Abstract
Post- communism and accession to the EU can be considered as independent variables in the study of the emergence of professional lobbying in the region of Central Europe. The arrival of foreign investors in the 1990s, as well as the desire to negotiate the best conditions for accession to the EU, played an important role in the establishment of the occupation of professional lobbying.
Apart from being independent variables, post- communism and the EU also appear as discursive variables mobilized as two poles of a normative dichotomy that Central European countries supposedly face: "post -communist drift " or " Europeanization/ Westernization ". This dichotomy plays an important role in the debates on the role of private actors in politics via lobbying.
It also is the background of other strategies of legitimation of lobbying : first, the use of the concept of political culture, post- communist culture supposedly preventing the public opinion from understanding the usefulness of lobbying, and then the assertion of political competence and capabilities of lobbyists closely that is in the discourse of private actors closely connected to the assertion of the incompetence of public actors specifically in the post-communist region.