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Guest Editors' Introduction: Realms and Forms of Ethnic Exclusion in Poland
... Unlike most Western European societies, Poland has not taken a linear path towards more immigration in the second part of the 20th century. The Second Republic of Poland (1918Poland ( -1939 was a diverse state where around one third of the population might be characterised as a religious and/or ethnic minority (Jasińska-Kania and Łodziński, 2009). After the Second World War, border changes and population displacements meant that Poland became largely homogeneous, both ethnically (Polish) and religiously (Roman Catholic). ...
In this article, the authors move away from approaching generations as static categories and explore how ordinary people, as opposed to scholars, distinguish generations and justify their different responses to cultural diversity in terms of ethnicity, race and religion/belief. The analysis draws on 90 in-depth interviews with 30 residents in the Polish capital, Warsaw (2012–2013). Through approaching generation as an analytical category, the authors identify various differentiating narratives which the study participants employed to draw boundaries between generations, reinforcing the common belief that the youngest Poles are most accepting of diversity. Although generations are seen as the axis of difference, conditioning generation-specific responses to diversity, the accounts emerging from the interviews reveal their relational nature, as well as similarities and points of connection between their experiences.
... Meanwhile, Warsaw has a history of ethnic diversity interrupted by the war and the communism era (i.e. in the Interwar period every third resident was of non-Polish background or non-Catholic religion; Jasińska- Kania and Łodziński, 2009). Warsaw is nowadays considered to be the most ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan city in Poland, although the size of the ethnic minority population is very low, app. ...
Scholars have been increasingly interested in how everyday interactions in various places with people from different ethnic/religious background impact inter-group relations. Drawing on representative surveys in Leeds and Warsaw (2012), we examine whether encounters with ethnic and religious minorities in different type of space are associated with more tolerance towards them. We find that in Leeds, more favourable affective attitudes are associated with contact in institutional spaces (workplace and study places) and socialisation spaces (social clubs, voluntary groups, religious meeting places); however, in case of behavioural intentions – operationalised as willingness to be friendly to minority neighbours – only encounters in socialisation spaces play a significant role in prejudice reduction. In Warsaw, people who have contacts with ethnic and religious minorities in public (streets, park, public services and transport) and consumption spaces (cafés, pubs, restaurants) express more positive affective attitudes towards them, but only encounters in consumption space translate into willingness to be friendly to minority neighbours.
All over the world, political philosophers are increasingly told to deliver more ‘engagement’, ‘relevance’, or ‘impact’, without it being remotely clear what this should involve. Less analysis and more activism? Fewer principles and more policies? Less critique and more cooperation? Or something else altogether: a particular way of working with others that sits alongside, rather than replaces, what we already do as professional scholars. In support of this last possibility, my argument here has two stages. First, a flexible theory of ‘public political philosophy’ that others can adopt or amend as they see fit. Second, a development of that theory by way of a particular ‘case-study’: ‘inter-minority dialogue’ in Poland, and especially dialogue between, and about, Jewish and Muslim communities residing there. Note though, in advance, that this is not ‘development’ in the sense of either ‘testing’ an empirical theory or ‘applying’ a normative one. Instead I aim simply to sketch out a particular kind of conversation, between and amongst these groups, as well as local scholars, by setting out three ‘methods’ they can experiment with, each of which is intended to support, rather than supplant, whatever dialogues are already locally occurring. These three I call ‘phacts’, ‘phictions’, and ‘philennials’, and if they are far from a solution to any of the problems these communities face, they are at least a new contribution that philosophers are particularly well placed to facilitate.
Background:
Our research aimed to assess the experiences of ethnic discrimination among students in Poland (Polish and international) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also tested the prevalence of anxiety symptoms and their relationship with perceived COVID-19 risk, the severity of discrimination, and social support.
Methods:
The data from Polish (n = 481) and international university students (n = 105) were collected online (November-January 2020). Participants completed measures of ethnic discrimination (GEDS), anxiety scale (GAD-7), COVID-19 risk perception index, and perceived social support scale (MSPSS) questionnaires.
