examines the role of public opinion in the European integration process. It develops a novel theory of public opinion that stresses the deep interconnectedness between people’s views about European and national politics. It suggests that public opinion cannot simply be characterized as either Eurosceptic or not, but rather that it consists of different types. This is important because these types coincide with fundamentally different views about the way the EU should be reformed and which policy priorities should be pursued. These types also have very different consequences for behaviour in elections and referendums. Euroscepticism is such a diverse phenomenon because the Eurozone crisis has exacerbated the structural imbalances within the EU. As the economic and political fates of member states have diverged, people’s experiences with and evaluations of the EU and national political systems have also grown further apart. The heterogeneity in public preferences that this book has uncovered makes a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing Euroscepticism unlikely to be successful.

Vojtěch Belling: Legitimita moci v postmoderní době: Proč potřebuje Evropská unie členské státy? 1. vydání. Brno: Mezinárodní politologický ústav Masarykovy univerzit, 2009, 211 stran, ISBN 978-80-210-5081-5.