“Making It to the West through the Wild East”: Poland’s Post-1989 Branding of Nature

This paper examines the use of “nature,” the “primeval” and the “organic” in contemporary Polish discourse to rebrand Poland at home and abroad.  While westerners’ mental image of Poland is often of its coalmines and grey facades, multiple governmental offices are hard at work to instill one of purity of air, water and soil in the minds of citizens and potential tourists. What has long been perceived and ridiculed by foreigners and nationals alike as signs of Poland’s economic backwardness—small farms, subsistence agriculture and animal labor, for example—is now turned into key assets to the European Union: No need to “go organic” when most of Polish agriculture has always been, the saying goes.  The paper focuses more specifically on the renewed attention paid by the Polish state, NGOS and producers of various products such as beer and vodka to the Bialowieza forest in Northeastern Poland, a unique ecosystem “home of the last European bison” in their effort to sell the idea that Poland deserves its place in “Europe.”  The paper will show, more broadly, how nature is “cultured” in nationalist discourse and how culture is naturalized through discursive and performative practices.