Introduction: Poland’s Wars of Symbols

Clashes on the streets have become the norm in Warsaw on 11 November, Poland’s Independence Day. In 2017, sixty thousand people joined the Independence March, a right-wing expression of patriotic pride that has taken place annually since 2009 in central Warsaw. A smaller counter-demonstration under the slogan “For Your Freedom and Ours” brought together a loose coalition of liberals, leftists, anti-fascists, and defenders of sexual and ethnic minority rights. The Independence March was awash with the colors of the national flag, white and red, and participants chanted slogans including “not red, not rainbow, only national Poland!”; the official rallying cry was “We Want God.” On the other side of the symbolic barricade, red, rainbow, and black flags were raised in response, ¹ alongside Polish national heraldry (Figs. 1, 2).

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Fig. 1

Nationalists, carrying Polish flags, march in Warsaw to mark Independence Day, 11 November 2017

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Fig. 2

Counterdemonstration by Antifascist Coalition in Warsaw, 11 November 2017

Thus, on Independence Day, one can observe how the symbolism of nation has been invested with different meanings and narratives. On one side, the nationalist claim for ethnic definition of Polishness explicitly references the heritage of Roman Dmowski and the National Democracy party of the early twentieth century. ² It draws on (or, arguably, appropriates) religious imagery and makes patriarchal demands on gender and sexuality as part of cultural identity. On the other side is an understanding of nationhood that emphasizes not cultural sameness but civic commitment to others and the appreciation and/or tolerance of difference. Its mnemonic points of reference include historical slogans such as “For Our Freedom and Yours,” an early nineteenth-century motto that also has a rich tradition in internationalist thought in Poland; the brandishing of red flags is likewise a re-inscription of socialist traditions into the Polish context, as well as a visual rejection of the nationalists’ proscription against the color. 11 November is therefore a day on which Poland’s wars of symbols play out on the streets. Visual icons, words, and performative rituals are in open conflict, turning culture into a battleground.

This Poland-focused special section analyzes the symbolic contestation that has characterized the country in recent years, studying a range of phenomena including nation, gender, memory, and religious symbolism within the overall framework of political conflict. In doing so, it offers a multi-disciplinary view on political fractures that have resonated throughout Europe and the “West.” The present moment has been widely interpreted as a watershed, whether this means “the end of the West as we know it” (Anne Applebaum), ³ “a new kind of politics” (Jeremy Corbyn), ⁴ or a new axis of division: “Farewell, left versus right. The contest that matters now is open against closed” (The Economist). ⁵ The neoliberal consensus is being challenged, conservative values are being championed by populist leaders, and national sovereignty and ethnic particularity are firmly on the agenda amid disputes over migration and European integration. The Polish case both illuminates these fractures as an exemplary instance, and demonstrates that contemporary cultural dynamics in the country are embedded in global trends. The 2017 Independence March was well noted by international media at least in part because it attracted activists from several other countries; Polish nationalism had, in other words, “gone global.” ⁶

The Polish case is particularly poignant not only because of the country’s size and its political weight in the East-Central European region but also because of the dramatic trajectory that it has followed. Despite being championed by commentators as the “success story” of the new Europe ⁷ and, until recently, standing out as one of the staunchest EU enthusiasts on the continent (with 88 percent of Poles satisfied with Poland’s accession to the EU), ⁸ Poland has transformed into a country that turns away from the principles of liberal democracy and voted in a party that demonizes the EU as a threat to Polish sovereignty and identity. ⁹ Alongside well-publicized legislative attempts to tighten abortion laws and to subordinate the country’s judiciary, which have provoked angered responses from Brussels, the current Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość [PiS]) government, in power since 2015, has also taken steps to radically change the cultural landscape by institutional means. The structure of governance at the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej [IPN]) has been streamlined to give the ruling party a free hand over appointments (and therefore policy), ¹⁰ and a similar subordination was carried out at the Polish Film Institute (Polski Instytut Sztuki Filmowej [PISF]), where the Minister of Culture controversially dismissed and replaced the director in late 2017. ¹¹ A “decommunization” policy was signed into law in September 2017, under which Soviet army monuments are likely to be destroyed or relocated, and street names changed nationwide (at the time of writing, some local councils are resisting the changes). The large scale and systemic nature of the intended changes to Polish society—as well as a perceived lack of consultation in their implementation—have prompted comparisons with Lenin’s Bolshevik party. ¹² At the same time, three quarters of the way through its four-year term, Law and Justice retains a clear lead in the polls, with more than double the support of its closest rivals. ¹³

