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

Abstract

This article contributes to a better understanding of the ‘anti-immigration’ discourse that has prevailed in Poland following the electoral victory of the Law and Justice party in 2015 by theoretically engaging the category of ‘race’ in the examination of Polish nationalism. To do so, it employs the Foucauldian perspective on racism, understood as deployed in defence of one's own nation, which is imagined as "race". The article also contextualises this discourse by elaborating how three globally circulated racist themes (threat, unworthiness and otherness) are deployed to uphold three components of hegemonic Polish national self-definition (vulnerability, deservingness and ‘Westernness’) against three aspects of the perceived liminality that destabilise this self-definition (temporal, moral and spatial). The article concludes that in Poland, the ‘anti-immigration’ discourse deploys racism as a device symbolically to ‘protect’ the imagined ethnically, religiously and culturally homogenous Polish nation from the belittlement and dilution of collective self-definition under the conditions of globalisation.