Friday, July 14, 2017
JWS - Room J10 (J355) (University of Glasgow)
Poland’s democratic leadership since the early 1990s, and especially after EU accession in 2004, has been a vital source of support for European integration. Warsaw’s once passionately pro-European mainstream outlook was driven as much by a widespread sense of recovery of Poland’s centrality to a European and Western civilizational community as by the indispensable economic boost Poland received by joining (or re-joining) Europe. Winning power in 2015, Poland’s conservative-nationalist leadership embraces a dramatically revised version of Poland’s European-ness, drawing on traditional conceptions of identity and sovereignty and seeking to re-interpret and discredit the democratic course followed since 1989. Under this new conception of Poland’s identity and interests, Poland is seeking to roll back what it sees as the extension of EU influence into the sovereign affairs of member states, and has increasingly found common cause in this quest from like-minded partners (above all Hungary) among Central and Eastern European members of the EU. The stability and possibly even the survival of the European Union in its familiar form are put at risk by the disaffection of the formerly dependably pro-European Poland, arguably the keystone in the arch of the EU’s post Cold War expansion. This paper will lay out and launch a preliminary analysis of the ways in which the PiS leadership has attempted to re-work Polish collective memory to accomplish its political ends in the domestic sphere and how the embrace of these ends implies a drive to overhaul comprehensively the scope of integration in Europe.