We interpret the fissures in the political life of Poland as wars of symbols in order to capture the wide range of issues at stake, from gender to religion to memory of the Second World War, as well as the far-reaching cultural significance of the conflicts. Poland’s current disputes concern not only law and justice, or even the legitimacy of the Law and Justice government. Rather, they are about the nation itself: its openness or closedness and the principle of its constitution (civic or ethnic). These competing meanings clash through visual symbolism and wars of words at demonstrations, such as the Independence Marches and Black Protests against changes to legislation concerning abortion; ¹⁴ in confrontations over street names and monuments; in disputes over the narrative content of museums; ¹⁵ and in the creation and reception of works of literature, cinema, and drama. ¹⁶

The essays gathered here study ways in which national symbols, topoi, and narratives have been deployed as tools in drawing and redrawing boundaries within society, polarizing and mobilizing the political camps as well as contesting and resisting power. These studies enable us to situate recent political events in historical perspective, mapping the rise of populism in Poland against the background of legacies specific to the East-Central European region, including nineteenth-century land-based imperialisms; national consolidation in the interwar period; wartime and postwar trauma and the redrawing of state boundaries; state socialism; and neoliberal transformation after 1989. Poland’s wars of symbols are thus definitively Polish, insofar as they are fought over national values and meanings, but their genealogies have roots in regionally shared pressures.

Wars of symbols are by no means a new phenomenon, not least in Poland where heated politico-cultural conflicts have regularly broken out in the past. ¹⁷ Nonetheless, we understand contemporary battle lines as specific to present-day social and political circumstances. The collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe looms over present-day events in a myriad of ways, most obviously in Law and Justice’s central claim that the post-communist elites who engineered the post-1989 transition betrayed Poland. ¹⁸ Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik argue that after the systemic transformations of 1989/1991, most Eastern European countries developed highly polarized narratives about their past. Such “fractured mnemonic regimes” are characterized by pronounced conflicts between “mnemonic warriors,” claiming ownership over a “historical truth,” and their political opponents, delegitimized as promulgators of a false version of the past. ¹⁹ David Ost notes that class all but disappeared as an analytical category in the first decade of post-socialist transition throughout Eastern Europe, as a result of which “‘nation’ had a free ride as the cry around which to galvanize critics.” ²⁰ While class is making a return among young urban intellectuals amid the decline of the hegemony of neoliberalism, ²¹ the appeal of populist visions of nation has strengthened among diverse social groups. The proliferation of competing memory regimes and different interpretive schemes for perceiving social reality therefore goes some way to explaining how wars of symbols come about.

A number of authors have already addressed the genesis of the current right-wing populist shift in Poland. Many point to structural factors, such as the existence of economic and axiological cleavages in Polish society, ²² the internal boundary between the liberal West and conservative East, ²³ or the weakness of the left. ²⁴ Transnational phenomena, such as the role of neoliberal capitalist globalization; ²⁵ the convergence of economic, refugee, and security crises, as well as a crisis of public knowledge; ²⁶ and transnational anti-liberal alliances in East Central Europe have also drawn the attention of analysts. ²⁷ Finally, critics have pointed to the potential of populist strategies, such as the instrumentalization of religion, ²⁸ or the redefinition of the national politics of memory. ²⁹ Some recent studies have confirmed that the polarization of the Polish political discourse in the wake of the Smolensk plane crash of 2010, correlated with a crisis of the shared “basic symbolic paradigm” ³⁰ and the saliency of “symbolic politics” over “programmatic solutions to problems.” ³¹ This dominance of the cultural over economical preoccupations in Polish politics has been traced back to the “symbolic heritage,” cultivated by the Polish intelligentsia. ³² But, while the mobilization of the “realm of symbolic imagination” ³³ and the emergence of a new “mnemonic language of politics” ³⁴ in Poland have been noted in the existing scholarship, a more systematic study of the symbols maintaining these cleavages and sustaining partisan identities is still missing.

In the political realm, symbols and rituals not only represent and reflect political agendas but “are themselves an important field of political struggle.” ³⁵ Some scholars go so far as to ascribe agency to symbols and see them as “actants.” ³⁶ Their importance as a medium of communication and a field of conflict relates to their two important features. First, given that symbols can “mediate imaginary, linguistic, intellectual and material domains,” they can offer a particularly sharp lens on the transformation of values, norms, and the dynamics of social cohesion. ³⁷ Changes in the realm of symbolic practice, such as the surge of new “invented traditions,” can be a symptom of much more fundamental transformations of society. ³⁸ Second, symbols are the sine qua non of people’s involvement in the political realm because they trigger emotions, without which people lose interest in political issues. ³⁹ Wars of symbols are therefore not to be seen as vagarious eruptions of emotions that constitute an anomaly in the political life, but rather as a constitutive element of human involvement in the public sphere.

