The Russian aggression on Ukraine in February 2022 came as a surprise to many EU member states. But there have been also those in the Union, who were much less surprised and rather frustrated as their voices and warnings had fallen on deaf ears. In fact, many countries from Central Eastern Europe had been trying for decades to warn their counterparts about the nature of Russia’s imperial policies in what Moscow perceives as its neighbourhood. As the President of the European Commission, Ursula Van Der Layen, recently admitted: ‘[w]e should have listened to the voices inside our Union – in Poland, in the Baltics, and all across Central and Eastern Europe. While one should not read too much into these statements, unfortunately, prior to Europe’s “Ukraine” moment, the CEE voices were often silenced, ignored or even stigmatized. Labeled as “Westsplaining,” academics and diplomats from the region have been expressing their frustration with the persistence of patronizing attitudes expressed towards them by their Western counterparts, who would insist on providing them with an explanation of how the Central Eastern Europe worked.

In this panel we are going to analyse the strive for recognition from the CEEs in foreign and security policy in the EU and beyond. Nearly, two decades since the “big bang” enlargement of the EU are the CEE members treated as decision-making “peers”? Have they been able to shape the policy and generate any (ideational) leadership within the Union? In order to unpack the dynamics between the Western and Eatern European states, we focus on concepts like agency, dominance, status-seeking or stereotypes. We also offer a comparative angle between EU and NATO as we seek to uncover whether there are any differences in the status of the countries from the CEE's in both organisations.

Ever since the accession of most of the Central and East European (CEE) states into the EU, the region has been treated mainly as the periphery of the Brussels-based bloc, buffering the core states from the “unknown unknowns” of international affairs and following their instructions. It was only with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that this treatment began to shift. The paper argues that for some CEE countries it was the interactions with China that assisted them to begin asserting their actorness in international life. In particular, the China-CEE countries cooperation mechanism launched by China in 2012 provided CEE states with unique opportunities for foreign

policy entrepreneurship outside of their traditional international outlook dominated by Brussels, Washington, and Moscow. Thus, the encounter with China has facilitated the CEE states to cast off their peripheral position on the global stage.

Literature identifies specialisation as one of the most important methods through which small states compensate for their structural disadvantages in international organisations, including in the EU. Specialisation is a decision to prioritise a topic/region in national foreign policy that over the course of several administrations concentrates scarce resources to accumulate expertise and develop the capacity to construct powerful arguments, bring new information to the negotiation table, and nominate experts to suitable positions in the institutions. To serve the purpose, however, specialisation needs to be recognised to bring the desired status and influence.

The paper will look at two specialisations in Czech foreign policy. Human rights have been a long-term foreign policy priority since the establishment of independent Czechia. However, this specialisation is not recognised at the EU level. When asked about Czechia’s specialisation in foreign policy, representatives of other member states and EU institutions do not connect the country with the human rights area at all. By contrast, the Czech specialisation in Western Balkans' transformation has been recognised both among other member states and EU institutions. Building on the method of difference with the use of semi-structured interviews, the paper will look for factors that have caused the different results and formulate hypotheses for future research on EU small states’ specialisation.

Why did the EU grant the status of a candidate country to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia on 23 June 2022, just four months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and amid an ongoing war with no clear end prospects? The recent scholarship has tended to see the latest developments in EUFP in (geo-)strategic terms, most notably in the eastern neighbourhood. The political/public voices about a “geopolitical turn” in EU foreign policy have also gone stronger in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The rationale behind the EU’s U-turn is mostly attributed to a security logic whereby the EU woke up belatedly to the security threat posed by Russia and revitalized its enlargement policy as a geopolitical reaction. This paper examines alternative views of the EU’s decision to extend a membership prospect to the EaP trio. It zooms in on the framing of the decision in public discourse in order to understand its socio-emotional underpinnings. It draws on the scholarship on the role of emotions in IR and probes the weight of emotional arguments in the decision-making process leading to the policy U-turn. It considers the spectrum of emotions involved in the decision-making, the emotional hierarchies at play, the political contests over emotional rights and duties in shaping the interactions among the main stakeholders at EU level. It examines the EU decision to grant a candidate status to Ukraine (and the others by association) as an attempt to restore a degree of justice on the continent.

The European Union (EU) faces significant challenges from within -- Brexit and extreme right movements moving closer to power in several EU Member States destabilise the Union. 1989 brought the end of communist-totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. It also brought the enlargement of the European Union (EU). In the Enlargement process, however, relations did not evolve sufficiently to match the values enshrined in the EU treaties. At the moment, we are witnessing counter-reactions indicating a weak basis for the enlarged Union. The aim of this paper is to explore the Eastward expansion of the EU in order to understand the fragility affecting the Union. To do that, the paper asks which are the main gaps in understanding among Western and Eastern EU Member Statutes as the EU expanded Eastward. Methodologically the paper relies on interpretive methodology, aiming to explore the meaning-in-use generated at the interactions between Eastern EU MS, Western EU MS, and EU institutions. In terms of research methods, the paper relies on content analysis, focusing on the discourse of political leaders and relevant documents. Two case studies are put forward, one referring to the relationship between Eastern and Western EU MS and the other to the German reunification.