Radical Right Parties in Central and Eastern Europe

At the intersection of racism and nationalism: Theorising and contextualising the ‘anti‐immigration’ discourse in Poland

“…This has been possible, I posit, because the theme of threat resonates with, on the one hand, vulnerability as a key tenet of hegemonic national self-definition and, on the other, temporal liminality that unsettles the perception of nation as a natural, timeless and continuous entity. Concerning the former, the nationalist imaginary hinges on the conception of the Polish nation, developed in the late 19th century and solidified in the interwar period, as a fragile, ethnically and religiously unified community, continuously threatened-physically, morally, culturally and economically-by others, both external and in its midst (see de Lange & Guerra, 2009; vulnerability and present security, whereby the current migration processes are not located in the context of present-day (engineered) national homogeneity, stable statehood and a growing economy, but are (mis)understood through 'mythic overlaying', that is, the ahistorical use of the past to interpret the present (Pytlas, 2015).…”

“…What is important here is the tying together of external threats with internal ethnic, linguistic and religious heterogeneity in a relationship of false causality (see Ja nczak, 2019). That is, in the interwar years minorities had come to be viewed in the popular imagination as threatening 'others', infiltrating the national fabric (Pytlas, 2015;Walicki, 2000). While Slavic groups were invited to assimilate into the reinvented Polish nation-not unlike the present-day conditional acceptance of migrant workers from Ukraine and Belarus-Germans and Jews were presumed unassimilable due to their alleged strong ethnic identities and intracommunal allegiances.…”

Polarización política y fanatismo ‘blando’: una hipótesis semiótica

“…En términos semióticos, esta dinámica apoyada en el conflicto y las interacciones adversativas entre actores colectivos puede ser concebida como una 'disputa por el sentido' ['contest over meaning'], en tanto toda actividad política está, como propone Bartek Pytlas (2016), "motivada por el esfuerzo de crear una convicción consistente sobre el atractivo y la efectividad de determinado producto político como la mejor alternativa para los intereses materiales e ideales del electorado y sus valores" (Pytlas 2016: 48).…”

“…Si desde una perspectiva semiótica lo político es concebido como una disputa por la fijación de sentido (Pytlas 2016) a partir de ciertas articulaciones discursivas (De Cleen 2017, Verón 1987, para comprender adecuadamente los fenómenos de la polarización y del fanatismo parece necesario pensar en qué medida la construcción discursiva de actores sociales genera ciertas percepciones, actitudes y efectos pasionales en los individuos. ¿Por qué alguien siente la necesidad de denostar con calificativos negativos a quienes considera sus rivales políticos?…”

Mind the Gap! On the Discursive Construction of Collective Political Identities

“…this domain will be conceptualized as a set of semiotic practices (fontanille 2008; Dondero 2017; Demuru 2017) by which individuals perform actions and interact with others to achieve specific goals on a discursive level; most crucially, to convince them of the value of their normative views regarding the exercise of power. accordingly, we can conceive the political domain as a discursive field (verón 1987) characterized by a "contest over meaning" (Pytlas 2016) between actors with conflicting interests. representatives of the competing political projects attempt to 'fix meaning' for their views to prevail (De cleen 2017) by employing discursive strategies to influence people's beliefs, emotions, and actions.…”