While the symbol has been viewed as “the basic unit of analysis in studies of political culture,” ⁴⁰ the study of symbols reveals much more than the mechanisms of political communication. As Charles Sanders Peirce put it over a century ago, “we think only in signs.” Every symbol, he argued, embodies not only the object or concept it represents, but also the human capacity to interpret, to ascribe meaning, and to associate. ⁴¹ Symbols “synthesize a people’s ethos,” as Clifford Geertz wrote, giving humans a means to develop and communicate both their worldview and “their most comprehensive ideas of order.” ⁴² If we think in signs, over the course of history, meaning accrues around the old symbols, and new symbols constantly emerge from the expanding constellations of the old. ⁴³ Looking into the genealogy of symbols, we look therefore at the history of human thought and experience.

Examining the instrumentalization of symbols in political culture from a diachronic perspective, we are inspired by Victor Turner’s dichotomy of “symbols of structure” and “symbols of anti-structure.” While the former define the differences and constrain people’s action in established, hierarchical structures, the latter are “undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, [and] nonrational” symbols of the communitas, which “originate in periods when societies are in liminal transition between different social structures.” ⁴⁴ Turner’s seminal distinction informs our analysis in that we consider symbolic conflicts as part of an ongoing process of consolidating authority and challenging it. ⁴⁵

Every use of symbols in their identity-building and power-wielding capacity implies a demarcation of boundaries. “Symbolic boundaries” between and within groups provide the basis of order in social life, but they are also constantly renegotiated. ⁴⁶ On the one hand, it is the condition of social change and “liminality” that creates a demand for symbols that would reinforce the boundary between “us” and “them.” ⁴⁷ In this way, mobilization of in-group members and exclusion of Others is to provide more social cohesion and a sense of security. On the other hand, though, popular culture and grassroots movements constantly challenge such rigid structures, creatively expanding the grey-zones and pointing to the permeability of boundaries between the conflicted ideological camps and narratives.

The present special section explores boundaries in several different dimensions: as a physical state border, demarcated not only in space but also via cultural narratives and symbolic practices; as a set of strategies to define the threatening “Others” (atheists, ethnic and sexual minorities); as a way of constituting the canonical (cult of “appropriate” heroes, iconic spaces) and the marginal (borderlands, women). In different ways and using diverse material, the four papers that comprise this section show that narratives, symbols, and performances of national belonging are fields of conflict and polarization, and they foreground the instability and ambiguity of national symbols that can be reframed, hijacked, and subverted.

Jan Kubik and Marta Kotwas offer a theoretical framework for interpreting the deployment of symbols in contemporary populism, centered around the notion of symbolic thickening. They assume that populism, whose hallmark is the division of a polity into “good people” and “bad elites,” can be either “thin” or “thick.” In Poland, the Solidarity movement was populist but it was a case of “thin” populism, whose symbols were multi-vocal. Thin symbolic ensembles, having relatively few symbols with rather simple connotations, are amenable to many interpretations and are therefore potentially attractive to a large group of people. However, those very same symbols—such as national heraldry or religious signs—can be “thickened” by combining mutually reinforcing sets of national and religious meanings; the authors introduce the term discursive opportunity structure to capture the set of variables on which the success or otherwise of such thickening depends. Symbolic ensembles that are often displayed in the public sphere by right-wing populists are “thick” in this sense. They include many inter-locked symbols that—in combination—allow for a narrower range of possible interpretations and thus attract a smaller set of people. Kubik and Kotwas interpret discourses, rituals, performances that have accompanied the symbolic thickening of Polish populism, including a prominent monument in Poznań, the Independence March in Warsaw, and the “Rosary to the Borders” initiative in which hundreds of thousands of Poles performed a collective prayer for the “salvation” of Poland and Europe. They show that symbolic thickening in Poland is closely intertwined with a revival of magico-religious thought and exclusionary drawing of boundaries, creating cultural conditions conducive to the outbreak of symbolic war.

