Resurgent Anti-Semitism, Politicized Memory and Populism

• In Event: Identity, Belonging, and Nation-Building in Eastern Europe and Russia

Abstract

This work traces how the past is politicized (mythologized) in post-transition spaces, how it enters the political language, and how it is implicated in the Central European turn to the populist right. Relying on and expanding the framework of collective memory and anchoring the story in Poland, I argue that the narratives of past communism structure political competition and affect the present-day imaginary of common belonging - that is, they determine political positions of players as they reveal who is included and excluded from the conception of the ‘we.’

I make three claims. First, I argue that programmatic identities of Polish political parties are weak. Despite this weakness political competition remains fierce, because the parties fashion enduring political identities. They do so by deploying, what I call mnemonic capital, that is, a politically productive symbolic resource that accrues to political players based on their turn to, and judgment of, the past. (I identify four political identities generalizable to other post-transition settings). Second, I claim that the field of the political competition predicated on the turn to the past and on moral opprobrium is the particular achievement of the party that is currently ruling Poland. In their electoral strategy, the party narrated the country’s main problem as that of communist state capture; and it claimed that (former-) communists and their post-dissident allies captured political, material and symbolic levers of power. This way of presenting the problem gave the wining party access to the language of crisis and it polarized the field: it cast political opponents as essential enemies of the nation, and it cast the narrators as country’s saviors. Third, this achievement is possible because the winning party narrated communism as evil, that is, essentially and existentially anti-Polish; it presented it as equal to Nazism, and it made it coincidental Jewishness. Such a narrative had three implications: it allowed the current rulers to articulate their anti-elite grievance in the language of the past and in the language of identity. In so doing, it skewed the electoral contest away from programs and platforms toward a manufactured identitarian crisis. It also authorized latent expressions of antisemitism, and it re-circulated an ethnicized frame of nationhood. My work concludes by drawing examples of the same maneuvers being performed in other populist-right settings.

Author

• Kate Korycki, Queen's University