Results:
The results showed that international students reported being much more discriminated than Polish students during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contrary to our expectation, a higher risk of anxiety disorders (GAD) was observed in 42% of Polish students compared to 31% of international students. The predictors of higher anxiety symptoms among both groups were the perceived risk of COVID-19 and the greater severity of ethnic discrimination. In both groups, the perceived social support had a protective role in anxiety symptomatology.
Conclusions:
The high prevalence of discrimination, especially among international students, simultaneously with high symptoms of anxiety, requires vigorous action involving preventive measures and psychological support.
Looking at mediated, political and wider public discourses on immigration in Poland since 2015 and exploring these in the context of the country’s right-wing populist politics, the paper develops a multi-step normalisation model which allows analysing how radical or often blatantly racist discourse can not only be strategically introduced into the public domain but also evolve into an acceptable and legitimate perspective inperceptions of immigrants and refugees. The paper highlights the strategic as well as opportunistic introduction of anti-immigration rhetoric in/by the political mainstream in Poland in recent years, often on the back of the so-called post-2014 European “Refugee Crisis”. It explores normalisation as part and parcel of a wider multistep process of strategically orchestrated discursive shifts wherein discourses characterised by extreme positions have been enacted, gradated/perpetuated and eventually normalised as an integral part of pronounced right-wing populist agenda. The paperfurthers a view that normalisation entails the creation and sustainment of a peculiar borderline discourse wherein unmitigated radical statements are often married with seemingly civil and apparently politically correct language and argumentation. The latter are used to pre-/legitimiseuncivil or even outright radical positions and ideologies by rationalising them and making them into acceptable elements of public discourse.
This paper analyzes politicization and mediatization of immigration in Poland in the context of the recent European “refugee crisis.” Although largely absent from Polish political discourse after 1989, anti-refugee and anti-immigration rhetoric has recently become extremely politically potent in Poland. The analysis shows that, soon taken over by other political groups, the new anti-immigration discourses have been enacted in Poland's public sphere by the right-wing populist party PiS (Law and Justice). Its discourse in offline and online media has drawn on discursive patterns including Islamophobia, Euro-scepticism, anti-internationalism, and historical patterns and templates of discrimination such as anti-Semitism.
This article explores ‘integrative encounters’ between immigrants and Polish people in Warsaw. Rather than focus on new arrivals we pay attention to the integration experiences of the host population in recognition that this is a group who have been relatively neglected in the literature. Post-socialist European countries where population mobility was circumscribed during the communist era and as a consequence became perceived as relatively homogenous white societies but which are now seeing a rise in immigration, have been largely neglected by non-domestic scholars. In Poland organised group activity is an important means to provide the established population with an opportunity to encounter migrants because such encounters are less likely to occur in everyday spaces. Drawing on research with a Warsaw based NGO which runs a football league to bring Polish people and immigrants together, we argue that attention needs to be paid to the issue of ‘motivation' to participate in integration projects and to the significance of sociality. In doing so, we suggest that creating the conditions for spontaneous connections to develop, even in contrived projects, is a way to overcome indifference to difference. Here, we highlight the qualities of football as a bridging activity to facilitate integrative encounters.
This paper draws on original empirical research to investigate popular understandings of prejudice in two national contexts: Poland and the United Kingdom. The paper demonstrates how common-sense meanings of prejudice are inflected by the specific histories and geographies of each place: framed in terms of ‘distance’ (Poland) and ‘proximity’ (United Kingdom), respectively. Yet, by treating these national contexts as nodes and linking them analytically the paper also exposes a connectedness in these definitions which brings into relief the common processes that produce prejudice. The paper then explores how inter-linkages between the United Kingdom and Poland within the wider context of the European Union are producing – and circulating through the emerging international currency of ‘political correctness’ – a common critique of equality legislation and a belief that popular concerns about the way national contexts are perceived to be changing as a consequence of super mobility and super diversity are being silenced. This raises a real risk that in the context of European austerity and associated levels of socioeconomic insecurity, negative attitudes and conservative values may begin to be represented as popular normative standards which transcend national contexts to justify harsher political responses towards minorities. As such, the paper concludes by making a case for prejudice reduction strategies to receive much greater priority in both national and European contexts.
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