Agnieszka Graff’s contribution concentrates on the gendered nature of Polish nationalism and the ambivalent status of national symbols in Polish feminist discourse after 1989. The symbolic conflict that Graff explores unfolds between “radical feminism,” which vehemently rejects the nationalist symbolic repertoire, and “mainstream feminism,” which seeks to adapt and instrumentalize it. While the radicals postulate that such an embrace will only fuel the dominant, male-centered understanding of nationhood that has traditionally marginalized women, the moderates believe that a left version of patriotism that includes women’s and minorities’ rights can further the women’s cause. Although these two, seemingly irreconcilable, approaches have defined Polish women’s activism over the last few decades, the recent mass mobilization of Polish women in response to the legislative project further limiting access to legal abortion has marked a new turning point. The Black Protest of 2016, with its spectacular scale and unprecedented intensity of symbolic activity, generated a new language of feminist “anti-structure” that transcended the existing divides. Inspired by the national tradition of dissent, Polish women have reclaimed the national symbolic repertoire on renewed terms, allowing multiplicity of meanings and ambivalence. As Graff’s case studies poignantly demonstrate, the emergence of this new form of communitas triggered vociferous resistance from nationalist-conservative circles, opening new fronts in the Polish war of symbols.

If all national symbols can polarize when harnessed into a particular political agenda, no other symbol in the Polish public life has triggered more emotion and controversy than the cross. Magdalena Waligórska’s “Genealogy of the Cross in the Polish Political Imagination” traces different and sometimes conflicting significances historically ascribed to this symbol in changing political conditions. During the January Uprising of 1863, the cross connoted progressive ideas of emancipation, equality, and solidarity with other ethnic groups resisting tsarist rule; half a century later, in the newly reborn Polish state, the symbol was used to redraw group boundaries by excluding from the national community Poland’s ethnic minorities. Waligórska relates the changing content of this multivalent symbol to the Turnerian cycle of “structure” and “anti-structure,” or solidification and dissent. If in times of national struggle, the cross was given a more universal meaning to mobilize a wide spectrum of people, when nationhood/independence merely had to be maintained, it underwent what Kubik and Kotwas in this volume refer to as “symbolic thickening”: the set of values and the in-group it denoted would become more narrow. This malleability, together with the wide range of meanings it has accrued over time, makes the cross one of the most powerful and contentious political symbols in Poland.

Simon Lewis’s essay considers Poland’s borderlands as crucial but contested repositories of symbols. On the one hand, the myth of the so-called Kresy Wschodnie (“Eastern Marches”) that has flourished since the late nineteenth century has generated a rich repertory of national symbols, such as the “lost” heritage of the formerly Polish cities of Lwów and Wilno (now Lviv, Ukraine, and Vilnius, Lithuania). On the other hand, the 1945 border shifts and the violent population transfers of the immediate post-war years left difficult legacies that are still being worked through; such traumatic memories go against the grain of the idealizing nostalgia for “lost” homelands. Lewis coins the term “border trouble” to describe this particular symbolic impasse, which combines the effects of post-war erasure, nationalizing expansionism of memory, and postcolonial displacement; the notion of “border trouble” posits that the two ambivalent peripheries—the “post-German” and “formerly Polish” regions—are intimately linked in the symbolic realm. The article analyzes the contemporary reverberations of border trouble through a close comparative analysis of four recent films whose stories play out in the borderlands: Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016), and Agnieszka Holland’s W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011) and Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017). It argues that narrative-visual “border work” engages in Poland’s wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity in fixed ideologies. Cosmopolitan expression has found fertile ground in the ambivalent peripheries, and the visual language of film engages dialogically with nationalizing, bounded memory.

One might interpret the various events analyzed in this collection as a symptom of political breakdown; as Ivan Krastev elegantly puts it, “Populism thrives when politics become about symbols rather than substance.” ⁴⁸ Yet while the essays presented here are in large part an evaluation of, and response to, specific contemporary phenomena, they also have in common the underlying assumption that today’s wars of symbols have deep genealogical roots whose development can be dynamically traced. In other words, the “symbolic thickening” and cultural conflicts that are observable in Poland today feed on, reactivate, and are conditioned by the archive of meanings and narratives that is extant in its culture. Thus, Poland’s wars of symbols should neither be understood as “just” a front in a global stand-off between cosmopolitans and nationalists during a crisis of the (neo-)liberal world order, nor should they be essentialized as a quintessentially national phenomenon. Rather, they can be seen as a case of the politicization of symbols more generally, which bridges the past, present, and future as well as the local, regional, and global.