Discursive Shifts in Ethno-Nationalist Politics: On Politicization and Mediatization of the “Refugee Crisis” in Poland

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes politicization and mediatization of immigration in Poland in the context of the recent European “refugee crisis.” Although largely absent from Polish political discourse after 1989, anti-refugee and anti-immigration rhetoric has recently become extremely politically potent in Poland. The analysis shows that, soon taken over by other political groups, the new anti-immigration discourses have been enacted in Poland's public sphere by the right-wing populist party PiS (Law and Justice). Its discourse in offline and online media has drawn on discursive patterns including Islamophobia, Euro-scepticism, anti-internationalism, and historical patterns and templates of discrimination such as anti-Semitism.

KEYWORDS:

• “Refugee crisis”
• Poland
• anti-immigration rhetoric
• critical discourse studies
• right-wing populism
• politicization
• mediatization

Notes

1. Despite its by now widespread presence in public and academic discourse, the notion of a “refugee crisis” is approached critically in this article. It is viewed as an ideologically charged notion developed in media and political discourse and as a recontextualization of earlier (negativized) descriptions of large-scale developments related to immigration and asylum seeking (e.g., in the context of wars in former Yugoslavia in early 1990s).

2. From the variety of available conceptions of social imaginaries (see e.g., Taylor 2004), this study follows a top-down conceptualization, which sees them as “sets of cultural elements common to a given social group (or groups) that shape the ‘lived experience’ and help reproduce social relations” (Sum & Jessop, 2013, p. 439).

3. All translations of examples from Polish into English are mine. Original versions of examples are available from the author upon request. The full speech in original is available at http://sejm.gov.pl/Sejm7.nsf/wypowiedz.xsp?posiedzenie=100&dzien=1&wyp=7&view=1.

4. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FqFXvqsa6Aa.

Additional information

Funding

The work presented in this paper has been partially funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) grant 21-2013-1498, “The Journalism-Politics-PR Interplay on Twitter: Hybridized, Cross-Professional Relations on the Web.”